MarionGropen 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (21)

• On the post: Publishing Lobbyists Suck Up To Trump With Lies About Copyright, Ask Him To Kill DMCA Safe Harbors

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2016 @ 09:11am

  oops

  I just posted a comment, and forgot to include my name. It was the comment just above, about assumptions, and pro-copyright.

• On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2015 @ 09:32am

  Re: Re: Hypocrisy, thy name is TechDirt

  "Anti-piracy efforts don't help authors because piracy doesn't hurt authors"
  
  This is as silly as the people who say that all pirated copies are lost sales.
  
  It is obvious on its face that some pirates would have bought copies if they couldn't get them illegally.
  
  There are far more types of books than most people, even people in the book business, realize. It's also obvious on its face that piracy will affect the sales of different types of books in different ways.
  
  So, yes, for some types of books the publicity value of piracy outweighs the actual lost sales.
  
  For other types of books, it doesn't.
  
  But here's the thing: it's not up to the pirates to decide if the free copies are better for the author or other people who have invested in the book.
  
  The only fair option is for the people who did the work to make the decision about whether they want to give that work away, or insist upon being paid for every copy.
  
  I don't get to insist that you do what you do for free. You don't get to insist that I do.
  
  And the people that claim that you can make money other ways than by selling copies? Totally clueless. MOST creative workers cannot.
  
  That might work in some areas (some types of coding, for example). But who the heck is going to pay a novelist for anything other than the novel?
  
  And what about all the other people who spend hundreds of hours on the book? Editors (there are 3 radically different types, btw), proofreaders, cover designers, and on and on? Should they have to work for free?
  
  Why?

• On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2015 @ 07:47am

  Re: Publishers -- very poor at selecting books to publish

  Think about this for a moment. It should be obvious that most publishers would not have been able to do for Rowling what the right publisher did for her.
  
  Publishers are not interchangeable. The ones who passed were right to do so, because they accurately identified her audience, and what would be necessary to reach that audience -- and knew that it was not their audience or their skill set.
  
  This argument is common -- and it's always a reflection of someone who knows little about what a publisher really does.

• On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2015 @ 07:59am

  Author Interests

  The article above misses an important point.
  
  Amazon does not now, and never will, have authors' interests at heart. It doesn't need authors or books much at all. It has a track record of squeezing publishers' margins, including self-publishers, as its power increases.
  
  The AAG IS acting in the interest of all authors when it points out that monopsony power is bad for all publishers, including self-publishers, and for all of their authors.
  
  Amazon's power over authors and publishers is enormous and growing. Unlike past monopsonies (such as Ingram), Amazon doesn't even need books much, and can do just fine if it squeezes enormous numbers of authors out of the business of writing.
  
  I agree with you that Amazon's expansion of the marketplace for books has been a good thing in many ways.
  
  For example: ebooks never made the break into a commercially viable format until Amazon launched the Kindle (with a TON of help from big publishers, btw).
  
  Another example: Amazon's expansion of the marketplace has made online retailing a viable path for all self-publishers, and has greatly expanded the viability of the "long tail" of book sales.
  
  BUT none of that changes the core point: Amazon is so powerful now that it can do some truly nasty things to our marketplace.
  
  Worse, it has a TRACK RECORD of squeezing even self-publishers in order to increase its own margins. It's only the friend of authors when they happen to have aligned interests. It doesn't need them, and it certainly doesn't care about them.
  
  Get over your prejudices about copyright, publishers and other stuff, and look at THIS point.
  
  The AAG is right on this one.

• On the post: Author Solutions' Rep: People Complaining About Our Scammy 'Services' Are Engaged In 'Racketeering'

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 09 Jul, 2015 @ 07:16am

  Re: A Point Re: Philippines

  Trails: any kind of editing needs to be done by someone from the country, or even region, where the book's primary market is.
  
