Amazon, Macmillan, e-readers
Jan. 30th, 2010 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessIf you haven't heard, Amazon and Macmillan have gone to war, with the unfortunate result, for readers and writers caught in the middle, that you can't buy Macmillan's books on Amazon.com, and writers can't sell Macmillan's books on Amazon.com. Macmillan is the large parent company that owns the huge presses of St. Martin's Press, Henry Holt and Co., Tor (science fiction), Forge (mostly mystery but other stuff as well), my beloved Scientific American and several other publishers. They are Big Guys. Amazon.com is the world's largest online bookseller, selling multiple other items as well.
)
Full disclosure: I am an occasional blogger for Tor.com (returning next Thursday assuming this weekend goes well), which is owned by Macmillan, and yes, I am paid a token amount for that. I've also been a reluctant Amazon.com shopper, but when I have bought things from Amazon, they've tended to be major purchases (specifically, I bought my electric trike through them). I'm also aware of the very hostile feelings towards Amazon.com that many of you have. Also, I own a Sony e-reader, not a Kindle.
Macmillan and Amazon have been fighting over the Kindle, Amazon's ereader, and the prices for Kindle books. Partly as a response to Walmart's discounting, and also presumably to help increase sales of the Kindle, Amazon capped prices for Kindle editions at $9.99, regardless of the cover price listed by the publishers, listing that price right next to prices for hardcover books, allowing readers to think, hmm, if only I'd plopped down that money for a Kindle, think of the money I'd be saving right now. Of course, Kindle copies use DRM, which means I can only read this on the Kindle.
(If you've been followingericreynolds's blog, you've been noticing that these are not the only prices Amazon.com has been fiddling with – they have frequent and as far as I can tell, completely inexplicable sales on some but not all of Hadley Rille Books.)
Meanwhile, over at the Sony ebook store, prices for ebooks are only slightly cheaper than hardcover prices, until the book goes into paperback, at which point Sony reduces the prices.
Which brings me to a chat about the Sony e-reader, which I got as a birthday present.
There's a lot to like about the Sony e-reader. It's lightweight and easy to use and once fully charged stays on for hours. You can easily change the size of the font, flicker between books, head to specific pages, and bookmark different pages – the bookmark feature, especially, makes it feel like a real book. Also, as I mentioned, you can scribble ALL OVER THE BOOK, and then see the book with your scribbles or without your scribbles and delete your scribbles and put in new scribbles. I don't think that the actual intention was to let me finally indulge my apparently deepset urge to deface library books with "OH THIS SUCKS" or draw little smiley faces on good bits, but it's there, and I have to say, I seriously wish I'd had this feature back in college with reference books and textbooks. What's also cool is that you can email these comments to friends. The reader remembers where you stopped, and it has a little dictionary feature which the cat discovered quite by accident. On a related note, the screen does not break when a cat steps on it, although I do not recommend this for you or the cat. Also good: you can carry a lot of books at all once for the weight of one, which is great for the times when you're not entirely sure what you'll be in the mood for.
Also good: the access to libraries and other electronic editions. In just one month it's hit the point where I check to see if the Orange County Library has an electronic copy before looking for a hard copy, and I like being able to download a mystery novel at 1 am when I'm having an insomniac attack. The Sony e-reader also does a great job with all of the Gutenberg e-texts, and it is easier on the eyes to read those books on my e-reader, adjusting the font, than on the computer screen. My only ongoing objection to the e-reader is that it doesn't offer an option for reading with or without backlighting, which means if the light is poor, the e-reader is hard to read. On the other hand, to my surprise, yes, you can read this in bright sunlight, which is impossible on the Toshiba laptop and doable on my Samsung netbook only after certain adjustments. On the other other hand, our library, at least, still doesn't carry that many ebooks yet, particularly some hardcovers (for instance, two recent biographies by Alison Weir). This, however, is partly a result of the Orange County Library's recent and severe budget issues, which in turn are the result of the severe collapse in home values here. So I can't exactly blame Sony for this.
So overall, yes, thumbs up for the Sony e-reader.
And now the bad:
The Sony e-store. And more specifically, the prices at the Sony e-store. Let's chat about four books:
On the good, that same biography by Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower, January 2010, Ballantine Books.
