The comments about Amazon being both Wholesaler and Retailer and disintermediating the supply chain bother me. When retailers get big enough they inevitably buy direct. Think Tesco, Walmart. This isn't dis-intermediation it's re-intermediation. As well as disintermediating Amazon (Tesco-Walmart), we also need to disintermediate the big publishing houses that roll up the efforts of the small publishers. Why does Tor have to abide by Macmillan's political manouevering? First can't Tor sell direct into Amazon, and second, why can't Tor sell direct? And because the second one is hard, where's the cloud computing service that handles sales and delivery for a fixed fee? At which point, I expect Google to extend Google checkout at some stage in the future and go into direct competition with Amazon but in a way that democratises the process so anyone, no matter how small, can play.
Meanwhile, as Macmillan and Amazon have their spat, who actually suffers? A publisher that keeps books off the market by refusing to deal with a retailer is no different from one that won't do a print run and keeps books in the "out-of-print" state. Which is not a lot different from a book that is kept off the market due to censorship.
]]>So, just as we need a collective project to digitise the sum total of recorded audio and make it available, we also need a project to digitise and make available the sum total of the written word. Which all just leads us head long into your dilemma.
But I don't think it's restricted to book writers. There are several other artistic trades that are essential to a healthy society but in which the traditional business models are broken or breaking. There's not a lot of money these days in being a Philosopher in Residence, or a Zine editor (remember SciFi Eye "too much content for the money"?).
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