  People in England speak English pretty well, but a book that crosses from the US to the UK or vice versa needs work before it's perfectly tailored to the local market.

• On the post: Author Solutions' Rep: People Complaining About Our Scammy 'Services' Are Engaged In 'Racketeering'

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 09 Jul, 2015 @ 07:19am

  It's shameful

  The purchase of AS by a large publisher, and the ownership of other Pay to Publish companies by other large houses, are one of the few things that make me ashamed of publishing and publishers.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 08:02pm

  Re: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  Publishers are constrained by things you don't know about, such as agreements with the important reviewers, like the PW, Library Journal and Kirkus, to see that the reviewers have the book a certain length of time before any format is released to the public.
  
  Review journals need a couple of months to get the book, decide to review it, assign it to the reviewer, have them read it, and write the review, then to get the reviews into print and distributed.
  
  Then their customers (librarians and bookstores) need a certain amount of time to read the reviews and decide which books to stock, and to get their orders in before the pub date, so that the books are available everywhere on the day of release.
  
  So, no, they're not being stupid and stubborn and ignoring the brave new world.
  
  They're dealing with something important, but invisible to you.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 07:57pm

  Re:

  Friends sharing physical books are not committing piracy. But when a friend shares an ebook, another copy is created. That is an infringement. It's a copyright.
  
  Libraries are different. They're very careful to see that the new copy is deleted after a certain time, and that they have no more copies on loan at any one time than the total they own.
  
  On the other hand, it may well be an infringement for libraries to create an electronic copy of a book that they own in print. That is a subject of much legal wrangling, and different courts have taken different perspectives at different times.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 07:54pm

  Re: Re: Re: The "sweet" price

  Nasch: I think publishers are torn.
  
  The factors in favor of higher prices:
  
  -- It does no publisher, author, or reader any good for Amazon to become a monopsony, as has already almost happened. If publishers make ebooks too inexpensive, they are in danger of killing off the competition for Amazon.
  
  -- If readers become accustomed to expecting prices that can be done if print editions carry most of the cost of preparing that edition, then when/if print dies, everyone in publishing and writing will have a hard time covering costs.
  
  Factors favoring lower prices:
  
  -- Dropping the prices increases the sales volume to some extent, and for most books, the elasticity makes total revenues increase.
  
  -- Dropping prices makes piracy less attractive.
  
  
  In the end, it's a balancing act.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 07:30pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ford Motors fails to provide me with Crown Vic for $1, therefore I'm justified in stealing one. Those bastards. Not even end of year models at convenient price.

  What makes you think that any book that only sells 25 copies at $25 (a very uncommon price for a consumer ebook) has any chance of selling 20,000 copies at any price, including free?

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 04:37pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ford Motors fails to provide me with Crown Vic for $1, therefore I'm justified in stealing one. Those bastards. Not even end of year models at convenient price.

  PaulT: the fixed costs of producing an ebook are huge. Almost all of them are exactly what they would be for a print book.
  
  A content edit costs about $1200 to $2000 per manuscript.
  A line edit costs about $12 to $16 per thousand words (and a book tends to run upwards of 80,000 words).
  A copyedit tends to run $9 to $12 per thousand words
  A decent cover image tends to go from $1500 to $5,000
  And the list rolls on.
  
  Yes, some of those things can be had, in a substandard way, for much less. But if you have a book that might sell 10,000 copies in a half baked version with $5,000 in fixed costs, and might sell 40,000 copies if you invest $15,000 in it, then you run the numbers and make your choices.
  
  It's a business. It's run by hundreds of VERY smart people who love books, and who are not the luddites or dinosaurs that people here seem to see.
  
  If you think they're doing something incredibly stupid, then the chances are that you're missing information.
  
  Don't be so contemptuous.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 04:30pm

  Re: Re: Ford Motors fails to provide me with Crown Vic for $1, therefore I'm justified in stealing one. Those bastards. Not even end of year models at convenient price.