Hardcover list price $28.00
Walmart, hardcover $14.00
Publix (I was shocked too; I have no idea what this is doing there) $16.00
Barnes and Noble, hardcover membership price: $15.40
Barnes and Noble, ebook price, $9.99
Amazon, hardcover price, no membership: $15.40
Amazon Kindle price: $9.99
Sony ebook price: $9.99
Ok, so here, on a brand new book available only in hardcover and e-book editions, I'm saving money on the ebook. (Although with all that, I ended up just putting the library's hardcover on reserve, since I don't expect I'll be rereading this book.) But let's look at the less good:
Catherynne Valente (catvalente)'s Palimpsest, Spectra, February 2009.
List price: $14.00. Copies were available at Mega-Con and Dragon-Con for $10.00 and I assume similarly priced at other cons, although I'll let others clarify that for me.
Walmart: n/a
Barnes and Noble, trade paperback, $10.08
Barnes and Noble, ebook, n/a (This is a surprise.)
Amazon: $10.08
Amazon Kindle: $9.99
Sony ebook price: $12.60
Notice: the Sony ebook price is higher than the price I would pay for the trade paperback. And the trade paperback is only a few cents higher than the Kindle edition – an edition that thanks to the DRM policy, can only be read on the Kindle. At least the Sony e-book edition can be read on multiple devices. If Barnes and Noble had an e-edition, it could be lent out on the Nook, important because the reason I was interested in an ebook edition is because a certain person still hasn't returned my trade paperback copy.
Philip DePoy, The King James Conspiracy, St. Martin's Press, 2009
List price: $25.95
Amazon.com, no longer available as of today, but presumably the Kindle edition was $9.99.
Sony ebook: $18.96
Sharon Shinn, Fortune and Fate, Penguin, 2008, paperback
List price: $7.99
Barnes and Noble ebook price: $19.96
Amazon Kindle price: $7.19
Sony ebook price: $7.59
Again, here I am paying only 40 cents more for a copy that I can take into the bathtub, loan to friends, never have to worry about the electricity, and possibly trade in at a used bookstore for more books. (I say possibly because I'm not very good at getting rid of books. I like to keep them beside me bringing me happy thoughts even as they steadily take over my living space. But this is just me.)
So, ok: compared to hardcover books, the ebooks seem fairly priced – and I can see publishers (and writers) worried that undercutting the ebook price too much, at this stage, can cause two separate problems: reduced revenue and royalties for all involved, and the infamous economic issue that if you underprice something, people undervalue it, and assume that it isn't any good.) The problem comes when a book moves into a paperback edition – or starts at a paperback edition, because then the prices for ebooks no longer look quite so reasonable or good. The vast majority of books at the Sony store are only a few cents less than their trade paperback or mass paperback versions, and sometimes actually more. (And we won't even get into Sony's habit of charging a buck or two for books in the public domain available for free at Gutenberg.)
When I buy a hardcover, trade paperback, or mass paperback, I'm fully aware that I'm also paying for paper, ink, shipping, storage and so on. Most of these are not issues with e-books. So why are publishers charging the same or only slightly less for ebooks? (To add to the problem, I've found formatting issues in some of the ebooks – both the ones I got from the library and the few I bought through the Sony store with gift certificates). Some of these are clear carryovers from Microsoft's ongoing tendency to throw unnecessary formatting code into everything, but not all, and it's annoying.)
(Others have already pointed out the irony that Amazon's music is DRM free, to compete directly with the DRM versions on iTunes, in direct contrast to the Kindle DRM editions. I can say, as a user, that it gets wearying to have to reverify that yes, yes, I did indeed "purchase" the iTunes version every time a computer dies and I have to switch my music library to a new computer. I have "purchase" in quote marks because I didn't pay for most of these DRMed songs – they were either the iTunes "Song of the Week" or "Discovery Download" of the week or those free songs Starbucks was offering for awhile. I think I've actually bought about, um, 3 songs from iTunes? Maybe more; I'm not sure. But it's irritating to constantly have to verify that yes, I have the rights to play songs that iTunes (or Starbucks) gave me for free, and nice not to have to do with the free songs I've downloaded from Amazon.com.)
