& 1 for Don: Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller?

[lektrode]

yo don... caught this one and seeing as you know eye appreciate your posts, what say you, being the successful author an all - about this? (can it be good news for the trade?)

found linked just awhile ago over at the doonster's place (my fave poli-sci cartoonist)
Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller (???)

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno..._for_you_.html

Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you.


By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011, at 6:50 PM ET

Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5 percent discount on the sale. (Disclosure: Slate is an Amazon affiliate; when you click on an Amazon link from Slate, the magazine gets a cut of the proceeds from whatever you buy.)

I’m generally a fan of price comparison—like everyone else, I hate spending more than I should—but I can understand physical retailers’ fear of the practice becoming widespread. When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump. The Price Check promotion (which lasted only one day) was, like Amazon’s aggressive efforts to dodge the collection of sales tax, a brazen attempt to crush local retailers, and I (as did many others) found it distasteful. Sure, I’m a fan of Amazon and devote a substantial portion of my income to its coffers—but does it have to be so wantonly callous about destroying its competitors?

All of which is to say that I was primed to nod in vigorous agreement when I saw novelist Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed taking on Amazon’s thuggish ways. But as I waded into Russo’s piece—which was widely passed around on Tuesday—I realized that he’d made a critical and common mistake in his argument. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books....

the rest (mights well give the slate a few hits too, eh? ;) over at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/techno..._for_you_.html


but there's ALL KINDS of interesting stuff to chew on, on this one - not the least of which is the implications of this:

Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app.

whoa!, huh?
talk about The Latest trends in ambush marketing/e-spionage, eh?
the retail game/battle is really heating up...

and THEN, caught this one the other night:

The video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time, breaking the $1bn sales barrier quicker than the blockbuster Avatar. Activision Blizzard, publisher of the latest game, said it reached the $1bn mark in just 16 days. Avatar took 17 days.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...d-6276139.html

and more at wapo:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...zpO_story.html

absolutely WOW !!!
and we (or me anyway) used to think compaq doing the fastest billion in only 2years was a big deal?.. well... guess it was back in the 'slow old daze' of the 90's

comments?

[don]

Re: & 1 for Don: Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller?

There's at least two things going on here. The lousy economy is one. That retail sales competition is heating up comes as no surprise. The other is the technological transition that's been underway in publishing. Authors have a number of ways to go on every book they write, albeit not without consequences.

A successfully self-published author signed by a traditional publisher is pitched as a feel-good story. An established traditionally published author that goes independent is treated like a pariah. When an author publishes independently of the publishing houses, distribution is one of his chief concerns.

Another is promotion, not that publishing houses do very much in most cases. For my book UnCrowned Champions, I could not get it published with the layout I desired - it has over 300 photos and illustrations supporting the text. According to McFarland's, et al that was too much for a niche market book. Going with a digital on-demand bookmaker got me what I wanted. Amazon provided the distribution. I've been too busy with our condo buy to promote outside the boxing (and iTulip) world - my signed copy sales and reviews have been strong. Time will tell on the rest.

What I'm finding is that going the independent route necessitates having a comprehensive approach to writing a book. Production costs - book length, color vs b&w, hardcover or soft, etc. - distribution, with e-books a growing consideration as well as distributor's fees, all become something better thought out sooner than later - like before writing the book.

The shakedown cruise is still underway - for the industry and for the authors. Opportunities, in time, will diminish for the latter. They are, after all, labor in the publishing game.