Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Pulls Book Publisher's Listings; Ebook Wars Underway?
As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple's new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon's way of "expressing its strong disagreement" with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: "It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes' insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that's selling the content. Last time, everybody compromised and walked away mostly happy: Universal and NBC got more flexible pricing, iTunes got DRM-free music and more TV shows for its catalog to sell. ... The difference in this fight is that Macmillan is one of the publishers signed to deliver books for Apple's iBooks store. They have somewhere to run. And credibly. That wasn't really the case with record labels, who tried to fuel alternatives to dilute iTunes power, and failed."
Apple is going to absolutely slaughter them on 1 through 3, maybe not 4. I'm looking forward to having another eBook reader to choose from.
Amazon dropping publishers is just an offense to me as their customer. I have no sympathy for them here. Maybe some day ePaper will deliver on its promise but for now I've given up.
begun the book wars have
No comment on the technical legality of Amazon's de-listing, but it's certainly an abuse of power by conventional standards. What we might call "strong-arming." And yes, refusing to sell merchandise can be strong-arming when you're by far the dominant seller.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I'm wondering if Apple's ePub books are DRM free? If so then folk do have somewhere to run - they can buy any one of the myriad of other e-ink readers out there.
If they have DRM that resticts users to an iPad, then it's a different story. The 1.5lb iPad with a backlit lcd screen is unlikely to be the reading choice of the masses.
Flame on, if you like, but this is precisely why I bought a non-Kindle device and happily read what I want from /b/torrent in any way and manner I choose. Fuck you, Amazon; fuck your DRM, fuck your WhisperNet and fuck your shitty closed formats.
That what's actually going on here is that Macmillan isn't committing anti-trust: they're merely setting their wholesale price for e-Books at a level that Amazon doesn't like.
Who's committing anti-competitive behaviour is Amazon: illegally tying stopping sales of paper books because they don't like the price they were quoted on electronic books.
My first thought when I read that a publishing group was being delisted was how am I going to know what was delisted?
I use amazon because I feel (dont really know) that it gives me access to pretty much every book that I can buy and so if Im researching a topic or want to read about something now IM not so sure that I'll use amazon.
Yeah, I know I could use a library but I live somewhere where its not that great and I dont know how to seach for books in other way, but now that I think of it, I'll do some googling.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Hopefully this will cause more than a few authors to reflect on who they want to be in charge of their livelihoods: a bunch of suits playing politics with the authors prospects, or some other distributor (or collective) who has their wellbeing foremost.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
No printing, distribution, warehousing, etc.
I want to pay _less_ for an ebook than a paper book, especially considering I can't easily resell an ebook.
No Kindle for me, thanks.
I have little detail about iBooks, but I see a comment asking about DRM within the first 31 comments on the review on cnet.com. The reply to that comment leads me to believe that the eBook industry is heading into a big mess of incompatible DRM formats, just what caused the music industry such problems when they unsuccessfully tried to dethrone iTunes.
One of the fallouts of that was that selling DRM-free music started to be viewed by the music industry as a a necessary evil. We can only hope that the book publishing industry will take less time to get to the same (correct) conclusion.
I really don't understand why people keep trying to shoehorn epaper and netbooks into the same category. I wish apple luck, and I think i might get iPad if i didn't already have an apple laptop: iPad + iMac would cover more use cases than Macbook + iMac, and cost less as well*, although just a macbook + generic LCD external monitor covers a lot of those cases as well.
*presuming of course, an all-apple home.
But it's not an ebook reader, and the Kindle is not the only e-reader, nor is it the only widely-held e-reader. Sony has a number of mature offerings, and Barnes & Noble's device looks very interesting, although it can't possibly have the numbers to compete with amazon yet, it's only two months old and it's been sold out for one and a half of those months.
I think publishers would be making a mistake if they think they can play apple and amazon against each other in this case, or if they think that trying to do that worked for them in the last case (e-music)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
For decades Ford would not authorize the creation of a dealership if it were to be owned by a public company. Ford feared losing too much control if one body had say 50 Ford dealers throughout the nation - the body would be able to name it's own prices, make decisions Ford wanted to make, etc. It was inevitable and eventually happened anyway. Ironically, the Ford/GM/Chrysler stores owned by large publicly traded companies were the ones that survived least scathed from the economic problems faced in 2008 and 2009. It was the small mom and pop shops whose franchises were either terminated or couldn't keep inventory and hold on long enough and closed their doors.
History repeats itself a lot, sometimes in a similar way - so Macmillan, you'd better get on the ball and let Apple and Amazon do their thing.
And Rupert Murdoch... Shame on you! You'll die a poor, broken old man with nothing but a memory of how you destroyed your empire.
Disclosure: I work in the Automotive Retailing sector.
Interesting. I'm curious how this will play out relative to the iTunes defection.
I expect Apple to:
1. outsell Kindle with iPad
2. be stubborn about pricing (look at iTunes history)
The fact that Apple is not the first big mover makes this interesting, as it will be years (if ever) until they'll have the same market power in books as they did after a year of the iTunes Music Store.
With iTunes it was, from the consumer's perspective, a benevolent hegemony. With books the price pressure from Apple is upwards, and Amazon is holding the line. Though they're differentiated products - kindle is B&W e-ink, iPad is color backlit LCD.
