Bartender Geek

No -- the number of customers who know the BACKSTORY as to why they're pissed is a very small number.

The number of customers who are PISSED is one sixth of the people who attempted to buy books and couldn't. And don't have any idea that it has anything to do with ebooks or MacMillan or anything. All they know is that Amazon was broken this weekend.

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In relation to your last comment, about keeping a thank you file to provide evidence of good work at review time to leverage filthy lucre...

It's one thing to play hardball in your profession (perhaps within certain limits, such as not playing hardball with your customers).

It's another thing to play hardball with your family.

Kiralee

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Listening to the NPR report this morning it sounded like MacMillian set a new price point with apple on how much it would sell e-books for the I-Pad, and wanted Amazon to charge the same price for e-books on the Kindle. A 3 dollar difference. And Amazon refused.

As of this morning the report said, Amazon was going to charge 10.50 (up from 9.99) and the I-Pad was going to charge 13.00 the price MacMillian wants Amazon to charge.

So who is the villain of the event:
-- Amazon for not holding the line on price.
--MacMilliam for wanting to charge more money.
-- I Pad for agreeing to a higher price for e-books on the new I Pad, almost forcing other book dealers hand

Off to do more research.

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Well... I'm not sure why you're responding to this - my comment had nothing to do with Amazon, but was meant to go off on it's own tangent relating to contexts in which it is, and is not, OK or effective to play hardball.

However, if you *are* going to talk about Amazon, and who's the villian...

Amazon and Apple are the villians for builidng ereaders with competing, propriatory, DMR protocols instead of supporting a widely available, universal, file protocol like PDF. If they supported a common protocol, publishers could create and price their own products, independent of the device used to deliver the product and any demands made by the manufacturer of that device. Then these sorts of things wouldn't happen, and competition wouldn't be so disruptive to readers.

Kiralee

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Error on my part, meant to respond to Ian's post not your comment.

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thespian.livejournal.com

actually, Apple and the iPad are going to use the EPUB format; "a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)." Some books will be DRMed or not but it's the *publisher's* decision. The format they chose for the iPad is an open standard, and is used by the Nook, the Sony Reader, and will be used by the Adam tablet and others.

So your basic statement that "Amazon and Apple are the villians..." and going further about proprietary software and DRM is incorrect.

Edited Date: 2010-02-01 06:46 pm (UTC)

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Then I was misinformed.

Kiralee

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cheshyre

A couple links for you from people in the publishing industry (mostly people whose books were delisted, so they're knowledgable but be aware of their bias):

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012148.html#396969

Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html

Tobias Buckell: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/

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Thank you, I have been reading Cory's post on BoingBoing and the NY Times report. I'll read those once I get to the doctors office.

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Sorry I meant to reply to Ian's post not your comment.

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Ah... well, no harm done and some good (I probably wouldn't have seen your post otherwise, and it was interesting, hence the major part of my reply; I did, however, also want to clarify my earlier post, since - at the time anyway - it seemed like that might be necessary.)

Let me, in my turn, apologize for sounding overly snappish, and coming on too strong about the (apparent) miscommunication.

Kiralee

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Listening to the NPR report this morning it sounded like MacMillan set a new price point with apple on how much it would sell e-books for the I-Pad, and wanted Amazon to charge the same price for e-books on the Kindle. A 3 dollar difference. And Amazon refused.

As of this morning the report said, Amazon was going to charge 10.50 (up from 9.99) and the I-Pad was going to charge 13.00 the price MacMillan wants Amazon to charge.

So who is the villain of the event:
-- Amazon for not holding the line on price.
--MacMillam for wanting to charge more money.
-- I Pad for agreeing to a higher price for e-books on the new I Pad, almost forcing other book dealers hand

Off to do more research.

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Honestly, I don't think ANYBODY is, particularly, a "bad guy" in this situation. I think that everyone was acting within normal ethical parameters for hardball negotiation. However, I think Amazon totally screwed up in how they handled this. I think that, really, they didn't do anything particularly unethical or dishonorable, or illegal. But I think what they did, and how they did it, was stupid. I think they pissed off a lot of people unnecessarily, and without gaining any advantage thereby.

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403.livejournal.com

Huh. Just personally, I found that when I tried to use Amazon this weekend, the books I wanted were either out of print (Topsoil and Civilization) or hideously expensive (textbook, of which I bought the international version off Ebay for $30).

My sympathies to your writerly friends, though.

