The future of publishing and what it means for readers

A friend directed me to this article on Salon.com by Laura Miller that speculates on the possible good (and bad) for readers when self-publishing becomes a matter of course. (After a rather bizarre intro, I have to say. Pinochet’s overthrow? Really?)

Depending on whom you listen to, traditional publishing may or may not be in its death throes. There can be no doubt that the industry is struggling with an array of challenges, and certainly it’s undergoing a transformation (willingly or not) in this world where change is measured in nanoseconds. One such challenge, electronic publishing, is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — threat to The Old Way Of Doing Things.

Electronic publishing means e-books, of course, and online delivery of content. But it also encompasses the world of self-publishing, wherein an author can bypass the traditional gatekeeprs of agent, editors, marketing, publishers, and retailers and offer their books (in any form they desire) to their audience. And it’s that world of self-publishing that’s the big question mark when it comes to just what dreams may come. (hee)

As Miller points out, self-publishing widens a reader’s choices unimaginably. No matter their predilections, there is guaranteed to be something for them to read.

Whether or not it’s readable is another question entirely.

She explains about the horrors of the slushpile so I won’t waste space on it here, but the point is important:  whatever you may think about traditional publishing and its role as a gatekeeper, the fact is that they read the crap so you don’t have to. Which isn’t to say that crap doesn’t get published, because we’ve all read enough books that made us ball our hands into fists and pound them against our skulls while chanting, “HOW DID THIS GET PUBLISHED?” But as she points out, the signal-to-noise ratio of readable stories that get published versus what exists in the slushpile? A difference of incalculable proportions. And if the publishing industry goes the way of T-Rex, the slushpile gets dumped into the media delivery systems like a deep water oil well gushing light sweet crude into the community swimming hole.

Because I think what this period of evolution in publishing — and media of any sort, really — is really about is understanding the exact nature of what their product is. Now that their traditional role of delivering books/content is being usurped by the new waves of technology and innovation, it seems clear that delivering books/content isn’t their product. Rather, it’s the expertise and authority publishers bring to the table to help readers find something that’s worth reading. (The definition of “worth reading” being hugely subjective itself, obviously.) That is, their product is the very valuable bundle of services that include identifying potential, editing, design, and marketing.  And in the brave new world of publishing that I think we’re entering, it will be their reputation that becomes the currency of the industry, and drives their sales.

The smartest and best will understand that just as Pixar has developed such a sterling reputation for excellent movies with terrific stories and unsurpassed quality for children (and a sizeable percentage of grownups ), a publisher’s branding will identify that This Book Right Here Is Worth Your Time. Publishers as a group are doing a stellar job of Not Getting It when it comes to that realization, but I think the ones that will survive the change are going to be the ones that move toward a model centered around the services they provide rather than the physical product they produce.

Which isn’t to say that there won’t be more successes that emerge from the self-publishing realm, or that self-publshing won’t become a viable, respectable, and lucrative route to success. I think self-publishing can indeed produce a book every bit as worth reading as anything produced by a traditional reputable publisher. There’ve already been such successes, though only a handful to date. That will increase with time, I think.

[I’ll just note that my focus here is on authors who want to be read by as many people as possible, whose goal is to become published — whatever the route is — and perhaps even make a living from their work. I realize that there are many, many, many people who write with no desire/intention of being published, and who may choose self-publishing as a means for sharing their material with a select audience or simply to be able to hold their story in their hands and be able to place it on a bookshelf. Obviously, I understand that. :) ]

But there are two factors to consider here. First, as Miller points out, such successes largely depend on the author’s willingness and ability to market themselves and their book. (We’ll assume for the sake of argument that they have some kind of editing resource, like a good beta reader or circle, or even paying a freelance editor, and that they can also pay for copyediting and layout expertise, or are capable of doing that on their own. We’ll also assume that they’re design-savvy or have access to and/or the funds for someone who can do a decent design of a cover if they’re selling print books. Templates don’t count.) There are authors who are willing to do this and have the ability to do it very well. There are many others who have either the willingness or the ability but not both. There are many who don’t have either one. (Guess which one I am.) Self-publishing is only a route for successful publishing if you’re willing to do the work that the publishing houses do and I remain unconvinced that the availability of self-publishing will magically confer these very special skills to the many authors out there who have something worth reading to offer.

