Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions

The same pattern occurs in TV, film, and games. In movies, for instance, a lot of the money is made in selling foreign distribution rights. There is still a significant cost associated with exhibiting movies in China, for example, including localization, marketing, distribution to theaters, etc. An American studio would rather license off the rights to a foreign distributor, taking a sort of annuity income stream, than incur those costs and burdens itself. This has become so lucrative, in fact, that foreign sales potential often "wags the dog" in the domestic (US) market. Movies get financed and produced off of pre-sales to other territories. (This is a mildly simplified way of describing the process, but on the whole, it will probably suffice).

So you see these patterns play out in the home video market as an aftereffect. Rights were carved up and sold off during the theatrical window, and more rights were carved up and sold off in anticipation of the home video window. And by the time that window rolls around, various parties hold the rights to various spots on the map. It's in the interest of none of those parties to break down DRM or region control.

It's hard to overstate the systemic importance of foreign distribution to the moviemaking business. Accordingly, it's hard to overstate the fierceness with which studios and distributors will fight to maintain region controls and exhibition windows.

Eventually, this model will have to give. It makes increasingly little sense to consumers. And, while there was once a physical scarcity making it necessary, that scarcity is largely nonexistent (barring extensive local marketing costs). But it'll be a long time before we see any major changes here. There are just so many parties aligned against change, and the capital costs of building a competing ecosystem are enormous.

With books, the barriers to entry are much lower. So I have a bit more hope for that market in the next few years.

From an user perspective, those walled garden for ebooks are a real problem. Since I like to have a paper copy of my books, I have a working solution, not perfect though: * If there is a paper version, buy the paper version. * If there is a DRM-free ebook, download it somewhere or buy it (depending on the price and added work, like a new cover, ...) * If the is only DRM version, download a DRM-free version for free once it's available. * If there is no paper version: * If there is a DRM-free edition, buy it * If there is only a DRM version, no good solution there, either a pass or a download somewhere.

My reader is a Kindle, so not perfect there, but I manage by keeping it in airplane mode at all time, to avoid stupid updates (like the 1984 fiasco), and by adding book only through Calibre instead of amazon's library manager.

Sounds like an agent is failing at middleman-ing to coordinate all those messy contracts.

It sounds like a terribly complicated project for a startup to disrupt the agent market by providing the agent a set of tools both technological and legal to massively coordinate releases across all markets simultaneously and cheaply for like 1% of the agent's cut or whatever seems fair. Or maybe for free during the initial startup phase. Two "portals" (I hate that word) one that agents talk to and one that publishers talk to and some minor smarts in the middle.

Or if you really wanna be disruptive implement Charlie's helper to do all the good stuff he's previously discussed for a publisher. I don't know if becoming a book publisher is edgy web 2.0 enough to attract VC money, but if everyone in the biz thinks the current situation sucks, and there's some profit to be made in market disruption...

The TLDR is a lot of "startup" theory is about disrupting middlemen. How about trying to make middlemen effective again using disruptive tools?

(BTW I like his latest book)

Just what is the deal with authors and advances? Endemic poor planning? When I read things like, "This means that they can't offer me a bigger book advance for world rights than they would for their own regional rights (because they might not succeed in licensing those territorial sub-rights—this has bitten me in the past)," I wonder if it wouldn't be significantly simpler all around if authors worked on straight royalties.

I get that it would mean that an author would not get a big, lump sum payment with which to write the next work. On the other hand, what was the author eating while writing the first book? Further, most advances are not going to keep a body in beans and rice for very long. And I get that under current schemes, most authors don't earn out their advances, and that a larger-than-royalties advance is the only thing that makes writing a paying occupation. But, I find the idea of someone making a loan that they don't expect to be paid back fully is economically sketchy. It smacks of company-store policies. Also, while the "gambling" aspect does support the idea that a few bestsellers subsidize dozens of other, less successful, authors, I think it equally supports the idea that new authors are barred from the marketplace: giving an unproven author with a genre-barrier-crossing any advance is singularly unpalatable.

With Amazon's KDP, you get to publish 'worldwide' (well, within Amazon's limits) as far as I can tell. I suppose there are other drawbacks, but for someone starting out who doesn't want to deal with that mess, it seems like it might be a decent option.