From Barry Eisler via The Guardian:

Until November 2007, when Amazon introduced the Kindle, the only viable means of book distribution was paper. Accordingly, a writer who wanted to reach a mass audience needed a paper distribution partner. A writer could hire her own editor and her own cover design artist; she could even hire a printing press to create the actual books. The one service she couldn’t hire out was distribution. And publishers didn’t offer distribution as an à la carte service. If a writer wanted distribution, she had to pay a publisher 85% of her revenues for the entire publishing package: editorial, copyediting, proofreading, jacket design, printing, and marketing, all bundled with distribution.

Was a price of 85% of revenues a good deal for this packaged publishing service?

. . . .

But for every author who wanted and benefited from the packaged service, there were countless others who took it – if they could get it at all – only because they had no alternative.

Digital distribution has provided that alternative. And increasing numbers of authors are choosing it.

. . . .

An author so inclined can buy digital distribution for 30% of the list price of the book she’s publishing – the same digital distribution a legacy publisher offers – and outsource all other publishing functions, all for significantly less than legacy publishers charge for their packaged service.

. . . .

And yet, when I offered these fairly axiomatic observations during a recent keynote at the 21st annual Pike’s Peak Writers Conference, the reaction among some editors and agents in the audience (and elsewhere) was extremely negative, with some walking out; others taking to Twitter to urge others to leave, to boycott my talks, and to boycott conferences where I’m talking; and a fair amount of name-calling.

The hostility is surprising in one sense (we’re just talking business, after all, not politics or religion), but in another sense it’s readily understandable. Because in essence, what I was describing in my talk was how digital distribution has changed the legacy publishing industry from something a writer needed, into something a writer might merely want. Because of digital, legacy publishing, which used to be a necessity, is now only potentially useful.

. . . .

But if your worldview, your conception of your rightful place in the universe, has always been informed by the implicit knowledge that you are indispensable, and tens of thousands of authors are now informing you that you’ll have to account for your value or they will take their business elsewhere, it’s not so inconceivable that you might find your sensibilities temporarily shocked.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

A classic example of shooting the messenger. Other messengers should also expect to be shot without, of course, having any impact on the ongoing disruption of traditional publishing.

From The Guardian:

“My brain,” as one reader put it rather dramatically, “fell over at the thought of selling ‘used’ ebooks”. He wasn’t the only one. The reaction to the news earlier this year that Amazon had a patent to sell secondhand ebooks was almost universally strong: it could ruin authors’ livelihoods, said some commenters. It was dangerous for publishers, said others. It’s just boggling my mind, said most.

. . . .

It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That’s not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don’t correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It’s something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.

“I think it is a very grave problem,” says Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian. “If you’re citing a digital version of a book, often you can’t cite the pages.” He adds that that documents have always been slippery – “there’s no definitive text of King Lear” – but the ease with which it is now possible to make changes to published ebooks means “you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in.”

. . . .

He also worries about what the possibility to update ebooks will mean for quality. “For authors, the printed book means you’ve finished and that’s the final format – you can’t keep revisiting it,” he says. “You want the author to know this is the final version. If authors have 10 bites of the cherry, will they concentrate as hard as if they think it’s the final version? There’s a feeling with the web that you can put something up there, and people can change it. One of the advantages of books is that they’re permanent.”

The ability to update ebooks is there, however. “Publishers can make changes to their books and send us updated files any time,” says an Amazon spokesperson.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Abel for the tip.

Disruptive technology change is, well, disruptive. For a lot of people. That doesn’t stop it from occurring.

PG will repeat his caution that watching published patent applications or issued patents is one of the worst ways to predict the future technology moves of a tech company. You’ll collect better information sitting in a bar near the company’s headquarters.

He will also observe that, speaking generally, Amazon is treating authors better than almost anyone else these days.

Predicting that the company will suddenly tear off its mask and be revealed as a great oppressor of authors is a pastime undertaken chiefly by publishers, agents and their fellow-travelers whose businesses and lives are being disrupted by today’s Amazon.

Neil Gaiman gave the keynote at the Digital Minds Conference for the recent 2013 London Book Fair.

