Political Crossfire Forums

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/busin ... .html?_r=0

The effects on publishers are real. The industry is rapidly consolidating which theoretically should enable them to more effectively compete with giants like amazon.

Now this is simply my own viewpoint, I think this industry trend is horrible and will only hasten the demise of publishers. In the past, publishers were gatekeepers to the market. Different publishers would compete for manuscripts, and would choose to publish varying works that they deemed worthy. The Internet has shattered this equilibrium. Since anyone can publish to the world, and since just about anyone can sell and distribute to the world (amazon), publishers have lost that raison d'être. There is no conclusion or prescription, it is quite simply an outdated business model. Even worse, unlike many newspaper companies that saw the writing on the wall and were able to enter the digital marketplace in its infancy, and compete with tech companies...publishers have completly missed the boat. They won't set up any ebook marketplace that can rival amazon, and they know it. At this point the only option is to consolidate and consolidate to mask the fact that the industry is dying.

I will say though, one of the biggest benefits to the way publishing operated 50-100 years ago was that each publisher did have a sort of brand, one that the consumer could recognize and use as a guide as to the nature and quality of whatever was published. Amazon, and other ebook suppliers, will sell anything that will turn a profit. There really is no signaling mechanism now with regard to what to read. There is no gatekeeper. This clearly has its advantages, but sometimes it's nice not to have to wade through crackpot "non-fiction," or some of the other nonsense that the Internet aggregate insists is good.

Illegal is illegal. You don't get to skirt the law because you want to. And again, Apple didn't give 2 shits about consumers in the end. They only wanted to make sure they weren't being cut out of the market and still get their 30%. Thats it. They didn't care about the future and how things were going - their company emails and direct comments from execs showed what they were concerned with - money.

Anywho, Amazon can't dictate anything if they can't sell books. There's nothing preventing the publishers from setting up their own stores and selling ebooks directly to consumers.