From a strategy perspective, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Probably won't hurt book publishers in the same way as music labels - book sales will not degrade into chapter sales in the same way that album sales degraded into single track sales.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Until all of this crap blows over and the industry pulls its collective head out of its collective ass I'll continue to do it the way I have for years now...
Buy the dead tree version so the author gets paid and then download the ebook from a torrent site.
I wonder how far Amazon will take this? Since the retail book industry is essentially consignment sales, does Amazon have the option to return all Macmillian books in inventory as unsold? What about pre-orders for unreleased books? Now Macmillian is owned by Simon and Schuster which is a division of CBS.
Will Amazon expand their conflict to all Simon and Schuster Titles?
Maybe stop selling CBS and Viacom products as well. (DVD and CD's)?
This could get real interesting, real fast. FYI: Amazon stock closed at $125 friday, CBS at $12.93
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
I want to archive my ebooks on my computer, i want to be able to read them via fbreader on my n900 or via Calibre on my netbook. In short i don't want DRM infested ebooks at all. I'm willing to spend a lot of money if the market will give me what i want.
I've got to say that MacMillan has never liked the concept of e-books to begin with, has been one of the fiercest supporters of strong DRM, and have ALWAYS wanted to price their e-books way too high. MacMillan is, for those who don't know, the owners of the TOR imprint (read: Wheel of Time) as the one most likely to be known by /. readers. That's right, the same people who will price an e-book like a hardcover after the paperback is out, and who regularly charged $15 for the PROLOGUES of the wheel of time books in electronic format. Plus they almost always delay the e-book publications, which annoys me. I have never liked MacMillan, and the only reason they get away with it (from me) is because while I don't like their company's policies on digital media, they actually do have pretty high quality editors and authors.
And while they could probably care less at Amazon de-listing their kindle books, if they've delisted the dead tree books, that's a real threat. And they deserve it, probably. That said, this is a game of chicken. Amazon can't afford to de-list their dead-tree for very long, and MacMillan can't afford to have them de-listed for very long. Who will blink first?
Or it could just be a glitch, there's no official reasons posted and TFA even admits they're not sure of the link, here. Amazon has had some wierd glitches before.
In another note, I do a lot of e-book reading on both my Kindle and my Laptop and other devices, and if what I want to do is 'sit and read a book' for several hours, the kindle wins every time.
...competition was supposed to lower prices, not raise them?
I guess they'll mod up anyone these days.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The difference in this fight is that Macmillan is one of the publishers signed to deliver books for Apple's iBooks store. They have somewhere to run. And credibly.
You mean to a marketplace that doesn't exist yet and a device that is 60 days out with unproven market traction? Doesn't sound very credible for me; two months of lost sales from your biggest retailer is a pretty big deal for all companies.
are they going to lock out the Kindle iPhone application from running on the iPad?
My book club picked a book from Tor, which seems to be a Macmillan subdivision. I had sent the preview to my Kindle, and went to buy it yesterday. It was no longer available, so after thinking "WTF?" for a while, I bought a used paperback copy instead.
Way to go, Macmillan!
Since Amazon say 60% of their book sales are Kindle, I imagine Macmillan are going to be hurting.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
From the replies, it looks like we're looking at two separate issues -
- Kindle vs. iPhone / iPod / iPon / iWhatever
and
- availability of products
On the first issue, the iPawn (let's just call all the products by that name) is better than the Kindle, hands down; but both devices ultimately suck for reading. IMHO, digital books can be a good supplement to printed material, but have yet to successfully replace printed material (especially for technical books).
The second issue is honestly more important to me. While it's not exactly new (Best Buy, Wal*mart and I'm sure many others demand a lower price from the manufacturer), one critical difference here is you'd be getting the EXACT same product, but the manufacturer would have a preferred retailer, and try their best to force (by price) potential customers to use that retailer over any other. Serves them right if Amazon dumps them!!!
These exclusive agreements with distributors go directly against the concept of free market. Amazon has every right to fight back, and any consumer who is at all concerned with his rights to choose what they buy and where they shop should be telling MacMillan goodbye at this point.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
on /. where some of the comments pointed out how people are being caged with Apple's plan to only allow iStore apps on their products. with the results of this particular fracas, it seems that the cage is also getting a strict perimeter established around it.
"To stop the terrorists."
It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes,
Seems to me Apple is pulling the s*** with iTunes, resulting in price hikes, more DRM, and even less availability.
Anyway, maybe we'll get lucky and Amazon and Apple destroy each other.
As an avid Kindle reader, I wish Amazon would take more stands like this to lower the prices of their ebooks. I already don't buy over-priced titles because the publishers just don't get it: I don't have to read their stinking books. There are millions of other books for me to read. I'll die wishing I'd read a few more.
What these publishers don't seem to understand is that my walking into a Barnes & Noble with nothing but a credit card and they supply me with the reader (paper) is vastly different from my going out and spending hundreds of dollars on a reader and then purchasing the content at practically zero distribution cost to them and the retailer. When I see that a paperback is $5.99 at the store and $5.99 on my Kindle, I hesitate to buy it because I know that there is some cost in paper, printing, binding, storing, shipping, retailing, and selling that paper. But the cost of digital distribution is practically zero, so that $5.99 is nearly pure profit. If they just reduced the price to reflect the reduced costs to distribute the content and make the same profit as previously, I'd be quite happy.
