I don't feel that the marketing or curation is problematic really. However:
Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback - which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a criminally bad OCR job.
So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under what genre you file that its a crap purchase.
Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.
Both of those issues are the fault of the publisher, not Amazon. The publishers are being dragged kicking and screaming (and whining) into the ebook future, and they're not doing a very good job of serving their customers as a result.
You're right, perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned Amazon as the culprit. Nonetheless I feel Amazon is partly to blame since they clearly have the muscle to force the publishers to fix their mess.
Besides, how difficult can it be? Find a competent English major, fuel him/her with some red bull, pizza and bit of cash and they'll fix it. Hell, if they had a mechanism to do so the fans of these books (Dune etc) would probably fix it for free.
What I don't get is WHY a modern book would require OCR to be turned into a digital format. The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format the author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi, right?!
If a book predates computers, I can understand OCR, but not for something that's been written in the past ~20 years and is popular enough to not be "lost".
The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format the author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi, right?!
Wrong.
Prior to 2000, the MS may never have been submitted electronically; or might be in an obsolete format (Word Perfect, anyone?).Then, until circa 2008, the book was almost certainly copy-edited on paper -- that is, the editor printed out a paper copy and the copy-editor corrected typos by hand, which where then manually transcribed on a DTP system to produce the final output. The author therefore doesn't have an as-published electronic copy.
To make matters worse, all the big publishers outsourced copy-editing, typesetting, and printing many years ago. The typesetting was probably executed using Quark Publishing System on MacOS by an external agency, who then burned any backups on floppy disk or CDROM. The publishers do not own these, and in fact cannot acquire them without paying the typesetting bureau a three (or four) digit copying fee. So neither the authors nor the publishers own an as-published copy.
These days stuff is typeset on Adobe InDesign, which is a whole lot more ePub-friendly, and which can import Quark files ... except that Quark's format is notoriously idiosyncratic and import ops commonly lose some formatting info. (Such as italics, font changes, etc.)
TL:DR is that any book published before 2007 or thereabouts may be impossible to republish without either OCR or re-typesetting from scratch.
(TeX is pretty much unheard of among authors outside the science fields, and thanks to M$ churning the MS Word file format repeatedly between 1990 and 2008 it may be difficult to do anything with the original manuscript.)
Going forward the picture is brighter: I have as-published ebook editions of all my books and know how to crack the DRM on them to pull that text out in a legible form, with formatting intact. (Yes, I appreciate the irony of this. Why, just last week I emailed three DRM-cracked novels I downloaded off BitTorrent to an editor. I wrote 'em, the editor has a license to publish them in the UK, so it's legal, but ... the irony! It burns!)
They may have lost them. They may have a tiny glitch preventing conversion which the dude at the publisher simply can't figure out. Or something.
Publishers are as incompetent as anyone else. At ICON this year I got to go to a reading by David Weber (of _Honor Harrington_ etc), and he talked a little about dealing with a publisher and gave 2 examples of global search-and-replaces gone terribly wrong - Barons -> Earls, and Lords -> Knights, which resulted in him proofreading the entire books just to fix the S&R. Turns out publishers apparently don't use revision control either.
(Well, most of them. I think Tim O'Reilly might argue the toss :)
Authors of novels are even worse. They are in a career that typically doesn't get started until they're in their mid-thirties. So unless they got their start in IT/CS, you're looking at J. Random Middle-Aged Non-Techie.
Some of us know what a revision control system is. Most haven't got a clue, and aren't interested.
Some of us know what a revision control system is. Most haven't got a clue, and aren't interested.
I'd bet a lot of them have seen the RCS-like abilities of Time Machine or Dropbox and been delighted or would react with delight if it those were demonstrated to them. A lot of them still wouldn't have a clue nor be interested, though.
If people have built content management systems for publishers like newspapers, someone must have thought of CMS for other publishers with roots in the dead-tree business.
You're correct, but book publishers aren't used to thinking in those terms. Traditionally, the job results in a static lump of ink on paper. Game over: you sell it, you're done. In some fields it's a little different; text book publishers expect to issue new editions, for example. But those new editions are de facto different books, re-written and re-edited and re-typeset from scratch.
Newspapers and magazines need CMSs because they may need to pull or revise stories. Novels ... not so much. Yes, it's good to fix typos. In the world of paper publishing the author gets just one shot at that: the book goes back to be re-flowed for a different page size when it goes from hardcover into A-format paperback, and there's an opportunity to fix snags.
