cry havoc

[Note: get a drink and have a seat. This is almost up to my usual levels of longwindedness, but this time, I do have a point! Other than the one on the top of my head.]

I came across an insightful comment the other day while researching, and the comment resonated with me strongly in light of the requirements compiling I was tackling at the same time.

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -- blue_beetle

Think about that for a bit, but first I want to run past everyone some of the thoughts bouncing in my head as a result of researching Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard, and various other (past and present) bookmarking applications. One particular journal entry (from 2008) compares Delicious and Diigo, though I'll rephrase some of the author's conclusions, since I think he got his main summary backwards. Here's the basis of his argument, thought:

Delicious, an original web 2.0 company, still has “user-generated” as its core raison d’être. Diigo has the later-stage web 2.0 philosophy of being a “social network”.

In essence (and to undo the backwards of his summary): Delicious is grounded in using content to find users, while Diigo emphasizes using users to find content. Somehow, I'm not surprised that so far, of the folks replying to my informal poll, that most of you have indicated that you follow the content and then, as a secondary step, discover like-minded users -- seeing how many of you have said you preferred old!delicious and don't like or care for the diigo approach.

Granted, these two things (users, content) are intertwined: you find a tag you want to follow, you start seeing the same names pop up, you realize the same people are marking things you're also liking, and you may switch your focus from the tag to the user, in hopes they'll lead you to even better stuff.

Here's the crux, though: what is the actual product?

This shit ain't free, y'know. Servers and storage and developers and designers don't just grow on trees. It's got to be paid for, either in cash or in kind or in stock or in some way, but usually cash since most landlords & mortgage companies don't accept vegetables, these days. If you see a product that you can consume, and it's free, someone paid for it. Maybe not you, but someone: NSTaaFL, after all.

( Let me step back here, to the days when I first found an investor, wrote a business plan, and opened a bookstore... and other commentary about the dot-com and post-dot-com business models. )

More thoughts later. For now, it's your turn.

Here's how you figure it, or at least, here's the math I've been doing for the past however long. Basic amounts, interest, terms, and whatnot have been adjusted to be equivalent to original; insurance can vary so widely let's just call that even between old & new, since you'd have to pay it anyway.

2-yr old VW Golf, pristine condition, 22K miles: $16K
12-yr old VW Golf, in pretty good condition, 180K miles: $3K

( comparison behind the cut. )

So here's the deal behind the last post, with context. Have a seat. This might take a bit, but believe me, it's amusing enough. (Or is, if you're me.)

Awhile back I joined a number of comms on LJ while trying to track down some of the more obscure fan-translated manga out there. I'd search for what I wanted, maybe check each comm every few days to every other week or so, and the rest of the time none of them show up on my daily flist. (That flist is long enough already, without high-traffic comms making it worse.)

[Note: I am not even getting into the legalities of translations and copyrights in this post. I can, if you're wondering, since I did look them up, but that's beside the point for this rant.]

At some point, I opened one comm to see what was new, and what did I see but at the very top a post about -- and link to a mediafire download for -- an ebook. Not a fan-translated manga, not a raw/original-language manga, but an American e-publishing company's ebook, written by an American author, and one whose work I've enjoyed and support. (And you know who you are, my dear, so have a drink and relax, this story's got a happy ending.) Well, mystified as to what an English-language, clearly-copyrighted work was doing being traded in a manga forum, I went looking at the tags -- and lo and behold, there's not just one or two authors that have slipped into the middle of a manga-trading community.

No, more like seventy authors -- and for a lot of those authors, the comm's trading their entire body of work. Two titles. Three. Five. Entire series: seven titles, ten titles, more. If on average every author had around four titles, and let's say the average price might be around $5, that's fourteen hundred dollars worth of ebooks listed. For free download.

Perhaps I should also mention: this is all listed a comm with more than three thousand members.

Potential losses? Oh, in the area of about four million two hundred thousand dollars.

( Flabbergasted doesn't really begin to cover it. )

Dear author: I adore your work, but please to stop enabling the cabbages in the audience, mmkay?

Dear LJ: you still suck. Even when you don't do anything at all. Sometimes, especially when you don't do anything at all.

Dear mod: this is a bucket of ice water, this is your head, this is your head in a bucket of ice water.

noloveatall,
Me.

( with slight footnote. )

About that previous post on ebooks and POD and technological possibilities for the publishing world, a few things of note.

