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Monopoly as a term of vilification...
Jan. 31st, 2010 06:43 pmAmazon is apparently going to switch to an "agency model" for Macmillan books. They way they put it is:
"We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."
Excuse me, but "a monopoly over their own titles"? Yes, this is technically true. Authors have a monopoly on how their works are distributed. It's called copyright. They typically license certain exclusive rights to a publisher, like Macmillan. Nobody else then gets to publish those books until the rights revert and the authors license the rights to someone else, or until the books fall into public domain.
The quoted sentence reads like "We're going to lob in the word 'monopoly' now so that you can see what meanies they are." Either that, or they really hate copyright and wished it didn't exist so that they could legally publish their own editions at cheaper prices. (I suppose they may want to do this. I have no idea what Amazon's stand on copyright is. If they're against copyright though, I'd be surprised.)
"Monopoly" gets used to tar the other side a lot in the blogs and forums on the computer industry. It's used so often that the term starts to sound meaningless. I was just surprised to see it here.
"We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."
Excuse me, but "a monopoly over their own titles"? Yes, this is technically true. Authors have a monopoly on how their works are distributed. It's called copyright. They typically license certain exclusive rights to a publisher, like Macmillan. Nobody else then gets to publish those books until the rights revert and the authors license the rights to someone else, or until the books fall into public domain.
The quoted sentence reads like "We're going to lob in the word 'monopoly' now so that you can see what meanies they are." Either that, or they really hate copyright and wished it didn't exist so that they could legally publish their own editions at cheaper prices. (I suppose they may want to do this. I have no idea what Amazon's stand on copyright is. If they're against copyright though, I'd be surprised.)
"Monopoly" gets used to tar the other side a lot in the blogs and forums on the computer industry. It's used so often that the term starts to sound meaningless. I was just surprised to see it here.