This is, obviously, going to change. In fact, I expect the bigger publishers to wake up real soon now and realize that not only do they have to do e-pub related things like drop DRM and fix the broken territorial rights problem, they also need to do internal process-related things -- like set up a CMS, in-source their typesetting, and modify their workflow to allow updates to existing-and-out-there books, rather than viewing the books as a terminal state at the end of a production process.
(Reasons why it should change? Well, for one thing it makes possible the issue of "director's cut" versions of a book. Yes, crass commercialism. But it also makes it possible to retarget books on a different audience. It makes it possible to rebundle in-series books in an omnibus edition. It makes it easier for the publisher to directly issue extracts from the book via their website, for promo purposes. Once layout/typesetting stops being a single step and becomes an ongoing process, there's every reason for in-housing it. And that, in turn, will require revision control and archival functions that publishers are currently unfamiliar with.)
You're correct, but book publishers aren't used to thinking in those terms. Traditionally, the job results in a static lump of ink on paper. Game over: you sell it, you're done.
...
they also need to do internal process-related things -- like set up a CMS, in-source their typesetting, and modify their workflow to allow updates to existing-and-out-there books, rather than viewing the books as a terminal state at the end of a production process.
I think there's a 3-way non zero-sum opportunity (win-win-win) lurking here if one can get away from the idea that the unit of production is a book as a lump of dead-tree or even as a particular string of bits or even as a stream of versions of a particular string of bits. Instead of focusing on curating individual books, wouldn't everyone win by developing CMS for curating collections of things, like author bibliographies?
In a way, this is what disparate parts of the industry already do. (Like this book by C. Stross? Why not try this other book by C. Stross? Like this book that's supposed to be "Hard Sci-Fi?" Why not read this other book...?) They're already trying to get customers to think of their brand as a good source of [some classification]. They're also motivated to get customers to think of an author as a brand as a good source of [some classification]. This is also how publishers and editors approach the brand represented by anthology series. Really, publishing at its core is the curation of a bibliographies. Customers and authors would benefit from such directed curation. (On the other hand, this might also perpetuate restrictive terms between authors and publishers.)
Indeed. I may or may not have asked whether they had revision control, but I do remember Weber remarking that his editor and publisher liked the old paper ways of doing things, and that's why he still was mailing back and forth physical books and paperwork.
(As I get older, I am becoming more sympathetic to this: paper stays put when you take your eyes off it, while bits do not.)
Pricing an e-book higher than the paperback is not ridiculous. That's capitalism. If technology has enabled a new version of a product that is superior for the customer in convenience or capabilities, the customer will be willing to pay more and the producer has every right to capture that, regardless of what it costs to produce. (Leaving aside OCR quality issues.)
This happens all the time. DVDs cost less to produce than VHS but sold for more because customers were willing to pay. TicketMaster can charge its service fee because customers will pay, even though it's certainly lower cost for TM to email PDFs than to staff a physical box office and buy ticket printers. A smart capitalist captures the consumer value he creates, regardless of his own costs.
> If technology has enabled a new version of a product that is superior for the customer in convenience or capabilities, the customer will be willing to pay more
This might be true if people were rational utility-maximisers. They're not, and people are quite capable of choosing not to buy something if they feel it's a rip off.
You are quite right, in that prices are set to whatever the market will bear. You're viewing things from the perspective of an individual price setter though.
I was talking more in terms of a bigger picture view: In a competitive market with high net profit margins more competitors should enter the market & undercut the existing prices. Mean that in the long run, the sales price of an item should approach the cost price. Now producing & delivering an additional ebook costs perhaps 1 cent, while producing an additional paper book costs perhaps a dollar. So ebooks should be sold at 1 cent + minor contribution to fixed cost + near zero profit, while paper books should be sold at 1 dollar + minor contribution to fixed cost + near zero profit. i.e. ebooks should be dirty cheap compared to paper books.
Yet in practice ebooks are somehow maintaining their prices way beyond what one would expect per economic theory. Little surprise then that various publishers are currently in trouble for price-fixing of ebooks.
Courts work slowly though & in the mean time I'm still pissed about the price I'm paying for those (badly OCR'd) bits & bytes.
And thirdly, you don't own your overpriced defective digital book but only hold a temporary licensee to read it. Of course you can eventually end with nothing once the license provider goes bankrupt or decide to change his business model.
