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Charles Stross on the Amazon Kindle: ‘Jeff Bezos Eats Kittens’
October 17, 2009 | 9:54 am
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By Paul Biba
Charles Stross, among the best science fiction authors today, has released a number of his books in non-DRMed e-book form. On his blog he has a great post about why he thinks the worldwide release of the Kindle is very bad news (the bolding is his) for writers. Here’s the summary and you can find the rest here:
So, to summarize: what have I got against Amazon’s Kindle?
1) DRM. (It’s unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass. To be fair: this also goes for other ebook platforms.)
2) Amazon reserves the right to delete work from your Kindle. (Under circumstances which are now a little clearer and a little tighter, but nevertheless still present.)
3) Censorship.
4) They’re using their monopsony position [link added] to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you’ll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.
5) Their actions may start a trans-Atlantic price war between publishers, to the detriment of authors (again, in the medium term).
We desperately need a sane price structure for commercial e-books, a better answer to English language rights licensing, and solutions that make books easier and cheaper for readers to get hold of while enabling authors and editors to continue to earn a living.
But Kindle—as currently sold—ain’t it.
Thanks to Ori Avtalion for the link.
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Comments:
Stross is in general a pretty smart guy, but here he doesn’t seem to quite grasp what’s going on.
#1 point, DRM, is a beef we all have — with the publishers. Kindle is no different in this regard: DRM is offered because publishers insist on it.
#2 point is easily gotten around: make a backup of the books you buy. If Amazon for any reason deletes a book, reload it. Backups are a good thing — something an ex-programmer like Stross ought to have engraved on the tissues of his heart.
#3 huh? Censorship? Might as well lump Amazon in with every government ever formed. Nothing new or different here.
#4 here Stross believes that the low prices Amazon is using as loss-leaders to build market share, necessarily translate into lower royalties for authors. He hasn’t dug into the figures deep enough to figure out that authors have a beef not with Amazon but with their publishers, over what shares go to the authors. (And I’m sure that the question publishers would ask Stross in this regard would be, ‘If we release all our etexts without DRM, what do you think will happen to your gross royalties then?’)
#5 is a concern, generally, of globalization, as digital global markets will lead to a race to the bottom in every price structure around (except salaries and bonuses paid to CEOs). But the bigger issue here is the antiquated patchwork of rights sales and markets in a digital internet age. All that must be ironed out, and it’ll take a while to do it.
Stross can, in the end, get everything he wants in that penultimate quoted paragraph, at least going forward, by insisting on good contracts that cover everything. Who knows, he might even be enough of a salesman to get it from his publishers.
What he doesn’t seem to grasp, oddly enough, is that he’s got the blogging platform, and the fans, that would let him self-publish on Kindle for free (he’s got the programming chops to design great-looking Kindle Editions) and put things out on Smashwords and the other digital platforms, and immediately triple, quadruple his royalties, even while offering lower cover prices to readers. AND, by using Amazon’s DTP process, he can guarantee that his future works on Kindle will have no DRM.
Ball’s in your court, Charlie.
I agree with everything pond said, especially the part about self-publishing.
DRM sucks, there’s no doubt about that, but I don’t see how any author wouldn’t want their work easily available to a worldwide market.
I’ve never read any of his work and doubt that I ever will so I’ll take pond’s word for it that he is a pretty smart guy.
What amuses me the most about his anti-Amazon tirade (which consists of the same old stuff we have heard before from many others) is that he still links to Amazon to sell his titles and garner the affiliate commissions (or “payola” as he tries to compare it) but because he has PRINCIPLES he won’t link to the Kindle versions. Oy!
Smart guy? Maybe. Hypocrite and whore? Apparently.
HeavyG, those are pretty harsh and insulting words. Unfair, too. Stross might well approve of Amazon’s business practices with regards to print books and disapprove of what they do with the Kindle. In such a scenario, he is sticking to his principles by supporting one and not the other. And as regards pond’s point about self-publishing, it’s a strange one. Stross may see a lot of value in traditional publishers. Pond seems to take from the fact that Stross sees Amazon as abusing a pseudo-monopsonistic power to the disadvantage of the publishing industry as evidence that Stross himself ought to abandon that industry in favour of Amazon — of who he disapproves. Now that would be hypocritical.
pond said what I was about to re. deletions ‘from Kindle’. I just want to add: Mr. Stross didn’t do his homework. Amazon deleted those titles (not only 1984, but also illegal Atlas Shrugged and illegal The Fountainhead) *from people’s accounts*. *Not* ‘from people’s Kindles’. Hence the need for backing up content to one’s PC. OF COURSE Amazon could ‘brick’ our Kindles with some firmware evil. So could Apple (who have stated plainly that a ‘killswitch’ exists). So could Micro-freaking-soft, for that matter. This might be a real issue, but as such it reaches *far* beyond a single retailer/manufacturer.
Three more comments: 1. It has rarely been stated, but is always true, that the average author’s biggest difficulty is in *getting people to read their stuff at all*. Most have a *long* way to go before sharing of their work will begin to impact them negatively.
2. If Mr. Stross *really* wanted to criticize Amazon, why didn’t he pick on them for not allowing purchases of DRM-protected material from other sources, like Fictionwise?
And 3. Regarding ‘censorship’. I’m with the ‘Annoyed Librarian’ on this one. As such, ‘censorship’ does not exist in the United States. Real censorship is achieved when THE GOVERNMENT outlaws publication of certain works. If Amazon decides not to sell a title, it is not rendered unobtainium; one just has to buy it elsewhere; possibly in another format. In a world of true censorship, production, possession and dissemination of a censored title is considered by the government to be a criminal act. Censorship is not a term to just bandy about. And – of course people need to mind their own business and let others read what they want; and no *total stranger* should *ever*, and I mean *ever* have the power to prevent *my* child from reading *anything*. But as abhorrent as such attempts to control the reading behavior of others might be… it’s not censorship.
“…fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you’ll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.”
I’ve been saying this for quite a while. I would say that it’s nice to see that someone finally agrees with me, but I’d rather be wrong.