The main reason I purchased the Kindle is because I do a lot of traveling, so I can carry much of my library with me and read whatever I'm in the mood to read without carrying a bag full of books and being in the mood to read the one I left at home on that trip, plus I can buy one that I would never have found in the airport bookstore. This is why something like the iPad will never work for me. I also don't like reading while staring at light bulbs, even dim ones called LCD's. So if the publishers think that Apple is going to be their savior, they're high on crack. What I've said all along is that most people who actually read books will not be interested in bulky, low battery life dim light bulbs. But that doesn't mean the iPad won't sell well, which in turn does not mean the iPad will sell a lot of books.
If Apple thinks the winning strategy to selling books is to offer them at a higher price on a higher priced device, I think they're high on crack. So far I honestly haven't explored P2P options for getting ebooks, but if the publishers think that if I really want this book that I'm not going to pursue the P2P option when their book is not available for my reader, then they're high on crack, too.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
What's wrong with real books?
Used bookstores are great. Can you re-sell your used "eBook"? Can you buy used "eBooks".
This consumer toy horseshit is a way to funnel money from you to them.
Content will be more tightly controlled and the whole thing only means higher prices to read anything.
People are stupid if they fall for this bullshit.
If you don't know what a wife is, how come you know it's out of place to post about one on Slashdot?
OMG humor logic fail
The kindle was designed for book junkies, and for people who like to read newspapers/periodicals. Does it have limitations, yes, but it does do its key functions well, deliver text content anywhere there is a cell signal with a very long battery life.
There are several key markets for books.
Premium customers - new books in hardback
technical customers - technical books.
children books
paperback customers
bargain hunters
periodicals -
The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.
Amazon has realized that only their premium customers will even pay for the 9.99 price for new books. If I pay that kind of price for a book, I want the dead tree trophied on my book shelf with the thousands of other dead trees in my house, so I can re read them later in life.
Personally I use my kindle for disposable media, like news papers ( the oklahoman and St. Louis Post dispatch) and magazines ( reason, mit tech review and reader digest.) All those combined equals a little over $20 a month, that before the kindle, I never would subscribe to.
When I am in the mood I usualy do the following to get free and cheap books, usually classics.
1. Every day or so amazon will offer a free book on the kindle, to lure you into a series ( it works, i usually end up buying the free book and the others in paper form)
2. type "-domain" in the kindle search bar. It will return all of the current free and cheap books. Usually around 20,000 or so.
3. Go to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide with the browser on the kindle. That will download a "book" that will allow you access to most of the guttenberg and other free book repositories on the intertubes.
Due to the ease of free content, amazon has been posting low cost collections of authors for usually a $1.00 that has excellent indexing and tables of contents.
I think the ipad will have its market but until they can make a device that I only have to charge once a week is useable any time during that period to allow me to read ( usually 2-3 hours a day) in addition to all of it computer usage, I will stick with my netbook and kindle in my backpack.
dhh
Where is Macmillan going to make up the revenue from sales of print books that they'll forfeit by not being on the Amazon store? Unless the third-party sellers are expected to make up the difference, in which case Amazon's move hasn't accomplished anything punitive at all and is an empty gesture.
I now buy more via kindle than on paper, and am frequently annoyed when a kindle version is not available. Recently a book published in 1924 was recommended. ebook format? Not available. Only dead tree. Half the books I find on amazon seem to be unavailable on kindle. I don't buy the paper one (with rare exceptions), I just skip that title.
On pricing: it seems the publishers want us to believe they don't price based on print cost but instead on 'value'.
But we all notice that is contradictory to our experience, they generally do price exactly on print cost (at least it sure feels that way when looking at books in the store).
Talk about jumping on a bandwagon before you know where it is going. I guess if I looked at Apples track record and saw everything they have done up to date, I would probably say, it is a good bet it will be a hit. However, they don't even know what type of people will buy the ipad. I was just thinking it would be a cool mini tablet system, depending on what applications it comes already installed on it, but now that I know what the applications are, they are going to have to make a whole lot more for me to spend over 700 dollars for wifi and 3G.
The Force of Amazon just deleted him.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
If you live close to a used book store and are just reading what strikes your fancy
then sure, a used book store can be great. Just try to find the new book
Fatal System Error in such a store. Oh. First wait a couple years and then
hope this low-volume book will show up in your local?
Sure, Kindle won't do everything. But it is a wonderful reading device and the software update of a couple months ago vastly improved the appearance and readability of photos and diagrams and pdfs.
I am essentially a professional reader, and I go through 1,000-2,000 pages a week easily, if not more.
I've also been a gadgeteer since the same time as many of us greyhairs on /. I can remember when the Newton was the coolest new tech thing on the block and I was busy reading books on it. In the meantime, I've gone through desktops, tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, smartphones, and Palm devices galore.
Laptops suck for reading in volume. They discipline your body; you must adopt a specific narrow range of postures and locations in order to use a laptop, which is heavy, hot, and fragile. Not good by page 800 when you're still trying to plough on. Not to mention eyestrain and headaches from the backlight.
I can get through a couple hundred pages on my iPhone, tiny as it is, but suffer many of the same problems in the end.
Kindle has been a revelation. I have nearly switched to Kindle entirely for my secondary research, and it's clearly a reading device. Light, endless battery, no eyestrain, nonfragile (no hinges, worries about pressure on the LCD, popping keys off when they catch on your zipper, etc.), no heat generation, legible in anything other than pitch darkness.