The other factor to understand is that even if you are such an author with such a rare skill set to be both your own publisher (and all that it entails) and a writer, that’s still no guarantee that anyone but your parents and the neighbor across the street will ever read or even know about your book. This is something that the traditional publishers already struggle with, and their bottom lines are testimony to the incredible difficulty of enticing a reader to pick up that book, turn it over, and consider buying it. Actually buying it? The odds in favor are vanishingly small. Doing that over and over again so that the book pays for itself? Microscopic. If traditional publishers had a good sense of just what is guaranteed to sell, they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in.

So imagine the scenario where the reading market is flooded with hundreds of thousands of new options available every year. As Miller points out, consumers have a tendency to become overwhelmed with too much choice and end up selecting the same thing everyone else is choosing. Sure, there’ll be the readers willing to sift through, develop their own network of identifying what’s worth their time to read. Many of us do that already, especially if our reading preferences are for less popular material (i.e., we don’t tend to read items that appear on the NYT list, for example). But even those brave readers will spend an inordinate amount of time sifting and a lot less time reading.

I’m not saying that self-publishing is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it’s terrific, and I’m excited about the possibilities for where books and other media are headed in the next few years. I love that people are getting their creations out there for others to read/experience, and the opportunity to share with the world is opening up for us all. I love the communal aspect of creativity it engenders, and the organic ways in which storytelling as an art form has grown and diversified as the internet and technology has allowed us the means to share those stories with each other. The democratization of information is a beautiful thing.

But I think it’s important to remember that it’s a messy thing, too, and just as we have gatekeepers now, we’ll have them in the future, too. Different gatekeepers, perhaps. Better ones, maybe. And though the future of publishing is a guessing game at best, the rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated.

(edited in a few places for typos and clarity)

Won't someone think of the zombies??

Libraries in communities across the country are facing devastating budget cuts or even closure. To say that this is bad is to call the Gulf Oil spill “unfortunate”. Thanks to some amazing people, a great grassroots advocacy organization, and some truly hilarious and talented folks, there’s a clever new campaign to raise awareness and donations: Zombies for Libraries! They’re the brilliant minds behind this terrific and hilariously awesome video:

(Check out their site for more great videos featuring zombies, libraries, and brainnnnnsssssss. I love their motto: ”Libraries Feed Brains! Brains Feed Zombies! Help the Zombies Help The Libraries!”)

Without libraries, people of every age and income bracket — but especially low-income kids — lose a vital link to the best, most valuable resource anyone has: information and knowledge. For some, it’s their only access to online facilities or information or both.

Without libraries, yours truly couldn’t have read the hundreds of books she burned through in her formative years. Books were my haven and my escape, and there were and are a lot of kids just like me who probably couldn’t even function if they didn’t have a way to feed their book hunger.

The librarian at my public library growing up granted me an exception to both their checkout limit and age rule because my reading level was higher than the children’s and young adults’ sections (though I did read most everything in both of those sections) and I read so much that I was basically checking out a new book every day when I was limited to only six books at once. The summer I spent in an even smaller town that my own hometown would’ve been seriously impacted if not for the twice weekly trips to the little library up the street (partly because I was recovering from a broken arm that summer); the librarian there waived the limitations for me, too, after the first three weeks of visits.

It was librarians who first introduced me to Jane Austen, Robert Heinlein, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ursula K. LeGuin, S.E. Hinton, and others well before any high school or college literature class. Kids like I was aren’t rare, and all over the country, librarians are some of the most important figures in a young person’s life.

