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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."
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?!
It's DRM'd to high hell - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon. There's something slightly frustrating about using an explicitly open format and then spewing their own brand of DRM all over it.
...but of vastly poorer quality and without the ownership and durability advantages of a dead tree.
I'm not so sure that we can count on such a durability advantage. This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'll try to keep it brief...
I am of the opinion that in the future, the 20th and most of the 19th centuries are going to appear to surviving generations as something of a "dark age". Since publishers started using woodchips to provide the requisite fibre to make paper in about the 1820s, residual acids in the paper have had a destructive effect on the paper. While some quality publications still appear on rag or otherwise stabilised or buffered paper, much has simply disintegrated.
The trouble is, although printers must be aware of the problem, they don't seem to be doing anything about it. I have many texts from the 1980s which are in very poor shape, which is bad enough. But what has disappointed me more is that a number of books I have bought *new* in the last year are already showing signs of serious foxing.
Although I still love the feel - and the smell - of printed paper, I'm inclined to think the textual content has a better chance of survival in digital form, provided that it is stripped of proprietary formats and DRM.
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.
In Britain, ebooks tend to be expensive relative to paper books because paper books have 0% VAT (sales tax), and ebooks have 17.5% VAT, or 15% if they are delivered from Luxembourg, which they quite often are. Is it a similar situation where you are?
Anyone who wanted just the ebook copy could buy the dead-tree, get the ebook, then sell the dead-tree and effectively get a discount while flooding the second hand market with like-new copies and driving down the price.