  AC: the marginal cost may be zero, but you can't go to infinite volume.
  
  Somewhere, somehow, the producer has to cover the fixed costs of production as well as the variable ones.
  
  Books are low priced, low margin items, with very high fixed costs of production.
  
  You need content editors, line editing, copyediting, cover design, file conversion for an ebook, and after the conversion, each ebook format has to be proofread. Soon, with greater sophistication in e-reading software, we'll need text layout again, too.
  
  Each of those things must be done by a human, who has to spend many hours on the book-to-be.
  
  A solid book might sell 5,000 or 10,000 copies.
  
  Publishers also get only a fraction of the sale price, and pay a hefty chunk of that to the author.
  
  Somewhere, somehow, if you want books to continue to be high quality, you need to be willing to cover the costs.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 04:25pm

  Re: Re: The "sweet" price

  The sweet spot is partly a function of demand elasticity. Not all ebooks are created equal in this regard.
  
  For example: the increase in sales for every dollar in reduced price is greater for a novel by an unknown author will be far, far greater than the increase in sales for every dollar the price is reduced for the book that just won the Booker Prize or a National Book Award, or the long-awaited sequel to a book that spent many months on the NYT list.
  
  Those are extremes, but they're illustrative.
  
  There is no one sweet spot for all ebooks. There is no one strategy that works for all ebooks.

• On the post: Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't Care

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2015 @ 04:15pm

  Re: The "sweet" price

  Seegras: Pricing requires consideration of both what readers will pay, and what costs publishers must cover.
  
  Obviously, if the only thing you have to do is push a button to convert a manuscript into an ebook, then yes, the price should be not much more than what publishers give authors.
  
  But publishers do a lot more than that to a manuscript before it becomes a book, even an ebook. Most of the costs of any book are not in paper, printing and binding. That's about 10% of the list price.
  
  They're also not in warehousing, shipping, and other similar expenses of handling a physical object. That's about 15% of the list price.
  
  75% of the costs of making a book are in other things, and about 65 to 70% don't go away.
  
  That would be why publishers would like to see ebooks priced at about 60% of the price of the print version out at the same time. (The 5 to 10% reduction is in order to try to improve volume and reduce piracy, and it's about all that publishers can afford to do.)

• On the post: If Publishers Can't Cover Their Costs With $10 Ebooks, Then They Deserve To Go Out Of Business

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 27 Apr, 2012 @ 12:24pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Help me out here...

  There is a built in maximum number of copies that any book is likely to sell at any price.
  
  We're not talking toothpaste or widgets. Books have limited audiences and limited sales lives, with very small long-tail sales after the end of those lives.
  
  Do the calculus, figure out the area under that curve, because believe it or not, we have. It's pretty darned small.
  
  If you don't cover the development costs (aka editorial, acquisitions, file conversion and subsequent clean up, etc, etc) within a few thousand copies, you NEVER WILL.
  
  Truly, publishers aren't as stupid as all of you clearly think we are.

• On the post: If Publishers Can't Cover Their Costs With $10 Ebooks, Then They Deserve To Go Out Of Business

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 27 Apr, 2012 @ 12:20pm

  Re: Re: Re: Help me out here...

  Books don't usually sell very many copies, compared to most other industries, and they have very low unit prices for something with so few units.
  
  The development costs have to figure into your pricing sooner or later, because if they don't get covered eventually, you go out of business.
  
  Note that publishing is one of the lowest margin industries around, not because the people in it are dinosaurs but because it's a low-price/low-volume business.
  
  That's different, btw, from the music business or the movies or . . .

• On the post: If Publishers Can't Cover Their Costs With $10 Ebooks, Then They Deserve To Go Out Of Business

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 27 Apr, 2012 @ 12:16pm

  Re: Re: Re: Help me out here...

  Guys, you're missing the point with the costs.
  