We have librarians to thank for some of the best books for children and young adults, because their word-of-mouth recommendations and networking are considered better and more powerful PR than any book review or NYT list appearance. If librarians support a book, publishers are known to expand their push for a particular book or even reconsider the marketing budget a book initially received.

And it’s libraries and librarians we have to thank for keeping the most commonly censored books, the ones that regularly appear on book banning lists, alive and well and available for everyone. They are staunch activists against censorship — including internet censorship — and they stand up to some pretty frightening machinery of anger and hysteria and ignorance.  Because of them, libraries truly represent the idea of “freedom of information”, and if that concept has any importance to you, then you’ll consider doing something to save libraries.

Linger-ing effect

Maggie Stiefvater — author of the wonderful novel, Shiver — put together the most amazing book trailer for the next book in her Wolves of Mercy Falls series. She did the whole trailer herself — storyboarded, shot, and edited it, composed(!) and played the music, did all the artwork in the trailer itself (by hand!)…everything. And the end result is absolutely gorgeous.

Writer, artist, musician, filmmaker…it should be illegal to have that many talents.

Another step in the right direction

Progress! My Writerly Pursuits week is underway, and I actually am making some sort of progress on writing-related tasks.

On my agenda for this week, as previously mentioned, are tackling my query letter and synopsis. The former is a single page introduction letter to a potential agent, in which a writer has one or two paragraphs (three at the very most!) to distill the essence of the story and convince the agent to read further (i.e., either the attached synopsis, if they take them in submission, or to request a synopsis or a partial or full manuscript). The query letter is much like the blurb on the back cover a book meant to excite a potential reader into wanting to read the book itself.

It is very intimidating.

So I decided today to help myself get into the groove by instead tackling the synopsis. My idea here is that immersing myself in the story and getting into the mode of distilling it down for a synopsis will help me drill down on the way to sell the story in an even shorter format. Familiarity with the material and alla that. (I mean, obviously I’m familiar with the material since I wrote it, and have read and reread it approximately fifty gajillion times, but you know how it is when you get on a roll working on something, and you you hit that sweet spot of everything just flowing right along…that’s what I’m after.)

The synopsis is, depending on where you look and who you trust, anywhere from a 1 page to a 25 page summary of the main story and characters, including main plot twists and the ending. Kind of a big range, there. (There’s all kinds of contradictory information out there as to how long it should be, in the absence of an express definition in a submission guideline. And submission guidelines vary widely from agent to agent. So.) I’m going to go ahead and write mine up and then edit it down, with a goal of hitting somewhere between 5 and 7 pages. For almost 500 pages of manuscript, that ought to be quite a trick….

But work has begun, and I’m already onto page 3 and feeling quite chuffed with myself. So, as I say, progress is being had. In the course of working today, I wanted to look up a couple of things I remembered saving about synopsis tips in my handy bookmarked “Writing Stuff” folder. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of links on all facets of publishing and writing and whatnot. And I’m pathologically organizational by nature, but as I’ve accumulated more and more links, the initial structure I’d set up and later modified has gotten less and less manageable for all of those links. Finding those tips I wanted took far longer than it should’ve, and I thought to myself, as I have many times in the last few months, that I really need to go through and reorganize the folders I’d set up for them to better reflect the way I’m using that folder now. A bit of a project that I just haven’t had time for, even as I keep adding links and terrific information gets buried under the sheer multitude of what I’ve accumulated. And then I thought “AHA!” Because, after all, that is exactly what this week is all about — taking the time I need to focus strictly on doing things for my writerly pursuits. (No I’m not avoiding that scary query letter. Am not. Am not. Shut up.)

Two hours later, and my pathologically organized self is quite content with my newly restructured “Writing Stuff” folder, with renamed folders and rearranged subfolders and newly-added folders and subfolders and all the inevitable dead links weeded out. Oh, it’s enough to make my little OCD heart to go pitter pat.

