Mile
Zero

Before anyone gets too excited about the DOJ antitrust suit against "agency-model" book publishers, it's important to reiterate the following important facts:

• Amazon is not on your side.
• Apple is not on your side.
• The publishers are definitely not on your side.

Who is on your side? We will assume, for the purposes of discussion, that you are, but I retain the right to be skeptical.

I'm trying not to have an emotional investment in this case (see opening list). Belle and I use a lot of Amazon services (did you know in Seattle you can buy your groceries from them? We do), but I'm fully aware that when it comes to both strong-arming suppliers and providing unfettered access to content (read: AmazonFail a few years back) they've got more issues than New Yorker archives. I'm just having a hard time, ultimately, seeing how the publisher's problems dealing with Amazon should be my problem (or any other customer's problem), or why they should be allowed to fix prices just because they feel threatened.

There has been a lot of good commentary written about this. Charlie Stross uses the suit as an opportunity to propose that DRM is dead, since it's the primary weapon that publishers have against Amazon. This is an interesting pitch, although I'm not sure it actually makes sense: Amazon has been selling other media, such as MP3s, unencumbered by DRM for some time and it doesn't seem to have done much for them either way. Moreover, I don't buy Kindle books because they're locked to the platform--I do it because the process is practically frictionless, as opposed to requiring a connection to a PC every time I want to buy a book. But then, I find Stross informative but not always particularly prescient, such as this disastrously wrong post from 2007 (shorter version: there will never be a cheap e-book reader. Five years later, you can get a Kindle for less than $80, and dropping).

As far as the antitrust case goes, the government's case seems pretty straightforward: yes, the publishers colluded to fix prices, using Apple as a middleman but also trading e-mails (with notes attached reminding each other to delete said e-mails at a future time) and having private meetings at fancy restaurants. From this we can conclude that these are people who have not watched either The Sopranos or any other mafia movie made in the last thirty years.

In fact, it's kind of amazing how much this case lets us learn about the book publishing industry--stuff that, frankly, seems entirely insane. This is an industry that, as Obsidian Wings notes:

• does little or no marketing for its actual product,
• barely edits its product,
• buys books that it will not print, and
• buys back and destroys stock that didn't sell from the store.

Ignore the questions of price-fixing. Set aside the (debatable) arguments that publishers provide valuable editing and marketing services that full-time authors cannot handle for themselves. Forget about the fact that, under their preferred agency model, they are happy to sell you fewer books at a higher price, or that this all seems weirdly similar to the way the music industry campaigned for self-immolation post-Napster. Just look at that last item: this is a business model that pays retailers to destroy stock solely to keep distribution channels stuffed.

Even people in the publishing industry tend to agree that this is basically insane. Call me an anarchist, but you'll have to forgive me for being incredulous when they propose we let them do whatever they want to keep their institutions intact. Anti-trust? Yeah, that seems about right.

• If you strictly want to read e-books, you're better off with an e-ink Kindle. Reading on an LCD is still annoying, and the Kindle application is choppy.
• It's pretty great as a streaming media player, as long as you have a Netflix account or an Amazon Prime membership, or both. You can't cache either of those offline, though, which means it's not great away from wifi.
• The music player is fine, but I'm completely spoiled by Zune Pass, and I don't really need yet another device that plays MP3s.
• Belle doesn't like the speakers much. I think if we were meant to listen through speakers, God wouldn't have given us good noise-blocking headphones.
• I don't have any experience with other tablets, nor do I particularly think there's anything earth-shattering about the idea of a tablet, so I'm the wrong person to ask whether it's a good fit within that niche.
• That said, if you're looking for a cheap Android tablet, I'm not aware of anything better than the Fire for the price.
• As soon as someone releases a decent launcher that doesn't crash instantly, you will want to replace (supplement?) Amazon's weird launcher. "Cover Flow" is not a useful browsing UI when, like me, you own a couple hundred e-books.
• I'm enjoying the ability to sideload applications on the Fire a bit too much. It's like a flashback to the days when people used to install software from websites (or, heaven forbid, a disc from an actual store) instead of a centralized, curated, for-profit repository. "Oh, Amazon doesn't let other e-book readers or browsers in their store? Who cares?"

