How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?
This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance.
People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance.
This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
(I think everyone, even people who simply don't want to work, should be able to eat and receive reasonable medical care. Authors not having healthcare is terrible, but no more terrible than unemployed people not having healthcare; the problem there is the crazy American healthcare system)
Or you know, let them do whatever they want, and price THEIR work however they want, and then either buy it or don't buy it.
The number of hours a person has available in their life to enjoy reading books is constant, or at least capped pretty close to where it's at now.
There are already too many books for anyone to read everything that might interest them in their lifetime.
So what's the use of new fiction books? Haven't enough already been written to serve everyone's needs? I agree that we need fewer fiction authors and the market is showing that with their low compensation.
My guess is that the long term earnings for writing will move closer to zero. The best writers working for the best organizations will still be able to make a lot of money.
We have just barely started moving in to a period where online education turns billions of uneducated third world/developing country citizens in to highly educated English speakers.
I'm not the OP, but seeing as most of my favourite authors are already dead (some have been so for more than a century) I would so: "not so much". The "would someone think of the content creators" mantra kind of works (up to a point) in the music and movie industries, where Taylor Swift doesn't compete against long-time dead J.S. Bach, nor does Star Wars compete against Melies's films, while any new fiction author has to compete against long-time dead authors like Proust, Kafka, Joyce or Ray Bradbury.
I have a long fondness for Bradbury, Shelley, Conan Doyle, etc., but they didn't write, oh, Hal Duncan's VELLUM, or Christopher Barzak's THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia's SIGNAL TO NOISE---I don't think they could have been written before the last decade or so, and I don't see that they compete any more with Proust than Taylor Swift does. There will always be a market for new fiction.
I suspect the answer will be a switch to "open publishing", with authors and editors collaborating via websites like on OSS programs and then monetizing on "stores", hence keeping costs so low that they can work on economies of scale.
Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost. But publishers moved to close the market and to increase the selling price whilst at the same time accruing the added profit from the reduction in production cost.
The blame here shouldn't be on those buying the books who refuse to be screwed by the publishers.
Readers don't care about the booktrade, they want to read books and have authors rewarded for writing them, the booktrade somehow doesn't seem to help much to this end.
Instead of starting a Patreon, perhaps your writer friend could sell books to readers rather than to a publishing house?
The market is... different. Wider in some ways, narrower in others. Young adult fiction is largely nonexistent in ebook, still, because young adults' access to e-reading devices is still more limited than adults', and they are less likely to discover fiction online than through more traditional channels.
The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print.
> Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money
While that's been the going theory in some parts for a while, in practice it hasn't turned out that way.
But the prices have been / are often higher.
I see that good ebooks have some extra typesetting and such, but that should be largely automated with the production of print ready copy.
How can they not save on paper, presses, covers, delivery, distribution?
Yes editing, proofing, marketing, cover design, etc., still costs.
Devices don't seem that discounted that there should be an extra load per book to post for them.
Do you have a source for eBook production costs, would be interested to look at financials vs. traditional publishing.
...depending on how many copies are sold, at the minimum. (Physical production and transportation will come to dominate at some point.)
...and, of course, this means that mass market paperbacks should be priced at the same level as first-run hardcovers.
> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
The actual cost of a book has no bearing on it's value. You could spend a billion on editing, publicity, materials, etc. and if no one wants to read it good luck.
I try to buy records/merch from (some of) my favourite bands. I value them greatly. They'll never make a decent living from it.
> How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?
I give to charities to take care of those who can't take care of themselves; I buy entertainment to be entertained.
> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
Then maybe the profession of writer will gradually go away, much as the profession of fencing master (the real sort, who taught how to win in a fight, not at sport) has.