Since I know that there are those among you who share either my writing passion or my OCD tendencies (or both!), I thought I’d share the end result. (Note that there are some duplications here, which were intentional, and that this doesn’t constitute everything in my writing universe; there are many blogs/sites that I follow with Bloglines or whatever, and so don’t need to keep bookmarked. And some that I do follow with those other methods that I also have bookmarked, because that’s just how I roll.)

Behold, for I am awesome!*  

*And for those of you asking yourselves, “Um…why didn’t she just share these via delicious/Google Bookmarks/etc.? Does she not realize this is soooooo Web 1.0**??” Well, boys and girls, doing so would require more than just a simple upload, would in fact require some sort of organizing or cleaning or whatever before and/or after doing so in order to make some sense of the wealth of information contained therein, and as I am currently doing my best to stay on task***, I am indeed opting for a less elegant, more brute force method.

**Also, when did Firefox start adding hidden gobbledygook code to their export bookmarks file? Because holy extraneous code, Batman!

***We will ignore the amount of time I already wasted doing both of those things before giving up realizing that it was going to take way more time than I wanted to spend. In other news, tagging is a great organizational method, but there is still something to be said for the tree system of organizing information. I AM LOOKING AT YOU DELICIOUS.

Evolution of design

I love, love, love this video of the making of a book cover design. I know firsthand just how hard it is to come up with the design at all, let alone trying to make it look something like what you imagined, and my own amateur attempt was much simpler than this one. Simply fascinating!

(note: takes some time to load)

I also love that this video is being used for book promotion, which is incredibly clever and smart. Got to envy that author for her very savvy agent and publisher’s marketing department…that kind of innovation and publisher push is, from everything I’ve read, not common.

via Agent Kristen @ Pub Rants

Novel length

I’m working on edits, and in the back of my mind, thinking about the overall word count. Reading all kinds of industry blogs, you learn what an “acceptable” word count is — 90,000 to 150,000, roughly, depending on the type of book or genre. Romance is generally at the low end or shorter, urban/paranormal fantasy more toward the middle, historical fiction toward the end of that range. Literary fiction is somewhere in the middle. Epic fantasy is at the higher end, and often surpasses it.

Keeping in mind that 75,000 is roughly a 200 page book, when you get up toward 150,000 words, then you’ve got a meatier book on (or in?) your hands. You start moving past that, you begin to enter BFB territory: Big Fucking Brick. Which is why epic fantasy is sometimes called brick fantasy. Or doorstop fantasy.

Well, mine comes in just under 250,000 words, so it’s not just a brick, it’s a cement block. True, it’s epic fantasy, but I’m concerned about that word count, not gonna lie. Which isn’t to say I’m going to start cutting things just to cut them, but I’m trying to be judiciously ruthless as I work through drafts, seeing if there’s anything I can tighten further, or shorten, or remove entirely.

Short of cutting out entire plot lines, however, I don’t see it getting down to, say 200,000. I’ve read that agents/editors won’t reject an ms out of hand due to a high word count, that if it grabs them from the beginning then they’ll make it work (though it’ll no doubt mean some painful cutting in the editing stage), but I admit I’m nervous about that big number that’ll appear in my query letter and the top right corner of my ms. Querying is hard enough as it is, as is getting your ms noticed in the pile of submittals and slush.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about it, other than to make the story the very best I possibly can, work hard on writing an outstanding query, and try to make myself shine enough for a potential agent to look past that scary number and keep reading.

Amazon vs. Macmillan

Since I made this decision to pursue publishing a couple of years ago in the midst of writing my book, I’ve been adding all kinds of industry blogs to my daily reading to learn all I can about every aspect — I read blogs and journals by authors, agents, editors, writers’ guilds, and power readers. I follow publisher and writers’ guild sites. I try to stay up on the latest trends and controversies in the publishing world. I spend almost as much time reading about the industry as I do writing. Oftentimes more.