One, there's iTunes new idea for DRM-free files: ( instead of locking the files, your name & email are encoded into the file when you purchase it. )

Meanwhile, in a blog post on Galley Cat, ( there's what purports to be an explanation of why ebooks cost so much (as much as pbooks, or more). Let's see. )

NY publishing houses don't ever claim they can make a movie out of your book, and they don't try, because it's not their industry: when are they gonna realize that epublishing is just as alien to them as movies?

continuation of first part

As rezendi pointed out in comments to last post, 'long-tail' as 'moneymaker' has apparently been dropped, and as I replied, I find it rather amusing. I think people jumped on it, seeing 'moneymaker' as 'woo hoo more bucks!' when if you look at the example at the start of previous post, one book a week is going to take about, uhm, two years to match what was sold in the first six weeks. Yes, it's a moneymaker... technically. The issue isn't whether it's a get-rich-method, so much as whether it's a consistent seller, which is a far more preferable lizard-tail -- from the bookstore point of view -- than anything else. Authors may go crazy at the idea of selling only a book a week but that "yep, sold another one this week, too," is a bookstore's bread and butter, baby.

Which is to say: I'm going with the notion of a LIZARD, instead. Still same great visual, but without that confusing pop-internet terminology that's giving some folks hives. (Sorry.) For the bookstore version of a lizarding: it's not in a specific single title. It's in all the titles that do not turn over in the space of one month. That's the true lizard [long tail], from a seller's perspective.

( Here's my idea of innovation, though it comes from the bookseller side: I'd say, take the dumpy igauna bookstore of the Cerberus ilk, and super-glue it to the library's skeletal chameleon, and then run that result through the internet cloning machine -- now with Netflix commentary. )

Because lizard GOOD.

ETA NOTE: yes, yes, yes, I know the legality already, and I understand that there are "people out there" who would gladly send of eighty PDF-copies to various broke friends. That's not really my issue, nor the real point of my rant, otaykthx.

( When I purchase a book, it's a fair possibility that down the road I will GIVE THIS BOOK AWAY. ... with a slight segue into What's Pissing Me Off Right Now About Scanlation Groups. )

This credit thing's gotta work both ways. That goes for the ebook publishers -- who need to recognize that I can feasibly hand over a copy of my purchased book, regardless of format, to someone else and never read it again myself, and that this option is one of the reasons I purchase books rather than just check them out from the library. And that also goes for the scanlators -- who need to realize that if you want me to respect the work you've done, then don't throw it in my face that you'll commandeer someone else's work, without credit at all, for the purposes of your own hypocritical reminders to me that I should never ever distribute your work without crediting you.

Yeah, right. I got yer freaking credit RIGHT HERE, baby.

Oh, man, do I feel like an idiot. Yesterday had a great interview, and clearly the manager adored me, but I waffled when we spoke at the end -- I didn't expect her to broach the subject of pay scale, not while I was still processing whether the intangibles of the job were worth less cash-in-hand. Naturally, today my mother calls out of the blue. I told her about the interview and my internal waffling over possible job with pay cut, and she says, "you do realize... don't you... that the conversion rate between contract position to employee position is thirty percent?"

( So, I ran the numbers. And I'm listing them here because I know there are younger women on my flist, and you're going to be educated and armed, whether you like it or not. Sit still! You WILL be informed! )

anghara has posted a response to mistborn's comments about authors, royalties, and the importance of purchasing hardbacks. I get all this, honestly I do; I used to look at hardbacks and think, okay, 40% from the cover price of a $20 book goes to me, and that's a lot more than 40% off the cover price of a $10 book or $5 book...

However, I just couldn't let that sit. I get that the royalties are quicker to earn out if you make more money off the hardback, but I'm also thinking of my own wallet, and how much money I have, and how far it goes. So I ran a few numbers, based on Alma's explanation of her own contracts (which, I might add, are probably still far better than the usual peons, seeing how she's got a long publishing history and more clout than she'll admit, because she's like that). So I went looking for the break-even points between the three options.

A hardback book, at $25, will earn the author:
$12,500 for the 1st 5K sold, at 10% royalties
$15,625 for the 2nd 5K sold, at 12.5% royalties
at 10K sold: author earns $28,125; avg $2.81 per
total spent by readers: $250,000.

A trade paperback, at $16, will earn the author:
$9,375 for 1st 5K sold, at 7.5% royalties
$9,375 for 2nd 5K sold, at 7.5% royalties
$9,375 for 3rd 5K sold, at 7.5% royalties
at 15K sold: author earns $28,125; $1.20 per
total spent by readers: $240,000.

A mass market, at $7, will earn the author:
$2,800 for the 1st 5K sold, at 8% royalties
$2,800 for the 2nd 5K sold, at 8% royalties
...and so on up to:
$2,800 for the 10th 5K sold, at 8% royalties
at 50,215 sold, author earns $28,120; $0.56 per
total spent by readers: $351,505.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions. I know what I'm thinking.

10 Feb - edited with corrections/clarifications from Habibti.

( part one: social security redux )