There’s been a lot of recent talk in the Shameless community about being an aware responsible consumer, and I don’t believe that the world of book buying is exempt from this kind of scrutiny. I’ve been known to sing the praises of indie buying time and time again, but thanks to the recommendation of the nomediakings.org weblink, I’m starting to understand why its more important than ever.
At times the commercial publishing industry, like the cosmetic or fashion industry, is just as guilty of bad exploitive practice, its mandate driven by sales and and thereby making it less than virtuous in its actions. We forget that our beloved books are part of what we know and critique as media, and that media is not famous for honest tactics. I’ve heard some horror stories as of late that reveal the big publishers as exploiting someone’s ethnicity or gender in order to sell a work, an action that ultimately leaves the author as a pawn in a economic game. The problem often lies in how authors are unwilling to talk about the injustices, their piece of the pie the smallest and with a thousand hungry writers behind them, they are reluctant to lose what they have. You’ll notice here I have failed to name specific companies or instances in the spirit of that same fear.
The issue is media monopolies and consolodations that leave us all without choice. My temporary solution to keeping my dollar away from the media machine is my discovery of bookmooch.com. Although it certainly does not solve the problem of media monopoly, it allows you to hold onto your dollar and share what you already have in the way of books with the rest of the world. Book mooch is a rather sophisticated online community of readers, each user compiling an inventory of the books they already have and other users are able to “mooch” at will. The only cost for a user is postage, and your personal account works on a point system- the more you send and share, the more you can mooch.
I love the concept, and so far its been working for me. If I don’t want to shell out up to fourty dollars for the latest Douglas Coupland hardcover I can mooch it from someone in Texas, while someone in Sacramento can partake in my rare north of the border indie collection.
Trouble is, the only way this sharing community can survive is with the advertising support of the largest online book retailer in the world—so the question continues to be, should we even care?
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three comments
Shoot. I've already got all my wish lists & stuff over in http://www.paperbackswap.com
No fair. I want a monopoly on THIS, anyway! When it's about an open system just trying to get everyone together, it's best to HAVE one dominant place people go (like Urbandictionary for slang or Wikipedia for random nouns you'd like to know something about).
Meh.
Posted by Katie
November 6, 2006, 4:41 PM
Let me preface my comments by saying that I work for a book publisher and I'm working on a Master's degree in publishing.
1) I believe it's important to be aware of how the "pie" gets divided when a copy of a book is sold (which is actually quite similar to the music industry) but I would argue that while some publishers are exploitative of authors and publishing a book with a larger "multi-national" publisher can be an bad experience (as was the case for Jim Munroe), that's not always the case and there are a lot of independent Canadian/American publishers that you can choose to support as an author or reader if you don't want your money lining Rupert Murdoch's pockets.
2) A good publisher (small or big) with sufficient resources will help market a book, getting it into the right sales channels (i.e. in bookstores across Canada, available through Amazon.com) and publicizing the book through the media - in a way that the author is comfortable with (they should have input into how they are promoted and should be able to say 'no' to any interviews they don't want to do). Yes, there are horror stories, there always are, but most authors I believe are simply happy to have someone else take care of making their book available for sale and securing them some publicity for it so that potential readers know about it. It's a lot of work to self-publish/self-promote. And while it may seem that authors get only a small slice of the financial "pie," publishers use most of theirs to print, distribute, and market the book and author; a big slice goes to whatever sales channel sells the reader the copy of the book. For example, when you buy a copy of Author X's new book for $40 at Chapters, Chapters makes $16 profit (because they bought the book at a 40% discount), while the publisher gets $24, of which $4 goes to the author and the remaining $20 has to cover the editing, printing (this alone is a couple dollars a copy, more if fewer copies are printed), marketing, publicity, and advertising, not to mention however much was spent just to get the book on prominent display at Chapters.
3) Sharing books is something most authors will encourage but if you don't BUY their books through a store, website, or at an event, they don't actually get any money. By using sites like BookMooch and Paperback Swap, only the postal system benefits financially. If you're trying to save money, I would recommend borrowing your favourite authors' books from the library because (at least in Canada) authors get a "royalty" payment based on how many copies of their book(s) are part of library collections.
Posted by Holland
November 13, 2006, 12:55 PM
Oh, and if you were serious about wanting to read Douglas Coupland's latest book, I'd be happy to loan you my (Toronto-based) copy.
Posted by Holland
November 13, 2006, 12:57 PM
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