I'm tempted by the iPad, but it certainly would NOT be a Kindle-killer for me until/unless high-refresh color e-ink emerges.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I don't want the bulk personally, I don't like having loads of possessions, all my music and film is digital. I haven't bought any ebooks yet either. So i'm happy to sit on the side lines for the moment. As long as I get Copy and Paste and the ability to highlight text within an ebook then I'll be happy. I want features that go beyond the paperback, adding value and making it worth the price.
Jonathanjk.com
For the last few weeks I've been reading off my Kindle almost every night by the light of a single Candle two feet behind my shoulder. I've had no eyestrain problems at all.
That's nice, but I can read whole books on an LCD with no light source - and have done so. So we're pretty much back to square one as to saying which technology will work.
Personally, the lower contrast of the Kindle screen bothered me enough that I decided to wait until that aspect had improved.
But really, I think the arguments about which causes greater eyestrain are silly - Backlighting is just that, light that is lighting up pixels the same way traditional lighting is lighting up your kindle screen. Eyestrain is more a factor of reading distance and fonts and font size than LCD vs. eInk.
The pro arguments for eInk to my mind are way more about battery life than anything, and that is actually pretty compelling all by itself, I don't think readability is a good vector to argue over which technology would be preferred.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Barnes and Noble, especially if Amazon's tactics include delisting print publishers that sign deals with Apple for ebooks.
whats average sized pdf 5-10meg
700 meg of bandwidth costs me 2 cents
WHY are they charging me/you 10-15$? for a digital copy that might add.5 cents in power to createa copy then have me download it THUS ME BEING the part of distribution
again copyright hounds gouging and ripping people off
eBooks are _already_ overpriced.
Indeed, even at the "lower" price that Amazon was charging, ebooks are too expensive. Even without DRM, they should be a fraction of the price of a tangible book.
So, is the Apple store going to charge the higher price, at which Amazon balked?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
People are paying $10 for an eBook???
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
The interesting thing about this battle, is how it is wholly unlike the music battle.
I don't know if I see either Amazon or Apple gaining an upper hand in selling eBooks. I think the iPad will be far more popular than the Kindle, but the thing is that Amazon already has a iPhone Kindle reader and it can take advantage of the greater space on the iPad.
iBooks will be more convenient shipping on the device as it does, but Amazon already has an established market with a descent size (I don't own a Kindle but I do have a few Kindle books that I read on my iPhone). So I think that ease of use of iBook will be balanced out by Amazons cheaper prices, which means neither will have a dominant market share after a year or so. So it's pretty important that Amazon hold the line on price, otherwise they lose that counterbalance that keeps people buying Kindle books.
The Nook is utterly screwed though. They launched too late and consumers will choose either an iPad/Kindle.
I have to say the inability to use the eBooks from either Amazon or Apple outside of the reader space has made me very reluctant to to buy them at all, I still prefer physical books unless the eBook is compellingly cheaper. But for travel there's no denying how much nicer an electronic book is, which is why I have any at all.. the way I stand to do it is I just think of it like a very expensive rental and if I like the book I buy a real copy later.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have about 15,000 pieces of content in my library, which I manage with Calibre. Books, lots of journal articles, reference volumes, etc.
Some of them began life as PDF files, others as MOBI, RTF, DOC, EPUB, TXT, even a few old LIT files. They can all be converted to MobiPocket files easily, and then simply USB'ed onto the Kindle.
Whispernet doesn't take anything away from you. I can read any format the Sony readers can. What it does do is give you an option to go online and buy content. In other words, it gives you an extra option, rather than taking options away.
Oh, and by the way, you CAN use DRM'ed MobiPocket files on your Kindle (just use your Kindle's PID as your device ID) and they'll work fine.
And double-by-the-way, you can always use DRM removers to strip DRM from both AZW (Amazon Kindle format) and MOBI (MobiPocket) files, which are the two dominant ebook file formats at ebook stores. All you have to do is use a DRM stripper (like MobiDeDRM) with your Kindle PID and out plops a non-DRM file. It takes all of about 2 seconds.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If Amazon's print coverage isn't comprehensive, they lose marketshare to their competitors in that space (particularly Barnes & Noble, who also has an ebook store as well.) Amazon can't really afford to delist every major publisher that makes a deal with Apple unless very few do, and if they try that approach and don't quickly kill the iPad, they stand to lose even if Apple doesn't win, because Apple and Amazon aren't the only players in the market.
What's wrong with real books?
Here we have yet another example of "I don't have an interest in a product, so obviously anyone who does must be stupid." Since several million people (myself included) were interested enough in a Kindle to pay several hundred dollars for one and you don't understand why, that obviously means all those people must be stupid. Indeed, whenever *YOU* don't understand something, that means someone *ELSE* must be stupid. Yep.
I have a personal library of several thousand books and I designed my custom-built house specifically to have a library room.
I also bought a Kindle and am very pleased with it. I bought it before going on a 2-week cruise last summer. If you can't think of what is wrong with lugging several dozen "real books" along with you on a trip, then I don't think I'm up to educating you. I worked pretty hard to keep my luggage down to something that was practical to lug through, for example, the London underground. It wouldn't have taken very many books to blow that.
"Particularly if they have a contract with Macmillan."
You're right. I'll bet Amazon forgot they have a contract.
ahem.