*Power readers is my term for readers who have popular blogs about books, and thus have Important Thoughts Worth Knowing, as an author understanding the reading public. My two favorite sites for this purpose are Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author, both of which focus on romance. Not a genre I’m interested in, but their astute observations and insight have been invaluable in helping me understand my ultimate audience: the reader. (And I’ve certainly gained a better understanding of — and respect for — the romance genre as an unanticipated side benefit.)

Some of the biggest topics in the last couple of years: the GLBT Amazonfail, RaceFail ‘09, the Google Book Settlement, the dying publishing model, the Hanchette affair, the Harlequin vanity press, CoverFail, copyright evolution vs. Creative Commons, and the George Orwell Kindle deletion. But hands down the biggest conversation happening in the industry involves ebooks. I’ve read more about ebooks and the various related topics than I have about any other aspect of the industry. What ebook pricing should be, whether or not DRM should be used, book piracy, the changing publisher model, the pros and cons of every ereading device on the market, the pros and cons of striking out as an independent author online and/or offering your books for free. Ebooks have been a part of every one of the controversies in that list above, and there’s not a single person involved in the industry who doesn’t have an opinion on it, or a stake in the outcome.

Well yesterday, the bomb dropped.

In response to a dispute with Macmillan — whose imprints include Tor Books, St. Martin’s Press, and many others, including many international imprints — about the pricing model for ebooks, Amazon has pulled the “Buy it Now” link from every Macmillan-related book on its site. Not just the link for ebooks, but for print books as well. That means that you currently cannot purchase a book like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, one of the most popular epic fantasy books ever, in any form from Amazon. (You can still purchase from second-hand sellers via their site.)

[Macmillan’s statement here. Amazon’s statement here.]

Needless to say, the internet has exploded in the past day and a half. I’ve spent the better part of last night and this morning reading up on it. Two of the best explanations I’ve read about what’s going on here are from Jane of Dear Author and Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. (Others worth reading on this subject: John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and especially Tobias Buckell, who takes the time to explain where the costs of publishing come from and how that impacts ebook pricing.)

There is no “right” party in this current dispute, just a less wrong one, and which one that is depends on a couple of factors and how important they are to the particular person discussing it. But Jane and Cory both make the point — and I think pretty much all of us on the sidelines agree — that the victims here are the authors and the readers. And though most of you aren’t authors, I know most of you are avid readers, which is why I’m taking the time to bring this whole thing to your attention even though others have analyzed it far better and far longer than I’ll be able to do here, in a single post.

You would think that it goes without saying that the publishers’ customer is you, the reader. But it’s important to understand that in actuality, you the reader are entirely irrelevant to publishers. This is probably the hardest thing to understand, and something that I don’t think even the publishers quite realize. But once you accept that fact, then the rest makes a lot more sense, inasfar as it makes sense to understand why this fucked up industry is so fucked up.

So if you aren’t the publishers’ customer, who is?

Wholesalers and retailers. There are lots of reasons why this is so, and there’s a whole historical setup for how this came about that I could bore you with but won’t. (And you obviously don’t have to take my word for it, there’s plenty of reading out there for you. I just won’t spending time proving that point here, since that’s not really the reason for this post.) The point is, the fact that you purchase the publishers’ product is largely irrelevant. I mean, that’s not quite accurate, since what you purchase drives the sales of those retailers and wholesalers, and thus you do have an impact on the publishers in an indirect and ultimate way. But unlike most other free market enterprises, where the consumer’s choices and preferences and demands have an immediate impact on the manufacturer/supplier, the demand in the publishing world doesn’t come from the consumer, it comes from, in effect, the reseller.

In the past, that’s been the big and small bookstores. Amazon is a slightly different animal, since it acts as both wholesaler and retailer, which is why they can offer such big discounts to you, their customers. They purchase directly from the manufacturer/supplier (publishers), getting the wholesale price, and sell directly to you, passing along some of the savings. (Warehousing price clubs like Costco, Sam’s Club, and Price Club, and large retailers like Walmart do something similar.)

