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."

Comments

Kindle v. iPad

[seanadams.com]

Amazon knows they're going to have to be way cheaper in order to sell any more Kindles. The problem with the Kindle is, well, it kind of sucks. I am a regular Amazon customer and have been using one since the second version came out, but there are some major problems wth it.

1. Screen contrast. The Kindle's contrast ratio is worse than newspaper printing or the cheapest paperback. You can read it in direct sunlight, sure, but can you read it indoors without a 200W light bulb directly behind you? I get eyestrain with it after just 15 minutes, but I can read a good LCD for hours.
2. Bad for illustrations. More than half the books I read are technical in nature and have diagrams and equations that require zooming to read. The problem is zooming is incredibly slow and laborious on the Kindle, and in most cases the bitmap image quality is not sufficient to read anyway.
3. Freagin slow. Right, it doesn't matter when you're just paging through a novel, but this makes it useless for shopping for books, web browsing, or quickly finding something in a reference book.
4. Titles are too expensive. Many paperbacks are SAME price delivered 2nd-day UPS to my doorstep (with Prime free shipping). What the fuck? And then more expensive titles are only a few dollars cheaper for the Kindle edition but of vastly poorer quality and without the ownership and durability advantages of a dead tree.

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.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[cheesybagel]

So you think the titles are too expensive, then you lambast Amazon for dropping a publisher which tried to hike their prices by 50%?

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[maxume]

It's entirely reasonable. They are a corporation. He is a customer. He shouldn't care too much about what they are up to as long as they are providing him a product that he desires.

And as they say, if they aren't providing the product, they aren't providing the product.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[sonicmerlin]

While I'm oh so certain the omission of LCD screen quality has nothing to do with any possible bias of yours, I would like to remind you that the Kindle has a e-ink screen is much easier on the eyes than an LCD is. The development of new kinds of e-ink tech (both color and faster refreshing) also gives Amazon a road-map for future screen improvements. Apple's tablet requirements mean they will be stuck with LCD for the foreseeable future. OLED would solve their problems I imagine, but it will be years before 10 inch OLEDs are affordable enough for mass market adoption.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[BrokenHalo]

As usual, there are two sides to this story.

On the one hand, Macmillan are perfectly entitled to strike deals with whoever they want in order to get the best bang for their buck. Fair enough if they can make it work.

On the other hand, they have managed to shoot themselves in the foot with pinpoint accuracy. They have failed to consider that by pinning their products to Apple's iPad, they are (a) gambling on the success of hardware that won't be commercially available for another two months and (b) failing to realise that iBooks is limited to the US for the forseeable future, so they have casually abandoned their international market.

It seems to me that some MBA sales manager has gone charging off to the latest trendy bidder without saddling up his brains first.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[Colonel Korn]

I would like to remind you that the Kindle has a e-ink screen is much easier on the eyes than an LCD is.

Saying it doesn't make it true, but thank you for "reminding" me of the points I already specifically addressed. Have you actually used a Kindle in typical indoor lighting conditions for any length of time?

I'm an amusingly good test subject for this. 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. If I did I'd light more candles, or maybe use a book light. This let's me read in a relatively dim room without bothering my sleeping wife. It's a lot more pleasant than the hours of reading I do on an LCD every day.

A paperback is 7 bucks

[ThreeGigs]

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.

Re:Seems to me...

[FroBugg]

Illegally stopping sales? There is no law anywhere that says Amazon has to sell Macmillan's books. Whether it's because the prices are too high or because they just don't like the way the company smells, Amazon is perfectly within their rights to sell or not sell whatever they choose to.

Re:Is Apple ePub DRM free?

[metamatic]

Erm, no. It's been Steve Job's and Apple's stance for a long time that DRM is a bad thing, even before Amazon sold music. The problem is that publishers want DRM on their products and when they enter into agreements they usually insist on DRM as part of the deal. Do you see any other major player offering DRM-free movies?

If only Steve Jobs had some influence with movie studios like Pixar, he could persuade them to make their movies available DRM-free...