Seriously? That's why you believe? That companies do stuff like this out of spite and without an understanding of the ramifications of the decision? You can't be serious.
15 bucks may seem OK to you, that's your business, but you also brought it up in a commentary forum, so I will comment. From my perspective, taking a longer range view of technology and society and business, you are encouraging them to keep trying to get 10,000% (whatever, some huge amount way over real production and delivery costs) markup prices for digital copies of stuff. I think that's shortsighted. I guess you make fair pay, but what about the rest of the planet for whom 15 bucks is a very considerable sum? Tough crap for those people?
You're force feeding the digital replicator tech monopolist trolls WAY too much there, bragging about it, and helping screw it up for the rest of the planet in the future by keeping prices just way way too high for these digital products. forced artificial scarcity. Just seems dumb to me to play make believe that some digital copy costs just so much to make and deliver, when it doesn't, it is nothing like a dead trees copy there, not even close.. Even ten bucks for some digital copy of a random book is way too expensive, it's ridiculous. Hey, why not brag about paying 200 grand for a toyota corolla? I'm sure there is some dealer out there would gladly markup to that level and take that much for one. Or maybe you can get one of those 999$ iPod apps that just says "I'm just so rich I can afford this app that does nothing but show how much it cost me, neener neener"? I mean, do you really want to encourage this price level for a few cents worth of electron transfer, and make it even worse? You said this was an academic question, so there it is in more detail, exactly why is this supposed to be a good deal for society in general terms, paying such a huge markup? How about the alternative, much cheaper per-copy costs, and have a MUCH larger sales potential then? How about that as a more fair alternative?
I say people should do this, stop paying that much for digital copies of stuff, and then however they want to go about it, email or phone calls or whatever, tell those content sellers they would be perfectly willing to buy product x, y or z, but only at a much fairer price level, a price level that reflects TRUE digital replicator costs to make and deliver new copies, for anything really, books, music, movies, software..whatever. If it can be made into a digital copy and transferred that way, it should be really cheap now, because that's the reality of the tech/engineering level we are at now.
I just hate large scale industry collusion to maintain artificial high prices in most anything, I don't care what the product is, tangible or intangible. It's even worse when people encourage that behavior and business practice by paying those bloated prices.
I thoroughly like the idea of ebooks and whatever, so that people all over the planet can get access to that, it is just ridiculous to think those sort of prices are fair or even a long range smart business decision.
Huge volume sales and really cheap prices are where it is at long range I think, at least it certainly should be. Charging 15 bucks for an ebook just knocks out about 3/4ths of the humans on the planet now from considering purchase, and even in the remaining 1/4 it is still serious price gouging.
I'm really not trying to be flambeau-bate here, just I seem by nature to take a longer range view of things, that's just how I look at stuff, always have. Digital copy prices today are a bad precedent now, and it needs to change.
I have oft wondered why we haven't seen a MEMS device modeled after squid chromatophores yet, which are full-color and in some cases capable of something like vibrant full motion video.
Regardless, the two devices are not the same *now* (apple could correct this by putting eInk on the bottom of the tablet and using the tilt sensor to determine whether to use "handy-web" mode or "power-saving book-reader" mode.)
More importantly, they are not the "only possible contender" to compete with kindle, so it seems really weird to me that they'd be positioned as such: they don't offer anything close to the same kind of device, at least not yet, and until they do, they're really kind of a different market: people who want portable electronic text, but want other features so badly they they're willing to suffer with the principle deficiency of using a backlit display as your text reader.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
About two years http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/15fox.html ago Apple and movie studios implemented exactly the business model you described (except, of course, with movies rather than books).
John Scalzi (and others, I'm sure) discusses it in his blog, Whatever
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
people who are practically illiterate (read: iPad owners)
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
But what's more amazing is that Amazon loses money on the transaction for many new releases.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I think the backlit LCD screen is the achilles heel of the iPad as a e-book reader.
Personally I think the cost of e-book readers are achilles heel of them.
Being readable outdoors, and consuming no power at all unless turning pages, is what virtually defines the usefulness of an ebook.
Being able to read a book period is what defines it's usefulness. No battery or a dead battery doesn't work. However I can grab one of my print books and take it outside to read by star/moonlight. Growing up I did precisely that, grab a book, walk out the front door, lay in the grass, and read the book. That is when I wasn't star gazing.
CNN is running an iPad vs Kindle fluff piece thought experiment this morning and give virtually no weight to the utility of e-paper vs. the pizzazz of color, and unfortunately I expect the same from most consumers
And what of the utility of being able to use a tablet and not just an e-book reader? Personally I have no interest in getting an iPad, however if Apple were to take a Wacom tablet and marry it to a MacBook Pro (the MacBook Pro Tablet) then I, and probably lots of other photographers, would be interested.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Regardless, the two devices are not the same *now*
I think you're making the false assumption that people will find the iPad so hideously unusable as an ebook reader that it will outweigh the other things it can do.
apple could correct this by putting eInk on the bottom of the tablet and using the tilt sensor to determine whether to use "handy-web" mode or "power-saving book-reader" mode.
Please feel free to glue your Kindle to the back of your iPad, but here's a hint: don't apply for a job in Apple's design department :-)
Seriously, apart from the extra cost; the ergonomic problems of having a delicate display on both sides of the device; the need for a different user interface (and probably a whole new API and display manager) in ebook mode ("multitouch" depends on a responsive display) you're talking about investing R&D in a technology which will almost certainly be obsolete or confined to a niche with in a year or two.