There's something a bit odd about that page/edition - only one review, and just a few likes - the one I bought has thousands of reviews and likes. Could your link be a rip-off, and that's why the OCR was so bad?
I'm a big SciFi fan and love Charles's work. I'm sure he knows more about the industry than I do, but from my own personal experience I much prefer the discovery process of SciFi books with eBooks than with pBooks.
In an ideal world, bookstores would have their shelves well stocked with a deep assortment of titles. Unfortunately, most bookstores carry a thin selection of good SciFi books. They have some of the latest books from well known authors, but rarely did they have some of their earlier titles. And worse yet if the book was part of a series, you would see the latest one or two books but never any of the previous ones.
So for example, they might carry Stross' "Rule 34" but not his earlier (and great) "Halting State" and "Accelerando". So what's a SciFi fan to do? Track them down in a used bookstore. I only get to visit Powell's once a year when I visit my parents. Back order them?
Now with my Kindle, it's much easier. Grab a sample for free. Peruse a couple of chapters and if I like it, buy it and have it in my hands in a minute. DRM or no, it's a much more pleasant experience and I get to read a lot of better books.
Nobody is arguing that it's getting any harder to "find more books by the well-known author X" or "find more books in series Y". These techniques are powerful and getting more powerful.
But how do you find new authors? Stross argues that the old technique, "look for whatever is shelved next to your favorite authors", is going to give much different results in the future than it did in the past, because in a world without physical shelves every author will scheme to get her works listed next to the works of as many other authors as possible. So what's next?
One technique is "listen to what folks like Stross and Gaiman and Walton blog or Tweet about", but the point is that the set of works which I'll find with that technique is highly unlikely to correspond to a well-defined 20th-century genre like "SF" or "fantasy" or "mystery". It's unlikely to be an especially coherent set at all. It's going to be a highly personal subset of the entire canon of English literature.
I don't read enough. That's because when I'm writing SF as a day job, I have a limited capacity to enjoy reading the stuff recreationally in my spare time.
(I know for a fact that this problem affects many other authors: you don't do for relaxation what you're doing for a day job the whole time.) So I'm not necessarily going to be a very good guide to what's worth reading ...
I think an important thing to consider in this discussion is the role of anthologies of short stories.
I suspect because of the economics of paperback length that you mentioned, that seems to be how almost all short stories are published in physical form. The move to ebooks allows short stories to be published on their own which is great and all, but it likely comes at the cost of disincentivizing all of those multi-author variety packs. A good deal of my author discovery has come from those books (for example, I read your 'Lobsters' in one); it would be a shame to see their obsolescence.
I imagine that blogs acting as curators would pop up, recommending sets of short stories to purchase together. Odds are that they wouldn't cost any more than a collection does now.
The bookstore method of finding new authors was much worse than it is with ebooks. Your choices were limited by what the store selected to place on their shelves, a process that is more likely to result in what is popular instead of what is interesting to you.
I like the ebook process of selection much better. I hear about books and authors from friends, blogs and discussions like this. I then go to Amazon, read the reviews, look at the kindle price (I don't pay more than $10 unless I am already familiar with the author) and click on the Buy Now button.
ebooks may blur the lines between the genres, but is this really a bad thing? Is there any reason why a book can't fit into several categories? There isn't. Genre was a way for stores to organize their inventory, and now that shelf space is no longer a premium we can use better methods to find new reading material.
Actually, since buying my Kindle I have read more than ever and find it hard to keep up with my reading list.
I would agree with you. The bookstore (or library) method as limiting as well as hit or miss.
"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" on Amazon is extremely useful. In one case I saw an author's titles continually pop up for months, looked him, found his blog, realized he was a genius, an then end up buying everything he wrote.
Pretty much everything I read now comes from that process.
There is a networking effect in place here. The first is from Amazon, the second is from the blogosphere/wherever authors are interacting.
One thing is for certain -- authors absolutely need to have good blogs and write frequently. Some of my favorite authors have infrequently updated blogs or Twitter accounts. Unfortunately I forget about them.
"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" creates chains if you dig deep enough. You will not be limited to a single pool of books (or music for that matter.) But, I find its also important to hand search the authors (or musicians) that come up for rarer and often just as meaningful work.
I read a review of one of Mr. Stross' works on the the A.V. Club while I was at work and it sounded interesting, so I pulled out my Nook and bought it. I thoroughly enjoyed it so I bought the remainder of his works and read them.
