Posted on 03/14/2012 6:41:33 AM PDT by Help!
The case centers on Apple's move to change the way that publishers charged for e-books as it prepared to introduce its first iPad in early 2010. Traditionally, publishers sold books to retailers for roughly half of the recommended cover price. Under that "wholesale model," booksellers were then free to offer those books to customers for less than the cover price if they wished. Most physical books are sold using this model.
To build its early lead in e-books, Amazon Inc. sold many new best sellers at $9.99 to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle electronic readers. But publishers deeply disliked the strategy, fearing consumers would grow accustomed to inexpensive e-books and limit publishers' ability to sell pricier titles.
Publishers also worried that retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. would be unable to compete with Amazon's steep discounting, leaving just one big buyer able to dictate prices in the industry. In essence, they feared suffering the same fate as record companies at Apple's hands, when the computer maker's iTunes service became the dominant player by selling songs for 99 cents.
As Apple prepared to introduce its first iPad, the late Steve Jobs, then its chief executive, suggested moving to an "agency model," under which the publishers would set the price of the book and Apple would take a 30% cut. Apple also stipulated that publishers couldn't let rival retailers sell the same book at a lower price.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Oh I agree. But the question is why does an e book cost more than a dead tree book?
The other problem is similar to why most pilots are paid very poorly. People dream of being an author, and with lower barriers to entry, prices will go down.
At 10,000 books in a print run, you have exceeded diminishing marginal returns, because you will only save another 25 or so cents per book, max, but you will have to pay a lot more for your warehouse space which charges you by the pallet “footprint.” Even a pallet with a few loose cases left on it, still costs you full pallet storage fees every month.
So your print runs must be balanced against your expected time to sell them all, versus your warehouse costs. So if you know you will dispose of 10,000 books in a short time, no problem. Or maybe you have an entire garage to dedicate to pallets of books. I know about that, too. I can tell you, a few pallets, and there goes your parking space.
All in all, it’s been the best thing ever for us self-published “indie” authors. Quality will out. Thousands of badly written novels are just dead wood or electrons, going nowhere. It also helps to have a rather unique “niche” that is not the flavor of the month. Can you just imagine how many badly written vampire/fantasy novels are uploaded to Kindle every day?
This forum called Kindleboards has been a tremendous resource for me. I usually hang out in the Writer’s Cafe. You can learn ANYTHING about ebooks at KB. ANYTHING. It’s just....terrific. And I don’t throw praise around much.
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/board,60.0.html
I’ve been Reading the Eric Flint “1632” Ring of Fire series from Baen. I download the ePub format to my Mac, import it into the iTunes library, and sync it up to the iPad and read with iBooks app.
Quality will shine through. On of my current favorite authors goes by Vaughn Heppner, and spent many years trying the traditional route till e publishing. His topics would never be touched by a traditional house, similar to yours.
Wow, I just looked, VH is quite prolific! It takes me 2-3 years to write my novels. I am not a sc-fi buff, but I’m glad that ebooks are allowing a lot of unpublished authors to have a fair shot. After that, “quality will out.”
But all we ever wanted was a fair shot. Thank you, Jeff Bezos!
From history to sci fi, he is a great read. The book on Carthage is a favorite.
I thought they were all scifi. Is his Carthage novel historical fiction?
” Ebook format works pretty well in a linear “text” like a long novel, where you are not constantly flipping around and referring to charts, graphs, photos, references etc. “
I found that tabs opened to google maps of the Tidewater region and the Potomac enhanced EFD just fine.
Is that on a Kindle Fire? Hyperlinks appear? I had no idea. I just have a basic B&W Kindle, it’s not even hooked up to wireless. I D/L via a USB cable.
I’m going to check out Sword of Carthage for sure. My long-term backburner project would be an epic alt history, where the Viking seed fell on warm, fertile soil in America. If the Vikings had the luck of Cortez, then iron making, the wheel and horses could have come over in AD 1000.
Project Gutenberg Austrailia has the rest of them, since copyright lengths are slightly less insane there.
Thanks. I'll take a look to see them and what other early 20th century books they have. I guess Disney hasn't paid for enough Australian legislators to continually extend copyrights there.
No hyperlinks, but that would be an interesting idea.
I was reading EFAD using Kindle Cloud Reader on my computer. Kindle Cloud Reader opens in a Google Chrome browser so I simply opened a few tabs for google maps of the locales that you were describing. I had one for greater Norfolk and another for the Fort Washington neighborhood.
I am glad you cleared that up because I was trying to reconcile how one loses money on selling a copy of an eBook being there is virtually no cost whatsoever in duplicating a bunch of ones and zeros.
Hypertext. A good Reference eBook is formatted with hypertext usually in PDF format.
Actually Amazon WAS losing money on the ebooks until this “price fixing” by the publishers. Because the real “price fixing” is what the publishers charge book sellers, traditionally, there’s a set price a publisher charges the bookseller for a book. Say $10 for a hardback, $4 for a paperback, whatever. Then the bookseller chooses what to sell the book for.
Amazon has always sold new hardcover books as a loss leader. For instance when the last Harry Potter book came out, Amazon sold millions of copies and did not make a penny on the sales, apparently their strategy was just to increase traffic to their site.
So Amazon would buy ebooks from the publisher for what the publisher asked and then discount them on their website. Amazon has the money to do this. It’s pretty clear they were trying to make themselves the major ebook player.
Since the price change that Apple and the publishers set, publishers are actually making less money per ebook in many cases but they get to control the price point. It’s in their interest to keep the “value” of a book high.
Whatever happens is going to be interesting but I don’t root for Amazon. Like Google, they’re a little too big and too.... all intrusive.
Oh that is not what they are REALLY worried about.
See Publishers had a LOCK on the book market. If you wanted to get published and sold you had to dance to their tune. Then changes in the traditional Dead Tree Media book industry allowed Independent authors a way to break the strangle hold BIG PUBLISHING had on the market.
Then eBooks destroyed forever the death grip BIG PUBLISHING has on the book market. Now they are scrambling in the same way the RIAA/MPAA is doing. See Amazon has in place a system where I can upload my self Published eBook to their Kindle Market and I can get either 70% of the proceeds of the sale of the book or 35% of the proceeds of the sale by choosing how I wish to go about marketing the book and whether I wish to sell it on competing platforms.
This is a worst case scenario for BIG PUBLISHING. So the Publishers are trying to deal with Amazon's very real threat to their Monopoly on Publishing by entering into a deal with iTunes to try and make it the only market Authors will want to deal with and hold the line on the high price of BIG PUBLISHING book prices.
See BIG PUBLISHING can't afford to pay Authors 70% of the price of a book because they have to pay for all the bureaucracy their industry has been bloated with over the years. A self publishing Author doesn't even need an agent. He just writes it and puts it up on the net and starts promoting using Social Media which is waaaay more efficient that they traditional BIG PUBLISHING way of doing things.
Granted he probably won't become as Big as Stephen King but then he can sell a fraction of the copies King has to to at a fraction of the cover price and still make real money.
For a time, Amazon was loosing money on some (not all) of the NYT best sellers. This was when they were selling them at $9.99. They also lost money when Apple tried to muscle in on the market and the big 6 colluded with each other. That didn't last to long, and the prices rose 10 to 25%.
The issue is that the publishers are trying very hard to break e publishing in general and Amazon in particular. They saw Borders go under, and Barnes and Noble is going down. They are that Amazon will take over the market, and force the prices lower.
In the end, I suspect there will be a standard epub format, which will force all the players on a level field. There are authors who are already skipping the publishing houses and selling the books on their websites.
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