Are Books Commodities? Are They Speech?

Books, as well as magazines, newspapers, newsletters in all of their various formats: paper, digital, smoke signals, whatever, are not commodities. They are speech.

There is no hard and fast rule that books should be priced at $9.99 either.

Source: IPDA News Digest, 04/17/15

Books are not widgets. They are not plastic tzotchkes made by low wage labor in China and packaged by low wage temp workers in overheated warehouses in exurbia USA.

Many readers consider books they love to be works of art (at least the really well written ones).

They are the result of hard work, hard effort, hard labor by the authors who often seek represenation by book publishers. Sometimes it's Hachette. Sometimes it's Penguin. Sometimes it's  Amazon.

So as wonderful as Amazon is, at least to their consumers, they do come in between the reader and the author. In other words, despite what the fanboys and the trade press thinks, they're middlemen. Just like wholesalers. Or publishers.

So, I'm sorry to point out all of the fans, apologists and futurists, but Amazon and many other e-tailers, are simply the latest thing that is "disrupting" a traditional economy. Just like the big chain booksellers disrupted the indy bookstore and newsstand economy in the 1980's and 1990's. Just like Pay-On-Scan has disrupted the traditional magazine distribution economy in the last decade. Just like Tesla is disrupting, to a certain extent, the car sales franchise market.

But to Amazon's credit, they've taken advantage of a deregulated economy, and found a great entre into middle and upper class pocketbooks - reading.

I've never bought the argument that "books cost too much". They don't.  They are priced according to the market.

Is it fair that some writers never got published under the old regime? No. The world is not fair.

Is it fair that some visionaries (and not a few hucksters) got into the digital book market first and made a ton of money while some true craftsmen now find themselves self publishing books and making slave wages because they were late to the party?

No. The world is not fair.

Books (and magazines) are not widgets. We'd probably all make more money if we stopped trying to market and sell them like that.

Link to the article mentioned above is here.