Amazon's practice does damage to the publishing industry, decreasing royalty payments to authors and profits to publishers.
Are you the effing Authors Guild or are you the effing Publishers Guild?
I think that the ever-huggable Neil Gaiman tackled the matter well in April 2002 in the following blurb from his journal :
Lots of people writing to ask what I think about Yahoo! News — Online Sales of Used Books Draw Protest.
I think it's mostly a fuss about nothing. No-one's doing anything illegal or immoral. (And, coldly and bluntly, if your book sales are such that the resale of some review copies -- probably less than a hundred copies -- is going to significantly hurt your royalties, then you really aren't making enough of a living from your writing for anything to matter.)
If you buy one of my books (or are sent it to review) it's yours. You bought it (or were given it). You can sell it on. I don't have any more of a problem with Amazon listing the used copies than I do bookstores having used book sections. It's their store.
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.
As I said when I discussed this at length in the piece I put up on this journal, that was quoted in Wired, last month, books don't come with single-end-user licenses, and I think that's a good thing.
What he said.
A writer who is not a reader first is one who only happened to find a job in the word trade.
Secondhand bookstores have been around how long? But no, it's all so upsetting now that we're so globally organized. Guess what, inkbutts, that avenue still boasts two-way traffic. Everything's just bigger in both directions now.
I've sold some books by fine authors in my time. I sold a book on Half.com today, in fact. What am I going to spend the money on? More books. (Okay, admittedly these are all textbooks, but, hey, if the textbook market can survive with inventories of $100 books that no one wants to read and will sell back to said publisher for 10% of the cost, need anyone really worry?)
Used books can't wipe out new books. Think about it, ye scurvy guildwankers. (No, a little harder. Harder. Sigh.)
You know, in an example of Shocking E-Commerce Ignorance that we've not seen since Lars shook his fist at Napster and in doing so led a wider audience to better file sharing programs, Authors Guild members really need to think about where they want to be standing when consumers say, "and you know what else we don't like?"
Because that first item is going to be "waiting a year to read something because first we have to serve all of the diehard fans and collecting freaks with the hardcover release and who wants to pay $25 unless it's Harry Potter?" This may be followed by "and we don't like fancy gatefold covers on simple paperbacks that are no doubt costing us money that we could spend on a Peach Cream Pie Shake at Sonic right this minute.” And then there are the prices overall, except for all I know they're quite fair. At least the book publishing industry doesn't seem to have an equivalent to "it's dirt-cheap to make/press CDs and we've forgotten how we promised to pass on those savings once vinyl was gone.”
This autumn Mike and I will be authors, which is supposedly a very fancy thing, what with the publication of our glorified Walt Disney World/Vegas trip reports and related material in Pixie Dust in Your Eye. It has been a fun experience, even with being too preoccupied with the hurricane to proofread entirely before submission. It's just through iUniverse, a print-on-demand service backed by Barnes and Noble. We pay a bit of $ and upload a manuscript; they purty it up, slap an ISBN number on its tushie, and send it to the Amazon.com (et al) shelves.
Anything published through iUniverse unfortunately passes the cost on to the buyer, but souvenirs are like that. Just let us release the PDF with colour photos and you save your money for maybe a Peach Cream Slush instead. Better hurry — Sonic closes in 40 minutes.
And that — iUniverse — is how I discovered The Authors Guild and their group-clutch nonsense. TAG endorses iUniverse, perhaps in an attempt to prove they're not the major publishers' bitches (unless asked). It may also be because they endorse Barnes & Noble for not being as organized as Amazon with the used book sales.
To that, I say: "Yet.” (Then snicker menacingly and only a little unattractively.)
I can't think of the number of authors I've discovered because I was in a used bookstore looking for the most reading I could get for a fiver. (Not even a single book at a regular chain store.)
Like I said already: are you the effing Authors Guild or not? Do you want me to read your book and see what consequences come of that, or do you want to stand in line for a reduced number of spots in the book budget? If you can't crack the New York Times Bestseller List (and that's most of you), then how are you ever going to crack my list of head-of-the-line favourites, required reading, friend recommendations, and touted bestsellers?
Love a used book today.
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