If I didn't have the Nook, I never would have read any of his works. The next time I was at a bookstore, I would have wandered around as I made a futile attempt to remember stuff that I wanted to read.
1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became popular or not, because people were already shifting their physical book purchasing to the "infinite bookshelves" of Amazon and B&N. E-books are simply the "native format" for the infinite bookshelf. If you can imagine a world where Kindle-compatible e-books were sold offline in brick-and-mortar stores via throwaway SD cards or scannable high-res 2D barcodes, they would end up divided by exclusive genres as well. The pigeonholing of a book into a single genre is a characteristic of the medium of sale, not the actual end format of the book.
2) While we're losing the "nearby book on the shelf" effect, we're replacing it with a vibrant ecosystem of social networks, blogs and forums external to the actual book sale location. When I shop for books, I don't really do it on Amazon - I go there when I know what I want, but I rely on sites like GoodReads[1], Any New Books [2], Twitter (where I follow authors I'm interested in) and Facebook (where I sometimes find recommendations from friends and family) to find my next read. This is definitely a shift, but I find it to be an overwhelming improvement from the old system of going to the bookstore and checking out whatever book's spine catches my eye. It's less arbitrary, it's (hopefully) less subject to manipulation by authors and publishers, and I've enjoyed reading the books chosen this way more. Your mileage may vary, naturally.
I think that to a certain extent this is similar to the "filter bubble" mentioned in the context of Google and searching. Having the "infinite bookshelf" and the powerful filtering/tagging makes it easier to find what you want, but it eliminates the natural wandering that some people rely on to be introduced to new things that they wouldn't necessarily look for intentionally. It may be that we simply have to force ourselves to wander a bit if we want variety and novelty, and hopefully the digital world continues to make that easy as well.
Note the theme of how collapsing publishing sectors get eaten by Hollywood.
Consider the case of comics, particularly Marvel and DC. I'm a huge fan of Stan Lee's work from the 1960's and 1970's and I like some Marvel and DC stuff after that.
Lee created some incredibly popular characters in the "Silver Age" but nothing added later really caught on. But, 40 years on, what can you write about the Incredible Hulk? How many times can Magneto trash the X-Men's house?
Sure, later on the comic houses published some books by Frank Miller and others that had more literary and artistic pretention, but none of those sold as well.
By 2000 or so both Marvel and DC flirted with bankruptcy and got bought by media conglomerates because movies about comic book characters were much more profitable than comic books.
Lee AND THE ARTISTS. Many of these characters were developed in close collaboration; the "Marvel Method" was usually "writer and artist jam on ideas for a few hours, artist goes off and draws pages with rough notes as to dialogue, writer does final text based on that". Marvel would not exist today without the titanic creativity of Kirby.
And then Marvel systematically screwed the artists out of credit, residuals, and just in general. They're still doing this, too. DC's not much better, either.
Pardon the slight rantiness here. I'm an artist so the creative credit going to the party who does the LEAST amount of the creative work bugs me.
Lee stopped editing in 1972. Wolfman left in 1980. So, what happened during that time?
Various writer-editors were given the title of editor-in-chief but they really didn't do that job. Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Wolfman, Gerry Conway (for less than 2 months), and then Archie Goodwin all had a significant amount of reprinted comics published because the new issues weren't done in time. Readers hate reprinted stories. (The only writer-editor who did not become editor-in-chief was Steve Gerber.)
What stopped this trend? Marvel hired an editor to be an editor-in-chief. This annoyed a few of the writer-editors and so most left in dramatic diva fashion.
Most comic fans do consider the 60's Marvel as equally good as the 80's Marvel, which includes Walter Simonson's Thor, Frank Miller's Daredevil, Byrne's Fantastic Four, Roger Stern and John Romita Jr's Amazing Spider-Man, and Claremont, et al's X-Men.
70's DC is an example of how to ruin a company. Without detailing their editorial problems, let's focus on two significant events. Sometime during 1972 and 1974, Marvel starts to outside DC for the first time in history. Except for a handful of months, this has been true until very recently. The second event is known as the DC implosion. DC screwed up and had to cancel a large number of their titles. Much of their talent landed jobs at Marvel.
So Wolfman and the other writer-editors jumping ship for DC was not a step up. It was a step away from meeting deadlines, and other responsibilities. Lee understood that no editor-in-chief could edit the writer-editors, which is likely why he left when he did.
