Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly)

[sofa king]

109. Yes, I understand.

Interestingly enough, I saw a similar thing happen in the music industry, with Ian Mackaye's Dischord Records. Back when grunge was cool every label in the country wanted to sign Fugazi, but Ian kept saying, "you say I need a job? well I've got my own business."

With no line of middle-men between Ian and his records, he fixed the price of his label's CDs at $10 post-paid for around twenty years, I think, and he still makes a good enough living to run one of the last decent record stores in DC.

It never cost more than a dollar to make a CD, so the 1800% markup for one represents mostly profit for everyone who handles that CD after it's printed--except of course the musicians, who usually get ripped off. It's even more ridiculous with ebooks. They cost a fraction of a penny to store forever, don't require a fancy $400 reader (though Amazon is doing a great job of snookering people into thinking they do) or an army of jaded book-industry hacks rejecting everything that doesn't come from an Ivy League author with ties to the industry.

Just like the recording industry, the book industry has a huge investment in controlling the market at every stage of the process. Now that 90% of the process is irrelevant and unnecessary, they're trying to convert that 90% saved effort into 100% pure profit--just as the recording industry did when digital recording made everything cheaper but the price of music doubled.

I'm willing to bet that the next step the publishing industry will take is to go back to the thousands of rejected manuscripts they have on file, identifying the ones written by now-popular independent authors, and trying to claim publishing rights over the manuscripts they previously rejected.