United States v. Jeff Bozos

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > United States v. Jeff Bozos

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BONGHITZ: Jan 1, 1970

Werthog 95 posted:

i don't know what the code is for the troll face emoticon and emoticons are blocked at work for some reason, so i hope i typed the troll face emoticon correctly.

you did!

# ? Oct 21, 2014 17:30

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 17:20

GameCube: Nov 21, 2006

BONGHITZ posted:

you did!

thank you.

# ? Oct 21, 2014 17:52

Endless Mike: Aug 13, 2003

cremnob posted:

self-publishing isnt a threat to publishers cause everything that comes out of self-publishing is complete garbage

dsyp

# ? Oct 21, 2014 18:08

Cold on a Cob: Feb 6, 2006; i've seen so much, i'm going blind
and i'm brain dead virtually; College Slice

didn't read the rest of the thread but

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

yeah that's p bad. there's also the case in the courts where they are being forced to wait in line up to an an hour after their shift to go through a mandatory anti theft screening and are of course not payed for their time. everyone knows being a warehouse worker sucks and you'll be taken advantage of. singling out just amazon for it is p dumb though.

actually it's a great way to get industry-wide change - focus on a high profile offender and shame them and use it as a catalyst for change

# ? Oct 21, 2014 18:10

prefect: Sep 11, 2001; No one, Woodhouse.
No one.; Dead Man’s Band

Sagebrush posted:

also 95% of stuff that comes out of regular publishers though

i think that's "sturgeon's law"

# ? Oct 21, 2014 18:16

Ericadia: Oct 31, 2007; Not A Unicorn

cremnob posted:

self-publishing isnt a threat to publishers cause everything that comes out of self-publishing is complete garbage

early on in college i was makin websites for people for some extra cash and 100% of my "clients" were self-published authors. Every now and then i'd try reading their stuff and it was like, at or below the level of writing of most of the freshman english class i had taken.

# ? Oct 21, 2014 18:57

Pinterest Mom: Jun 9, 2009

is this the Amazon thread

544 million dollar loss. oops.

# ? Oct 23, 2014 21:44

Cold on a Cob: Feb 6, 2006; i've seen so much, i'm going blind
and i'm brain dead virtually; College Slice

mods rename thread to 'Shareholders v Jeff Bozos'

# ? Oct 23, 2014 21:51

cremnob: Jun 30, 2010

good article that shits on matt yglesias's piece that all the "disrupters" are linking around

quote:

Matt Yglesias Entirely Misunderstands Why the Book Publishing Industry Exists

Matt Yglesias has a little �real talk� for us at Vox. Amazon is doing us all a favor, he says, by crushing the fundamentally useless middleman between author and reader: the book publisher.

Yglesias�s piece is mostly a rehash of familiar arguments that often come from people who occupy a similar position to Yglesias�s: They are, broadly speaking, outsiders to the publishing world and more closely associated with the broader fields of business, economics, and technology. They appear to believe their outsider status allows them to see more clearly how broken publishing is; they�re not captive minds. The insiders tend to respond that the outsiders could stand to be less ignorant of the industry they�re criticizing. This fight tends to devolve quickly.

Perhaps it would help to reframe what a book publisher really is in terms that might resonate with Yglesias and his teammates in this debate, such as Josh Barro and Marc Andreessen and a long line of book-industry critics that precede them.

A publisher�s list of books is in essence a risk pool, a term most often associated with health insurance. In the insurance business, the profits from the healthy people outweigh the big losses from the sick ones because the healthy outnumber the sick. In publishing, it�s the opposite, yet the underlying concept is the same. Most books lose money, but the ones that make money earn enough to cover all those novels that didn�t sell.

The publishing scenario that Yglesias is advocating is a world without health insurance. (Ironic, I know.) In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life�s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die. �So what?� Yglesias might say, because that�s the kind of ruthless neoliberal thinker he is. �If people didn�t buy the book, that�s just proof of its worthlessness.�

But I�m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he�s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended �good, unusual books� such as Maxine Hong Kingston�s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett�s Consciousness Explained. �I�m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,� Krotov writes.

Most of the �really important influences� that Yglesias recommends in those posts were published by the trade houses he wants to see crushed. Susan Moller Okin�s Justice, Gender, and the Family sounds interesting. I wonder how well Okin would have been compensated if she had uploaded it to Amazon rather than being paid an advance from Basic Books, which absorbed a lot of the risk for her. I wonder if Yglesias would ever have encountered Okin�s book amid the ocean of Kindle content. Would Okin even have written it without any guaranteed payment?

Yglesias writes:

But what really matters here is that book publishers are not charities. They are for-profit business enterprises. If advances don�t make financial sense, then they will die off regardless of what happens to Amazon. If they do make financial sense, then they will live on as financial products even as the rest of the industry restructures.

But we already know that on some level advances make financial sense: Book publishing is a profitable business. Last I checked, the Big Five publishers (not the Big Four, as Yglesias has it) all make money in a typical year. Otherwise they would be dead by now. True, the margins are skinny and unreliable, and after doing a fair amount of reporting about the industry, it is still a little mysterious to me why giant publicly traded corporations are interested in owning publishers, but they obviously are. You would not know from reading Yglesias that the system basically works.

What is more, the premise of the entire paragraph I quoted is flawed, though it may appear unobjectionable at first. The observation that book publishers are not charities but business enterprises is largely accurate, but it does not capture the whole truth.

