411–420 of 752 posts
For example: celebrity books like David Goggins’ sell extremely well at a lower price point. At the other end, Taschen, who makes expensive art books and partners with celebrities often, also does well.
I recently started buying paper books. Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me. It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc.…
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…
Meet Fitzcarraldo, the publisher house with four Nobels so far: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/four-nobels-an...
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…
From the article: >>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?" I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local…
It's not disruption to make me wait 5 weeks to read a digital file through my local library's Libby service. It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices. Spotify doesn't make me take out a hold on the artist I want to listen to. Netflix doesn't make me queue to watch the latest release.
I agree that it's artificial scarcity and it's hard to feel bad for the publishing companies
319 comments and I don't see the simple fact that the article title is dead wrong. We are going through a massive book boom right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLSGuGOWoAArd-K.jpg:large . Book sales are the highest they've been in 20 years lol. So all the comments mourning books can relax.
The title is provocative clickbait, but the actual point is this: > These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies). Given that spending p…
Most of the books that sell hundreds of copies wouldn't have been published in the past. If you write a niche book about something and a few hundred people read it, that seems great. If you're (stochastically) subsidized by a few huge hits and bestsellers, that also seems great. People are reading the Bible, Harry Potter and celebrity memoirs? Great too, I'm sure they are enjoying them. Possibly many of those people have not chosen those books in preference to other more "worthy" books but in preference to other pastimes.
The only problem I can see is if you wrote a book and had it published hoping it would be this year's runaway success, and it wasn't. Fine, but someone's book was. By its nature not everyone can achieve this.
From the article: >>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?" I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local…
> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity…
Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read.
Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the books. Publishers, as pointed out in the quote, are publishing tons of books that don't make it, in part because of a belief that it's a good thing to do. It's easier to self publish than ever before. And social media is often playing a big role in discovering the huge hits that everyone else is reading - many are not the books pushed by the marketing machine, but word-of-mouth successes that get discovered and shared by a huge group of dedicated, articulate readers.
If there were hardly any books selling 3-digit numbers, that to me would suggest an unhealthy market. The presence of lots and lots selling that many seems very positive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want a DRM free e-book collection you will need a book scanner or send it to a scanning service. Well, technically there's a third option...
Yeah, but if I _could_ write my own, I wouldn't be in the market to buy one, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not disruption to make me wait 5 weeks to read a digital file through my local library's Libby service. It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices. Spotify doesn't make me take out a hold on the artist I want to listen to. Netflix doesn't make me queue to watch the latest release.
I don't think it's fair to compare Netflix and Spotify to libraries; you pay for the first two. I agree that it's artificial scarcity and it's hard to feel bad for the publishing companies