So the publishers are moving the e-book industry to the so-called agency model. I resent having to care about this, but since I own a Kindle and the new model will boost the price of digital "hardcovers" by at least a couple of bucks, I feel like I've been dragged into it.

The argument for agency pricing (in which the publishers, and not the retailers, set the prices for their books) primarily concerns preserving the premium for new releases. This premium, and not production costs, is why hardcovers are traditionally priced so much higher than paperbacks (they don't actually cost much more to produce). It's a kind of early adopter tax on avid readers, and the extra profits on bestselling hardbacks go to subsidize all the other books, most of which lose money. The irony is that under agency pricing, publishers are actually making less money in the short term, because they're not getting as much as they were when Amazon was selling titles at a loss.

Customers have been promised that this will all work out better for them in the end, because agency pricing also means that publishers can drop the price of older e-books, similar to the way paperbacks work, instead of keeping them all at a uniform $10. Amazon was also supposed to work this way, and I believe it sometimes did, but I'm not really sure when the change was supposed to happen, and often e-books didn't drop in price when the paperback version hit shelves. That said, I think a lot of people are distrustful that the older book discount is actually going to happen, and with good reason: publishers have historically looked at e-book markets as an opportunity to gouge readers, and it's not at all clear that they won't continue to do so.

Take, for example, Karin Lowachee's Warchild. I started looking at Lowachee's books after her newest, The Gaslight Dogs, got a favorable review on Tor.com last week. Warchild is the first of a three-part series, and was originally written in April of 2002, making it more than eight years old now. Hachette, the publisher, wants readers to pay $11--more than many "brand-new" e-books!--to download it. No doubt they considers this fair: Hachette offers Lowachee's books in a $22(!) mass market paperback format, making the e-book a 50% discount. From their perspective, maybe that seems like a good deal. But to the average reader, that's insane. There's no way I'm going to pay $11 for a pulp sci-fi book that's almost a decade old, any more than I'd pay more than $20 for it on cheap paper. Those are the kinds of prices that send me running to the used bookstore or the library--and then Hachette (and more importantly, Lowachee) gets nothing.

Which pains me, because I like giving money to authors. That's one of my favorite parts of the e-book market: I can give my money to authors without feeling guilty about destroying countless trees for books that I'll read once and never touch again. I buy a lot of books--many more, in fact, now that eco-guilt is out of the equation. And given time to adjust, as I've said, I don't see a real problem with paying a bit more for a just-published e-book. To give one example: although Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds will set me back $13, it sounds like a neat book and I don't want to wait for a paperback, so going over the $10 Amazon price point isn't the worst thing in the world. On the other hand, if it costs that much 8 years from now, I'll be considerably less sanguine about it.

I don't know that much about publishing models, so I'm not going to lecture about the costs of production and all that--I'm told those are minimal anyway--but nothing's going to kill consumer interest in e-books faster than a pricing scheme that regularly makes them more expensive than their paper equivalents. And if publishers wonder why people tend to eye them with distrust when they insist that they'll price older titles fairly, they should probably take another glance through their own back catalogs.

At some level this is a conversation about what kind of book market we want to have, and what it's possible to preserve. The existing publishing system is not at all set up for profitability. It leverages blockbuster titles to pay for the writing and editing of a diverse range of smaller, less popular books. I may find Dan Brown and JK Rowling personally repugnant, but their omnipresence makes possible the publication of obscure personal favorites like, say, Joseph Schloss's Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.

Assume that we agree, as a society, that diversity of publication is a good thing. Does the agency model preserve it, or does it simply allow an inefficient system to perpetuate itself digitally? More to the point, does the move to cheaper digital pricing necessarily mean margins too thin for niche books to exist? Or is it possible for independent writers and publishers to leverage the new platform? Is the desired model that of the music industry, the movie studios, or something else entirely (Netflix and subscription services, maybe)?

I don't have pat answers for those questions, but I hope they figure it out soon. I'm getting exhausted by the rollercoaster up-and-down of the debate, and I can't be the only one. It'd be nice if they got this sorted out before they alienate the Americans who still read, but given the print industry's general track record, we probably shouldn't get our hopes up.