Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works:
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology. Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.*
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
People are weighing in since Amazon “capitulated” (their words) to Macmillan yesterday. The most entertaining rundown was written by John Scalzi. The most insightful was written by Tim Bray.
Author Charlie Stross explains the business reasons why Amazon pulled all Macmillan books from their online store last week. It’s the best overview of the dispute and why readers should care about it that I’ve seen.
Also check out this post by Jim Henley, in which he links to a bunch of reactions and runs some of the numbers in the dispute, and explains in concise terms exactly what’s at stake:
There are $7-8 in incremental costs coming off of every hardcover book as we move from print to bits, with some small new incremental costs for ebook production. So call it $7 a book.
One way or another, that $7 is going to be split among authors, publishers, retailers and customers. The question is, who gets how much?
Update: Macmillan wins, for now.
I’ve been seeing snippets of Cormac McCarthy’s interview with John Jurgensen all week and I finally got around to reading the whole thing. You should too, it’s inspiring.
If you’ve ever been curious about what kind of money you can make writing computer books, check out Peter Cooper’s post What I’ve Earned (and Learned. Having written a number of books myself, I find his article matches up pretty well with my experience.
Google founder Sergey Brin takes to the pages of the New York Times today to explain the value of Google Books:
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
As an author, I’m completely supportive of Google Books, and I agree with Brin in that I wish there were many such services. Recently an out of print, foreign album I had been searching for in any format for years became available via Amazon MP3. In one day, this band’s music went from being completely inaccessible to being available to essentially everyone with an Internet connection. Google Books’ arrangement is slightly different, but the concept is the same. Most people create things in order to reach an audience, and Google Books gives authors of out of print works an opportunity that simply does not currently exist. It’s unlikely that a better opportunity is worth holding out for.
I’ve finished Scott Rosenberg’s history of blogging, Say Everything, and wanted to finish writing up my thoughts. The other day I wrote about the first half, now I’m adding my impression on the whole thing.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, Scott does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.
There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. There’s a discussion of sincerity and authenticity that I found illuminating. I never really considered the differences between the two, but they are important and meaningful. I’d classify this blog as a “sincere” blog, but not an “authentic” one, by Scott’s definition.
He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly — the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not — it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.
I also want to note that Scott incorporates quotations from blogs throughout the book, and the quotes are very well selected. The quotations not only underscore the points he’s trying to make, but are also almost always important in their own right. There are very few quotations from blogs in the book that were new to me.
This is a book about blogs that any blogger would enjoy reading. It’d also be great for people who have never gotten what blogging is all about. It’s really a fine book.
I’ve plowed into Scott Rosenberg’s new history of blogging, Say Everything and finished the first half of the book today. It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important. This is the first history book I’ve ever read (and could very well be the last) that describes events that I observed very closely. Scott does a great job of filling in the backstories for those events. Nothing in the book rings patently false or wrong to me, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay.
A few random impressions from the first few chapters:
A few things I was sad to see go unmentioned:
I was reading Douglas Crockford’s excellent JavaScript: The Good Parts and came across a great sentence that you wouldn’t find in many technical books:
If you want to learn more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, consult any other JavaScript book.
That’s the sort of thing that cuts through the tedium of reading a book about programming.
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