Now Books on the Internet

Disruption!

There are two industries, if you can call them that, which have for years exploited artists and writers. Music and Publishing.

The music business still today believes it can pay an artists just £1 out of the sales of a CD for £10. But as the internet and downloading is proving - I don't mean file sharing which is an illegal breach of copyright - but legal iTunes, Amazon, Spotify are the new reality of music delivery.

The old model in which the artists sign away their copyright in exchange for promotion and distribution (via CDs) of their music is breaking down. Labels are haemorrhaging money. New models are starting to emerge (Fans on Facebook, direct artist downloads) which cut out the old labels and kill their business model. They have reacted of course, trying to get the government to block file sharing, which they see as theft, but which artists see as promotion in itself. They are just trying to prop up a dead business model...

And now publishers are going the same way. In this business things are, if anything, worse. Typically an author gets £0.40 when his book sells for £10.

The publisher has this deal: An author writes and owns, through copyright, his book.The publisher takes 50% from any sale of the work, the author pays up front for in-store displays and promotion to catch a customers eye, which take a lots of the other 50%. Then if the books don't sell they are shipped them back to the warehouse. Possibly not to be promoted again.

Selling through supermarkets is worse, they demand 65-85% of the sales price, leaving the publisher with not much and the author with even less. They may also use a high value book as a loss leader, thus depressing the value in the whole market.

The book business is almost monopolistic, at least in the way they do business, Authors have little choice in the business model.

But now comes eBooks. Publishers now have a new scam, they do not sell a book, but lend it or license it to your eReader. And if they want to they can delete it without warning, just as Amazon did on the kindle for those that thought they had purchased 1984, when Amazon found they did not have the rights to the book. Then there is the boggie man of DRM, to stop us reselling or lending our books, which we were free to do with printed material.

But help is at hand, there is a move to share 50:50 between authors and editors, and promote and sell directly on the web. Thus cutting out the large, monopolistic and publishing houses.

By the way, the next are newspapers,big news companies, but a future of journalists and editors paid on an article-by-article basis and delivered to new platforms like Apple's iPad.

Bring it on.