Tag: corpocracy

Technology making life better

For bankers, anyhow. And don’t think this payment technology won’t eventually be applied to medical systems:

Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

But before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers like Ms. Bolender must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.

The devices, which have been installed in about two million vehicles, are helping feed the subprime boom by enabling more high-risk borrowers to get loans. But there is a big catch. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle…. Now used in about one-quarter of subprime auto loans nationwide, the
devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely
payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline.

Brave New World indeed. They’re really squeezing every last drop of credit out of the economy.

Spinning the “bestseller” narrative

Once more, Johnny is counting on the fact that people don’t know the relevant facts in order to attempt to mislead them and spin the narrative in his favor. Notice, in particular, his blatant lie about my ignorance, when the fact is that just as when I caught him repeatedly lying about his traffic, I am the precise opposite of ignorant on the subject:

Vaguely related, not too long ago I noted with some amusement a perennial detractor of mine blathering ignorantly, as he nearly always does on any subject relating to me, about how it didn’t seem to him that Lock In was doing particularly well; this was almost immediately before the book hit the NYT Hardcover list and was Bookscan’s #1 top-selling front list science fiction novel. I considered sending him one of these cookies, so he could eat his words. But then I thought that giving a cookie to an asshole was a backwards way of doing things, at least from the point of view of the cookie. So, no cookies for him. He’ll just have to bask in the infinite pleasure of being wrong, so very wrong, yet again. He’s used to that, in any event.

Now, who was wrong about those “two million page views monthly” again? It’s so typical of SF/F’s Bernie Madoff that he claims I am “so very wrong” when events have gone EXACTLY as I predicted they would. It’s not that Lock In has been a massive failure; most, though not all, books by a reasonably known author that have been pushed as hard as Tor has pushed Lock In will be similarly successful in its first month. Initial “success” in the publishing industry is, to a great extent, predetermined by the publisher’s decisions concerning print runs and marketing budgets.

For example, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was such an initial failure for Pocket Books that they turned down its sequel. That’s why The Da Vinci Code has a different publisher than its predecessor. Pocket has since sold millions of copies, and they could have sold tens of millions of copies of Brown’s other books as well if they had simply given Angels and Demons a bigger print run and a marketing campaign. An executive at Random House once told me that Pocket’s mishandling of Dan Brown was the single biggest mistake he has personally observed in the industry.

So, it’s no surprise that Lock In is superficially successful, as Tor has invested a lot of money (relatively speaking) in the marketing of the book in both obvious ways, such as the author’s nationwide book tour and the reviews in various media outlets, and less obvious ways, such as buying the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list.  On Hugh Howey’s site, Tim Grahl explains how these lists work and why they are merely marketing vehicles as opposed to reliable indicators of how a book is selling vis-a-vis other books.

This is the specific “also selling” addendum to the Hardcover Fiction list of September 14th, to which McRapey is referring:

    17. THE HEIST, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
    18. THE SILKWORM, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland/Little, Brown)
    19. THE MINIATURIST, by Jessie Burton (Ecco)
    20. LOCK IN, by John Scalzi (Tor)
    21. TOM CLANCY: SUPPORT AND DEFEND, by Mark Greaney (Putnam)
    22. LOVE LETTERS, by Debbie Macomber (Ballantine)
    23. CLOSE TO HOME, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)
    24. INVISIBLE, by James Patterson and David Ellis (Little, Brown)
    25. HER LAST WHISPER, by Karen Robards (Ballantine)

A version of this list appears in the September 14, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending August 30, 2014.

That’s great and all, but recall what I pointed out before Lock In reached the NYT bestseller list: “McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry
Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying
him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a
book.”  And also “Just keep an eye on the NYT list. If LOCK IN is only on it for one week,
it’s a paid marketing stunt. If it stays on it for several weeks, it’s
probably legitimate.”

And now the verdict is in, which is probably why McRapey is already out there frantically trying to spin the narrative again.  Here is the most recent New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list, including the “also selling” section, for the week of September 21st. Care to guess what book isn’t on it?

  1. PERSONAL, by Lee Child
  2. SOMEWHERE SAFE WITH SOMEBODY GOOD, by Jane Karon
  3. THE BONE CLOCKS, by David Mitchell
  4. THE SECRET PLACE, by Tana French
  5. THE EYE OF HEAVEN, by Clive Kussler
  6. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI, by Haruku Murakami
  7. THE LONG WAY HOME, by Louise Penny
  8. THE GOLDFINCH, by Donna Tartt
  9. BIG LITTLE LIES, by Liane Moriarty
  10. MEAN STREAK, by Sandra Brown
  11. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr
  12. DARK BLOOD, by Christine Feehan
  13. SON OF NO ONE, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
  14. WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, by Matthew Thomas
  15. ADULTERY, by Paulo Coelho
  16. SHIFTING SHADOWS, by Patricia Briggs 
  17. MURDER 101, by Faye Kellerman
  18. ANGELS WALKING, by Karen Kingsbury 
  19. THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, by Liane Moriarty
  20. THE 6TH EXTINCTION, by James Rollins

What a complete surprise! With its one-week showing of #20, Lock In didn’t even do as well as his previous “New York Times bestseller” Redshirts (#15) although it did do better than that famously popular bestseller Fuzzy Nation (#23).  Recall what I wrote back in February 2013: “the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably
fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller. They
appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week,
never to make another appearance there again.”