Another thing worth understanding is the practice of returns. This is, as far as I can tell, a practice entirely unique to the publishing industry, and it is, in my opinion, one of the main culprits for the industry’s decline. Again, I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of returns per se, but to simplify it for our purposes here: when a bookseller purchases an order of books, they have a guarantee that any books left unsold after a certain period can be returned to the publisher for a refund of that portion of what they outlaid on the initial order. This is why, if you’ve ever worked in a bookstore, part of your job is to tear off the covers and throw away the now coverless book. The covers are sent back as proof that the book didn’t sell, and the bookseller gets a refund for it. This is also why it’s illegal to sell or even give away those books. Yes, I know, it’s a goddamn shameful waste, I’m just saying, that’s why. No other industry does this, and it’s completely cracktastic. Welcome to the world of publishing.

(Oh, and just to add an extra degree of wtf: those returns are also counted against an author’s ultimate sales. There’s an entire art of negotiations devoted to whether or not to take an advance and how much it should be, for this reason. While an author doesn’t have to pay the publisher back for those copies that didn’t sell, they are counted against the author’s “earn out” balance. Which means that if, after all the pluses and minuses are added up, the author failed to make back the amount expended on their book and their advance, then they “failed to earn out”. Not earning out is discouragingly common, and depending on the size of the advance and marketing campaign invested, can have a severely negative impact on whether or not the publisher will contract for a future book from that author. It’s complicated.)

Note, however, that Amazon doesn’t participate in the returns system. Their entire business model is centered around warehousing, so there’s no problem for them to store books indefinitely (as there is with others, which is why the returns system started in the first place) because the chances are very, very good that eventually, they’ll sell those books no matter how old they are. (Hello, wonders of the internet.) This sets Amazon on entirely different terms with publishers, because from Amazon’s perspective, it’s a straight across transaction of the sale of widgets. Books are largely the same no matter what, as far as Amazon is concerned, whereas from everyone else’s perspective (publisher, author, and reader), books are decidely not the same. As Jane of Dear Author points out:

Of course, books are a unique product in that each book is its own tiny monopoly. No one else can produce and publish a Stephen King book. There are other mystery books and other horror books but there is no other Stephen King.

Which isn’t to say that books can’t generally be treated the same from a business perspective in a broad sense — indeed, they have been for decades — but merely to point out that there’s good reason from the publishers’ side of treating books somewhat differently, i.e., to have some flexibilty in pricing. It does not, mind you, justify the truly insane* pricing models that some/most engage in for ebooks (which I’ll get to in a second), but there’s a perfectly sound and legitimate reason to have a pricing scale that slides downward over time. (Hence the higher price paid when a book first comes out, regardless of whether it comes out as a trade paperback or hardcover, then a reduction in pricing, then the release of the mass market paperback at a lower price still, then a reduction in pricing again as more time has passed. This practice is called “windowing”.) And this is, in a very simplistic summary, what Macmillen was proposing to Amazon with ebook pricing that caused Amazon to flip their proverbial shit.

*[Publishers’ cracktastical idea that ebooks should cost the same as, or only slightly less than (or in some cases more than!), print books is truly crazy and illogical. After the intial cost of getting the book published (pay the author, editors, artists, layout designers, copyeditors, marketers) and processed into the fifty gajillion formats you want to make available to your reader (because you are a smart publisher and recognize that you should make it as easy as possible for your readers to buy what you’re selling), you have no other costs.  (caveat: website, bandwidth, yada yada) Which isn’t to say it means ebooks only cost pennies, especially when you can only count on selling a few thousand copies AT MOST for the vast, vast majority of books. But ebooks are inherently more profitable if/when they achieve parity with print books, simply because there is no incremental cost associated with them.]