Here’s a partial transcription of his remarks from Falls Into Writing:

These days the gates being guarded, the gates where there are fewer and fewer actual walls. In music, the walls have long since fallen along with the sale of physical objects. Home taping didn’t really kill music. Music’s out there doing just fine. More of it’s actually being made than ever, but the trick is becoming to find the good stuff. And for people who make the music to figure out how to monetize what they’re doing. Things change. It used to take monks between five and twenty years, according to links sent to me on Twitter when I asked, to produce a complete, illuminated Bible. Whole lot of monk hours and fully employed scriptoria. That work and that world vanished with the arrival of the printing press, and nothing was ever going to bring it back.

People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things, and I tell them my only real prediction which is it’s all changing. I don’t know what publishing’s going to look like five years from now. Anyone who says they do is probably lying to you. I don’t know, neither does anyone else. Amazon, Google, all of those things – probably aren’t the enemy. Big publishing – probably isn’t the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing.

People ask me if I think we should be, they should be guarding the gates more carefully, and I say, ‘Sure, why not?’ Makes as much sense as anything else. I don’t think it’s a long-term solution to the problems and challenges that face publishers. I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that novelists – we may have been a blip. There may have been a small amount of time in which people who were good at making up stories could actually trade their abilities for more than perhaps an evening’s meal and some admiration.

. . . .

The truth is, whatever we make up is likely to be right. It’s time for dandelions. Embrace the old as we embrace the new because we’re on the frontier, and there are no rules on the frontier. We can actually break rules that nobody’s thought to make yet. We can enter through doors that still say, ‘Exit only.’ We can climb in through windows.

The model for tomorrow, and this is the model that I’ve been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001 – probably since I started using CompuServe end of 1988, the model is try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. Succeed in ways we would never have imagined a year ago or a week ago. I think it’s time for us to be dandelions willing to launch a thousand seeds and lose 900 of them if a hundred or even a dozen survive and grow and make a new world.

Link to the rest at Falls Into Writing and thanks to Barb for the tip.

From author Barry Eisler:

This past Saturday, I gave one of the keynotes at the 21st annual Pike’s Peak Writers Convention (great conference and I highly recommend it to other writers). During my talk, I shared some thoughts on the choices writers have today in publishing — thoughts which, judging from some of the Twitter comments I’ve seen, have caused a bit of upset here and there.

. . . .

• The primary value-add offered by legacy publishers has traditionally been paper distribution. Certainly legacy publishers offer many other services (much of which is outsourced) — editorial, copyediting, proofreading, book packaging, and marketing, to name the most obvious — but the primary service, the one the others are built on, has always been paper distribution.

• The advent of digital book distribution means that today, not all authors need a paper distribution partner. Authors can reach (and thousands of authors are reaching) a mass audience in digital by self-publishing instead (a third option, Amazon publishing, combines elements of both systems).

. . . .

• It’s important to compare the reality of one system to the reality of the other. Too often, people compare the reality of self-publishing to the ideal of legacy publishing, and such a skewed comparison doesn’t yield useful results. The most useful way to look at the choice between legacy publishing and self-publishing, therefore, is as a choice between two kinds of lottery, each with different odds, different kinds of payouts, and different overall advantages and disadvantages.

. . . .

Nonetheless, one literary agent in the audience, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank, tweeted that I was ”offering up bullshit” in suggesting that a legacy publisher’s primary value is paper distribution. Because this is an exceptionally important point of disagreement, I’d like to talk about it a bit more.

As I’ve noted, an author who wants to reach a mass audience in paper needs a paper distribution partner. But an author who wants to reach a mass audience in digital needs no distribution partner at all. It is simply a fact — a fact — that a lone author can distribute 100% as effectively by herself as she can with the assistance of a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate (again, editing, marketing and all the rest is a separate story; for the moment, we are talking only about distribution).

To put it another way: a publisher offering an author digital distribution services is like someone offering me air. I already have it and I don’t need to pay extra for it. I know it can be unsettling in some circles to have the matter stated so baldly, but I really don’t think the matter is disputable, either. In digital, as Clay Shirky has said, ”Publishing is a button.”

. . . .

