Yeah, sorry. I dunno why that article was just about the UK version of the site. It's not exclusive to the UK. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html You can say "but that's just Amazon", and yeah true it's just Amazon, but you're talking about one of the biggest companies in the world that spearheaded e-books. E-books outsold their print books in less than four years. Amazon even includes physical books with no e-book version in the number of physical books, too. Pretty hard to pass this off as 'well it's just one place...'.
Yes, Amazon is a horrible company and if it weren't for the fact that they control like 2/3 -3/4 of e-book sales I wouldn't deal with them at all.
I note that this means that Amazon now has an immense amount of power, in this scenario where authors theoretically have power. Authors have the power that Amazon chooses to grant them.
Yeah, dude. No. The context of my post gave the word "exactly" context outside of its literal meaning, so your argument does not work.
And your point with this is...? That authors are still at the mercy of Amazon? Well, Amazon is incredibly generous to its authors. What point are you trying to make other than some weak technical argument that "well, technically speaking, Amazon only chooses to give authors power..."
I really suggest that next time you say what you mean, or you put your theoretical context in the sentence where you're using the word. For example: Games and books are exactly the same, in one aspect: The ability of independents to sell them without the support of a larger corporation. That would have been clear--though, still, the use of "exactly" immediately clarified to mean not-exactly-but-kinda-similar, is a bit of waste of a word. It's a little bit like, "Butter is exactly like cucumbers, in one aspect: They are both food" and "Cats are exactly like humans, in one aspect: They both have hearts."
Well, they do basically have labour camps where their employees are forced to sleep in cars in the company parking lot because they can't afford housing close enough to their jobs to be there on time otherwise, so yeah. Some hyperbole obviously, but that's just what I do. Would you prefer if I made a Mussolini reference?
Yeah, again. No. Your argument isn't working, man. Just give a rest already. My language made it extremely clear how I was using the word "exactly". You are trying to argue pointless mechanics.
Because Amazon is a philanthropic organization only interested in the good of mankind? And I really don't see "incredibly generous". I don't even see "generous". The fact that Amazon's cut to authors is higher than a traditional publisher's royalty percentage isn't generosity, it reflects a fundamentally different business model.
I agree that Amazon has a lot of bullshit attached to it and everything, but your point is still weird and doesn't make sense. I was talking about how e-book sales were beginning to overtake sales of physical books, you said "like Nazis overtook Europe before everyone found out they were bad". Are you trying to imply people will eventually discover e-books are evil or Amazon is evil or something?
Because there's no evidence to suggest that Amazon is going to flip the tables and start choking their e-book publishers, therefore implying that the fact "Amazon could totally do that" is a false argument. The government could suddenly have you assassinated because they only allow you to live with the power they have over you, gee, should we destroy the government before it's too late?!?!?!
It actually truly didn't. I realize that in this context you are never going to admit to error, but it's something to think about for the future. You seem to be using "exactly" as a sort of generic intensifier, and that is not clear communication.
I dunno about you but the percentage they take for publishing you on their platform and immediately formatting your stuff (if you wrote it correctly) to work on any size of e-reader and kindle device is pretty nice, considering they take none of your intellectual property and claim absolutely zero ownership of what you published.
It's probably important to note that the overwhelming majority of e-book sales are from traditionally published books. I'd imagine that self-pubbed sales are a tiny fraction of the e-book pie... so any inference made from e-book sales ties directly back to traditional publishing houses delivering their product in a different way, and not a dramatic shift in the market.
You realize publishing houses don't claim ownership of your works either, they simply take publication rights. Sometimes in contracts they'll ask for other rights, which is why an agent is nice, but all works still belong to the author.
Well, we can't be sure of that until the day comes (if it does truly come, which I think it eventually will) where we see books primarily being published as e-books before physical ones. Lots of books have been successful despite never being physically published before they were an e-book, and I don't think there's anything to suggest a book needs to exist as a physical copy before it's able to have a good shot at making it as an e-book; that's just how the world is at the moment.
It actually seems like they're taking a pretty big cut, given that they put zero effort into the content. They wrote software to handle ebooks in bulk, and they take a pretty fat cut. I'm not seeing generosity, I'm seeing profit motive and a domination of the market.
ETA: Fact checked and found earliest evidence that the allies knew about concentration camps was 1942.
