Teresa @ 19:
Does anyone here feel like explaining what long-term strategy Amazon is pursuing when it prices ebooks so far below the publishers' prices that it sometimes loses several dollars per copy?
Sure. It's a standard monopoly-creation strategy. You start out with a lot of cash, so you can operate at a loss for long enough for your low prices to drive all your competitors out of business. Then when you've created your monopoly you can push prices up to where you recoup your initial losses and make a bundle besides. What Amazon doesn't seem to understand is that this is not necessarily an effective strategy if a) you're selling something the customers can afford to do without or b) there is another market from which they can get a substitute or c) the pain of high price is greater than the pain of committing piracy. In other words, for this strategy to be successful Amazon would have to monopolize all forms of text distribution, and even then would probably be the cause of florishing gray and black markets.
Has anyone else noticed the irony that Amazon, the company that built itself on "the long tail", wants to become the behemoth of book distribution, resulting in an almost certain contraction of the publishing lists to rely even more on blockbuster titles than they do now?
Remember "personal desktop publishing"? No one would need professional graphic designers or printers to create newsletters, wedding invitations, etc., because non-experts could do all the work with personal computers and inexpensive (hah!) layout software. Remember what all those newsletters and wedding invitations looked like? Remember "font mania", or for that matter Comic Sans? Like to forget, wouldn't you?
Now Eva and I have done some of our own design and printing, but I have years of experience with layout software, and some graphic arts training, and Eva has a BFA in visual arts. And we certainly wouldn't attempt a large or complicated job, because we know how much work that can be, and our experience isn't up it. So what about all the people who have no experience, training, or skill?
The same is true in writing. Not everyone has the training, few have real skill, and only the ones with a real drive have much experience because it's a demanding task with little economic return for most writers.
I have heard the idea from many people that skilled work is actually more fungible than is generally accepted; certainly in the software industry where I worked for quite awhile there is a myth that using the right development process, or acquiring the right software, or casting the right management spells will rid software projects of dependence on excellence (or maybe even competence) in programming. The idea that publishers are unnecessary in this brave new world of frictionless delivery¹ seems to me to hold a similar appeal to those who don't want to pay the real cost of the product they consume.
¹ That reminds me so much of the "zipless fuck" so beloved of soft-porn writers in the '80s. I'm beginning to think there's a corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics that says that all information tends to become porn.
Re the NBC employees' cafeteria particle:
Oh dear, they forgot the watermelon.
David Dyer-Bennet, P J Evans:
I once saw a publicly-screened video of Ken Olsen, one of the founders, and at that time CEO, of DEC, in which he declared baldly that there was no market for personal computers. This was around 1988, I think. Sadly, I saw some evidence of senile dementia in his physical appearance and affect, so that might not have always been his opinion.
Earl Cooley III @ 143:
Barley I may call you,
Any night, any day,
In your heart, you'll hear it call you:
"Come away...Come away."
Credit where it is overdue: the poems in this thread are very fine work, most especially B Durbin's piece about caretaking. I need to get back to reading Making Light every few hours, so I don't fall so far behind, and maybe miss something really good like those poems.
Paula @ 262:
I think they're expecting Divine Intervention. I wonder what their insurance companies will say about that.
Interesting. Amazon stock started to fall over the weekend, and continued to fall yesterday and today. It's down About 15 points from it's opening Sunday morning. Coincidence?
And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells the US Senate that we ought to allow gays to serve openly in the military. By Crom, we'll drag them into the 21st century yet!
Erik Nelson @ 80:
The larger the gorilla, the bigger the cluestick you need. I'm not sure there's one large enough for Amazon.
Amazon.com: We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
I sent Amazon a nasty email yesterday, that began:I understand that your recent action in removing books published by Macmillan from online purchase was part of what Amazon management perceives as a conflict between the two corporations. But it seems to me that you have responded to a proposal from Macmillan intended as part of negotiation with a bullying tactic that hurts not only Macmillan, but your customers as well.
You can read the rest of the email, and their lame reply at Newsflash: Amazon Tries to Poke out Curly's Eyes, Misses
Charlie @ 34:
Good on you for switching to Powell's. I would recommend that to any writer who wants to get away from Amazon. I've had my differences with the current management there, but we've had a long relationship; I've been buying and selling books there since 1979, was on regular speaking terms with old man Powell, the founder, until he turned the company over to his son and retired (we used to go there just about every weekend).
Thinking about the timing of this latest bit of thuggery at Amazon, I'm of the opinion that the iPad introduction scared them; this whole circus is intended to bolster the market for Kindles by holding down book prices in the months before the iPad is available with possibly higher book prices, and before Apple starts adding more features in later versions.
When I was 15 my parents gave me an old Kodak bellows camera that used 135 film, and my aunt, a professional photojournalist, encouraged me to try taking B&W shots. I found I didn't like snapshots particularly, but I loved taking photos of textures and light. I didn't get into developing my own photos for several years, and when I did I discovered color slide film, which had a clarity and contrast that I preferred over color negatives. Developing my own color film was too expensive (especially when my one attempt to do professional work convinced me I didn't want to do that.
Despite looking at and admiring the photos of a lot of the greats, Ansel Adams, Steichen, and especially Walker Evans, I didn't find a photographer whose work resonated with my own vision of things until I discovered Cartier-Bresson. Ironically, he had been since the 1950's, and continued to be until his death, a close friend and colleague of my aunt, something I didn't know until I found a photo of her he took in the '90s.
I used a Nikon SLR that I bought in Japan in the '60s until about 5 years ago, when I switched to digital. That old camera needs some minor repairs, but it worked fine the last time I used it. I don't think they make them that robust anymore.
Lila @ 783:
A beatifully concise description of my own position. Wish I'd said that.
Now what might a Speakerian political position be? First, personhood and rights should be apportioned in a tiered fashion: first human rights, then animal rights, and lastly corporate rights. Next, all political offices would require some sacrifice proprtional to the power of the job on the part of
the politician. In the case of the highest offices, we should enforce term limits by sacrificing and ceremonially eating the politician at the end of their term. Last, but not least, wages would be changed to reflect the benefits a person actually provides to society: teachers, garbage collectors, and nurses would be paid far more than stock brokers, financial instrument engineers, and Harvard MBAs.
abi @ 754:
I think that view of Marxism is somewhat limited. Maybe it would be good to distinguish between Marxism and marxism, as we often do with [Ll]ibertarianism. There are certainly cults of personality within Marxism: Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Stalinist, Trotskyist¹. But if you ask a "marxist" economist or political theorist whom he considers an expert citation, you'll hear about Marx, Engels, Maslow, and list of others.
1. Replace "ist" by "ite" depending on whether you view the particular cult positively or negatively, respectively.
albatross @ 704:
For some reason, I don't think they're going to miss the money much.
Newspaper advertising revenue is directly proportional to circulation, so canceling a subscription will have a very small effect on income. Bitching to a lot of other people and having them cancel their subscriptions will have even more of an effect.
In any case most newspapers (definitely including The Orgoreynian (sic) IMO) are locked into a death spiral of reductions in circulation causing cuts in coverage, causing more reductions in circulation. I can just stand over here and watch the train wreck without having to do a thing.
Stefan Jones @ 697:
Thinking about canceling mine. It was never a very good paper, it's dropped most of the good columnists over the last couple of years (and kept a lot of the bad ones), and as soon as Obama was inaugurated it started a steady drift back to the right from whence it came.
Om the other hand, I've gotten some good recipes out of the Food Day section on Tuesday. Hmmm ... doesn't seem like such a great tradeoff.
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| 2008 | 1269 |
| 2007 | 2422 |
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