All true, but weren't comic book sales in decline before DC and Marvel were bought by Warner Bros and Disney? I don't think it's all bad. The indie sector is still very vibrant, and the good artists there usually get jobs in the majors and do good work (Remender, Abnett and Landing, etc).
I feel that Mr. Stross has sidestepped the strongly related medium that has been likewise disrupted by digital mediums and delivery - the music industry. It seems to me, as a not frequent observer of the music industry, that genres in music are doing just fine if not better than they were ten to twenty years ago.
Now, we've got the iTunes Store, iPods, individual song purchase and the 'death of the album' and while there is genre blurring, it seems to me that this has also been happening for a long time and there are plenty of strong musicians who play almost exclusively in their genres and succeed.
The music industry is not an exact analog to the publishing industry, I know, but it would seem they have enough similarities to be explored by someone like Mr. Stross, and extrapolated out to genre fiction.
Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself.
Concert venues enforce genre, more strongly than the shelving of books or records has ever done. If you show up at the square dance and they're playing eighteenth-century pavanes, or Black Flag, there will be protest. If you show up at the county fair and they've booked a Korean classical ensemble, there will be mass confusion. If you go clubbing and find that they're playing the classic hits of Kansas, there will be blood.
Musical genres are centuries old, and because new music must necessarily be premiered at venues designed for old music, new musical forms have often been greeted with confusion or hostility. Audiences rioted at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiere, they were puzzled by most of Beethoven's symphonies, and you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave.
For all I know, recent changes in the recorded-music industry could actually strengthen genre boundaries in music, because as recordings get less and less profitable the revenues from live performance become more and more important, and having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.
Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself.
Much of music is also intimately tied to the old art form of dancing and many other aspects of culture, such that very strong sets of expectations are placed on music in different contexts.
Actually, it's even more complicated than that. These sets of expectations are often somewhat disconnected from the mainstream population's everyday experience, have become somewhat shallow/cartoony, and are subject to media manipulation.
you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave...having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.
Having a live band is often fraught with dealing with expectations. It's to the point where someone can have something like an Irish Traditional or Bluegrass influenced band and run up against people constantly asking for music that you don't really want to do or really doesn't fit the aesthetic of your band.
I don't buy it. Tags can work, tags can be very helpful, but they're time and effort consuming to get right. Personally, I hate with passion systems where I can't search by multiple tags (tag1 + tag2, or tag1 - tag2). Frequently, it degenerates into a situation where a single tag is assigned to zillions of content and you have to review it all manually anyway. And if you leave tag creation completely open, you'll and up with tags "dragon", "dragons", "one dragon", "two dragons", "half a dragon","dragoon", "fire breathing lizard", used inconsistently of course.
I also don't buy the idea that everyone is going to use a tagging system. Not everyone understands the benefits or cares about them. Never underestimate inertia.
I'm an eBook author with several books that pretty much live on the first page of results for their genres, so I have experience in this arena.
The recent growth in the eBook market is, in my opinion, excellent for most aspiring authors, but might be bad for some already successful authors.
eBooks lower the barrier to market entry. Aspiring authors don't need expensive equipment or software anymore (my ebooks are written in Microsoft Word), nor do they need to spend time socializing and mingling with industry types that they should be spending on writing.
However, eBooks are hastening the end of the days of an author being able to write one book and live off of it for years. The lowering of costs, as well as the increase in competition, will force eBook authors, myself included, to focus on both increasing quality and on churning out more books more quickly. The economy of scale applies here in ways that used to only apply to publishers, not authors.
Of course, this makes sense because in the eBook era the author is, quite often, the publisher.
I think ebooks will change the landscape less in the short term than Charles is supposing. The idea of 'genre' is a powerful one with a lot of momentum, and not a little utility independent of physical organization of books. Genre will continue to be a useful way for retailers to partition the power law to maximize sales.
I'm also hopeful that the growth of ebooks will make the promise of GoodReads or even the good old days of rec.arts.sf.written come true: that 'what you read' will become an ever more viable way to find birds of a feather for both book recommendations and social connections.
One interesting thing is that an e-ink e-book is particularly bad interface with which to find new titles. It's fine for buying something you know you want. But a real, internet connected PC is currently needed. I imagine this situation will get better.
Fiction should cost $0.99, because it's a genre millions of people buy. At $0.99 the price will represent no barrier for anyone even mildly interested in reading a fiction book.
Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback - which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a criminally bad OCR job.
So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under what genre you file that its a crap purchase.
Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.