Over at Vox.com, Matthew Yglesias has a provocative article on the contretemps between Amazon and the publishing industry and with Hachette in particular. It’s mainly been portrayed in the press as an argument over prices but Yglesias says that’s just a side show.
The truth, he says, is that the publishing industry is dying and its current battles with Amazon won’t alter that fact regardless of the final outcome. The reason for the industry’s imminent death is that it no longer provides any benefit.
That wasn’t always true, of course. It used to be that books had to be typeset, printed, bound, and shipped to retailers. It was virtually impossible for authors to do these things on their own so the publishers provided a necessary service. With the advent of ebooks, those services are no longer required. Software to take an author’s manuscript and produce an ebook is widely available, often for free. And, of course, printing, binding, and shipping are not required at all.
What about marketing, then? Surely one of the key services a publisher provides the author is marketing. Yglesias says that, in fact, the publishers are terrible at marketing. He says that the current argument between Amazon and Hachette proves this. If Hachette actually was good at marketing they could simply market their books to other vendors and directly to the public at large.
You may or may not agree with Yglesias but one thing he says is certainly true: the fight between Amazon and Hachette really boils down to who gets to keep the extra profits flowing from the fact that producing another copy of an ebook is essentially cost free. Amazon says they should be used to reduce the price. Hachette wants to keep them. Inasmuch as Hachette and the other publishers have been claiming for years that ebooks cost about the same as physical books to produce, I’m not inclined to accept their arguments.
Yglesias has other arguments supporting his thesis so you should definitely go read what he has to say. It’s a fascinating idea you don’t hear very often—at least in public.