

Disintermediating Amazon. Fast. - Turing_Machine
http://contraterrene.com/blog/ebooks/2012/04/18/going-into-competition-with-amazon-fast/

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Turing_Machine
The server is starting to show signs of stress, so here's the text:

Everyone has an opinion about the DOJ v. Apple/Big Six case (or Big Five, I
guess, since Random House wasn’t involved in the alleged collusion). I’ve got
my own opinion on the merits of the case, of course, but I’m not going to
discuss that in this post. Instead, I’m going to address some common
misconceptions: first, that publishers find it difficult or impossible to get
their books on the Kindle without paying Amazon (as expressed by Bruce in the
comment thread on this post by John Scalzi) and second, that setting up your
own ebook publishing workflow requires scads of time and money (as expressed
by Charlie Stross here). Now, Charlie Stross is a smart, technically
sophisticated guy, but he’s way off base when he claims (in the comments) that
“if I had to run my own self-publishing op I’d lose half my writing time”.

Starting at 5:39 PM CST, I created a cover image, formatted and compiled an
ebook using Abulafia (shameless plug, deal with it), created a video
explaining how to set up your Kindle to receive third-party books by email,
and wrote a rudimentary book-to-Kindle distribution mechanism (actually, there
was very little original code involved — all it really has to do is send the
book file as an email attachment, and people have already written that code
plenty of times). If you want to try it, watch the video, then set up your
Kindle to allow mail from books@contraterrene.com.

In a (probably vain) attempt to forestall nitpicking:

No, I didn’t write the book in that time. It’s actually just a short story;
Poe’s Masque of the Red Death — but I could just as easily have copied and
pasted his complete works. The writing time is irrelevant to this discussion
anyway (you’ll have to write the book no matter how it’s distributed, yes?).
The cover image could use some work, certainly. It’s a modification of an
illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, taken from a 19th century edition of the
piece (it may be moderately NSFW, depending on where you W). If I were going
to put this up for sale, I’d either spend more time on the cover or hire an
artist. Maybe one of these folks. It wouldn’t take much volume to bring this
little server to its knees. A production server farm for the likes of the Big
Six would need to be much more robust, no question about it (and I’d
definitely spend more than 15 minutes on the code ). But, you know, you can
spin up as many servers as you want nowadays — within minutes. Hundreds of
servers. Thousands of servers. If you don’t want to screw around with
maintaining your own, there are companies (including Amazon itself) that will
rent you as many commodity servers as you want, by the hour. I don’t have a
payment mechanism set up but that’s also a solved problem. These guys, or
these guys, or even these guys (if you must). Hundreds of others. Yes, Amazon
could shut down the Kindle’s email facilities (or start blocking email from
competitors they don’t like), but that would very likely result in the DOJ
descending on them. If that happens, getting a third-party book on the Kindle
would require the awesomely complex process of plugging it in to your
computer, waiting for it to show up as a USB drive, then copying the files (or
you could use this — another shameless plug). It is now 11:08 PM, and I spent
25 minutes of that time talking to my aunt Joyce on the phone about issues
unrelated to this project — so about 5 hours total to go from raw text to an
ebook that’s available to every Kindle owner on the planet at the click of a
button. Not bad.

Remember, that’s the total time to format the book, create the cover image,
compile the book, set up the server for distribution, create the tutorial
video, and write this blog post.

And I’m just, like, a guy, you know. If I can do this why can’t the Big Six do
the same? Claiming that they’re “unable to compete with Amazon” is sheer
unadulterated nonsense. Sorry, it just is.

I should note here that forward-thinking publishers such as Baen and Pragmatic
Programmers have been doing exactly this for quite some time. I didn’t invent
this process. I have probably a couple of dozen books from those publishers on
my Kindles right now — none of which were purchased through Amazon.

Update: April 22, 2012

In case it’s not perfectly clear: I’m not planning to go into competition with
Amazon myself (certainly not with this server) — this is just an illustration
of how easy it would be. If I can do this in 5 hours, imagine what someone
with Rupert Murdoch’s budget could do.

The story choice was not a coincidence. The publishing industry is behaving in
much the same way as the characters in the story.

This only addresses ebooks. Amazon, of course, also has a colossal (and
massively efficient) infrastructure for delivering physical goods. Now that is
an area where it would be very hard to compete with them. Digital goods are
another story entirely.

With respect to Amazon “not paying taxes”: Amazon charges sales tax and pays
their own taxes in every state where they have a physical presence, and
doesn’t in states where they don’t, just like every other mail-order company
since, well, always. The same is true of every other retailer from Apple and
Barnes & Noble all the way down to the indie bookstore on the corner, which
doesn’t collect sales tax on mail orders to other states. This is one of the
consequences of a federal form of government. In general, you’re not obliged
to abide by the laws of a state unless you’re physically present in that
state. Changing that would likely require a constitutional amendment. If you
think that’s a good idea, it might be worth considering how you’d feel about
being required to abide by all the laws of (insert least-favorite state). That
doesn’t sound quite as appealing, does it?

