The Crotchety Old Fan

Anyone remember Sturgeon’s story that ran in National Lampoon’s science fiction issue – Pruzy’s Pot?

The toilet talked and performed other functions that when performed by anything that can talk are squicky. At least for me.

Fortunately, I don’t have that particular problem. But I do have a toilet that sounds as if it’s laughing, sometimes, after it’s been flushed. A short little giggly, chuckly kind of thing.

The toilet’s timing is perfect too. The sound happens just after you’ve had enough time to turn off the light and are just about to step completely out of the bathroom.

Very disconcerting. At least it was the first time it happened, when I had no idea that it was the toilet.

Today it happened again and I told the wife that the toilet was laughing at me. She doesn’t believe me, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that I’ve yet to figure out what the toilet is laughing at: technique? consistency? color? facial expressions?

Maybe it’s just ticklish?

I’ve been known to post a few analogies that don’t quite work. I may be trying to do the same this morning.

First though a public service announcement. I’ve added Richard Robinson’s blog to the blogroll – he had to prompt me and shouldn’t have. Sin of omission and one I’ve been guilty of before. If you think I should be adding you and haven’t, send me note to remind me.

I’d also like to thank Keith Graham for his offer of help with the hack-crap and his post from today.

Next – before we can analogize, we need to know what’s being talked about.

Amazon has pulled MacMillan titles from their direct sales. This is because MacMillan (publishing) wants Amazon to sell their e-books at prices ranging from 12.99 to 14.99, rather than the fixed 9.99 that Amazon wants to impose on all e-book sales.

Amazon is trying to drive e-book sales in support of their Kindle. They are under pressure to sell Kindles, pressure that has been increased by the intro of the IPad from Apple, which is working on a sales model closer to what MacMillan is looking for. (Apple is making noises about helping content providers like newspapers and magazines, not to mention books, get back onto a making a profit for their content model.)

There is lot’s and lot’s and lot’s of commentary about this. John Sargent of MacMillan has posted an open letter; The Nielsen-Hayden’s are weighing in over on Making Light; Scalzi from yesterday; BoingBoing this morning; Jim Butcher also this morning but I can’t find the link (sorry Jim). And lot’s more all over the place.

One interesting between the lines thing I saw in Jim Sargent’s letter is that it is obvious that some pressure is coming back at MacMillan from traditional book sellers; Jim alludes to this: In the ink-on-paper world we sell books to retailers far and wide on a business model that provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably. Looking to the future and to a growing digital business, we need to establish the same sort of business model, one that encourages new devices and new stores. One that encourages healthy competition.

In other words, brick and mortar sellers are saying “How can we sell a hardback for $25 a copy when the exact same thing is available for $9.99 on Amazon?

Good question despite all of the assurances from various and sundry that E-book sales spur physical book sales & etc. May be true (some certainly swear by it) but the issue is not whether that is true or not, the issue is whether those who are spending the money to purchase and re-sell believe it. And obviously they do not at this point in time.

Amazon is also playing hardball, trying to maintain their market share and gain acceptance of their sales model before Apple gets anything going. (Who’s going to sell to Amazon for a fixed-loss when Apple sells for a “fair price”? No one – unless Amazon is right in their assumptions that there is a price beyond which E-books won’t sell.)

Quick aside: who in their right mind believes that every book is worth exactly the same as every other book? (Yes, I know that books can be sold for less than 9.99, but that’s kind of beside the point right now.) No two books, authors, subjects, etc., are the same. Does anyone really believe that say, a long lost newly released Heinlein novel has the same value as a first time novel from someone we’ve never heard of?

Anyway. Here’s my analogy.

Back around 1990 or so, paintball guns went electronic. This conferred both tangible and intangible benefits to the paintball market: a very light trigger pull (just a switch, no mechanical force exerted), let the guns be controlled by a chip so that you could fire three balls per trigger pull, for example.

Some though found major faults; guns could no longer be looked at to determine if they were firing above safe limits, for example; there was no way to determine how many balls per second were being shot (and we’re talking capabilities in excess of 30 balls per second – approaching the rate of fire of those electronic gatling guns you see in the Terminator flicks).

