Capitalist ethics.

[thalmin]

The FLGS can't just go out and break the street dates, at least by very much. We haven't received the books yet. I am not sure if my distributors have even recieved them yet, and my preorder from WotC hasn't yet been shipped. We generally don't receive any products prior to the street dates (or the day before in the case of WotC.)

 

[Celebrim]

Sometimes street dates are broken by low level employees in the warehouses who don't know any better and are just trying to do what they think is a good job (get product in and out of the warehouse as fast as possible). I have some sympathy for the company if that happens.

However, really what we are talking about here is what either is or should be a binding legal contract. I have no sympathy for the deliberate decision to break a contract. I'm very much a liberal capitalist in outlook, but Adam Smith and the rest of the liberal capitalists pretty much agree that the capitalist system only works if it most sellers are honest. If the participants in a capitalist system - however motivated - don't practice good business ethics, then the basic assumptions of transparency, profit maximized by capital producing behavior, and so forth get tossed out the window and the fundamental model of the market breaks down. When that happens, you pretty much have to have laws to push the market back into its assumed model.

If sellers of books have a reasonable belief that thier profits depend on a particular release date and cause thier distributers to agree to a particular release date, then it is unethical to break that agreement and the sellers of books ought to punish the behavior. There ought to be fines. There ought to be some threat of giving exclusive distribution rights to conpetitors that abide by thier agreements.

Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be any such thing in this case because - unlike say JK Rowlings - WotC isn't itself a 800 lb gorilla that can really make believable threats. It's in WotC's interest to get its products out to the widest number of distributors, and threatening to pull the Magic cards, minatures, and books from a particular distributor and giving a competitor more exclusive distribution rights isn't likely to help WotC's interests. In plain fact, the profits WotC stands to loose because someone broke the release date agreement are probably smaller than it would stand to lose by going after the unethical distributors and risking its distribution agreements.

Probably WotC's best bet is to do what fan authors like Dickens and Tolkien have done in the past - make a direct appeal to thier readers not to purchase from the offending publisher/distributor. This often works surprisingly well, because the fans generally have a relationship of respect with the author that they don't have with the distributor.

In this case, no one need be mentioned by name. A simple appeal not to buy from a seller who breaks the release date should work. It won't stop everyone, but it will impact sales enough to make breaking the release date risky.

Of course, if they were serious about this, WotC surely would have had a campaign in place before the release date. Frankly, I don't see alot of sign that WotC cares that much. They certainly should have known it would happen.

 

[Mark]

Probably WotC's best bet is to do what fan authors like Dickens and Tolkien have done in the past - make a direct appeal to thier readers not to purchase from the offending publisher/distributor.

I was told those emails were probably not real. The ones from Dickens, anyway. I printed the ones from Tolkein and plan to have him sign them at the next Gencon he is at. I'll be the six foot tall hobbit.

 

[Celebrim]

I was told those emails were probably not real. The ones from Dickens, anyway. I printed the ones from Tolkein and plan to have him sign them at the next Gencon he is at. I'll be the six foot tall hobbit.

Dickens of couse being a comrade of Charles Babbage and Samuel F. B. Morse, some of those emails are most certainly real. Of course, the encoding type '3bit' and content type 'application/telegraph' of the original emails is no longer supported by most clients. However, due to poor coverage by his wireless provider, Dickens actually had to go about 3000 miles out of his way to actually text his US customer.

If Dickens comes to Origins this year, you can get him to tell you about the bad old days of piracy. Not only did pdfs appear before the release date, so did copies of the books printed by other publishers.

 

[MojoGM]

It's not so much they don't care as they can't do squat.

Wal-mart doesn't get a bad rep just because there's a bunch of elitists who refuse to shop there. They routinely use their size and power to break laws and contracts and there's nothing anyone (including the American government, in practice) can do about it. But I digress.

I work for a large publisher. Wal-mart breaks the street date on our titles from time to time.

The real reason why there is no recourse against Wal-mart is that they don't get their books from us (or any publisher) directly, they go through a third party. We sell the books to this company and they sign an agreement to abide by the street date, then we get the books to them so they can get it out to all their customer by that date. To accomplish this the books must go out early.

But then we find a Wal-Mart put the book on sale, but what can we do? Cut off the 3rd party and all their other customers from the next street date? Can't do that. Tell them who they can and cannot sell that title to? Nope. So we rattle our sabres and that's about it.

 

[Scribble]

Dickens and Tolkien left the island on the wrong coordinates...

 

[Atavar]

I thought they were moving the island?

 

[EricNoah]

I had some of this explained to me back in the day and I don't know if it's still true. But as I understand it, the book stores and gaming stores get their WotC stuff from two very different distribution sources. WotC was having a hard time getting book stores to honor street dates (there wasn't much WotC could hold over a chain bookstore's head, so to speak), So to circumvent that they decided they would try to control the distribution dates instead. If there was an unexpectedly early shipment in the distribution lines, that's what could have affected retailers' abilities to sell early -- because they got it early.

 

[Andor]

Just a quick point.

The ethics I was talking about are not those of the seller, but of the buyer.

We are all informed consumers who (as shown on this thread) are perfectly well aware of market forces and the buisiness implications of things like breaking street dates. It may not be in the power of the producer to punish the retailer however we as consumers certainly do have that power. If a company is breaking street date it does them exactly zero good if no consumers purchase that item from them before the proper date. It's the failure to exercise that power of ours that I was remarking on when I started this thread.

 

[Asmor]

I don't really see it as much of an ethical quandary on the part of the buyer. In particular, if all you did was switch your order from Amazon to Buy.com you're not abandoning an FLGS.

There might be an issue with someone switching from an FLGS to Buy.com or some other place, but has anyone actually done that? It seems to me that if you're choosing to buy from an FLGS, you're already willing to pay more to support them. If you're willing to pay more to support them, it seems likely you'd wait a few extra days as well.

The fact that the PDFs are readily available online makes the few extra days even less painless. It's worth noting that I'm not losing any sleep over downloading a book I preordered and paid in full months ago. You could try to argue that it's unethical, but I doubt you'd be able to convince me.