Let me be clear: I'm not thrilled with Amazon's approach here, and from a writer's perspective, I have a major concern with Amazon's attempt to dictate the prices publishers are charging (Scalzi, over at Whatever has much more to say about the economic impact on writers). I also completely agree that it's problematic to offer a Kindle edition for $9.99 against a $29.00 hardback edition in order to sell more Kindles, and that the growing tendency of both Walmart and Amazon to dictate what prices publishers (and other producers) should charge is a concern, especially since these prices do not always take into account the costs of production. And knowing the costs behind book publishing, I am very concerned about the effect these enforced lowered prices will be having on the already beleaguered small press, most of whom would be lowering the costs for their printed books if they could. And I would note to Amazon that when it comes to ebooks, they have some very serious competition coming up with the iPad and Apple's iBooks store.
(Incidentally, I actually am ok with Walmart, Bestbuy and Amazon selling certain items at a loss to get foot traffic into the door or web portal, which is actually how some of this all started. (Some of it - the issue of charging less than a CD or DVD for album/movie downloads - came up more as a a response to illegal piracy.) My concern comes in when they - well, Walmart and Amazon - decide that this loss needs to be shared with publishers and thus creators.)
But Amazon does have one point here, however poorly made: publishers need to be taking a serious look at the prices they are charging for ebooks after the trade paperback or paperback edition is in print. By all accounts Apple is already taking a hard look at this and will be taking it into consideration, the same way they currently adjust prices on some songs and complete albums on iTunes now. We pay less for (legally) downloaded music, movies and television shows, and this is the expectation people have for ebooks. Sure, some people may well be willing to pay for owning something that won't take up vast shelf space (even if books make me feel happy!), but I'm not sure we're there yet. Maybe in a couple more years.
John Scalzi tossed off a suggestion, which makes a lot of sense, and mirrors what seems to be happening with some TV shows: charge full prices initially, and adjust as time goes on. For instance, if you absolutely must watch Leverage (legally!) the day it airs, you need to pay for cable and watch a few commercials; you can pay a small fee and watch it commercial free through Netflix or iTunes the following day; or you can watch it for free, with commercials, a week later. I assume this financial model must be working on some level since TNT has renewed Leverage for a third season. It's very similar to what was a successful book marketing strategy – full price for hardcover for those unable to wait or who wanted a more long lasting book, considerably reduced prices for the paperback editions.
***************
On a completely unrelated note, homemade fig preserves are amazing. I just needed to share.
)
Full disclosure: I am an occasional blogger for Tor.com (returning next Thursday assuming this weekend goes well), which is owned by Macmillan, and yes, I am paid a token amount for that. I've also been a reluctant Amazon.com shopper, but when I have bought things from Amazon, they've tended to be major purchases (specifically, I bought my electric trike through them). I'm also aware of the very hostile feelings towards Amazon.com that many of you have. Also, I own a Sony e-reader, not a Kindle.
Macmillan and Amazon have been fighting over the Kindle, Amazon's ereader, and the prices for Kindle books. Partly as a response to Walmart's discounting, and also presumably to help increase sales of the Kindle, Amazon capped prices for Kindle editions at $9.99, regardless of the cover price listed by the publishers, listing that price right next to prices for hardcover books, allowing readers to think, hmm, if only I'd plopped down that money for a Kindle, think of the money I'd be saving right now. Of course, Kindle copies use DRM, which means I can only read this on the Kindle.
(If you've been following
ericreynolds's blog, you've been noticing that these are not the only prices Amazon.com has been fiddling with – they have frequent and as far as I can tell, completely inexplicable sales on some but not all of Hadley Rille Books.)Meanwhile, over at the Sony ebook store, prices for ebooks are only slightly cheaper than hardcover prices, until the book goes into paperback, at which point Sony reduces the prices.
Which brings me to a chat about the Sony e-reader, which I got as a birthday present.
