Publishing

I was just reading a story in The New Yorker about the iPad and the book business. They are saying that Amazon is buying e-books (electronic books) from publishers for $14 and selling them for $10 in order to pump up their Kindle business. Publishers are P.O'd that Amazon is charging that little, and I'm thinking WTF?

My mistake was thinking that the actual cost of the work and materials involved in printing a book was substantial, and that's why books cost so much. I mean you need big, high speed presses and fancy bindery machinery in order to produce books at a reasonable price. I didn't realize that the price of actually producing a book was next to nothing. I'm thinking it's probably under a dollar, at least for books with just text in black and white. If you add color pictures it may add a quarter. Who knows? Nobody is telling. It's a big secret.

In any case, this means that book publishing is working on the same basis as the music industry. A nickel for production costs, a nickel for the author and 90 cents for the publishers to spend on promotions, parties, and silver linings for their wallets. So publishers can all go hang as far as I'm concerned.

There was also a quote in the story attributed to Stevie, something along the lines of "the book business is dead. 40% of Americans read one or fewer books last year". Another Whisky Tango Foxtrot. 40%?!?! Is that all? I would have expected it to be more like 99%. Let's be pessimistic and say 40% didn't read any books last year. That means 60% did! At one book each, that's 180 million books. I wonder, do we spend more on books or records, er, musical recordings?

Only movies seem to have adapted to the realities of the digital age. Books, records and newspapers don't seem to have figured it out. I read something that said owning a newspaper was like having a license to print money. If you wanted to run a real business, where you worked hard and produced a product that people wanted, you could probably make a go of most big city newspapers. What they are complaining about is that the fountain of cash is drying up. Sorry, you'll get no sympathy from me.