Publishing and Pricing

Publishing and Pricing

I want to write. Or rather, I really should be writing. I can't properly remember a time when I haven't liked spinning tales through my head. I've just never developed the discipline proper to sit down and write them out.

I want to write, but I do read. That's where a great deal of my spare time goes. Now, I may be unusual about that, but I will kill whole days pouring through a book (often even if it's the third or fourth time). But I also have lived, for several years, in a series of apartments. This makes it really hard to lug a large collection of books along with you, so two years ago I ended up donating most of my paperbacks to charity and keeping my hardcovers as they make the better shelf candy. Then, a year ago, I bought a Kindle and set myself up with some money in Amazon Gift cards. It's been a great experience. Now I know most of the arguments against the Kindle (I do agree with a great many of them), but the simple fact of the matter is that they have the authors and books, or at least most of them, that I want to read.

And I've been watching the recent flap that Amazon is going through with McMillian, in which Amazon gets owned pretty much and retreats with the excuse that publishers have a monopoly on their content. To those who understand copyright law, this is a remarkably self-evident proposition, but I think it's meant to hint at another point that Amazon might have been trying to get at. The publishers have the monopoly rights locked up on a great many known quantities that are not their creations. They've paid for the rights to those works, but the Authors own them. It might have been a stupid way of letting slip that Amazon would prefer to be dealing with the authors directly instead of through their publishers. So instead of whining about a simple fact of copyright law, they could have just been letting it slip a little too loudly that they wished to be vultures.

But I still lean towards Amazon on this on, for reasons that that are purely selfish. I want to be able to buy more books. The amount that I read, I can't purchase enough books to keep myself in books. I want this market to reach that point where we start to see more downward pressure on prices, because there's plenty of books that I haven't read yet and instead gone back to reread something because I couldn't pick up a new book.