For one, there are nonprofit publishers�a lot of them, and some pretty big names!�but leave that aside. Even the for-profit publishers do not always operate in a way that most corporations would recognize. For instance, Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes a lot of poetry, using time and energy that could easily be directed to more lucrative ends. There is really no plausible business justification for doing that. Publishing poetry may bolster prestige, but I suspect that FSG publishes it because they think it�s important. That may be impossible for some people to understand, but I know a lot of people who understand it with no difficulty at all.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing

# ? Oct 24, 2014 21:50

Captain Foo: May 11, 2004; we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

why the gently caress you post this

# ? Oct 25, 2014 00:42

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

cremnobs gonna cremnob

# ? Oct 25, 2014 00:46

theadder: Dec 30, 2011

ban cremnob :toot:

# ? Oct 25, 2014 07:57

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Pinterest Mom posted:

cultural works are not analogous to cars, idiot

lmao @ olds thinking that a physical books is the primary means of cultural propagation in this day and age.

# ? Oct 25, 2014 13:04

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Ericadia posted:

early on in college i was makin websites for people for some extra cash and 100% of my "clients" were self-published authors. Every now and then i'd try reading their stuff and it was like, at or below the level of writing of most of the freshman english class i had taken.

vanity publishing is dumb as hell

self-publishing but using a {copy, style, etc} editor and getting a good typesetter and the like? not so much.

works best for technical books which is why u see the silly valley people so in favor

# ? Oct 25, 2014 13:08

Ericadia: Oct 31, 2007; Not A Unicorn

Malcolm XML posted:

vanity publishing is dumb as hell

self-publishing but using a {copy, style, etc} editor and getting a good typesetter and the like? not so much.

works best for technical books which is why u see the silly valley people so in favor

yeah I'm talking like, children books and jesus centered novellas

# ? Oct 25, 2014 14:22

Ericadia: Oct 31, 2007; Not A Unicorn

the best part was usually the artwork done by a close relative, god drat i loved that poo poo

# ? Oct 25, 2014 14:23

power botton: Nov 2, 2011

Ericadia posted:

yeah I'm talking like, children books and jesus centered novellas

also the tons of lovely romance novels that are top of the amazon self published charts

# ? Oct 25, 2014 14:54

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

yeah that's p bad. there's also the case in the courts where they are being forced to wait in line up to an an hour after their shift to go through a mandatory anti theft screening and are of course not payed for their time. everyone knows being a warehouse worker sucks and you'll be taken advantage of. singling out just amazon for it is p dumb though.

so it's bad for me to single out one of the largest logistics firms in the world for abusing workers?

should we be singling out some mom and pop 3pl running a single warehouse, instead?

# ? Oct 25, 2014 16:35

qntm: Jun 17, 2009

singling out amazon for it make perfect sense, they're a high-profile perpetrator if not the highest and their punishment would serve as an example and warning to others

make amazon suffer

# ? Oct 25, 2014 18:06

Boxturret: Oct 3, 2013; Don't ask me about Sonic the Hedgehog diaper fetish

theadder posted:

ban cremnob

# ? Oct 25, 2014 18:18

suck my woke dick: Oct 10, 2012; I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

cremnob posted:

i love when apple's enemies get hosed

because there's no way fapple could compete on the actual market :smug:

# ? Oct 25, 2014 18:34

cremnob: Jun 30, 2010

Malcolm XML posted:

vanity publishing is dumb as hell

self-publishing but using a {copy, style, etc} editor and getting a good typesetter and the like? not so much.

works best for technical books which is why u see the silly valley people so in favor

self-publishing is bad and anyone that likes books as we know it would be against it

# ? Oct 25, 2014 18:41

Boxturret: Oct 3, 2013; Don't ask me about Sonic the Hedgehog diaper fetish

cremnob posted:

bad and anyone would be against it

# ? Oct 25, 2014 18:42

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

Malcolm XML posted:

vanity publishing is dumb as hell

self-publishing but using a {copy, style, etc} editor and getting a good typesetter and the like? not so much.

works best for technical books which is why u see the silly valley people so in favor

self-publishing with a legion of professional help is the new way for vanity publishers to soak clients for more money. every one of those services is added margin. they will even hire illustrators for your children's book

for technical books there is very little reason to seek a vanity publisher. conventional publishers operate on a "throw poo poo at a wall, see what sticks" basis. anyone, literally anyone, can get an advance to publish a technical book. the only reason you would want to publish yourself instead is that you think you can realize higher revenues w/out a publisher's marketing oomph or capital input

# ? Oct 26, 2014 01:29

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud: Apr 7, 2003

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

self-publishing with a legion of professional help is the new way for vanity publishers to soak clients for more money. every one of those services is added margin. they will even hire illustrators for your children's book

for technical books there is very little reason to seek a vanity publisher. conventional publishers operate on a "throw poo poo at a wall, see what sticks" basis. anyone, literally anyone, can get an advance to publish a technical book. the only reason you would want to publish yourself instead is that you think you can realize higher revenues w/out a publisher's marketing oomph or capital input

One of the oldest vanity presses, Dorrance Publishing, is based in Pittsburgh.

# ? Oct 26, 2014 04:08

Moo Cowabunga: Jun 15, 2009; [Office Worker.

sounds awful

# ? Oct 26, 2014 06:14

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 17:20

lampey: Mar 27, 2012

cremnob posted:

good article that shits on matt yglesias's piece that all the "disrupters" are linking around

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing

The majority of the article is just an ad hominem.

im the worthless books that only exist because of publishers advances

# ? Oct 26, 2014 12:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > United States v. Jeff Bozos

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