I think it’s difficult to argue other than that paper distribution has traditionally been legacy publishing’s primary value-add, and I’m surprised that such an anodyne observation could provoke controversy, let alone consternation. Maybe in some circles, putting it so plainly just isn’t the done thing? It’s bad manners to depart from pretty talk about how legacy publishers “nurture” authors, and to focus instead on actual value? I’m not sure.

. . . .

Agent Jennifer Laughran of Andrea Brown Lit recommended that Fairbank ”Stop listening! Save yourself!” Agent Janet Reid of Janet Reid Literary advised that it’s a mistake to even attend a conference where I’m speaking (apparently it’s not sufficiently protective to boycott just me; you have to boycott the entire conference). Agent Pam van Hylckama Vlieg of Larson Pomada tweeted that she wanted to walk out, though she didn’t. Agent Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary tweeted, ”I had to be restrained in my seat. What a douche!” (Goldblatt subsequentlyretracted the name-calling aspect). Fairbank also claimed that a Random House editor left early, fuming, rather than listen to my presentation.

(Apparently, you didn’t even have to know what was said to know it was bad: author Lauren Dane offered up a variety of reactions, suggesting talks like mine are “insulting,” “condescending,” “smug,” and “dismissive,” before acknowledging, “Oh, I do want to say, I wasn’t there. I only saw one quote that I have no other context for so I could totally be reading it wrong.” Indeed. Why let a lack of any relevant knowledge get in the way of a chance to offer a string of public opinions?)

These reactions, and the attitudes behind them, aren’t just immature. They’re also fundamentally unhealthy. How can agents and editors serve writers in a dramatically changing industry if they refuse to listen to new and contrary views?

Link to the rest at The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

There is a lot more to Barry’s comment, but is PG the only one who thinks that this “nurturing” business sounds just plain weird? He’s heard the term used elsewhere to describe one of the most important things an agent or publisher does for an author.

Does nurturing even belong in a healthy business relationship?

PG says maybe some baby authors want nurturing, but most grown-up authors don’t. If you simply must have nurturing, maybe a dog or cat is a better idea than an agent or publisher. They’ll love you to pieces and never ask for a contract (unless the cat hires an attorney).

Like many things in traditional publishing, maybe you get nurturing whether you want it or not.

Here’s an idea. Let’s make nurturing an à la carte option that the author can pay for:

Agency Commission – 15% with nurturing, 7.5% without nurturing

Publisher Ebook Royalties – 25% with nurturing, 50% without nurturing

From publishing consultatant Mike Shatzkin:

There are three overarching realities that are determining the future course of book publishing. They are clear and they are inexorable:

Scale, and its close cousin “critical mass”, is the ability to use size as a competitive advantage in any endeavor;

Verticalization, or being in sync with the inherent capability of the Internet to deliver anything of interest in an audience-specific way; and

Atomization, or the ability for any person or entity to perform the most critical component of publishing — making content available and accessible to anybody anywhere — without capital and without an organization dedicated to distribution.

. . . .

In the 20th century, scale in publishing was really an internal concept. Big publishers had more resources to sign books, get to bookstores, and roll out marketing than smaller ones. Barnes & Noble and Borders had supply chain and cost advantages over independent bookstores, except that Ingram and other wholesalers lent their scale to provide partial compensation. Bigger literary agencies had negotiated more boilerplate agreements than smaller ones and often had helpful relationships that went beyond publishing, but a single operator could still cultivate enough editors to make a legitimate case that he or she could place a book as effectively as the giants.

But that’s changed entirely in the past 10 years. Now publishing operates in a world increasingly controlled by Amazon, Apple, and Google, all companies that make far more money outside of books than through books. One Big Six CEO observed to me about five years ago that the time had passed when s/he could call all the biggest trading partners of their company and reach the CEO instantly. Penguin Random House has merged into a publishing company that will control about half the most commercial titles in the marketplace, but any suggestion that their size will enable them to dictate much to Amazon, Apple, or Google is deluded.

What Random House can do is apply scale against other publisher competitors. And they will.

Critical mass is a scale-related concept but it is also a component of verticalization. When a publisher, or any aggregator, has enough material to allow it to ignore competition in a consumer offer, it has achieved the effective barrier to entry that scale also provides. For example: subscription models for general books are a very difficult commercial proposition because the biggest agents for the biggest authors wouldn’t want their titles included. But Amazon might just have so many titles they can make available through a subscription offering that they can do it successfully even without the top of the bestseller list.

