OK, so let me get this straight.
The airlines just get bigger and bigger. Continental merges with United to create the world's largest airline. Ticket prices go up. Services goes down. WAY, WAY down.
Banks keep getting bigger and bigger, with colossi buying up independent state or regional banks. Fees go through the roof while interest rates on savings go through the floor.
Investment firms are declared "too big to fail" (as a result of merger after merger) while hard-working people lose their retirement funds.
Mrs. See's candies, those wonderful San Francisco chocolates, are now a part of Berkshire Hathaway.
Speculators continue to drive up the price of crude oil, making gasoline prices skyrocket. But that's OK.
In a nutshell: Huge, powerful companies are merging, acquiring, eliminating jobs left and right, sending work overseas, and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division nods sagely and with delighted approval. No, the Antitrust Division has much bigger fish to fry. Why hold banks accountable for ruining people's lives when you can sue the publishing industry for price fixing?
For those of you who don't know, it is likely that the Department of Justice is going to sue Apple and the large publishers for attempting to fix prices, especially the new ebook model. What a great use of the taxpayers' money! Last time I checked, people don't take out mortgages to buy novels. The publishing industry doesn't foreclose on their homes or charge them $5 when they use an ATM outside their network. Our products sell in the $5 - $30 range and are completely discretionary purchases. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying, "Buy this book or I'll blow your fucking head off."
What are publishers doing, you may ask? We're simply trying to establish a model that does not devalue our products to the level of mass-produced Chinese garbage. We're trying to prevent Amazon from ITS predatory practices of using our products as loss leaders and its many other questionable (and borderline unethical) business decisions.
And what do we get for trying to protect intellectual property - and to protect the industry that is responsible for world literacy from going the way of the music business - and for our attempts to find a fair model that compensates authors and agents while not sending us into bankruptcy? A proposed lawsuit for "price fixing."
Department of Justice: I hereby declare you the biggest bunch of morons, imbeciles, and shitheads on the face of this planet. Let's hope your government pensions remain intact when one bank runs the United States, gasoline costs $10 a gallon, and one mega-airline has swallowed up all others. Then you'll get to read your $2.99 paperback or .99 ebook on a flight to Chicago that has cost you $4,000.
Don't agree. Books are really important, and some people can't afford to buy them at the prices publishers charge. Yes, really.
Maybe, if publishers want to be seen as promoting world literacy and similar high-faluting ideals, they might usefully consider paying authors, without whom there would be no publishing industry, a less risible proportion of the profits.
Big Publishing has had things its own way for a long, long time. Amazon is offering readers and authors a better deal. As long as it continues to do that, it will thrive. As soon as it starts to get complacent and fails to meet customers' needs, it will run into the sort of problems trad publishers are facing right now.
Posted by: Lexi Revellian | March 19, 2012 at 05:27 PM