{"id":5793,"date":"2013-07-07T10:32:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T16:32:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5793"},"modified":"2013-07-07T20:51:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T02:51:59","slug":"books-monopolies-and-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5793","title":{"rendered":"Books, Monopolies, and the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two articles that seem to relate to each other.<\/em><\/p>\n

1. Having gotten the majority of the book market<\/strong> through aggressive discounting, Amazon is (surprise) raising prices, <\/a>although their prices on academic books are still often under the publisher’s list price.<\/p>\n

Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and\u00a0independent\u00a0presses, said he recently surveyed 18 publishers. \u201cFourteen responded and said that Amazon had over the last few years either lowered discounts on scholarly books or, in the case of older or slow-selling titles, completely eliminated them,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2. Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to create “closed gardens” for their users,<\/strong> as America Online, Compuserve, etc. tried to do twenty years ago.\u00a0 You go to the site, and you stay there. Hence Google’s elimination of Google Reader: RSS and Atom feeds are free, low-maintenance, and don’t make money.<\/a><\/p>\n

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything<\/em>.While Google did technically \u201cown\u201d Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far<\/em> more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.<\/p>\n

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it\u2019s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they\u2019d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else\u2019s salespeople.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two articles that seem to relate to each other. 1. Having gotten the majority of the book market through aggressive discounting, Amazon is (surprise) raising prices, although their prices on academic books are still often under the publisher’s list price. Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and\u00a0independent\u00a0presses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-5793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-publishing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1vr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":849,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=849","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":0},"title":"Dionysus, Jesus, Castaneda","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"After watching the BBC take on anthropologist - novelist - sorcerer Carlos Castaneda, M. and I rented another documentary about him. Enigma of a Sorcerer was released in 2002. It is available through Netflix, but it is only for the hardcore student of neo-shamanism as phenomenon.Since it is only a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2513,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2513","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":1},"title":"Spamming and Swindling with E-Books","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 2, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Spammers and plagiarists target e-books (Kindle, etc.) Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"publishing\"","block_context":{"text":"publishing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=publishing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1320,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1320","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":2},"title":"Mark Teppo on Magick and Fiction","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I noticed this post about Mark Teppo and urban magick on Instapundit, linking to an Amazon blog item about his thoughts on the nature of magick.Like I said, the definition [of magick] is a bit slippery, and it might be a bit much to attribute to the writing of a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"magick\"","block_context":{"text":"magick","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=magick"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":899,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=899","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":3},"title":"The Street of the Idol-Makers","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Last Monday I drove to Denver for the last day of the International New Age Trade Show (West) at the Merchandise Mart, partly to see friends and also to check out the Books, New Age and World Music, CD's and DVD's, Aromatherapy Bath and Body Preparations, Apparel, Candles, Crystals, Tarots\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4785,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4785","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":4},"title":"Fields Books to Close on Polk Street and Move Online","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 4, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The last time that I visited Fields Book Store, San Francisco's long-time esoteric bookshop (older than the Golden Gate Bridge), was the last time that I was in the city. I can't remember what I bought \u2014 something \u2014 and I spent a while skimming the last volume of Mircea\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":988,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=988","url_meta":{"origin":5793,"position":5},"title":"When Librarians Strike Back","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A fairly brilliant fund-raising idea in Alamogordo, New Mexico: funding a new library with photos of a local book-burning.The book burning pitted two opposing points of view. It was \"not a book-burning, but a holy bonfire,\" according to the church's founding pastor, Jack Brock.....On one side [of the street] were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"libraries\"","block_context":{"text":"libraries","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=libraries"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5793"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5802,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5793\/revisions\/5802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}