  Since it seems obvious to all of us that ebooks will soon be the ONLY edition of many types of book, we need to price the ebooks from the start in such a way that we can cover those costs.
  
  First, almost no one in publishing makes more than a bare living wage. And many, many of them have to take second jobs in order to keep eating. The costs are not from stupid things.
  
  They're from things like editing (all 3 types: structural-, line-, and copy-editing), design (including the "cover image" for the ebook) and author royalties.
  
  These aren't sunk costs. These are FIXED costs of producing an edition.
  
  The variable costs of selling another copy of an ebook are less than the variable costs of selling another copy of a printed one, but not much less. Distribution is still a huge chunk. Author royalties are a big piece of what's left.
  
  If you want the professionally published books to have been edited, and then get high quality file conversions, the prices are going to have to continue to be more than the shoe-string self-publisher can do.

• On the post: Comic Artist Dylan Horrocks Explains How Copyright Is Too Often Used To Kill Culture

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2010 @ 08:28am

  Re: Re: Copyright isn't just about selfish corporations

  "Good! That means there's a better field of competition! But the focus here was who owns the copyright holders and why it's ever anyone other than the creator of the work."

  
  In the book publishing field, copyrights are almost never sold to the publisher. They're licensed to them for a period, but owned by the author or illustrator. And, as I said earlier, even when the corporation is the publisher, the majority of the little profit there is, goes as royalties to the author.
  

  an illegal download of a digital copy is never a lost sale. The logic behind that claim is fallacious.

  
  I beg to differ. I think we all know that some of the people who download now would buy a copy if they couldn't pirate. Not all, but certainly some. And so, some of the downloads really are lost sales.

• On the post: Comic Artist Dylan Horrocks Explains How Copyright Is Too Often Used To Kill Culture

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2010 @ 06:17am

  Copyright isn't just about selfish corporations

  I keep seeing people discuss copyright as if all of the rightsholders were large (and therefore automatically evil) corporations. Not so. I don't know the music world, but I've been in book publishing since the 1980s.
  
  The vast majority of book publishers are "mom and pop shops." There are more than 100,000 of them active in the US alone, and only 5 are large corporations. Only 100 are even modest-sized corporations.
  
  As for the output? Yes, most of the books in bookSTORES are from the corporations, because the tiny companies have huge barriers between them and you. Because of that, every single sale is critical. The margin between life and death for these companies is razor thin.
  
  We all know that not every download of pirate content is a lost sale. But we also all know that some are.
  
  On another front, most authors are making minimum wage, at best. So the royalties are pretty important to them, as well.
  
  Last, but not least, most "bookstore books" pay more to the author in royalties than to the corporations' profits and overhead. This means that even if you're "sticking it to The Man," you're doing even more damage to some poor author at the same time.
  
  Victimless crimes? I don't see it. And I also don't see that many people buy printed copies of books they've pirated. Or pay for some sort of performance from the author of same, or any of the other inanities I've heard as models for our brave new world.
  
  Yes, downloading is different than simple theft of a physical object, but it's also more similar than those who download want to think. It's wrong.

• On the post: Misguided Outrage At NY Times' Ethicist Over Ethics Of Downloading A Book

  

  MarionGropen ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2010 @ 09:12am

  No Loss?

  Overlooked in many of the arguments about copyright violation is the issue of control.
  
  The short version: If I make it, and I want to restrict the way I offer it to you, you have no right to force me to do otherwise.
  
  I believe that an author or other creator has the right to control how their work is sold and distributed, where substantial parts of it get used in mash-ups and other ways, and many other things. Of course, many authors choose to release that control. Some offer their work under various copyleft licenses. Some renounce their rights explicitly, but if they do not, then we don't have the right to take their work and do as we will with it.
  
  That said, I also believe that US practice is fair: you can extract content from one version and move it to others for your own personal use. However, the minute you offer to share it, or take that sharing from someone else, you are violating the creators' and rightsholders' control.

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