. . . .

The barrier to entry for book publishing was always relatively low compared to other media: magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and movies would all require much more of a financial and organizational commitment than was required to publish a book. But there definitely was a fence around the book publishing world, and the position of “gatekeeper” was both well-earned and well-rewarded.

But those days are gone too.

As of this writing in April 2013, sales of any book of narrative reading will, depending on topic or genre, be 20% to 60% in ebooks, which requires no inventory investment and minimal distribution infrastructure. Sales of the printed books — the other 40% to 80% — will be anywhere from 25% to 50% through online channels. Those sales can also be achieved (largely through Amazon) without an investment in inventory, printed at the moment they’re ordered.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

PG will observe that large organizations dealing with disruptive changes to their businesses have a number of very challenging problems:

+ They don’t have the right employees. The employees necessary for the old business are probably not the right employees for the new business. This is a particularly acute problem in the executive suite.

Hiring a bunch of new employees doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there is typically an age difference. The old business has older employees, including a lot of lifers. The old business doesn’t realize how weird its corporate culture feels to employees necessary to operate the new business. Ultimately, regardless of what the CEO says, the culture doesn’t want to change. The old employees are masters of the politics of dealing with current management and know how to shoot down or slow down new initiatives.

New employees and what seem to the old organization to be radical new ideas are treated like bacteria invading a human body. The immune response of the old organization is powerful and manifests itself in many ways. Instead of focusing solely on building the new, valuable time of the new employees is involved in dealing with the immune response. If the organization has hired really talented new employees, those employees will leave for greener pastures where there aren’t any immune responses, leaving the big new thing left half-done. If the organization tries to tie talented new employees down with employment contracts, they’ll responde with low morale, start leaving early and spend their evenings and weekends working on independent projects.

+ The size and resources that give organizations access to scale in the old business slow them way down as they try to adjust to the rapidly-changing new business. Yes, they can eliminate departments and fire people who are no longer needed, but that requires time and places a tremendous drag on the morale of the survivors. Having a billion dollars invested in people and infrastructure necessary for the old business and irrelevant for the new one is a big management problem and a boat anchor for a company that needs to move quickly.

+ Finances preclude dumping the old business model as quickly as is strategically desirable. What CEO is going to give up a billion dollar revenue stream that exists today but will be a $50 million dollar revenue stream in five years?

Current revenue is the shiniest of shiny objects for a typical financially-oriented executive. Instead of putting all resources into the potential five billion dollar revenue stream of five years into the future, the executive deludes him/herself that the organization can do two things well, one entrenched in the past while the other pioneers the future.

When the real (as opposed to perceived) competition is 100% focused on the future, this strategy almost never works.

The tech world is littered with the corpses of highly-impressive companies with really smart CEO’s who failed when they tried to ride two horses at the same time. Yes, some companies are able to be successful in lots of different businesses, but none of those businesses are typically facing a serious technology disruption.

From The Harvard Business Review:

I missed Twitter. I first heard about it when everyone did in 2006. And I started an account in a knee-jerk way. But I didn’t grasp it. In those days, I would just stare at the entry box and think, “What?”

Now of course, I pretend Twitter struck me as an irresistibly good idea the first time I heard it and that I was an early champion. I have forgotten and concealed the early days, the days in which I had no clue.

. . . .

The fact of the matter is our professional lives now churn with change. Markets change. Technology changes. Consumers change. Channels change. Competitors change. This is an era of disruption. Not disruption as the occasional event, but disruption as the constant, chronic condition of our professional lives.

. . . .

Stage 2: Repudiation. It turns out there are lots of people who don’t get the new technology and now social life is a little like a competition to show that we’re not “falling for it.” At this point, there can more social capital in saying that we don’t like the tech than that we do.

Stage 2 is marked by snappy one-liners. With the practiced ease of stand-up comedian, we can now be heard saying stuff like, “Twitter. What could I possibly say in 140 characters?” Or, “FourSquare? Why would I want to be mayor of my living room.”

