mrslyndathompson

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
  NPG: "expensive slugs" is not a description that matches anyone I've ever met in publishing. Compared to film/TV/games it's a low growth, low budget field where there's not a lot of surplus money to go round....
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
  Except that, under the terms Macmillan has decided upon, Amazon cannot drop the price. Only Macmillan can. And that price will (I'm assuming at this point, but with good reason) be the same on all ebook sites....
• Charlie Stross commented on Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
  Amazon is a corporation. Like almost every other, their executives are required to make their decisions on one criterion: does the action in question increase shareholder return on investment? (If not, think hard -- they can go to jail for taking actions they can't justify purely by ROI.) Blaming Amazon for acting this way is a bit like blaming the scorpion for stinging -- it's in its nature -- but only a bit. There's also such a thing as intangibles, and maintaining customer and supplier goodwill in the long term is something that even accountants nod at, grudgingly....
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
  As long as the ebooks are tied to specific vendors and devices via DRM, the format doesn't matter. It only matters if there are other places from which to get content. webscription.net (which I recommend as a fine place) lets you download in multiple formats. Including Kindle, and ePub....
• Charlie Stross commented on Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
  Robert Crowl: bittorrent isn't the best system for transporting ebooks; it's optimized for larger files. (An entire ebook is typically smaller than a lossy mp3 rip of a single album track.) You want usenet -- down the hall, second door on the left....