Economics of Publishing
 

Here's an article on E-books, a good one: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...carouselMain.0

Because I am a financial planner and a poet, I've seen a lot of publishers' closely guarded financial statements. It costs not much more to publish a cook book or a dog training book which can sell tens of thousands of copies than to publish a poet who will sell 500 copies. The difference is just paper and shipping. I think one of the bravest guys in the world is Alex, who has founded Able Muse Press to bring us really good poetry. I don't see Alex' financial statements, but I know what he's up against.

The most shocking thing to me in this article is that Borders owed Penguin $41 million when they filed for bankruptcy. That's a pretty big trade credit! The Sullivan/Murphy Beowulf is published by Penguin's parent, Longman/Pearson, whose president for literature is a hunting buddy of mine. If Barnes and Noble goes down the loss will be graver by far. Today I am going to go spend some money on books.

This has long been clear to anyone who buys a lot of books. Not the necessarily the wherefore part, but certainly the why part.

In the past few years it has been possible to get a classic (Dickens, Balzac, etc. the kind of books usually offered by so-called thrift publisher niche, Dover books et al) for zero dollars in a Kindle version.

I have in recent memory, a painfully similar marketing trick here in Sweden, one applauded by dummies when it appeared but which energetically and painfully screwed the general public in the long run, (no, make that "within a short planning horizon).

Background. As long as I have lived here, which is half a century, we have traditionally had excellent and dependable public transporation (both rail travel and bus) at affordable prices. Some years ago a bus operator from another country muscled in. They printed vouchers in newspapers that anyone could cut out and present to the bus driver and travel anywhere, anytime for free. No need to book in advance, just be there. If the bus was full, another would be called to take up the slack.

After a while you had to pay to ride, but still it was a ridiculous price compared to what a ticket cost on the established transportation modes, esp. rail, which as we know, leaves a much smaller environmental footprint than busses do.

After another while, the national rail transport--then a state responsibility--was losing lots of money and was privatized. In other words, a company built up by tax dollars was sold out. Local bus companies which were undercut went belly-up.

The situation now is that most of our transportation is owned and operated by foreign companies. A rail ticket is set according to supply and demand. So if you want to travel on a weekend or holiday at a popular time, expect to pay up to ten times what it costs to travel on the late, late train. This method means that young children, old people, the handicapped can't travel at a reasonable cost at a reasonable time. Do trains arrive on time? Guess.

Needless to say, there are fewer bus alternatives throughout the country. Also, not surprisingly, it is no longer possible to "show up and board". The ticket must be booked in advance, via the internet, and when a bus is full, it is full. Sorry, bye-bye. Bus travel prices have gone up to fill in the gap left by bankrupt competitors.

I expect this to happen in the book branch when publishing is consolidated to the major actors in the field who see a book as a commodity just like any other and to hell with cultural or educational value-added. And don't expect to find a kindle version of books that almost no one buys. Even if old books are sold as physical objects on the second-hand market, handling and postal costs will make it prohibitive.

Since e-books have no postal charges and a minumum of handling cost a.k.a. fewer employees, when the book market settles back into its present price level, the difference will go to the distributor, not the author or the buyer. I am as skeptical about authors being contracted to a major player-supplier such as Amazon, as I would be if they were being bound to an organization controlled by a totalitarian state.

The answer is not, alas, to buy more books, but to get a government that is not influenced by lobbyists and controlled by greedy big business. I'll stop there.

signed

a Luddite and proud of it.

another interesting development:
is it only a matter of time before more follow suit?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/daring...140209029.html

All this makes me very sad. Those poor little publishing houses, led like lambs to the slaughter at the altar of Apple and Amazon. What ever will they do? Why, just the other day I heard them talking about how the sky was falling, and they can't possibly stand up to those twin corporate giants.

Take poor little Macmillan. They've published everybody: W.B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Sean O'Casey, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole, Margaret Mitchell, C. P. Snow. How could they possibly keep resisting the evil empire? Except, of course, they are a wholly own subsidiary of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. And have been for a couple decades.