Stage 3. Shaming. This is when we are so persuaded that we’re right and the new innovation is wrong that we are prepared to make fun of the credulous among us. I was on the receiving end after I gave a presentation on new media to a large advertising firm. When I finished, three planners took turns patting me on the head and telling me, “This Twitter thing. It’s just a fad. Give it a couple of months and it will go away.” We heard a lot of this sort of thing about Pinterest in the early days. Now it’s valued at $2.5 billion.

Link to the rest at The Harvard Business Review and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From FutureBook:

The publishing industry is struggling to find the metaphors that describe the transformation that is taking over the sector. This is one conclusion from Digital Minds, the annual digital conference that acts as the Sunday-prelude to the London Book Fair.

First up in the metaphor-wars was Pan Macmillan’s ebullient digital director Sara Lloyd who chaired the conference. Digital was akin to climate change, she said, and it also now has few deniers. Like global warming, the way we describe digital has altered as our understanding of it has, and while it will threaten some parts of the business, other bits will survive and adapt. “Digital weirded our world, and for a while we didn’t recognise the seasons as those seasons changed.” Unlike, climate change, however, as Lloyd admitted, this was a change we could–in fact should–embrace.

. . . .

One of the best sessions at Digital Minds was the session on ‘start-ups’ and how publishers could work collaboratively with them. The session began by going down the usual route of start-ups telling publishers how best to work with them, but was turned on its head by Penguin’s Molly Barton, who explained in great detail just what a publisher, such as Penguin, was doing to engage with start-ups.

She advised start-ups to have clear message, and strong business plan before approaching a publisher in order to quickly find the right people to talk to. She advised them to talk among themselves and “competitively reposition” themselves if they find other companies working on the same problems. She also cautioned against too much “pivoting”, which might mean the publisher lose faith in the executives and their commitment to their idea. Anyone who thinks publishers don’t get the start-up scene, should meet Molly. But bring a business plan.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

Passive Guy says the most valuable startups for publishers are talented authors. Increasingly, such authors are not particularly interested in working with traditional publishers in part because they’ve lost “faith in the executives and their commitment to” treating those authors as valued partners in deed as well as in word.

At this stage in the disruption of the traditional publishing business, publishers need authors more than authors need publishers. Smart authors already realize this fact when publishers attempt to engage them. This truth will continue to become more and more obvious as additional time passes.

Perhaps it’s time for authors to put something like this on their websites:

Publishers wishing to submit proposals for publishing any of author’s books should send them to queries@author.com.  Proposals should be no more than 250 words and include the amount of the proposed advance, royalty rates for hard copy and ebook editions, the number of years of publishing rights requested and the amount of the guaranteed promotion budget for each book. Proposals that ask for rights for a period of longer than ten years or include ebook royalties of less than 50% of net revenue will not be considered. Regretfully, Author does not have time to respond to proposals that do not meet these requirements.

From Paid Content:

Newspapers and other media entities have gotten used to thinking of themselves as the most important part of the equation — but why not focus on helping individual brands engage with their audiences and then share in the revenue?

. . . .

Although they have since become a crucial element of modern society, in many ways newspapers were just the best packaging and delivery mechanism for information we had available at a certain point: a way of aggregating everything from local election coverage to foreign reporting. Now, of course, we have an almost unlimited ability to create, package and distribute our own content — and that means journalists and even those involved in news events can reach an audience directly. What if more media companies thought of themselves as platforms for helping that to occur?

. . . .

“Some news personalities now play a strong role on Twitter and Facebook, but they often get little institutional support for this, and such participation and engagement remain merely part of a narrow web traffic strategy. But what if news outlets decided to flip their model, so that the editorial staff was not subservient to the brand, but the ‘brand’ became a platform for talent?”

. . . .

Where platforms like theNew York Times and Newsweek used to hold all the cards, and individual writers were forced to cut deals in order to find an audience, bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo have shown there is an alternate route.

. . . .

“On Election Day 2012, more than 20 percent of NYTimes.com traffic visited Nate Silver’s blog. At the same time, his book had just been released. The Times had little role in Silver’s book. But imagine it had a big one; imagine the way it would open revenue possibilities, taking advantage of the giant platform the Times provided Silver. Publishing books, hosting events, and public speaking are just the beginning.”

