And so a third pebble joins those of Macmillan rolling downhill and Harper-Collins teetering on the edge. Jason Boog at Galleycat and the Wall Street Journal report that Hachette Book Group has announced it is shifting to the agency pricing model.
Hachette stated that, apart from protecting the marketplace and its authors, this means it can release e-books simultaneously with the first print editions of its books. There is no indication yet whether Amazon is going to pull Hachette’s books, too.
Meanwhile, TechDirt links to an interesting Washington Post article about turbulence in the e-book industry. In this article, Steven Pearlstein opines that the Amazon/Macmillan feud heralds is the beginning of a technological transformation that will see some authors hire editing and marketing expertise themselves and self-publish works directly to consumers, while others contract with smaller, editor-centric publishing houses.
It is an interesting point of view, but similar to one that John Scalzi ridiculed in a satirical “play” he posted to Whatever yesterday. As in any disagreement, someone’s going to be right, someone’s going to be wrong. I wonder who will be which?
Shocker.
I’m not at all convinced that current publishing houses are going to weather the transformation to electrons at all. Neither am I particularly convinced that Amazon will either. Amazon’s feud with Macmillan has had the interesting side effect of turning the spotlight onto that nasty hidden secret of the book world – how much (or rather how little) the author gets.
I’ve got some related thoughts at my blog – http://www.di2.nu/201002/04.htm – and while I don’t disagree with Scalzi regarding self-publishing I do think that
er end got chopped off somehow
… while I don’t disagree with Scalzi regarding self-publishing I do think that a new model that combines some elements of SP with elements of the current model is entirely possible.