My prediction: as soon as a "best of both worlds" display technology comes along that's up to Apple's standards, they'll use it. Sounds like the transflective display doesn't quite cut the image quality mustard yet, but its not vapour.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Apple has wasted an opportunity to redefine the tablet market, and instead given us an oversized iPod Touch that doesn't fit in anyone's pocket. This assessment might not go down well with the fanboys, but although I don't have any animus against Apple in particular (I have an iPod and a 2nd-hand MacBook) I won't be buying this gadget.
Same here. When I first heard of the possibility of a tablet Mac I was gungho. But the iPad disappointed me. Now if Apple had married a Wacom tablet to the MacBook Pro, that would be a different story. I'm pretty sure Apple could do a better job than Axiotron did with the Modbook.
Should there be a Law?
... and the hardback is $$$ vs. the Kindle edition.
New hardback vs. kindle edition is one of the few scenarios where the kindle could save you money. But generally, saving money isn't kindle's main benefit in my experience.
Oh, then I wouldn't ever buy -- or recommend -- one, and I'm certainly not alone.
And I'm not alone in saying I don't recommend matte screens. For those who want high contrast matte screens do not cut it. However there are filters that can be bought and placed over glossy screens to cut glare. When I ordered the laptop I'm typing this on I had a choice between glossy and matte screens and I specifically chose the glossy screen.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is not universally the case, of course; some of the books were about equally priced, excluding shipping, but of course there is always shipping. (I use Amazon Prime, so the shipping is not easy to calculate, but it's there.) I am a heavy reader -- 2 to 3 books a week. Over the first two years of Kindle ownership I saved more than $1200 versus paper if I'd purchased paper from Amazon. This is actual savings, not made up, I added them up in a spreadsheet in a fit of pique while arguing about e-book futures with someone. But really the savings were much greater: Many of my book buys are impulse, and that means I used to hit bookstores a lot and pay retail prices, especially for recent releases. (As an aside I lament the fact that e-books are the final nail in the coffin of local booksellers. I hate that, although I love having huge catalogs available all the time.)
Of course the readers ate into that a lot; $400 for the first one, $360 for the Kindle2 (because, what the heck, I saved more than that the first year anyway and my daughter can use the old one), and $200 for a refurb Kindle2 after I drove away with the first one on the trunk of my car (this when the readers were still $360). As of last summer I was really only about break-even, but of course every month I go without buying another reader is like another $50 so I'm well up again at this point (plus my daughter's books are cheaper too).
Now, those are all new book purchases, as is my norm. If you're one of those people who hits used bookstores or libraries the economics completely fall apart, although they are getting better as the reader prices drop.
Going forward the economics should only get better.
Dropping prices for e-ink readers are one reason I think the Kindle et al are pretty safe from the iPad. Most of the book readers I know weren't keen on spending $400 for a reader when the Kindle came out, though by last Christmas, at $260, many more made the jump. I think it's a safe bet that you'll see Kindle2-class readers for under $200 by the end of the year, and probably around $120 by the end of next year. It's going to be very hard for the iPad to compete on price. It's a different class of device, so perhaps it will do well anyway, but it isn't going to be mass-market in the way e-book readers are quickly becoming.
Personally I look forward to the competition in e-readers. The more of them that are out there the more competition from retailers and the stronger the incentive to standardize on one book format. (I bet we don't see DRM disappear entirely, for lots of reasons.)
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
It seems that big publishers, who have had last word in the price of the songs/books that they sell, enjoyed being able to set the price of what they purchased the content for and sold the content for. Here comes newfangled electronic media, and now they are the middlemen and not the end distributors - and it appears they don't like being in the position that they have had authors (/musicians) in all along. Seems like a heaping dose of karma to me.
I think you're making the false assumption that people will find the iPad so hideously unusable as an ebook reader that it will outweigh the other things it can do.
It remains to be seen whether or not that assumption is false, however you've clearly admitted that the devices are not the same by using the word "outweigh" in reference to capabilities that each one has that the other does not, which is the claim I was trying to make.
They are substantively different devices with some overlap. We differ in that I believe the differences are at the moment significant enough to make them largely different markets (of which the iPad market it probably larger overall, though the book-reading iPad market may not be), and you believe them to be similar enough to occupy the same market despite the obvious differences.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I just received the following from Amazon.com:
Hello,
We are working with the publisher to make their titles available as soon as possible and at the lowest possible prices for our customers. We will e-mail you when these titles are available, which we hope will be soon.
Just click the link for "new and used" offers for this title.
We hope to see you again soon.
This is really annoying for Amazon Prime members, as the "free" shipping has suddenly disappeared for all Macmillian titles.
Frankly, I really don't care about the eBook dispute; the fact that this is disrupting purchases of dead-tree books just pisses me off.
It has been reported that Amazon was giving a 70/30 for exclusive e-publishing
rights, and 50/50 if other e-publishers are allow to publish the books. If you switch
from 70/30 to 50/50, your price goes from $10 to $15...
It has also been reported that Apple is giving 70/30 no matter what... My guess,
the publisher wants their $7... And amazon is switching from $10 to $15 because
they aren't exclusive anymore.
My solution to reading while traveling is to take one book (or none) and then hit a bunch of used book stores at my destination.
