The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Avram:

Cally, all I know is that if all of my books were ebooks, I could back them up offsite, and they'd survive even if my building burned down. And I wouldn't be tripping over them all the time.

Actually, I do know things other than those.

Markdf @360, yeah, yeah, and the Internet is just a fad like CB radio. (Yes, I recall someone saying that in the mid-'90s.)

Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-yadda!
I like to eat frittatas,
And sailing in regattas.
Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-yadda!

Would this go better if I stopped emphasizing "books" and "magazines"? Is it that people think I'm correcting them rather than trying to introduce clearer terms?

Because from where I'm sitting this is like that Far Side cartoon with "blah blah blah Ginger blah blah".

Heresiarch @291, actually, I just discovered that Action Comics #1 only had ads on the back cover.

TexAnne @292, comics magazines still generally have ads, and I've gotten so used to not having them that I now find them incredibly distracting on the rare occasions that I read a mainstream superhero comic. Comic books (see above) generally don't. Sometimes there'll be a few pages in the back advertising other books by the same publisher.

I was telling a friend of mine a year or two back that the transition from comic magazines to comic books is very like what science fiction went through back in the (I think it was) '50s, complete with the old pros panicking.

Xopher @287, yes, they were, and still are, called that. (Except for the Fantastic Four.) But they aren't that. Which was, as you recognized, my point.

Will, according to DC, Watchmen sold about a million copies in 2008, thanks to the movie, but it sold 100,000 through bookstores in 2007. If it'd been selling 100k/year the previous decade, that'd be another million. And that's just bookstores; it doesn't count the direct comics market. So there's another difference between the book and magazine markets: long-term sales.

Furthermore, comics today are hardly just targeting "rich fans". Manga-style books sell big among kids, though I don't know if any of them sell millions of copies here.

My point is that the comics industry that regularly sold to millions was catering to children and abused the hell out of its creative workers. The modern industry puts out a much greater diversity of work, and treats its creators much better. Teresa, meanwhile, is arguing that Amazon's plan for ebooks would turn the book industry into something more like the old comics industry.

Will @275, thing is, comic books, properly speaking, never sold in the millions. Those millions of copies of Captain America or whatever were comic magazines -- periodicals supported by advertising.

The current market for comic books (called "graphic novels", even when they are short story anthologies or collections, because magazines already grabbed the name "books") supports all sorts of high-quality material, much of it creator-owned, while the old comic magazine market of the 1930s and '40s supported mostly childish crap, and treated the writers and artists like disposable machine parts.

TNH @194: Is it okay for me to be sorry about not being clearer, but wholly impenitent about dismissing Ben Trafford?

Trafford was, in general, doing that Dunning-Kruger thing, as I said before, so it's no skin off my nose.

PNH @195: it's also interesting that Audible.com--a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon--refused to sell this un-DRMed audio edition, despite the fact that both author and audio publisher were insisting that the lack of DRM was fine with them

Is it any wonder that some people say "Screw this, I'm doing it on my own"?

Lisa S @183, in what way does what you just wrote address what I wrote to Teresa?

ErrolC @171, have you heard about file access on the iPad?

Wait, TNH, I've got a bone to pick.

First, in the text of your post, you said:

At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books.

And later:

I like the agency model. Publishers keep doing what publishers do well. Online retailers step into something very like the role of the bookseller. Market forces continue to exert themselves in normal ways. And after decades of theories and models and way too much discussion, the ebook settles into being what it always should have been: just another repro technology, with its own strengths and weaknesses and price points.

But then, when Ben Trafford refers (@2) to "trying to reproduce the print model in ebooks", you replied (@15) "Have you noticed that no one's proposing to do that?" and mocked him as describing a "business plan that no one's proposing".

So which is it? Is Macmillan's agency proposal based on the idea that ebooks are pretty much like dead-tree books, and should be published under a model where everybody keeps doing pretty much what were doing with dead trees? Or has nobody proposed reproducing the hard-copy model in the ebook world?

None of this is to say that Trafford isn't going all Dunning-Kruger on us in other respects. For one thing, it's far from obvious to me that publishing ebooks under the dead-tree model is doomed to failure, as he seems to think. But it does seem to me that you were indeed proposing reproducing the print model in ebooks, or something so similar to that as to be easily mistaken for it.

IreneD @152, you'd think someone would've noticed the Twilight books (pub'd by Little, Brown, a division of Hachette) becoming unavailable on Amazon.

Jo @79, actually we generally pay $25-30 for hardcovers down here in the States. (That's list price; less if they're on sale or we go to Walmart or Amazon or the Strand.)

I'm confused, Teresa. Isn't setting prices generally something done by the retailer, not the publisher? If a bookseller wants to knock 30% off the prices of all their wares, don't they generally have the power to do so, even if it means they take a loss?

Maybe, Xopher. On the other hand, tradition publishing is responsible for things like Galaxy 666 by Pel Toro (aka the Rev Lionel Fanthorpe).

Keith @74, well, not comparing self-published books to "shitty cheese" might be a good start.

Keith @71, yes, there is an apples-and-oranges aspect to the comparison, which is why I started that comment the way I did.

However, I've been reading self-published indie comics since the early '80s. The biggest booster for the comics self-publishing movement wasn't the market mess of the late '90s, but rather the amazing success of Kevin Eastman's and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with maybe some influence from Dave Sim (who advocated for self-publishing in the editorial columns in Cerebus). A bunch of comics people held a summit hosted by Eastman and Laird in 1988, where Scott McCloud drafted "A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators". Four years later, a bunch of Marvel's most popular creators broke off and started their own company.

Now, another difference between the comics and prose fiction industries is that prose authors publishing through big companies generally retain the rights to their work, while DC and Marvel generally treated its artists and writers as staff doing work-for-hire. So the self-publishing movement in comics came arm-in-arm with a movement for creator's rights within a traditional publishing model.

But anyway, the lack-of-stigma that self-publishing enjoys in the comics world came well before the speculator market collapse. The world we live in today, where Understanding Comics is published by a HarperCollins imprint, literally would not have come about without the Ninja Turtles.

Keith @64, the reason I specified "prose writers" is that self-publishing is actually pretty common in the comics world, and doesn't have the same stigma that it does in the prose world. I know several comics people who self-publish, earn a living at it, and wouldn't be able to earn that living off of what a publisher would pay them for the same work. Good thing they didn't get frightened off by analogies about shitty cheese.

And I also know several who self-publish, and still need day jobs to keep themselves fed. But that's true of many traditionally-published authors as well.

Creative fields in general are not known for producing stable, reliable, comfortable income.

TNH @60: it essentially turns publishing houses into unfunded R&D labs that are obliged to turn over the rights to their products to other companies at rock-bottom prices.

Isn't this basically how publishing houses treat authors? Doesn't the typical author get paid not-enough-to-live-on, in the hope that maybe one day he'll write a big hit?

Victoria @90: For Macmillian to be a monopoly, it would have to buy up the other five big publishers and run the small presses out of business.

In order to be a trust or a cartel, it would just have to collude with the other publishers, perhaps to the extent of agreeing on a common pricing scheme.

I'm not denying that Amazon would like a monopoly, though I don't think they'll succeed in becoming one. I'm just saying that a bunch of publishers all adopting the same pricing model looks like a cartel.

Victoria @32, wait a minute. Macmillan wants to force a particular pricing scheme onto Amazon. Now Hachette, another of the "Big Six" book publishers, is joining in, demanding a similar (possibly the same) pricing scheme, and HarperCollins might be pushing for higher prices, too. Isn't that the kind of behavior (price-fixing) that anti-trust laws were created to stop?

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