Blog #42

I really didn’t know what to write about on this post. The news has been all about a topic that we’ve already discussed. The battle over the e-Book continues to rage, with most consumers blissfully oblivious to the realities of why MacMillan would want to control its pricing structure and honestly feeling like they should get all of their products for nothing. There’s already a major outcry against the “Multi-million dollar” Publishers who are pushing this agenda out of greed in order to improve their bottom lines, with little being done by publishers to show what the impact of Amazon’s model will have on this small margin field. Publishers have basically been labeled the bad guys here because people are still demonizing the music production industry and think that publishers are basically the same. I feel like MacMillan and publishers in general have not done nearly enough to explain their position and the precarious nature of the field. People just see that they are owned by big corps like Viacom and assume that they are billion dollar powerhouses. I feel like if publishers would release more news explaining what their problem with the $9.99 price point is, they may be able to avoid a lot of fallout later. If the fall of the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that PR is important in order to maintain the image of publishers as companies interested in the proliferation of literature, not media conglomerates interested only in the bottom line. If we can humanize the industry, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to weather the oncoming storm without resorting to the drastic price models that the music industry has had to adopt in order to maintain their business.