(Scalzi also claims The Lost Colony was a New York Times bestseller, although I was unable to find it on any of the 2007 lists. I suspect this is because the historical lists do not include the “also selling” section. Redshirts is his only book to appear on the actual list per se.)

Notice that the closest comparable, Paolo Coelho’s Adultery, which is presently at #15 in its third week on the list, has an Amazon rank of 292 overall and a Science Fiction and Fantasy rank of 71. That’s what a legitimate bestseller looks like. Lock In, by comparison, has an overall rank of 2,807 and isn’t even in the Science Fiction and Fantasy top 100. It falls an order of magnitude short. Haruki Murakami’s latest is on the top 100 list for some reason, which I find very strange since there is literally nothing science fictional or fantastic about it, although I suppose that won’t prevent it from winning a Hugo next year either.

Lock In does not appear on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list and is #107 on the USA Today list. Perhaps it will go up from there, but note that Redshirts never went higher than 55 on that list and Fuzzy Nation never appeared at all. In other words, the initial indications are that despite the massive marketing effort Tor Books put behind it, Lock In is not even doing as well as Scalzi’s award-winning Star Trek ripoff.

This is potentially significant due to what it may mean for Tor Books. I’ve heard, and seen, evidence that they are not doing very well over the last two or three years. I suspected that the otherwise inexplicable decision to push Lock In so hard was an indication of their urgent need for a quick revenue boost, and so I conclude that Lock In‘s failure to become a legitimate bestseller presages an eventual shake-up of some kind at the publisher. As always, the value of a predictive model is its ability to predict future events. It will be interesting to see if PNH is still at Tor Books proper one
year from now. If he is not, I suggest that will tend to support my
observations here.

In any event, Scalzi is spinning his “success” in the same way that an NFL running back’s agent spins it when he’s angling for a new contract. Sure, he gained a thousand yards and the team made the playoffs, but the problem is that it took him 305 attempts to gain those yards, he’s averaging 3.3 YPC , the team was a wild card that lost in the first round, and his salary is $8 million per year. The team can get similar results at considerably less cost from someone else. That’s the inevitable downside of the big splashy marketing campaign for every Big Five author. With great marketing expenditures come great expectations. Merely good results of the sort that observably could have been achieved without them is a failure.

UPDATE: McRapey is so busy with his book tour and NOT paying attention to anything that I say that he tweeted this response almost immediately:

Latest stupid from my detractors: “You were ONLY on the NYT list for a week! You’re not a real bestseller!” Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

Well, this is awkward. Ah, Johnny, look, it’s not a real bestseller. It’s a fake one that Tor Books bulk-bought for you, just like they did with The Last Colony and Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts. Some would call it fraud. Tor Books calls it “marketing”.

Chin up, Johnny! Oh, wait, you don’t have one. Um, well, stay strong, tiger!

Whores in the workforce

Once more, women are disemboweling a primarily male occupation by entering it en masse while refusing to accept any responsibility for their actions and lack of job performance:

I am tendering my resignation as we speak, as are some writers for other sites. This industry is beyond corrupt. It is beyond destructive. It’s become a cult, so bloated on its own self-righteousness and loathing of everyone who doesn’t conform to the hivemind that it is that it’s impossible to stay and not become either part of that hivemind or completely fucking insane.

This isn’t just an issue of “whore fucks around and drags down women/sets feminism back.” This is a critical problem with women across the board. Once they get hired they cannot be fired unless they are caught doing something illegal.

Just ask any man who has dealt with HR complaints what women in the office are really like. They can’t be dealt with on any level, because they are treated like rock stars with CEO clout. A lot of guys in STEM are being driven out of their jobs because the ladies in marketing think nerdy guys are “too unattractive” to even be in their presence.

Of course, a significant contributing element is the MALE response to problem employees who happen to be women. Male employees don’t like to complain to HR because it is unmanly while male managers like to play white knight and refuse to hold female employees accountable to the standards they expect of male employees. So until they do, and until men put steady pressure upon HR to discipline and fire women for the same behavior for which they discipline and fire men, absolutely nothing is going to change and corporate America will continue to spiral downhill in an unproductive whirlpool of bureaucracy and paperwork.

