Troublesome Young Men

If you were lucky you missed the weekend kerfuffle between Amazon and Macmillan Publishing.♠  It as all about Mr Jeff Bezos of Amazon being a troublesome young man.

Amazon was boycotting Macmillan for a couple of days—you couldn't buy a Macmillan published book at Amazon, either on the Kindle or in paper.  Here is the reporting from The New York Times.

Now comes Mr Charlie Martin, of Pajamas Media, talking about the issues behind the dispute.  Mr Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer.  He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center.

Mr Martin's take is that it is all about the business model.  With the Amazon Kindle♥ now being supplemented by the Barnes and Noble e-reader and now Apple's iPAD, the computer based approach to reading is threatening to make big cuts into the production and selling of paper books, hard cover or paperback.

Who is going to win? Bet on Bezos. The mainstream publishers can hold on for a while, based on reputation and while e-readers aren’t widely available; there’s still some prestige to being published by a reputable publisher like MacMillan. But eventually, some publisher will realize that a book that would have sold for $29.95 in a physical edition can be sold for the cost of the royalty, plus a small markup for production and administration. Our $29.95 novel would sell instead for $3.95. When that happens, except for coffee table books and an occasional print-on-demand hard copy, the physical book is dead.

Speaking of "print-on-demand", it has come to the COOP at Harvard Square, Cambridge, or so I am told.  I need to go down and check it out.  It sounds neat.

The article is interesting, but it involves talking about business models and risk and anticipation of the future.  All of which are very important as we ask where the jobs are in the current economic recovery.

The world is a'changing and if we are to move forward and secure the new jobs for our citizens we are going to have to find out which way the future is going and run with it.

UPDATE:

And here is a rebuttal, from a writer.  Hat tip to Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Interestingly enough, the future British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, used to edit books in the family business during the day, before showing up for sessions of Parliament.  This was in the 1930s, when he was one of those Troublesome Young Men who thought that Adolf Hitler was a menace to Western Civilization.
♥  I love mine.