Link to the rest at Paid Content

From The Huffington Post:

The death of publishing has been greatly exaggerated.

Though traditional publishers are being threatened from all sides — the rise of ebooks, competition from other media, the growing shadow of Amazon — publishers have learned from the failures of the music industry, the futility of closing one’s eyes and trying to deny an evolving marketplace. They have conformed to many aspects of digitization, hurrying to convert to required formats and bowing to imposed pricing structures, hoping to not miss the last boat provided by the new marketplace.

However, accepting the future is not the same thing as embracing it, thriving in it. Many of publishers’ traditional functions — printing books, storing and shipping them around the country, maintaining a far-flung sales team — are becoming less relevant as content moves to digital. Self-publishing is an increasingly plausible option, with some remarkable success stories. While nervous companies typically fight to preserve and protect what’s left of their industry, the smart ones figure out how their skills might be applicable in the next. In this new world, how do publishers make themselves valuable and even necessary?

Salvation may lie in the same source as the challenge. Ebooks alone may not require a traditional publisher, but simple ebooks only scratch the surface of the potential of this new realm.

. . . .

Expecting books to be unaffected by these new reading devices would be like expecting cinema to consist of nothing more than filmed plays. True embrace of the emerging formats requires projects more ambitious than simply digitizing a traditional text.

So far, the growth of these evolving forms has been limited by practical obstacles. Unlike straightforward ebooks, transmedia projects can be very difficult for individual authors to undertake on their own. Platforms must be built from the ground up, new markets must be discovered, audiences educated — all for a single one-off project. These challenges would instantly shrink, however, if many projects were brought under a single umbrella — essentially, a new-media publisher.

. . . .

The real potential of digital storytelling will be uncovered only via iterative experimentation, not by eyeballing each plucky startup’s new publishing platform. Today, it’s those startups that attract the brightest technologists and creative thinkers, eager to own the production tools and distribution channels, and sound the death knell for old-world publishing. But “content” is often an afterthought for these companies — public-domain novels, crowdsourced texts, faddy non-fiction; most don’t have the ability to produce powerful, original writing or develop talented new authors.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Randall for the tip.

PG has had a lot of dealings with publishers and worked for part of a giant international publishing conglomerate.  He has had a lot of dealings with tech companies, including being employed as an executive by a few.

The words, “never the twain shall meet,” come into his mind.

From Scott Turow at The New York Times:

Last month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary market, authors won’t get royalties.

This may sound like a minor problem; authors already contend with an enormous domestic market for secondhand books. But it is the latest example of how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams.

. . . .

Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce: there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book for full credit.

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.

Best-selling authors have the market power to negotiate a higher implicit e-book royalty in our advances, even if our publishers won’t admit it. But writers whose works sell less robustly find their earnings declining because of the new rate, a process that will accelerate as the market pivots more toward digital.

. . . .

Even libraries and authors, usually allies, have grown less cozy. No one calls our public library system socialistic, though it involves free distribution of the goods authors produce, and even though in many Western nations, authors get a tiny fee when libraries lend their works. Authors happily accept our system, because libraries have nurtured them as writers and readers.

Now many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection.

. . . .

 An even more nightmarish version of the same problem emerged last month with the news that Amazon had a patent to resell e-books. Such a scheme will likely be ruled illegal. But if it is not, sales of new e-books will nose-dive, because an e-book, unlike a paper book, suffers no wear with each reading. Why would anyone ever buy a new book again?

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Dinah for the tip.

Scott’s problem is that he conflates the well-being of authors with the well-being of publishers. PG suggests that a better title for the piece would be The Slow Death of the American Publisher.

PG would advise anyone not to get too close to a dying organization. See Night Shade Books as one example of why this is a bad idea. When an author’s writing success is bound up with the success of a publisher, if the publisher dies or contracts, the author will definitely suffer.

On the other hand, a great many indie authors are doing quite well these days in a new and thriving world of publishing. Many who were formerly associated with traditional publishers find their incomes increasing as they self-pub.

As far as the sales of books in overseas markets are concerned, indie authors can enter an increasing number of those markets with a mouse-click and set prices in a way that optimizes their profits from the sale of their books around the world.