But if you find yourself in a similar situation and you are willing to quit anyhow, why not first at least try putting pressure on your employer to get rid of the useless parasite employees. That way, even if they choose the parasites over you, you’ll have forced the executives to realize that they face a situation. Maybe they know and don’t care. But in most cases, they probably have no idea what’s going on.

Those who seriously believe in the equality myth won’t believe that the increased reluctance of men to work for large organizations is a problem, because female employees are every bit as productive as the men who are quitting. Of course, all the observations about falling corporate productivity, the increasing lack of tech innovation, the difficulty of finding high quality employees, and the constant lament about where all the good men have gone would tend to testify otherwise.

“Me very bad raciss too, can haz $2 billion?”

This mea culpa from an admittedly racist NBA team owner sounds more than a little financially motivated to me:

For the second time this year, the owner of a professional basketball team will sell his controlling interest of a franchise after his racially insensitive views were made public.

Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, informed N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, effectively cutting short a league investigation into an email that Mr. Levenson sent two years ago to fellow Hawks executives detailing his thoughts on how the team could attract more white fans.

On Sunday, when the issue came to light, the Hawks released the text of the August 2012 email, in which Mr. Levenson speculated that the team’s black fans had “scared away the whites” and that there were “not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base.”

Some have conjectured that this is the result of Donald Sterling’s vengeful investigations, which certainly could be the case. But when you read the actual email itself, it sounds to me as if Levenson would simply like to extricate himself from an underperforming business in a manner that will not reduce the value of the business.

when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can’t get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

— it’s 70 pct black

— the cheerleaders are black

— the music is hip hop

— at the bars it’s 90 pct black

— there are few fathers and sons at the games

— we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba’s urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. 

Levenson’s email demonstrates, yet again, that what the SJWs and SWPLs decry as racism is nothing more than “paying attention to readily observable reality”. I think my favorite part is the way Levenson is attempting to decry racism while simultaneously copping to racial insensitivity. It’s such a bizarre position that I think a financial motivation is the only reasonable explanation.

Government against the citizenry

Lest you be under the impression that the U.S. government’s job is to protect the interest of its citizenry, disabuse yourself of the notion:

A Texas catering business will pay the United States $26,400 for engaging in “citizenship-discrimination,” as part of a settlement with the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Culinaire International unlawfully discriminated against employees based on their citizenship status, the Justice Department claimed, because it required non-citizen employees to provide extra proof of their right to work in the United States.

Culinaire has agreed to pay the United States $20,460 in civil penalties, receive training in anti-discrimination rules of the Immigration and Nationality Act, revise its work eligibility verification process, and create a $40,000 back pay fund for “potential economic victims.”

And this is the institution citizens are relying on to feed hungry Americans, heal sick Americans, educate young Americans, protect vulnerable Americans, defend Americans against foreign invasion, and provide a healthy American economy?

Why would you expect them to do so they don’t even take the side of actual American citizens?

Any faith you might still have in the U.S. government is very sadly, and badly, misplaced.

A letter to Hachette’s CEO

Our friends at Amazon requested that those readers and writers who support them write an email to Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch. Amazon has been very good to me over the past few years, both an author and a customer, so I was happy to oblige.

Dear Mr. Pietsch,

As a Hugo-nominated author, a Pocket Books author, and an editor
for an independent publishing house in Finland, I would like to
encourage you to rethink your position regarding Amazon. I understand
that the rapid changes in the industry are affecting your company, often
in a negative manner. I also realize that your overhead and your
contracts tend to reflect standard industry practices that are no longer
in line with the new world of digital publishing.

The fact is, Mr. Pietsch, that the world is changing and Hachette has to
change with it. Ebook prices are coming down as per the technology curve.
When have you ever known a new technology to come out and gradually
become more expensive over time? I don’t wish to criticize you or your
organization for various attempts to keep the new world at bay, as the
important point is not that colluding with other mainstream publishers,
trying to protect higher book prices, or using authors as leverage is
wrong, or even bad PR, but that such actions are ultimately futile.

The ebook genie will never go back into the bottle. Therefore, the sooner you
restructure Hachette to reflect the new realities, which include coming
to a reasonable accomodation with Amazon, the more likely it is
that your organization will survive these changes.

With regards,

Vox Day

Hachette’s position isn’t merely economically illiterate, observably hypocritical, and morally wrong, it is untenable. At the moment, Hachette obviously needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hachette. As for its supporters among the scribbling classes, I think Amazon would do well to teach the authors who are publicly opposed to them a Very Important Lesson by refusing to sell any of their books for six months.

