Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

I know this is in some way an irritating thing to say, but this is exactly what I would have guessed before I read the article. It's cool to see numbers put to it but I don't think this was a secret.

I am struck by the coda where the antitrust intervention did nothing to preserve a healthy market. Kind of a common story.

How is this an unhealthy market?

Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read.

Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the books. Publishers, as pointed out in the quote, are publishing tons of books that don't make it, in part because of a belief that it's a good thing to do. It's easier to self publish than ever before. And social media is often playing a big role in discovering the huge hits that everyone else is reading - many are not the books pushed by the marketing machine, but word-of-mouth successes that get discovered and shared by a huge group of dedicated, articulate readers.

If there were hardly any books selling 3-digit numbers, that to me would suggest an unhealthy market. The presence of lots and lots selling that many seems very positive.

> Everyone can easily access the books they want.

Not particularly. New niche-interest non-fiction books are expensive ( $60+ ) and tend to have short print runs, after which their price on the second-hand market quickly escalates. And few are available as ebooks.

I've had to let a lot of books pass me by, even before they've been printed, simply because I couldn't afford them.

I realise that this isn't an argument to show that the book market is healthy, but have you considered piracy? Many of the type of books you are describing are very easily available via libgen.

Their idea of the problem with the proposed merger, making it unhealthy, was that it would reduce the number of players in the market. How is one of the players getting picked apart by private equity instead of merging with a different player a better outcome, then?

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