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goljerp

The thing is, I think that the publishers may be getting a bit greedy here. Let's look at the costs of an e-book vs a paper book. For a paper book, of course you have to pay the writer. But let's be realistic - for most authors, that's not a big cost (at most, what, 15% of cover price?). And editors, and layout folks to make it look nice, and an artist for the cover. And marketing people. Then there are costs which are only for paper books: printing costs, and the inventory/shipping/handing returns. Those costs just don't exist for e-books; the bandwidth costs are tiny in comparison. It seems that when publishers are talking about wanting e-books to be closer in price to hardcovers, they're thinking mostly about increasing their profits. I doubt they're paying authors higher royalties on e-books...

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felis-sidus.livejournal.com

As I understand MacMillan's pricing scheme, the price of an e-book would vary in some relation to the price of the available hardcopy versions of the book. The e-book price would start out in the roughly $12-$15 range when the hardback version is released. (E-books would be available at the same time the hardbacks were available.) Then, as the book moved to paperback, the price of the e-book would decrease, so that it always would be less than the cost of the least expensive print version available. That doesn't seem totally unreasonable to me.

Someone recently posted a nice explanation of the costs involved in providing an e-book. If I can remember who it was, I'll come back and provide a link.

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The thing is -- the physical printing and shipping? TINY part of the price.

Seriously. Yes, electrons are cheaper than paper and ink. But paper and ink already don't cost a lot. Yes, bandwidth is cheaper than trucks. But trucks already don't cost a lot.

It is true that ebooks are cheaper than paper books. By a few cents.

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goljerp

OK, I stand corrected. Somehow I was imagining paper/printing/shipping/warehouse costs to be at least 10-15% of the cost of making a book. You're saying it's more like 1% or less?

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In most businesses, labor is generally more expensive than supplies; everyone in the publishing industry perenially complains about how little they make, but there are a lot of people involved in creating books - the writer, the agent, at least one editor, and possibly a seperate copyeditor, cover artist, marketing experts, and administrative, managerial, and executive staff to support them (or at least the ones who work directly for the publisher); and of course the printer and shipper (and distributor) have to pay staff out of the price of their services as well.

Add to that the fact that one may need to hire someone to manage the code for an e-book...

That being said, as someone who has looked into self publishing personally, the cost of printing and shipping can be prohibitive. One can create and distribute PDF copies of material that it would be absolutely impossible to create or distribute as 'real' physical books. And while I'm not a big player in my field (tabletop RPG game design), even compared to other independents, I believe many other people / companies in that field have come to the same conclusion, based on how they chose to distribute their products.

Given my personal experience I find it hard to believe there are no significant cost savings in electronic distribution; or at least there ought to be some way to realize some. With regards to e-readers... I haven't seen it yet, not even with the introduction of the iPad.

Kiralee

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As I understand it, though, the main costs in physical printing are the initial setup costs. It costs a lot more, as a one-time expense, to set up a print run than it does to distribute an ebook. Which is why, for small "print" runs, it's vastly more cost-effective to distribute electronically.

However, the per-copy costs AFTER initial setup and distribution chains are set are NOT that high. For instance, I am given to understand that academic texts are so costly because they have small print runs, so the initial setup cost is spread out among many fewer books.

In larger print runs, that initial cost is spread out more. And the per-book cost is only a trivial increase.

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If I'm following you, you're saying that there *are* substantial cost savings in producing that-which-is-distributed-electronically over producing that-which-is-distributed-in-print, at least in certain cases or parts of the industry, even if the source of the cost difference is in how production is handled, rather than electrons vs. paper.

I've heard that people read about as much as they used to; that the number of titles printed each year has been steadily increasing; but the size of the print runs for each title decreases, so that the number of books remains the same. Some people claim it's a serious problem, which could 'kill' publishing (I'm somewhat dubious - serious, yes; lethal, maybe not).

The business model - the one that says printing is a tiny cost of the book - is based on large print runs... large enough to divide up the set up cost until it's immaterial; but print runs are shrinking. So maybe a business model that sucessfully avoids the set-up cost would be better. If it can find a way to pass some of the savings on to customers, and come in at a lower price point then print publishing... well, maybe that would be a way to break into the industry.

Someone could probably make a lot of money by being the first to do that; but so far, it would still take a lot of work - meaning, not all the resources you need are there yet, so one would have to create them first - possibly enough work that it isn't (yet) worth it.

Kiralee

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