Never know when you might find a whole shelf of out-of-print hardcovers by some author you like, or a great bargain on some well-printed multi-volume beauty.
Doesn't solve the "having to carry a heavy bag" problem, but it does cut it in half. :)
Baen Books sells most of its backlist (the part it doesn't give away free) for $5-6 per DRM-free book. I regard that price as reasonable and probably have spent $150 on their product in the last year, which I might read on my netbook or PDA or even my desktop. That's what DRM-free means, no happy horseshit involving proprietary DRM software locked to a single machine in a time when most likely customers are going to want to read or listen on more than one device. IOW, readily available, decently priced, and oddly enough, they make money for the publisher as well as saving it for the reader.
I don't have a lot of use for "walled garden" setups, whether they're Apple's or Amazon's.
Needless to say, I don't read e-books on Kindle.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Sorry for any inaccuracies - I don't own a Kindle or anything of the sort (yet), but there's at least one big reason for me to choose it over dead tree: I live in Brazil.
I love a lot of books that are in English/French, and I've recently had some bad experiences with translations, so "national" versions - when they do exist - are a no-go for me. This leaves me with two options:
1) Buy the book from a local book store at a sometimes ridiculously inflated price and absurdly long shipping times (2+ months if the book is not very well known) - that is, if they actually have it.
or
2) Take my chances at importing it from the US/EU/etc and hoping that customs is not on strike yet again (though their usual is not that much better). Stuff that takes 2-6 days to cross the globe to get here can take more than 3-4 months to be cleared (it happened to me several times), and I've read stories about people having to wait 8 months for a freaking pair of snickers.
Finally, the closest thing my city has to a public library is a building the size of a Burger King, and the nearest city where I might have better chances is 200km away.
So there. 60 seconds to download a new book? Count me in.
They are substantively different devices with some overlap. We differ in that I believe the differences are at the moment significant enough to make them largely different markets
FWIW I think they are different markets right this minute - I just see them converging over the next few years as today's prototype displays (whether they are new eInk tehnologies or hybrid LCDs) emerge.
Main disadvantage I see with the iPad - the battery might be touch and go on a 10 hour long-haul flight... but then, my brain is touch and go on a 10 hour long haul flight, so I'd possibly settle for a regular iPod with audiobooks plus a real book to read when you weren't allowed electronics.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Amazon sells more things than books you know?
On the other hand, can you imagine how much bad press Apple would get if they did anything like what I've mentioned?
That's true, but in general I think as you noted there is a whole category of books already, and Apple is not going to remove them.
And because Apple cannot remove all of them, I cannot see them targeting just one or two apps like the Kindle. This is a case where Apple really needs to compete on quality... Apple has not removed audio applications in the past even though there is the iPod player.
The Kindle app is the litmus test for how much Apple really will not allow any competition on the device, or if they are flexible. The line I think Apple would not want a Kindle app to cross, is to offer the book store within the app itself as that might be seen to be too much like the book store they are offering. The way it works now is that it opens Safari to the Amazon site, and that should be fine for both Apple and Amazon to proceed.
Even Phil Schiller and the Apple Fanbois couldn't double-talk their way out of that one.
I do not think there's a single "FanBoi" who would try. You could easily explain the rationale, but you'd have to admit it sucks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This consumer toy horseshit is a way to funnel money from you to them.
Yet somehow printed books aren't a way to funnel money from you? Have you seen the prices of books lately?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Book pricing (like most pricing) is only loosely related to production costs. The entire publishing ecosystem is being dragged into the digital age by a mix of defacto bribes and strong-arming from technology companies like Amazon and Apple. (Shameless plug for more detail at http://blog.sbooks.net/2010/01/14/ebookcost/.
The real sparks may start to fly when the price wars collide with vendor lock-in. It's not clear what kind of DRM we'll see for iBooks. They've mentioned using ePub, but it's not clear if they'll go with Adobe's DRM, like the Nook, or some version of their own. It will also be interesting to see if Apple allows the iPhone/iTouch Kindle app on the iPad.
I am fully aware of those sorts of distinctions, and addressed them. I do a lot of macro and micro economic research and writing here, I am fully cognizant of normal economic terms, and also with the usual stupid and now boring lame excuses I hear from rip off price proponents and excusers.
Digital copy prices today are serious price gouging, no way around it.
You have your single production and then gold copy cost, after that...unlimited copies you can have "for sale" for chump change. It has been a pretty big game changer. So we need some game changing prices to reflect this reality.
There is no scarcity there with digital products, in any practical engineering or supply numbers, to justify such high retail costs, none whatsoever. And your "market", if you deign to notice, is and has been to a large degree routing severely around your blatant price gouging and going directly to the black market, despite all your ridiculous efforts to stop it, and you have no one to really to blame besides short sighted and incredibly stupid greed based last century level tech business policies.
You can expand your potential customer base, greatly, on a global scale, by making these virtually free to manufacture copies very cheap in legitimate retail price, and then hit volume sales instead of limited and restricted sales, and still get a decent markup per copy. And most likely, "make more money" long term than what you are doing now.
Instead, these digital copy peddlers went WAY high, just insanely ridiculously high, and people took the most obvious way to beat that, and started pirating and manufacturing their own copies for the cost of a few electrons moving around, and this big stupid no win for anyone war between the producers and the consumers began, and it never had to happen in the first place.