The industry loved this. Everyone loves pulling the trigger and the more balls a gun spits out per second, the more profit the paintball manufacturers were making.

Prices per ball lowered dramatically over the next couple of years, going from an average of 6 to 8 cents per ball to 2 to 4 cents per ball.

The paint manufacturers went into major market share wars, since everything became about volume of sales – volume, volume, volume.

Every gun manufacturer HAD to add electronic models to their lines or they were out of business.

No one was paying attention to the consequences: every player had to step up to the high-volume level of shooting if they wanted to remain competitive (or even stay on the field playing for any reasonable length of time.)

Sure, the amount of paint (and money) each individual player was spending increased – but we were losing players. By the droves. Competition paintball became cost-prohibitive. The big name teams and players that spurred younger player interest could no longer be funded. At the grass roots, it became impossible to entice new players into the game – the perception of the initial cost was just too much for the average person looking for some fun.

Some of us tried to put the brakes on. We pushed for competition ball (the marquee of the sport) to slow down and emphasize skill over volume. The economic rollercoaster of huge volumes of paintball sales just rolled right over us.

The industry is down 30+% these days, losing ground to other shooting sports, manufacturers (of electronic guns) are dropping like flies, distribution companies are feeding on each other and there is far more capacity (still) than there is demand for. Consolidation is the order of the day and

a lot of voices are now calling for a slower game, one that emphasizes skill over volume, fun over expensive, flashy gear & etc.

Amazon is the company pushing for volume here. MacMillan is the company trying to slow things down. It’s great to be able to afford more and more and more – until you find out that the folks selling it to you (in this case, book publishers) can no longer afford to stay in business. No paintballs, no shooting. (Actually, a lot of noise with no result, lol)

I know the parallels aren’t exact here, but the end result will be; publishers are going to get squeezed until they are forced to consolidate, less and less content will become available and all you readers will start with a short-term glut, but end up with a long-term that has very little to offer.

EDIT: 1:25 est
Lot’s more discussion coming in on this one:
Tobias Buckell
Charlie Stross (perhaps the best all-around explanation of the situation so far, and generally supportive of the paintball industry analogy I offered earlier, as well as a general endorsement of the fundamental concept that

A MONOPOLY OF ANY KIND IS NOT A GOOD THING

Suricatus
Jay Lake
Cheryl Morgan (includes the Amazon Fail logo)
And SF Signal has a nice roundup of the above and more

I’ll say this for sure: This thing will not be going away by Monday

Yesterday while I was in Boston, the internet splooged all over MacMillan (TOR), Amazon and Apple.

John Scalzi summed things up from his perspective (many of his books are published by TOR, though not all, it’s not nice when your books can’t be purchased, it’s not nice when you don’t actually own the book you purchased, etc.)

Essentially, Amazon pulled all of a leading publisher’s works from their offerings because either they are in dispute over pricing that MacMillan finds unacceptable or it is the first move in the Apple IPad vs Amazon war. Or both.

I am largely unaffected by this for reasons I will go in to. I did want to mention though that many of my comments and observations are based not on Scalzi’s post or this NY Times article, but by the comments found on Scalzi’s post and our own internal household discussions here concerning the possible/forthcoming IPad and/or Kindle purchases.

One argument that I will not now or ever buy, accept or have any truck with is the “I’m running out of space for my physical books” justification.

Unacceptable. No one who has lugged 3000+ books clear across the country multiple times, suffered through years of having them packed away, spent hundreds, if not thousands on bookshelves, acid-free storage bags and countless hours cataloging & etc., will ever have any sympathy for those who view physical books as ephemeral.

In my mind (and most likely in the minds of those who are like me) – those of you who only keep a few (hundred) books around, give them away or trade them in or ‘clear off the shelves’ to make room for other books – you people are like those folks who send the dog to the shelter so you can get another puppy ’cause “they’re so cute!”. You are, at best, ’second class’ book lovers. Your love is not love, it is an affair, a fling, something that can be discarded after a night of fun. True, we’re discovering that human beings are far less monogamous than originally believed – but let’s not forget that books and people are two very different things. Books can last almost forever….

