There wasn’t even a faceless ‘We regret that we have to take this action’ impersonal press release about it; they behaved as if this was merely a private matter between them and Macmillan.

It’s not a private matter as soon as you annoy your own customers by doing it, and Amazon was blind to this. If you’re going to take actions that annoy your customers, you’d better explain it to them.

The publisher is a middle-man desperately afraid of getting cut out of any future arrangements if the market goes in the direction it’s particularly likely to go. For electronic information, not more than three people should receive payment for services rendered from the reader:

The Writer/Aggregators
The Editor
The Publicist/flapper.

That is

a) the person or persons resposible for the creation itself,

b) a person to help smooth over the rough edges of the creation using professional experience and natural distance from the production.

c) the person who calls it to the attention of the reader — usually paid directly by the reader, not by the first two: “You know what I like. What have I not experienced that you think I would enjoy?” Everyone will have dozens, if not hundreds, of flapper-agents, whose purpose is to bring new things to people’s attention. This can be as simple as another author’s recommendation (“I started reading Harry Turtledove because I read a blurb on the cover by S.M. Stirling, who I already knew I liked”). It can be a reference from a collective aggregate list (“IMDB users rate this a 7.9″), or it can be something more sophisticated and/or technical — from a person making their own list of things to read/hear/watch whose opinion you’ve learned to trust, to automated listings tied to carefully designed psychological analysis of those with similar likes (Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought…” is a very primitive example).

Now, where the heck in the middle of that stream is any cut for a “publisher”?

Who needs them? Who wants them?

And that is what it’s all about. Them attempting to rearrange the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic of copyright law

By the way, the reason you’re seeing so much anger over this has nothing to do with consumers. If you go over to amazon’s forums, you can see that most supported them in trying to bring the prices down. It’s the writers who are throwing up a shit storm. They blog a lot, and all of them are angry about losing sales on their books. I feel for them, but their publisher is run by idiots.

Computers are great for research. They’re great for archiving. They’re great for searching and cross-referencing. But for reading books, they’re (still) very much sub-par. These organizations think too highly of themselves, and of their technology, and are far too convinced it’ll replace traditional print. Ebooks won’t do that at all….video will.

They aren’t as intelligent and informed, or they don’t care about wasting money, or both.

LOL, what makes you think THAT is going to happen? Corporate interests like Disney fully plan to keep extending copyright indefinitely, like they did with the Bono Bill, a blatantly unConstitutional law (it changes the rules for events which have already occurred, which is a clear “ex post facto bill of attainder”, and hence unConstitutional).

BTW, I don’t recommend the Kindle.

As happened to be revealed when Amazon Canada inadvertently sold something to US residents for which the copyright in Canada had run out, but not in the USA, Amazon has the power to not only remove items you have purchased (and no, I don’t give a rat’s ass if they “refund its price” or not. Once a book is in my possession it should be more than a bitflag flipping to remove it from same), but, MUCH MORE CRITICALLY, Amazon also happens to have revealed that Amazon has the capacity to alter content AFTER PUBLICATION.

Can you say “Orwell”?

I have four numbers for you: A one, a nine, an eight, and a four.

I can’t speak for you, but there is NO WAY in F**** HELL I’m EVER giving someone arbitrary control over the contents of the books I own.

Because it’s rather obvious that not only can Amazon abuse this, but so, too, can hackers, Government agents, and even the agents of foreign governments.

Suppose some nasty political event occurs in China. What is to stop the Chinese government from waiting ten years, and then having their sponsored hackers go out and “revise history” to change the descriptions of the events. Are you going to remember them certainly enough that you’re willing and able to disregard what “published reports” say?

More importantly — Are you going to convince others that you are right and that the reports they have sitting before them are wrong?

Not claiming such abuse is likely to become common — but I’m not accepting the idea that the system should be amenable to such abuse AT ALL — and the fact that I can’t make my own independent backups of things which can’t be altered without my express permission is a systemic vulnerability which should not be tolerated.

I don’t think they actively work to that end, it’s more than likely simply the most common end-product of their indifference, as inherent agents of Friedman’s fourth transaction type:

Milton Friedman’s simple but powerful take on purchasing transactions : He noted that there are four types of purchasing sitations:
1. Individual spends his own money to buy something for himself. The right item is bought and the best price is paid.
2. Individual spends his own money to buy something for someone else. Wrong item is frequently bought but buyer tries not to overpay — Father’s Day gifts, Anniversary gifts.
3. Individual spends someone else’s money to buy something for himself. The right item is bought but the price paid is often too high — you spending your employer’s money to buy yourself lunch.
4. Individual spends someone else’s money to buy something for a third party. Wrong item is frequently bought and price paid is often too high — Government is the perfect example — the spender doesn’t have any vested interest in the gift, nor do they have any vested interest in the expense. From this we get thousand dollar hammers.

I put it to you that almost all government expenditures occur as a result of being type 4 transactions, and thus don’t seek to destroy value, they are merely indifferent to it. The net affect is no different, no, but there is significance in this in regards underlying motivation and how one goes about doing something about it. It suggests alternative approaches and/or mechanisms for dealing with resistance.

Example — if they are not out to explicitly destroy value, then one possible approach is to reward the ones doing the spending with some percentage of what they save (yes, determining this AND preventing it from being gamed is far from trivial, I grant… it’s just being suggested to make the point). By doing that, the purchaser now has a vested interest in what is spent, making the transaction type 2… Similarly, if the people who benefit from the purchase are part of the people making the contract definition, then they will have a vested interest in what is purchased, turning the transaction to type 3 (yes, this, too, can be gamed but, once more — it does help focus on possible alternatives).

The ideal would be to minimize government expenditures, but how far do you plan to do that, AND the problem still exists for whatever remains, making it a worthwhile issue to approach even with a complete intention to pare down government actions to the absolute minumum.

;D

From what I understand (and please point out if I’m mistaken) is that Macmillan doesn’t want cheap e-books to undercut their initial hardcover sales. So, rather than push back the e-book release by several months, they’d set the initial price higher so that the hardcovers had a chance. Then, over a period of time, they’d incrementally reduce the e-book price.

I don’t have a problem with Macmillan trying out that business strategy, nor do I have a problem with Amazon attempting to negotiate a different pricing contract. I also wouldn’t have a problem with Amazon declining to sell e-books that it can’t price at $9.99. But when Amazon pulled ALL Macmillan titles, regardless of format, they stopped being my agent and started being a direct hindrance to me. I wouldn’t have bought an e-book regardless of the price so I wouldn’t have been helped or hurt by either of them prevailing but, by pulling all formats, they’re now involving that don’t have a stake in the actual fight – not only me, but the authors as well. At point it stopped being a laudable business strategy and became a petulant, school-yard bully tactic.

one reason for a distributor is that consumers have no idea who published most works and don’t want to know. they often want multiple books at the same time, often from different publishers. can you imagine going to a different video store or having a different netflix account for paramount, fox, pixar, etc? it would be awful. if it costs a bit more for a one stop shop, i suspect that most are willing to pay it. i certainly am.

i don’t want to go to the del monte store and the campbells store and the tropicana store. i want to go to the supermarket.

this is why the distribution model exists.

in the case of e-books, it’s a bit more complex as well as the standards are all proprietary. effectively, amazon and apple are selling access to a platform and a format. there is no MP3 style industry standard. if one develops, distributors will likely lose some power, but id itunes is any guide, perhaps not as much as one might suspect.

tomw