There's a lot to like about the Sony e-reader. It's lightweight and easy to use and once fully charged stays on for hours. You can easily change the size of the font, flicker between books, head to specific pages, and bookmark different pages – the bookmark feature, especially, makes it feel like a real book. Also, as I mentioned, you can scribble ALL OVER THE BOOK, and then see the book with your scribbles or without your scribbles and delete your scribbles and put in new scribbles. I don't think that the actual intention was to let me finally indulge my apparently deepset urge to deface library books with "OH THIS SUCKS" or draw little smiley faces on good bits, but it's there, and I have to say, I seriously wish I'd had this feature back in college with reference books and textbooks. What's also cool is that you can email these comments to friends. The reader remembers where you stopped, and it has a little dictionary feature which the cat discovered quite by accident. On a related note, the screen does not break when a cat steps on it, although I do not recommend this for you or the cat. Also good: you can carry a lot of books at all once for the weight of one, which is great for the times when you're not entirely sure what you'll be in the mood for.
Also good: the access to libraries and other electronic editions. In just one month it's hit the point where I check to see if the Orange County Library has an electronic copy before looking for a hard copy, and I like being able to download a mystery novel at 1 am when I'm having an insomniac attack. The Sony e-reader also does a great job with all of the Gutenberg e-texts, and it is easier on the eyes to read those books on my e-reader, adjusting the font, than on the computer screen. My only ongoing objection to the e-reader is that it doesn't offer an option for reading with or without backlighting, which means if the light is poor, the e-reader is hard to read. On the other hand, to my surprise, yes, you can read this in bright sunlight, which is impossible on the Toshiba laptop and doable on my Samsung netbook only after certain adjustments. On the other other hand, our library, at least, still doesn't carry that many ebooks yet, particularly some hardcovers (for instance, two recent biographies by Alison Weir). This, however, is partly a result of the Orange County Library's recent and severe budget issues, which in turn are the result of the severe collapse in home values here. So I can't exactly blame Sony for this.
So overall, yes, thumbs up for the Sony e-reader.
And now the bad:
The Sony e-store. And more specifically, the prices at the Sony e-store. Let's chat about four books:
On the good, that same biography by Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower, January 2010, Ballantine Books.
Hardcover list price $28.00
Walmart, hardcover $14.00
Publix (I was shocked too; I have no idea what this is doing there) $16.00
Barnes and Noble, hardcover membership price: $15.40
Barnes and Noble, ebook price, $9.99
Amazon, hardcover price, no membership: $15.40
Amazon Kindle price: $9.99
Sony ebook price: $9.99
Ok, so here, on a brand new book available only in hardcover and e-book editions, I'm saving money on the ebook. (Although with all that, I ended up just putting the library's hardcover on reserve, since I don't expect I'll be rereading this book.) But let's look at the less good:
Catherynne Valente (
catvalente)'s Palimpsest, Spectra, February 2009.List price: $14.00. Copies were available at Mega-Con and Dragon-Con for $10.00 and I assume similarly priced at other cons, although I'll let others clarify that for me.
Walmart: n/a
Barnes and Noble, trade paperback, $10.08
Barnes and Noble, ebook, n/a (This is a surprise.)
Amazon: $10.08
Amazon Kindle: $9.99
Sony ebook price: $12.60
Notice: the Sony ebook price is higher than the price I would pay for the trade paperback. And the trade paperback is only a few cents higher than the Kindle edition – an edition that thanks to the DRM policy, can only be read on the Kindle. At least the Sony e-book edition can be read on multiple devices. If Barnes and Noble had an e-edition, it could be lent out on the Nook, important because the reason I was interested in an ebook edition is because a certain person still hasn't returned my trade paperback copy.
Philip DePoy, The King James Conspiracy, St. Martin's Press, 2009
List price: $25.95
Amazon.com, no longer available as of today, but presumably the Kindle edition was $9.99.
Sony ebook: $18.96
Sharon Shinn, Fortune and Fate, Penguin, 2008, paperback
List price: $7.99
Barnes and Noble ebook price: $19.96
Amazon Kindle price: $7.19
Sony ebook price: $7.59
Again, here I am paying only 40 cents more for a copy that I can take into the bathtub, loan to friends, never have to worry about the electricity, and possibly trade in at a used bookstore for more books. (I say possibly because I'm not very good at getting rid of books. I like to keep them beside me bringing me happy thoughts even as they steadily take over my living space. But this is just me.)
