In the News

The word around the blogosphere assumes that publishers are angry about the state of the book marketplace because their superannuated business model is about to be blown away, and that's a good thing because that old model makes books too expensive, excludes too many fine authors, and makes too much money for greedy owners. Most of this is sounds like sour grapes, or misinformation, or as I pointed out in a previous blog, a way for dot-com start-ups to make money.

Excerpt: "Let's take a hard look at the phrase 'digital content.' Do eBooks have digital content? Many people, people who are in the business of selling digital everything and who proclaim from the rooftops that everything non-digital is a dead duck, would like you to think so. It makes it easier for them to make money. But the idea that eBooks have digital content is very misleading. The content of eBooks is language, language which has been digitized. Likewise the content of the books Gutenberg printed was language set in type. These are just two different ways to make language hold still so you can read it.

Publishers are now increasingly paying authors a royalty based on net sales rather than a percentage of the list price of copies sold. Can a publisher add co-op fees, advertising allowances, and free freight charges to the discount calculation, thereby reducing the net sales on which the author royalty is based? There are thousands of Author/Publisher agreements still in force that simply do not address this issue, just as there are thousands of agreements that are silent on the question of who controls the eBook rights.

Co-op used to be a bookseller's charge to a book publisher or distributor to purchase special treatment for a particular title. "Give me $3000 and I will put your title on the new and notable table in 300 stores." This evolved into something entirely different: "Give us 4% of your last-year sales with us for co-op and we will do wonderful but unspecified marketing things for you. Otherwise we will take down all of your eBooks." A fixed percentage fee for co-op unconnected to any particular benefit looks, to a man riding by on a horse, a lot like additional discount by another name.

Amazon has decided not to offer our Kindle editions at this time. Our other electronic formats are available from booksellers nationwide.