If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Tyler Gage is the 26-year-old founder and CEO of Runa, a sustainable, fair-trade Amazonian tea company. It's a cool story. He's a cool dude.
For 500 years, the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but today the industry finds itself faced with the greatest challenges since Gutenberg.
Uncertainty is an easier destination to arrive at than confidence, especially when the truth is, there's no such thing as making anything that's really new. Everything is an evolution of something else. But you can make something better.
For two financial quarters in a row, the New York Times has expertly timed slingshots at Apple that have had a material effect on its stock. But that's what happens when you're Goliath. They say the third time's a charm.
And so ensued the ethical debate: support The Strand and pay a whopping $10 more for the book, or save the $10 and order the same book online, further hastening the imminent demise of great bookstores like the very one I was standing in?
All I desire is a decent Americano with a good head of crema. Not some drink they call The Golden Mountain served to me by a pigtailed kid wearing a t-shirt so sheer his nipples show through.
The truth is that this dispute is not about saving literature or the sanctity of the literary world, it is about the publishers' business model.
The new ploy by book publishers is to characterize Amazon as a monopoly poised to take over and dictate terms and run rampant over those who create ebook content.
It's a sad day for the Big Six publishers -- but not because they're in a bitter race to the bottom. It's sad because of their thinking. These publishers would rather close the doors and slash their staff than innovate in a changing market.
The trouble is that in too many cities and towns, we no longer have a village square except in the form of enclosed spaces owned by profit-seeking corporations. What happened to that protester said a lot more about our privatized idea of community than it does about that one particular incident.
A report released today by Greenpeace International finds that major tech companies Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are burning vast amounts of polluting coal to power their data "clouds."
I'm back to where I was in 2009, with a highly praised novel and no one willing to publish it. Before electronic self-publishing became a viable alternative, that would have been the book's death sentence.
In 1999, I decided to self-publish a novel. I'd sold books to mainstream houses in the past, but no one wanted this one. But I believed in it. My agent believed in it. My wife believed in it. The dog was neutral.
The DOJ says that their lawsuit and settlement terms are intended to return competitiveness to the market. But just one retailer, Amazon, stands to gain.
The DoJ lawsuit might make things more difficult for those who have based their business models on paper books, but it could well be a boon to smaller publishers, authors, and--most importantly of all--readers.
It's not possible for Amazon to both (1) sell e-books at a loss in order to reap big profits on Kindle devices, and (2) sell Kindles at a loss to reap big profits on e-books. It may be doing 1 or it may be doing 2, but it can't be doing both at the same time.
