Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The collective insanity of the publishing industry

genedoucette.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 154 posts

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#131

Post by vinceguidry »

lmm wrote: post #113
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can choose something bad but still not have better choices available. If it's their best option are they allowed to complain then?

Yes. My understanding of "working well below market" is that it by definition means there are much better-paying jobs available to them, no?

kevinr used that phrase poorly. Working well below market means that there is enough demand for your services so where you could charge more, but you choose not to, typically due to inexperience.

But that's not the case, the market for the output of authors cannot sustain living wages, there is no 'market wage' to make. If you look closely at this and other creative professions, that has always been the case; there is always more people that want to make a living with creative work than there are people that want to pay well enough for that work so that the creators can live.

This is structural and unlikely to change barring something like basic income. The usual answer given to aspiring creator is both to generate the income you need to live in the service industry, say as a waiter, and also to be your own agent and pimp out your professional services yourself.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#132

Post by dragonwriter »

toyg wrote: post #119
dilemma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then successful dedicated marketing outfits starts vertically integrate to beat out competition, offering editorial services, distribution, etc.... becoming a publisher. What will happen is that some publishers fail to adapt to a digital economy and are replaced by upcomers who are perfectly adjusted to it. Publishing companies will not disappear because they fill a function in the industry.

A "publisher" in the digital world will be a very different beast and it will be hard to call it such. Most of it will likely be automated. Their core-competency might not even be book-publishing. Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? No, but they do produce high-quality video content. Is Louis CK a "studio"? No, but he's producing a TV series. Publishers' functions (content editing, packaging, distribution, marketing an…

Amazon and Netflix both operate studios. I think in both cases as distinct subsidiaries -- e.g., Amazon Studios.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#133

Post by toyg »

dilemma wrote: post #128
toyg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "publisher" in the digital world will be a very different beast and it will be hard to call it such. Most of it will likely be automated. Their core-competency might not even be book-publishing. Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? No, but they do produce high-quality video content. Is Louis CK a "studio"? No, but he's producing a TV series. Publishers' functions (content editing, packaging, distribution, marketing an…

A computer can process text, it cannot read and it cannot write because it cant think. There is no automating taste. Publishers' function will be close to exactly the same, just built on top of a digital infrastructure and organization. Netflix and Amazon are studios when they do the same work as a studio.

> There is no automating taste.

Recommendation engines are real and are improving. Spellcheck fixes typos and some decent neural-network training can be pushed into literary land (already MS Word "dares" here and there, and that's not even centralized). Would a "digital editor" be foolproof, or particularly good? No, but it would likely do a lot of the grunt work fairly reliably, so you can shrink the workforce or increase output (more books, argh). When I hear of the "slush pile", I cringe. That's a job for a machine and not a very smart one at that.

> Netflix and Amazon are studios

No, they are content distributors who happen to produce content because of supply failures up the chain. The middlemen upstream are failing to see opportunities, so downstream is taking charge. The minute this changes, they will go back to being content distributors because that's what they do.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#135

Post by jameshart »

The behavior does look irrational if you ignore the fact that publishers also want to sell their books in to other retailers and those retailers will not order books if they believe Amazon will deeply undercut them for the same titles. So they ask the publisher to put in place a deal with all the retailers through which the book will be sold that guarantees no one retailer will offer the book below a certain price. This is, of course, quite a lot like price fixing, but seems to be how it's been done in many areas of retail for just about ever.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#136

Post by dilemma »

toyg wrote: post #133
dilemma wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer can process text, it cannot read and it cannot write because it cant think. There is no automating taste. Publishers' function will be close to exactly the same, just built on top of a digital infrastructure and organization. Netflix and Amazon are studios when they do the same work as a studio.

> There is no automating taste. Recommendation engines are real and are improving. Spellcheck fixes typos and some decent neural-network training can be pushed into literary land (already MS Word "dares" here and there, and that's not even centralized). Would a "digital editor" be foolproof, or particularly good? No, but it would likely do a lot of the grunt work fairly reliably, so you can shrink the workforce or in…

This is just hand waving. It's impossible to replace editors with computers, you even say so yourself.

Netflix is a studio; you're trying to change the meaning words because the facts don't fit you.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#137

Post by dragandj »

gunnihinn wrote: post #124
dragandj wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or could, oh, horrors, the authors, editors, and proofreaders learn to use LaTeX themselves so the typesetter could just check the final document for errors?

Hi, LaTeX copyeditor and typesetter here. The bane of my existence are authors who know just enough LaTeX to be dangerous. First, almost all of their formatting work is the first thing to be thrown out. Second, authors are strongly incentivized to learn the bare minimum of LaTeX to do what they need, and to copy-paste furiously whatever stuff they find on the net. You have to remember that (La)TeX is both a markup an…

Sure - for highly specialized stuff. But, let's not pretend that 99% of the published work couldn't be well served by standard LaTeX templates and a little effort of learning the basics. If that is too much, then how do they send you the formatting specifications anyway? In some custom, poorly self-invented format?

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#138

Post by AJ007 »

lmm wrote: post #70
kevinr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance. People working fu…

Serious answer: I think there is a huge oversupply of authors at the moment. The world would probably be better off if half of all authors (selected at random) were to quit and go find something more productive/lucrative to do. (I think everyone, even people who simply don't want to work, should be able to eat and receive reasonable medical care. Authors not having healthcare is terrible, but no more terrible than un…

Writing isn't alone for this one. Musicians, actors, and artists fall in the same group. These are things a huge number of humans are capable of doing at a very high level. Many perform irregardless of earning potential.

My guess is that the long term earnings for writing will move closer to zero. The best writers working for the best organizations will still be able to make a lot of money.

We have just barely started moving in to a period where online education turns billions of uneducated third world/developing country citizens in to highly educated English speakers.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#139

Post by lmm »

toyg wrote: post #92
lmm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing production and outsourcing is its own skillset. Division of labour between a specialist "producer" and the person who does the actual writing ought to make sense in terms of efficiency.

Yes, but nowhere is set in stone that such skillset cannot be automated (and hence more efficient, in aggregate). Webapps will appear that will manage such production, once demand emerges, not unlike they appeared in the music business.

Automating the production of a book might be as hard or harder than automating the writing though.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#140

Post by mcguire »

kevinr wrote: post #107
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? // Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost. But publishers moved to close the market and to increase the selling price whilst at the same time accruing the added profit from the reduction in production cost. The blame here shouldn't be on those buying the books who r…

> Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost. The market is... different. Wider in some ways, narrower in others. Young adult fiction is largely nonexistent in ebook, still, because young adults' access to e-reading devices is still more limited than adults', and they are less likely to discover fiction online than through more traditional channels…

"The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print."

...depending on how many copies are sold, at the minimum. (Physical production and transportation will come to dominate at some point.)

...and, of course, this means that mass market paperbacks should be priced at the same level as first-run hardcovers.

Post reply on HN