It's freekin dumber and more retarded than the "war on some drugs" those idiots started to "reduce crime", just short bus stoopid and has been a total long range failure, as was pointed out to them, by a lot more forward looking analysts, back when they first started that policy in earnest.
Now we have layers of DRM and other various schemes, cons and plans, draconian anti technology luddite laws, complete with ludicrous copyright extension limits, well beyond what is necessary or fair for society as a whole in the first place, and terrible precedents set that for this major technological breakthrough, that they have basically colluded to have carved in stone "per unit" pricing models that were first set way back when the only copies available for sale fell into the durable goods/expensive to make and distribute model.
Nuts.
It is blatantly unethical price gouging, and I contend business wise short sighted as well, they are making *less* money than they could, plus annoying their potential customer base.
There was never any need for maintaining those prices in the first place once the switch to digital production and delivery became possible, they could have just switched to lower prices, still at a real decent markup, much higher than in any other industry, that would still be *cheap*, as in really really cheap, for the consumers, and not have made enemies of all their potential customers, and probably we would not be seeing near as much piracy now.
And to make it worse, that I addressed previously, it is anti-humanitarian, they have restricted practical access because of these ridiculous prices to a smaller segment of the planet's people, rather than everyone, when there was no need for that, they could have made it affordable for all, anyplace. It is just slap wrong on many levels, and that is a large one.
I am in food production myself, and if I saw at the retail level food products that I knew were a 10,000% markup, I'd be just as annoyed, and would expose that, and rail against it in public, as well. One, I would never seek to restrict my products t
How can we get the bright publishing industry captains to understand that an ebook *must* cost less than books made of dead trees if they want to get to mass public? When they're going to learn that nobody pays more for less (except the filthy rich like themselves maybe)?
The reason why ebooks are not popular is that they are more expensive than paperbacks. Until ebooks get less expensive than paperback, if will stay a thing for early adopters and geeks like me. And I only buy e-books that are cheaper than their paperback because I'm not dumb and don't want to pay for the next luxuries of fat executives.
Seem that all publishers are the same: music, film, books, whatever... Do they learn to think?
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
Not sure if there are any advance details yet, though. I think they announced it last year, and with the Nexus launch they've now got their toe-in-the-water online merchant stuff set up, so now I guess they have to graft a set of eBook databases onto the back of it and get the publisher permissions. They can probably pick up a lot of passing trade by making the public-domain chunk of their library downloadable.
Eric Baird
None of them will see a penny from me until there is a settled standard. Someone else can waste their money helping these giants engage in a price war. I'll stick with a real book until there is some actual advantage to the e-readers. If I really want to save a few bucks, I'll browse the bookstore, then borrow the book of interest from the public library. Once in a while I find one worth buying for my own library, but in most cases I have a good read and don't spend a cent.
On the Palm platform there was a proper set of synchronisation protocols, so that an app could synch its files to a parent computer regardless of the file format. On the iPhone, the necessary infrastructure for sychronisation isn't in place, so the only things that get synched are a restricted set decided in advance by Apple.
If a platform doesn't have a properly developed synchronisation system, then, yes, the ability to use it as a USB drive toload up and resave files is a nice workaround ... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could put your data onto a card slot ... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could synchronise and send contacts, data and files via bluetooth ... which AFAIK, doesn't work on the ippies (at least, not with anything I own). I haven't had a chance to try this with a pair of ippies, but certainly with an ippy-and-something-else, the bluetooth only seems to be there to support bluetooth headphones, the ippy will recognise and connect to all the other bluetooth devices and puters I have, but it won't exchange datafiles with them.
Maybe if you jailbreak it you should be able to load up and resave your files that way, but I haven't tried that yet.
---
Now, on the plus side, one of the things that they're supposed to be changing with the iPad , is that the iTunes synching software should also let you synch files whose suffixes correspond to the major MS Office file formats, plus PDF, rtf and txt, and probably a few ebook formats, so with the iPad you now will be able to plug into your host machine, click "sync", and all those files (if they're in the correct folder location) will be copied onto your machine, to go. It'd be nice if they retrospectively added that freedom to iTunes when its used with an iPhone oriPod Touch, but ... we'll see.
I suppose that you might be able to fool iTunes into allowing any file type onto the iPhone if you, say, had a zip folder and renamed it with a JPG suffix and secreted it in your pictures folder ... but I don't know whether or not iTunes checks the internal file structure of things it synchs, for legality.
I suppose that what you could try to do is write a transfer app that uses the iphone camera to OCR what's on a second iPhone's screen, or you could perhaps get the screen to flash and use that as a low-bandwidth replacement for infra-red transfer. There's an external camera interface accessory for the iPad that gives USB and cardreader support, but since they're not saying exactly what the specs are, it leaves open the possibility that it might only have read-only support, and/or might only support the same restricted set of allowed formats that's registered with iTunes.
I'm going to have to try the jailbreaking route soon, partly because I've just had to uninstall iTunes from my WinXP PC - something in the iTunes suite (perhaps Bonjour?) was making Explorer use 30-100% of my processor ticks even without any apple gear present. God knows what it was up to, but I don't think I can afford to have the iTunes software installed on a PC that I actually do work on. I guess that if you use a Mac, more of these gripes will have been ironed out.
Eric Baird
So do their competitors. But if people who know specifically what they want to buy can't find it on Amazon, they are more likely to start using one of Amazon's competitors.
I have, and it's robbery.