(I really loathe both the longstanding practice of marking a scandal by appending “-gate” to a name and the newer version “-fail.” I don’t have a better alternative, but I hate both of those. Somebody get to work on a better scandal signifier.)<\/p>\n
So, the hot topic of the moment is the hissy-cow being thrown by Amazon and Macmillan<\/a> over the pricing of e-books. A great many electrons have been expended in discussing this on the Internet, but Jim Henley’s take<\/a> is probably the one I like the best, and links to most of the others.<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/strong> Jim’s follow-up post today<\/a> is even better. It attempts to use actual math to explain what’s at issue here.<\/p>\n I don’t directly have a dog in this fight– my book<\/a> is from Scribner, which is part of a different gigantic conglomerate, and not yet affected by this mess. As an author, though, I can definitely understand the righteous anger on the part of those whose books have been de-listed (it’s always the writers who end up being Belgium<\/a>“). If my book were directly affected, I’d definitely be outraged.<\/p>\n The problem is, there are arguments to be made from the consumer side as well– people are more likely to buy $9.99 ebooks than $15.99 ebooks– and it’s hard to tell which of those win out. I have argued numerous times against the common Internet myth that ebooks are somehow free– there are a lot of costs in publishing that do not involve the manufacture and distribution of physical artifacts, and none of those go away when you move to an electronic format. But is the sweet spot between customers wanting low prices and publishers covering their expenses closer to $16 or $10? I don’t have enough detailed knowledge of the business to know.<\/p>\n It’s been obvious for some time that sooner or later the same forces that have cast the music industry into chaos were going to hit book publishing. This is probably the beginning of what will be a long and ugly process. It’s a little harder to know who to root for in this case, as book publishers are not rapacious assholes like record companies. As a general matter, though, I tend to root against tantrum-throwing at any level, and I hope some compromise is reached soon that gets the virtual books back on the virtual shelves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (I really loathe both the longstanding practice of marking a scandal by appending “-gate” to a name and the newer version “-fail.” I don’t have a better alternative, but I hate both of those. Somebody get to work on a better scandal signifier.) So, the hot topic of the moment is the hissy-cow being thrown… Continue reading The Amazon Kerfuffle<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,28,81,37,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-politics","category-economics_1","category-pop_culture","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}