Harper Collins, of course, is wholly owned by News Corp, and is part of the Rupert Murdoch group, better known here for it's Fox News subsidiary.

Penguin isn't Penguin, it's a subsidiary of Pearson PLC.

Simon & Schuster is wholly owned by CBS. That one gets even better. Here's a brief summary of the last few decades:

In 1975, Gulf+Western acquired the company, and nine years later, Prentice Hall was brought into the company fold. G+W would change its name to Paramount Communications in 1989.

In 1994, Paramount was sold to the original Viacom.

In 1998, Viacom sold Simon & Schuster's educational operations, including Prentice Hall and Macmillan, to Pearson PLC, becoming part of Pearson Education.

Viacom would split into 2 companies at the end of 2005: one called CBS Corporation (which inherited S&S), and the other retaining the Viacom name. Despite the split, National Amusements retains majority control of both firms.

And who, you may well ask, is National Amusements? Well, it's 80% privately owned by Sumner Redstone. His daughter owns the other 20%.

So, these poor little publishing houses, innocent victims of those big bad wolves like Amazon and Apple? Makes me want to weep in my beer. What's the world coming to? ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Thanks for the link Seree. I'm familiar with EDC and didn't know they'd cut both Amazon and Baker & Taylor off. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for the big publishers but Amazon has now moved to squeezing small and mid-size publishers until they die. And they have the federal government on their side.

The point is that it is the reading public and the authors who are being screwed. Monopoly is not just a board game.

I was surprised to discover recently that Abe Books, which I had considered an alternative place to purchase, is, in fact, owned by Amazon. The modus operandi in media and publishing is the same as in the pharmeceutical industry, ad infinitum. Smaller companies are taken over and eliminated or assimilated, and competition which is supposedly the heart of free enterprise is ceasing to exist.

I am flabbergasted by anyone not concerned about the consolidation of the media and information industries into the hands of a few. Look around you to see what can happen to a nation when one person or a few actors monopolize the media. Look at the the danger wrought by Murdoch and Berlusconi for heaven's sakes and the methods these players employ once monopoly is a fact.

An article in this month's Atlantic analyzes the transition from having a market society to being market society. i don't know if it is online but this is a clue to the content http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1424733.html

There are many things that I feel should not be entrusted to market forces but which are the province of citizenry via good government, among them the control of books and information media.

Others, formerly responsibility of government, now the province of business are: education, prisons, public transportation, affordable housing.

I suggest a close reading of the Atlantic article by Michael J. Sandel titled "What Isn't for Sale?"

One should not disregard that the one percent is wiping out the middle class which is the main factor for stability in any society. Look at the countries without a middle class and you will see what happens when the vast majority are poor and controlled by a small elite.

Poverty and joblessness not only lead to a greater crime rate it is anti-productive in every sense of the word.

Anyone fortunate enough to have a beer should indeed be weeping in it.

Oh, my. That's a "Luke, I'm your father" moment.

Ed

In the UK poetry publishers do exist, such as my last one Peterloo, now alas defunct, my next one, Enitharmon, and Ann and Bill's, Cinnamon, which would not do so were it not for The Arts Council, a Government body which gives them money - and still does, though less, in these straitened times.

Another reason to buy our books.

PS I don't know about the economics of Jayne's publisher. Publishing hese days is much cheaper than it was, as I think Tim pointed out. I've sometimes thought of going in for it myself, but not for long, it's a blody life's work. Vive Able Muse!

In The real story: publishing, four and a half years on Sharon Blackie, of Two Ravens Press (Scotland), writes about sales, marketing, blogs, reviews, money and motivation - "Even though our sales through Amazon, for example, go out at the highest discounts we ever give, we love them. Because they represent firm sales, and they never come back again." ... "We’ve had e-books for a couple of years now, sold through our website and also fully distributed through a major wholesaler, and our bestselling e-book has sold about ten copies."

How are readers being screwed by Amazon?