After the initial screeches of outrage died down, I suspect they would all fall in line very quickly. One of the things I like about Amazon is that it is the sort of thing they might actually do; I don’t think they’d be afraid to demonstrate to those various loud-mouthed authors just how unimportant they truly are. It’s amazing how many writers not only excuse their mainstream publishers for actions that Amazon has not even committed, but fail to realize that selling books is only a small part of Amazon’s business these days.

Amazon isn’t perfect. What corporation is? But they have been the best thing for authors and the reading public since Mr. Gutenberg first assembled his printing press. And the fact that the dinosaur gatekeepers and their pet authors hate and fear it is a feature, not a bug.

One of the Mad Geniuses, Amanda, adds her two cents on the subject:

[A]ll Amazon did was take a page out of Hatchette’s book and ask its authors to take a stand. Oh the cries of foul that suddenly rose from the interwebs. Within
half a hour of reading the email, I was seeing accusations of Amazon
acting like a stalker in sending the email to the usual AHDers (Amazon
Hater Disorder sufferers) about how evil Amazon was to ask its authors
to contact poor, innocent Hatchette. There was even one author claiming
that Amazon is not and never will be a friend to authors. All of those
had me shaking my head and wondering if these folks had ever really read
their contracts with their traditional publisher — several of whom are
signed with Hatchette — as well as if they actually knew the meaning of
the terms “contract”, “negotiation” and “irony”.

What pushed me over the edge was a post by another author who
admitted to not having received or read the email but, based on what
they were seeing form their author friends, Amazon was once again
resorting to dirty pool and must be stopped because, duh, Amazon is
evil.

They really are proper little Manicheans, aren’t they.

Additional ilkotism

The gentleman who had a job available for a member of the Dread Ilk has a few more on offer:

Thanks for posting the job opportunity. The turnout was pretty impressive. I am also coming across other opportunities that I am hooking Ilk up with. I have another one for you to post, if you are still inclined. We are looking for three more outside sales guys on the West Coast. These would be some spectrum of entry level to experienced.

As before, if you’re interested, shoot me an email with JOB2 in the subject and I will pass it on to the relevant party.

18,000 and H1B

Item 1: Microsoft Chief
Executive Officer Satya Nadella kicked off one of the largest layoffs in
tech history on Thursday, hoping to reshape the aging PC industry titan
into a nimbler rival to Apple and Google, and jolt a culture at the
company that is used to protecting its existing Windows and Office
franchises.
Microsoft Corp said on Thursday
it will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, over
the next 12 months as it almost halves the size of its newly acquired
Nokia phone business and tries to become a cloud-computing and
mobile-friendly software company. The
larger-than-expected cuts are the deepest in the software giant’s
39-year history and come five months into Nadella’s tenure.

Item 2: Bill Gates says the United States’ position as the global leader in innovation is at risk. The Microsoft chairman says there is a deficit of Americans with computer-science degrees, and he wants the government to make it easier for Microsoft to hire foreign-born workers. Gates testified before the House Committee on Science Technology on Wednesday about what he sees as a need to liberalize rules for H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers. Currently, Congress has set an annual limit on H1-Bs at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 earmarked for foreign students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

Item 3: Immigration and visa reform are necessary to boost the U.S. economy and job market, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Disputing the idea that Silicon Valley execs are simply trying to secure a higher number of H1B visas for their own companies, Zuckerberg told attendees at the event: “This is something that we believe is really important for the future of our country — and for us to do what’s right.”

It’s not terribly difficult to understand why nations experiencing economic stress are so often inclined to resort to nationalizing corporations, not when the corporate executives are so blatantly acting against the interests of the citizenry.

Great Depression 2.0

Only instead of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, we have the geniuses who permitted the NSA to spy on allied countries:

Germany Instructs Its Companies To Limit Cooperation, Procurement Orders With The US

Update: it just got worse. Moments ago Bloomberg followed up with the second, and expected, part of this story, namely that just like China cut off major US corporations from big procurement contracts leading to a collapse in CSCO and IBM Asian revenues, it is now Germany’s turn. Per Bloomberg, the German Interior Ministry reviewing rules for awarding govt contracts for computer, communications equipment and services as political rift w/ U.S. widens, people familiar with matter told Bloomberg News’ Cornelius Rahn, Amy Thomson.

  • Ministry will probably issue new purchasing guidelines in coming weeks to replace “no-spy-order” dated April 30
  • Details being worked out, may require suppliers of components of bidder’s goods or services to guarantee they don’t hand over confidential data
  • IBM, CSCO, MSFT may be affected by any tightening of procurement procedures: Forrester Research analyst Andrew Rose

It could be for show, but I tend to doubt it. German companies have to be slavering at the notion of having an excellent excuse – nay, reason – to bar their American competitors from government contracts.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.