It's a Movement
November 30, 1999
7:03 a.m.
I simply will not be made to believe that it's almost December. I assume you all saw the second real fall out of the Y2K problem, right? Jewel cancelling her concert because of Y2K concerns? Yeah, right. Her only Y2K concern was that there weren't going to be but 1K people paying to spend New Year's Eve with her. She scratched her head at that one--or at least her managers did. After all, tickets were only something like $70-80 bucks, and other folks were getting $2K for their Y2K gig in big cities like New York and Las Vegas. Geeze. People are strange. We'll complain because a bank makes $2 from an ATM, but will cough up an average of $50 bucks to see an NBA basketball game (that's not counting pop corn and a coke, in a special $4 cup with a picture of the star on it). Yeah, there are some things worth it--Cirque Du Soleil, for one. I just can't get over this ATM thing, you know? Let's look at it from a publishing perspective. ATMs are basically in the position of a distributor--they are the middlemen. Last I heard, a book cost something like seventy cents to produce (that pays for the material goods and the labor it costs to manage and produce each book). Let's double that to account for returns (books that are ordered by bookstores, but not sold to readers). So, let's say that for every book you cart away from Barnes and Noble or that appears on you doorstep from Amazon.com, the publisher gets $1.40. Then, let's assume a really, really successful author. Say someone who gets a dollar a book. I'm being REALLY, REALLY generous here from everything I've heard. (Not having sold a book, how would I know, though?) That means there is $2.40 sunk in cost of producing those books. Last I saw, books sold for a lot more than that. Profit? I hear you say. There's profit to be added in there. Okay, but publishers work on a pretty tiny margin as I understand. Let's be generous, though and make our math easier, too. Profit is ten percent of cost, or $.24 a book. Brings the total to $2.64--throw in the extra penny for rounding purposes, say it costs $2.65 for that book, including profit for the publisher. Then, of course, there's bookstore. Let's give them more than the publisher, just to round things out--say, $.35, bringing the total cost of the book, author, to publisher, to bookstore, to $3.00. This, I think, is awfully conservative, remeber? I think the real cost is lower than this. So, then, why are we paying $7.50 and up for a paperback book these days? Who gets the extra $3.50? You know, I'm thinking that the people of America should pass a law stating that distributors should be required to distribute books at no charge. This would certainly be better for everyone involved, you know? If nothing else, it would make the economy zoom by removing the friction these middlemen put on book sales. I'm sure we all see the distributor as a greedy, money grubbing entity who adds no value to the end product--except, of course to actually get it to the place where we go to find it. So, power to the people, I say. Let's get behind this effort full force! Tear down City Hall one town at a time. If it works in Santa Monica, it'll work anywhere! Yeah, people are strange. And, I suppose I'm one of the strangest.   Have a good one. Many Thanks to Shannon Wendt for her award   And they say the sixties are dead Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for?" Country Joe & the Fish  Ethics for the New Millennnium |
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