[LINK] Book monopolies

[Frank O'Connor]

Just a couple of thoughts here:

1. The Apple iBook and Amazon Kindle models tend to freeze out 
conventional publishers. Basically Apple or Amazon become the 
publishers. They do take catalogues from major conventional 
publishers, but otherwise prefer to deal with the authors themselves 
rather than take on small specialist catalogues.

2. Publishing books in e-publishing formats isn't especially 
difficult. Nab a copy of the freebie OSS package Calibre if you want 
to try it. It translates books between different formats quite 
easily, and you can take a basic RTF, Word, PDF or other text format 
files and generate an ePub (iBook format), Mobi (Kindle format) or 
whatever at will.

3. Amazon and Apple have the marketing and technological weight ... 
but it's still possible for small publishers to offer their wares on 
the Net and make a living at it. Other sites like Lulu and the like 
will do it for you if you don't want to provide your own site.

4. From an author's perspective, especially if you don't expect world 
beating sales , the Apple and Amazon model makes more sense than 
e-publishing using a small publisher. Sure, they take a 30% cut, but 
the author gets the remaining 70% ... which any way you look at it is 
better than the royalties received from a conventional publisher. 
Yes, the prices are much lower, but the cut is much higher.

5. Finally, Apple and Amazon will do the accounting for the author 
... it's all part of their SOP. They market, they sell, they handle 
the accounting (simply to get their cut) ... but the upside for the 
author is that he can simply take their statements and cheque to an 
accountant who understands double tax agreements, the treatment of 
royalties and averaging provisions and the like and all the 
aggravation goes away.

I suppose my point is that it's not all downsides.

						Regards,
---
At 5:11 PM +1100 2/12/10, Kim Holburn wrote:
>I was just listening to Philip Adams on the ABC in the car, as you 
>do, and he was talking to some Australian publishers about ebooks. 
>One of them was saying that the big ebook publishers: Amazon, 
>Google, Apple have virtually frozen out Australian publishers.  Also 
>I read recently that only a very few Australian publishers were 
>allowed into Apple's iBookstore.  He also pointed out that the large 
>"foreign" booksellers didn't have to pay GST so real dead-tree book 
>sellers in Australia were at a double disadvantage.
>
>This is of course interesting to me as a small, (very, very small) publisher.
>
>In these days were publishing is so easy that many small publishers 
>can easily publish books it seems bad that the market is so 
>effectively tied up, monopolised by large overseas (US) booksellers. 
>Amazon for instance, AFAIK only allows publishers to sell books on 
>Amazon if they have  a US bank account.  Amazon UK ditto.  Amazon 
>skims off US tax on any money foreigners might earn, and makes the 
>seller responsible for understanding and paying all the complicated 
>US state taxes.
>
>Kim
>
>--
>Kim Holburn
>The Pinchgut Press
>http://www.pinchgut-press.com.au
>T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
>mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
>skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request
>
>
>
>
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