So, ok: compared to hardcover books, the ebooks seem fairly priced – and I can see publishers (and writers) worried that undercutting the ebook price too much, at this stage, can cause two separate problems: reduced revenue and royalties for all involved, and the infamous economic issue that if you underprice something, people undervalue it, and assume that it isn't any good.) The problem comes when a book moves into a paperback edition – or starts at a paperback edition, because then the prices for ebooks no longer look quite so reasonable or good. The vast majority of books at the Sony store are only a few cents less than their trade paperback or mass paperback versions, and sometimes actually more. (And we won't even get into Sony's habit of charging a buck or two for books in the public domain available for free at Gutenberg.)
When I buy a hardcover, trade paperback, or mass paperback, I'm fully aware that I'm also paying for paper, ink, shipping, storage and so on. Most of these are not issues with e-books. So why are publishers charging the same or only slightly less for ebooks? (To add to the problem, I've found formatting issues in some of the ebooks – both the ones I got from the library and the few I bought through the Sony store with gift certificates). Some of these are clear carryovers from Microsoft's ongoing tendency to throw unnecessary formatting code into everything, but not all, and it's annoying.)
(Others have already pointed out the irony that Amazon's music is DRM free, to compete directly with the DRM versions on iTunes, in direct contrast to the Kindle DRM editions. I can say, as a user, that it gets wearying to have to reverify that yes, yes, I did indeed "purchase" the iTunes version every time a computer dies and I have to switch my music library to a new computer. I have "purchase" in quote marks because I didn't pay for most of these DRMed songs – they were either the iTunes "Song of the Week" or "Discovery Download" of the week or those free songs Starbucks was offering for awhile. I think I've actually bought about, um, 3 songs from iTunes? Maybe more; I'm not sure. But it's irritating to constantly have to verify that yes, I have the rights to play songs that iTunes (or Starbucks) gave me for free, and nice not to have to do with the free songs I've downloaded from Amazon.com.)
Let me be clear: I'm not thrilled with Amazon's approach here, and from a writer's perspective, I have a major concern with Amazon's attempt to dictate the prices publishers are charging (Scalzi, over at Whatever has much more to say about the economic impact on writers). I also completely agree that it's problematic to offer a Kindle edition for $9.99 against a $29.00 hardback edition in order to sell more Kindles, and that the growing tendency of both Walmart and Amazon to dictate what prices publishers (and other producers) should charge is a concern, especially since these prices do not always take into account the costs of production. And knowing the costs behind book publishing, I am very concerned about the effect these enforced lowered prices will be having on the already beleaguered small press, most of whom would be lowering the costs for their printed books if they could. And I would note to Amazon that when it comes to ebooks, they have some very serious competition coming up with the iPad and Apple's iBooks store.
(Incidentally, I actually am ok with Walmart, Bestbuy and Amazon selling certain items at a loss to get foot traffic into the door or web portal, which is actually how some of this all started. (Some of it - the issue of charging less than a CD or DVD for album/movie downloads - came up more as a a response to illegal piracy.) My concern comes in when they - well, Walmart and Amazon - decide that this loss needs to be shared with publishers and thus creators.)
But Amazon does have one point here, however poorly made: publishers need to be taking a serious look at the prices they are charging for ebooks after the trade paperback or paperback edition is in print. By all accounts Apple is already taking a hard look at this and will be taking it into consideration, the same way they currently adjust prices on some songs and complete albums on iTunes now. We pay less for (legally) downloaded music, movies and television shows, and this is the expectation people have for ebooks. Sure, some people may well be willing to pay for owning something that won't take up vast shelf space (even if books make me feel happy!), but I'm not sure we're there yet. Maybe in a couple more years.
John Scalzi tossed off a suggestion, which makes a lot of sense, and mirrors what seems to be happening with some TV shows: charge full prices initially, and adjust as time goes on. For instance, if you absolutely must watch Leverage (legally!) the day it airs, you need to pay for cable and watch a few commercials; you can pay a small fee and watch it commercial free through Netflix or iTunes the following day; or you can watch it for free, with commercials, a week later. I assume this financial model must be working on some level since TNT has renewed Leverage for a third season. It's very similar to what was a successful book marketing strategy – full price for hardcover for those unable to wait or who wanted a more long lasting book, considerably reduced prices for the paperback editions.
***************
On a completely unrelated note, homemade fig preserves are amazing. I just needed to share.