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

141–150 of 154 posts

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#141

Post by cableshaft »

elthran wrote: post #60
kevinr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hey, someone better-informed than me. There's also a sizeable fraction of the reading public of all ages who still prefer print books for a host of reasons both sentimental and practical. (The one I've just discovered: I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up. Whoops.) Ebooks have mostly killed the mass-market paperback, though---more's the pity for beach-reading and o…

> I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up Seriously, get a kindle - if you like reading you will absolutely not regret it.

Had a Kindle Keyboard forever, finally impulse bought a Kindle Paperwhite.

Reading even more books than ever, since now I can turn its backlight setting to very low, and it's so much less light than my iPad ever was, while still being plenty to read with, and it's not bright enough to bother my SO if I read while she sleeps.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#142

Post by cableshaft »

lmm wrote: post #74
kevinr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hey, someone better-informed than me. There's also a sizeable fraction of the reading public of all ages who still prefer print books for a host of reasons both sentimental and practical. (The one I've just discovered: I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up. Whoops.) Ebooks have mostly killed the mass-market paperback, though---more's the pity for beach-reading and o…

I don't know about the iOS walled garden, but more generally there are tools to adjust screen colour temperature to something appropriate to the time of day.

Even if I set the iPad to its lowest brightness, though, it's still about 10x brighter than the lowest I can set the backlight in a Kindle Paperwhite.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#143

Post by mcguire »

ghaff wrote: post #125
spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But As Charlie Stoss says he doesn't want to do that middle mans work as it takes time from writing.

Which, for someone who can establish a good relationship with a good publisher, is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Publishers are like any other service. If they provide good value, authors should use use them and otherwise not use them.

On the other, other hand, editing, etc., is a one time cost. And, as far as I can tell, Publishers, however, take their share per-copy. And, IIRC, the final profits are divided about 50/50 between author and publisher.

Charlie may be leaving a significant chunk of money on the table, given his popularity.

I wonder how much more work it would be to get a good relationship with a single priced editing service over a traditional publisher. Hey, maybe you could even get your agent to do that.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#144

Post by mcguire »

ghaff wrote: post #127
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…

>Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? They pretty much are in today's sense of "studio." The days of MGM having a bunch of actors under contract and cranking out movies on their backlots and sound stages is pretty much ancient history. Studios are mostly the moneymen for independent production companies--which is the case whether the studio's name is Fox or Netflix.

Exactly.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#145

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #127
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…

>Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? They pretty much are in today's sense of "studio." The days of MGM having a bunch of actors under contract and cranking out movies on their backlots and sound stages is pretty much ancient history. Studios are mostly the moneymen for independent production companies--which is the case whether the studio's name is Fox or Netflix.

[deleted]

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#146

Post by kaitai »

dragandj wrote: post #64
dietrichepp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX can only do typesetting when a human operator makes it happen. Human operators for LaTeX tend to be fairly expensive, I dare you to try and hire one.

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?

LaTeX is fine for putting out pdfs. It's not a sufficient skillset for putting out an ebook in any other format. It is still a pain to put out a math-heavy book in a wide range of formats. I would say that Softcover (Michael Hartl's effort) is making that a lot easier, but I can't use the full range of LaTeX there (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread) and I still need to visually check every format to make sure that formulas are typesetting appropriately, because I'm trying to push the boundaries of current implementation -- and that's just in writing about probability and linear algebra.

In addition, if you really want to put out a quality product you have to be aware of how each e-reader renders the stuff you send them. Different e-readers process the same file differently and not all support the promised features of epub 3.0. It's best to know up front what each supports in terms of images and scaling, and then write with that in mind. Again, far beyond latex.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#147

Post by zeveb »

kevinr wrote: post #28
pgrote wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not." I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged…

> 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…

> > 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?

I give to charities to take care of those who can't take care of themselves; I buy entertainment to be entertained.

> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

Then maybe the profession of writer will gradually go away, much as the profession of fencing master (the real sort, who taught how to win in a fight, not at sport) has.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#148

Post by kaitai »

ghaff wrote: post #21
true_religion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. The costs of mode…

They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.

It is mildly hard to find a copyeditor, especially for technical books. I tried recently and did not figure out where to find a quality person (for math), and gave up after not trying very hard. (If you have any suggestions let me know!)

This used to be the selling point of publishing through Springer, for instance. But now it seems very little editing or copyediting is done. I am reading "Novelty, Information, and Surprise" put out by Springer in 2012 (math/stats/information theory) and there are two typos in the first paragraph of the introduction. It doesn't feel like the rest of the writing saw an editor either.

I'm looking for the rise of a more streamlined process for hiring your own editor as people realize that publishing through the mainstream doesn't get you editing or royalties (although it still does give a lot of street cred or something to put on your CV!).

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#149

Post by amag »

Nutmog wrote: post #106
coldtea wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Or you know, let them do whatever they want, and price THEIR work however they want, and then either buy it or don't buy it.

The number of books in the world is monotonically increasing. The number of hours a person has available in their life to enjoy reading books is constant, or at least capped pretty close to where it's at now. There are already too many books for anyone to read everything that might interest them in their lifetime. So what's the use of new fiction books? Haven't enough already been written to serve everyone's needs? I…

I don't understand why you're being down-voted. I mean I want to scream "NO!" to what you said, but against my will (I love books) I have to concur. Same as in all other branches of the entertainment industry too much crap is being produced which decreases the SNR making it harder to find the good stuff.

Re: The collective insanity of the publishing industry

#150

Post by tomjen3 »

kevinr wrote: post #54
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimate question: what is the total cost of labor to publish a book, aside from writing it and physical production? It's hard to imagine it being more than $25k – a quarter-person's salary at $100k/year for editing, typesetting and design. At $5 per book, that's covered by 5000 sales. With ebooks, the rest is pure profit – or could go directly to the author if authors hired publishers to do that work instead of th…

This is weird because there's great variety between books and publishers, and there are lots of hidden costs. The one most self-publishers miss is marketing and sales---at the big publishers, there are I am not a publishing industry insider, so these numbers are an educated SWAG, but let's see if they shed any light. Let's say a top editor at a big-5 genre publisher makes $100k a year. That's way high, but we'll roll…

Shutterstock has pictures for less than 100 usd as long as you don't print more than half a million copies of the book. You could probably cut other expenses too (eg why not hire a VA to copy edit it?).
Post reply on HN