Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
January 7, 2019 09:02 pm PST

Blame authors' fortunes on monopolism, not university professors, booksellers and librarians

The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade. John Scalzi offers some important perspective.

Here's the summary:

* Authors Guild: authors' incomes are way down, thanks to Amazon's monopolism, which is crushing indies and traditionally published authors alike; universities are relying on fair use and Google Books for coursepacks, and big tech overall is "devalu[ing] what we produce to lower their costs for content distribution."

* New York Times: yeah, it's mostly Amazon.

* Scalzi: This isn't a very good study. They surveyed 5,000-ish, self-selected authors (and the Science Fiction Writers of America didn't participate). Comparing the fortunes of authors today to Hemingway may not be very representative -- think instead of writers like John Brunner, who lived a writerly life that's pretty recognizable to writers today. Was there really ever a guilded age of writerly incomes, or just a bunch of survivor bias?

My take: Amazon and the other monopolists are a huge problem. But big tech isn't uniformly culpable. Facebook and Twitter are certainly big social problems, but, they're not hurting authors. The idea of "devaluing what we produce" by letting people talk to each other for free is incoherent, intellectually bankrupt nonsense, ripped from the pages of "Home taping is killing music" and "Home cooking is killing restaurants."

Also a problem: consolidation in publishing (we're down to five big publishers, and rumor has it that Simon and Shuster will be a subsidiary of Harper Collins within a year). Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/UPm-pV0aiYw/nonrepresentative-surveys.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article