You all need to find a different justification.

Pricing. I have and do make my book purchases based on a wide variety of factors, including -

whether I’m likely to get the book in for review
who the author is
whether I think it’s important to have a review up sooner rather than later
how badly I want to read it
what the state of my book buying budget is

I buy hardcovers on release and well after release
I buy paperbacks because I’ve had to wait or because I want to read the book and couldn’t afford the hardback
I buy hardbacks at used book stores. I buy paperbacks at used book stores

I fully respect the right of the publishers (and sometimes the authors) to set whatever price for a book they choose to. Just as they (have to) respect my right to spend my money in any manner I so choose.

I have my own internal justifactory pricing guidelines: 24/25/26 is (barely) ok for a new hardcover. 6/7/8 is ok for a new paperback. 12 to 14 is ok for a trade.

($100, $200, $500 or more is ok for the right book or pulp (in the right condition, by the right author(s) – but that’s collector territory and therefore somewhat outside the bounds of this discussion.)

But those price quotes are not for every author. I’ll spend 30 on a hardback for a Niven. I won’t spend a dime on King. Those are highly personal judgments and I certainly hope your mileage varies – otherwise I’ll be spending even more on Niven.

As a perfect example: I have purchased specialty press books by Scalzi, paperbacks by Scalzi and hardbacks (on release) by Scalzi.

Any discussion of the appropriateness of e-book pricing must take these highly personal and varied decision making processes into account.

Right now, for me, E-books are classed with King. I won’t spend a dime on em.

What I would spend a few extra dimes for would be a DVD or a download key that was folded into the purchase price of the physical book. If such came packaged with the same for the audio version, I’d be willing to spend even more extra dimes.

I know I am on the far side of the generational divide, but right now boomers are a very large and weighty buying block (and we will be for some decades to come – we hope). Digital stuff is cool, sometimes interesting, sometimes convenient, sometimes useful, but a lot of us are still wed to physical objects – and have put the time and effort in to proving it.

(Not that I’m a big autograph hound, but “Hey John, could you sign this, er, where do you sign an E-Book?” scenario keeps popping into my head. Maybe someone ought to start making DVD sleeves for author’s to have something to sign.)

(As an aside, I’m also wondering when authors/agents are going to start renegotiating their publishing contracts so that they will stand to reap the benefit of direct to consumer sales. Let the publisher spend their money on publicizing and then, once the author has an audience – drop the publisher. Of course, one wonders why a publisher would accept such a deal (or how many authors will be willing to sustain the on-going PR and marketing work required), but it’s tough to look at the percentage given away and the downward pressure on book pricing and not contemplate ways in which the author will make more AND the reader will pay less.)

As for DRM, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Karen is an electronics fiend. She’s also been having trouble reading regular books and recently tried out several readers and found that those are easier for her to read (and our household always encourages more reading). She has now seen the IPad and the dreaded “I Want One” has been uttered (which of course means she WILL have one).

The out is of course that there will be plenty of opportunities to obtain files of things that have been cracked or broken or transferred from one format to another (and, as someone pointed out, there’s always Project Gutenberg – yay!)

But I don’t see ME using one (reader) any time in the near future. Heck, I still haven’t even bothered to figure out how to plug a phone number into the cell phone.

Convenience on trips? You know what my solution to that is? I bring the book I’m working on with me and then I hunt up the bookstores – both used and new – wherever I happen to be. I’ve yet to visit a country that didn’t have a store somewhere selling English language science fiction. This provides two benefits: I’m only lugging weighty stuff around one-way (and what’s a few extra books on top of the clothing, souvenirs, duty free liquor & etc?) and, perhaps more importantly, I find stuff that would otherwise be unavailable at home (like the pirated copy of The Solarians by Spinrad that I picked up in Israel).

If you really love books – you REALLY love books – and nothing that happens on the E-Book front, from devices to pricing, is going to change that. Otherwise you’re just a wannabe poser.