From Amazon’s perspective, a single price for ebooks (the widgets in question) makes a lot of sense. So much sense that they’re currently selling most ebooks at a loss — they’re a big enough company that they can absorb it — in order to drive sales to their site by selling for less than everyone else. But the key here to understand is why. There’s only one good reason to take a loss on a product you sell, and it’s to move some other product that makes you money and/or to increase other or future sales. This is the infamous “loss leader”, a practice used to spectacularly devastating effect by Walmart.

Well, it’s no mystery what product their ebook loss leader is meant to sell more of: the Kindle, of course. They won’t release numbers, but the general consensus seems to be that they’ve sold a few million Kindles since they came out, which means that Amazon dominates the ereader market already and they’re well-positioned to expand that advantage as more people convert to ereading. More than that, though, they set the terms, since the Kindle has a proprietary platform, DRM restrictions, and an unfair licensing setup. You don’t own the ebooks you buy for the Kindle (to the surprise of several Kindle owners not too long ago when their purchased copies of 1984 vanished from their devices overnight), nor can you move them to other devices to read if you decide to switch to a different device (iPad, anyone?). You can’t sell your copy of a Kindle ebook to a used book store, or share it with a friend, or donate it to the local library.

Note that these problems are not unique to the Kindle, and aren’t only driven by Amazon. DRM in particular is a problem largely created and perpetuated by the publishers, since they can’t seem to understand that their fear of piracy that’s driving them to embrace draconian technology like DRM does nothing to actually prevent or stop piracy. In fact, the only real effect DRM has is to harm their consumers, the reader, since it punishes the reader for buying a legitimate copy, assumes that they’ll do something criminal with it, and throws up unnecessary obstacles for the reader to buy the publisher’s product. (And the actual, you know, pirates wouldn’t have legitimately bought the book anyway.) But remember what I said before that the publisher’s customer isn’t you, the reader. So I won’t get into all the whys and wherefores that DRM is not only evil and unfair, it’s a stupid business practice. At least, not today.

ANYWAY, from Amazon’s POV, having prices dictated to them by the publisher is decidedly Not Cool. And from a free market POV, it usually isn’t, either. But as with anything you learn in Econ101, assuming the simplicity of a free market is a fool’s errand because the free market always assumes rational actors operating in a purely free market, and that’s never the case. (You can always tell a person whose understanding of economics is built on what they learned in Econ101, because they’re generally the ones who believe the free market solves all ills. The first thing you learn in the second year of Econ is that everything you learned in the first year was false.) Charlie, Jane, and Cory already laid out better analysis of the pricing aspect of the dispute than I could, so read them instead.

In the time it’s taken me to write all of this, Amazon has now caved to Macmillan, pretty much exactly when and how John Scalzi (and others) predicted they would. And in the time you’ve been reading this, you probably forgot what I was originally writing about in the first place, huh? ;)

My point — and I do have one — is that the implications of this throwdown are undoubtedly going to have some serious repercussions for publishing in the not-too-distant future. Even if you don’t read books electronically and don’t ever plan to, how ebooks are handled in the coming years are going to determine the viability of most of the large publishers (and thus, the majority of authors, at least in the short term). Done well and fairly, consumers become the focus of book selling (as they should be) and they have access to a HUGE list of ebooks at a reasonable price with no restrictions on what device they can use or what format it’s in. Publishers are decoupled from the returns system and the dinosaur business model that’s been dragging them down for years, break away from their addiction to blockbusters and subsidized publishing, and maintain a healthy business structure with a rational profit expectation. Sellers (including Amazon), are able to set their prices as they wish without dictating prices up the chain to publishers, expand their share of the ereader market, and continue to make record profits. And of course authors have a new potential revenue stream that enables them to do what they do for a living, expand their audience, try different approaches to their career, and build their success.

As I said, done right, all of those things are possible. But then, I’ve always been pathologically optimistic.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll just keep buying my books from Powell’s, online or off, and hope to god that this stuff gets sorted out by the time I (hopefully) get published.