Amazon Fires Missile At Book Industry, Launches 70% Kindle Royalty Option | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Fires Missile At Book Industry, Launches 70% Kindle Royalty Option

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75 pointsicey31 comments

This is brilliant. Anything which streamlines distribution has always helped the consumers and producers while increasing overall efficiency. Redfin is a good example, this looks like it will be another.

Not always. Redfin, maybe, since the middleman in that case is really more like an obstruction between buyers and sellers. Publishers aren't an obstruction in that sense. Sure, some of them could probably run leaner operations and give more money to their authors, but the publishing industry as a whole serves a very valuable purpose we don't necessarily recognize, because we're so used to it.

Depends, there is some use like content filtration. However the user ratings could fill in for a lot of that on amazon.

Also, as came up in another branch of the article's discussion, this could cause certain things like freelance editing to get a real boost from potential increased customers.

Personally I love the idea of authors earning more for their efforts, I think that's great, but there are so many unintended (by consumers, anyway) costs of Amazon using its reach for this kind of thing -- publishers get squeezed, so they produce fewer books, bookstores get squeezed, so more of them close up shop, commerce flows ever more directly to Amazon, choice gets limited... I just don't like it. I buy a ton of stuff from Amazon, but I'm starting to think maybe that's such a great thing anymore, in the long run.

Your comment was gray when I saw it, so I restored it to >0, but I disagree. This move makes it easier for authors to get their product into readers' hands, gives them a better cut than the publishing industry generally did, and provides better value for the user. Amazon can't cause "less choice," because for one thing, they have effectively unlimited inventory; and for another, if there's an untapped demand, a competitor will arise.

Sure, nobody else can publish to Kindle, but the next few generations of smartphones, netbooks, and possibly tablets are very likely to make that a nonissue.

Sure, nobody else can publish to Kindle

That's not true, is it? I'm sure I've seen publishers like Pragmatic Programmers selling Kindle stuff that doesn't go through Amazon. I don't have a Kindle though, so I'm not going to state this with 100% confidence ;-)

this is true. pp's technical books actually look better on the kindle than amazon's.

They do indeed. I have a number of titles in epub format from them.

The article suggest that the Kindle business is a big money-loser so far? That surprised me. Why it should be a money-loser, when the Kindle itself is rather expensive and the e-book copies cost virtually nothing(?)

There was an article a few months back that stated that Amazon loses $2 for each book sold on Kindle. Publishers won't sell e-books for less than the publishing price.

http://www.tbiresearch.com/e-readers-should-drive-profits-fo... is the original document, as far as I can find right now.

Is this genuinely a case of "We have commercial control of a lot of physical book manufacturing commodities and in order to leverage the value of these commodities we want to artificially inflate the price of the competition"?

That... seems... well, it doesn't taste good, let's put it that way.

This is a totally exciting and great idea, but the down side the cynic inside of me sees coming is the spam/ads saying "Work from home as an author and make $$$" and junk Kindle-only books flooding Amazon.

> "and junk Kindle-only books flooding Amazon"

I actually think this would be a great idea - so long as it does better than the App Store in terms of filtering for the best. Amazon's recommendation/review system has always been pretty strong, though.

Democratization of publishing, of content distribution and production, is one of the chief reasons why the internet has been the most important invention in recent memory.

So, am I correct to assume that authors mainly need publishers for printing, distribution, and marketing? Will we see more self-publishing as a result of the Kindle/Nook/etc?

We'll probably see more self-publishing, but marketing will still be extremely important for authors.

i think they need them more for editing. All the kindle-only books I've read, had a ton of spelling errors.

Freelance editors are pretty cheap. I don't know about their quality, however.

Actually that's an interesting side point, might this improve/increase the business model for freelance editors? The potential is rather interesting, though would that just be line edits or something more substantive?

If you're really interested in this, you could look into the editor market on lulu

I'm not sure if Lulu gives the same effect, because you have a higher cost per book that isn't going to you, since there is a flat cost per book (unless you wanted to charge a lot, of course). But if you want to sell a $5.00 book this will let you, pretty sure there's no way to do that w/o losing money via Lulu.

You can publish ebooks through Lulu with a base cost of 1.49 http://www.lulu.com/publish/ebooks/?cid=publish_portal

I've not gone through their tutorial to see what the minimum cost is, however. Their comparison suggests how a 13$ ebook can earn you more as a writer than a $20 physical book, but once again I dont know what the minimums are.

Ah ha, goes to show I never looked at Lulu closely enough! Will have to look at that a bit, since it likely would have had a similar effect. The only differentiating point then is if people will be willing to invest more into work they put up on amazon or not, which is likely no but hard to prove. Hrm.

The problem with that is that the people who need editors are often the ones who don't believe they need them. If it's money out of their pocket, why bother?

I agree that some of the Kindle-only (often of previously self-published books) are painful and embarrassing to read. "You do realize you've used the same distinctive phrase five times so far, and we're only on page 50, right?"

Publishers are yet another industry where much of the value chain is locked up within the one organization. This is historical because of the economies of scale needed to turn a profit in the area.

With more free markets in all areas, and lower costs of distribution, many of those reasons do not necessarily apply anymore. What you may see is the devolution of the publishing business into smaller parts, and each part completed by a different business/individual.

For example, I might write a book, find an editor on a freelance site, then find an artist, and a PR agent. I could even perhaps hire a manager who co-ordinated the whole process for me. I might then either self-publish (LuLu) or put it straight to Kindle. In the past these were all handled in-house, and the publisher had high overheads for all the staff and accompanying infrastructure.

I think the internet will continue to break up these value chains into smaller compononents with more competition at each step. Publishers will only go with big-selling authors, and probably only after that Author finds success independently - kind of like a band signing a deal after releasing their own EP and making a go of it.

The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering. Even the worst publisher printing unbelievable shlock is light years ahead of the garbage in the publishing anteroom, the slush pile.

With that, the greatest blog post on publishing of all time, "Slushkiller":

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

> The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering.

The main benefit I receive from my friends is filtering.

Now, the question is: do publishers or my friends do that job better?

Or a deeper question, are the publishers making your friends' lives easier by doing it first? Do your friends read thousands of self-published books to provide you with recommendations? Or is all their action applied after the mainstream publishers' filter?

I'm sure there is self-published stuff out there that is worth my time. Unfortunately, I don't want to read the literary equivalent of MySpace to find it.

A good publisher has a quality bar I can trust, and they've taken on the burden of reading unsolicited submissions. And as the blog post says, 75% of it is unreadable crap, 24% is readable but not worth your time, and 1% or less is quality and publishable. That's a lot of hours you and your friends would have wasted.

that's true for me (using publishers as filters) when i'm in a bookstore. but i don't think i've looked at who the publisher of a book is when buying from amazon for ages - typically i read amazon's comments and then google around for what other people are saying.

:-D I'm waiting for the Apple tablet info the 27 of January. It seems too much coincidence that Amazon changes her policy now just at the same fees that Apple Apps Store charges.

They must know something that we don't and want to be first...

There have been rumors/leaks that Apple is making content deals with various forms of publishing including book, which if true this does make more sense.

While I sympathize with the Publishers, they're beginning to sound a lot like the RIAA. For capitalism to work, dinosaurs have to die. And it's beginning to look like the publishers are turning into dinosaurs.

Personally, if I were to publish a book, I'd be tempted to just cut out the middle man and forego the big advance (which I hear usually isn't that big anyway).

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