Re: Sucks to be a creator @ skelband
There's certainly no question that the middlemen in some industries need some correction, that's pretty obvious. But they aren't 'just' parasites and what they add, even for the most aggressively parasitic, may not be obvious, but they definitely add value. I'll use myself as the example, since I tried it both ways. This may be a bit wordy.
I wrote a scholarly work dealing with the migration of Scottish furniture forms and design elements through the Southern Appalachian Highlands from 1790-1850. It's a massive, five volume work that took me about six years and I funded it out of pocket because it was something I wanted to do. I never expected to make any money, but recovering the investment would be nice. The thing was independent publishers aren't keen on 6,500 page treatises on extremely esoteric subjects. The full set with the two volume appendix was going to retail for about $2,200, well beyond the reach of the academic audience I wanted to reach.
So I went to the company that publishes my commercial works. They've made a lot of money on my seven industry titles and those titles are about as esoteric as you can possibly get, and they're really, really expensive. The subscription, updated quarterly, for one of the tables references is $11k per year (now on a single Blu-Ray :) and the graduate level textbooks are $7-800. The point is they are used to pushing high price works and they've already got direct contact with the people who are used to buying high priced works. I had wanted to bypass them and, not to put too fine a point on it, give some wee, invisible publisher a leg up, my name carries and I'm a big supporter of small business.
But it simply wasn't feasible. The small publishes simply don't have the resources to get it done. I'm not going to pay someone to publish my stuff on speculation, that's not how the industry works. They've got to assume some risk too, otherwise they really aren't adding anything. I understand it's a big risk for a small publisher, but I'm not a supporter of risk averse businesses as I don't understand why they're in business.
So there we go. My regular publisher and I worked out a deal and they covered my out of pocket expenses with a single check and an dandy advance on the first printing, which they sold out of in four months. The 2nd edition will be in museums, reference libraries, classrooms and private libraries in 2016, if anyone is interested. The proceeds from that are how I pay the extremely gifted art history students who expanded the work for the later editions. The work those sorts of people do is vitally important, but it doesn't typically pay a lot, so it's up to people like me to make sure that work continues. So I'm creating jobs and supporting higher education in subjects that have a much longer reach than any of the commercial studies so popular today.
But that couldn't happen if my publisher wasn't able to create enough demand for the book and push printing costs down to a level the target market could afford. Something simply beyond the ability of a small entity that doesn't have the established customer base, distribution mechanisms and most crucially billing systems and payment terms that take away the pain of purchasing. That's a really big part of selling more than tiny quantities of something and small companies and individuals just don't understand that.
You're not going to sell many of anything if you don't have the financial end of things absolutely locked in and most small entities don't even know where to get started with that. The people that are going to buy more than one of your thing aren't going to dick around with PayPal, call up with a credit card or even send a check. You're going to email a PO and a month or three later you'll get paid. That's just the way things are. Why would anyone capable of creating want to sacrifice that to do an office job that pays less than the office job they're likely trying to escape? Because that's what you're going to be doing if you're not going to let the middlemen do it for you.
It's a gross miscalculation that middle men don't add anything. A very well suited example for El Reg would be a co-lo datacenter. You can run a rack or two of servers in a garage with an extension cord but you can't scale very far. Sooner or later you're going to have to start writing some big checks to the utility department. Yes, paying them sucks, but unless you're going to build and manage an energy production and distribution ecosystem then you've got no choice to pay if you want to grow. It's a cost of doing business.
Trying to rebel against all that is the basis for the sad sort of story that so very many extremely gifted and talented people tell about how their (creation) almost became popular and/or made them a lot of money. The middlemen exist because they are the bridge between the creative and the commercial. You cut them out and you cut off huge swaths of the creative from the commercial. There's no bridge and nobody is going to build one because the commercial doesn't need it. They can keep cranking out endless copies of what they've already got and people will go on buying it simply because there's no option. You should be able to see that in the smartphone market. Incremental changes instead of groundbreaking new design (Apple is the most painfully obvious, but Samsung, Mokia, LG and HTC all do it too).
Yes, the middlemen have gotten out of control with the growth of the Internet, but that's a temporary situation. You see it in any industry as everybody tries to minimize their risks in the face of new opportunities. A breaking point always occurs where intrepid middlemen see a new product of creation and they carry it to commerce on their bridge. Yes, right now is crap, but that will change, it always does. It's important to realize none of this is remotely new, it's just more visible because it's seen online instead of being mailed around on paper.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
