saul.tannenbaum

Comment Threads

• Sean Eric Fagan commented on Cutting their own throats
  And yet I cite The Winds of Tara: copyright doesn't let you play with others' ideas: demonstrably true. (Sorta. The issue is far more complex than that; although tWoT was blocked in the US due to copyright, The Wind Done Gone was not. One was a retelling, one was an unauthorized sequel. And while I'm not really taking a side on this one, I will say that the biggest obstacle to "others [sic] ideas" is the cost of litigation.)...
• Brett Dunbar commented on Cutting their own throats
  The law in European states, such as the UK, that allow a corporate person to be legally the original author treat work for hire the same way as it treats anonymous and pseudonymous works where the author's identity is unknown. Copyright lasts for 70 years from the work's creation. Where a natural person is the legal author then life + 70 applies....
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  Could be just the shake up the publishing dinosaurs need. Remove some dead wood from the top of these organisations on the back of a negative judgement and get things moving in the right direction. Unfortunately they're not structured that way. Each of the "big six" is actually a group of companies. Within them you've got newspapers, magazine publishers, fiction publishers, non-fiction publishers (the latter two often grouped within a "book publishing" subsidiary, even though their markets and workflow are very different), and sometimes film, TV, software, and music studios. Policy is set at board level and broadcast throughout the...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  You fundamentally misunderstand how books are sold. Traditionally, books are sold via reverse auction. That is: when they first come out, the price is high. The longer they're on sale, the cheaper they get. Finally, the price bottoms out at just over the marginal price of manufacturing. You, as the customer, set the maximum price you're willing to pay and buy the book when it drops below that threshold. Because hardcovers cost a little money to produce, publishers began producing cheap paper-bound editions that cost less to manufacture so that they could cut the price after a while. And because...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  It's not just publisher royalty contracts that don't work that way; if you look at Amazon or the other ebook vendor contracts, they don't work that way either. I could do it, but I'd not only have to go indy, I'd have to write and debug my own storefront software!...