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Apple Raises E-book Prices For Everyone
Nom du Keyboard writes "I was informed by my publisher this week that they would have to raise my e-book prices because they planned to sell them through the Apple iBooks store. How could this happen? A lot of my individual stories sell in the $1 to $3 range, which is well within the impulse purchase amount for many people. In this price range a 50-cent price difference may well be the difference between a purchase and a pass. Meanwhile, Apple is touting its new 'agency model,' whereby the publishers set the prices. However, it seems that Apple requires books sold in its iBook store have prices ending in .99 — nothing else." (More below.)
"Furthermore, Apple requires that if you sell books through them that you absolutely cannot sell them for less through anyone else. To my understanding Amazon also requires this, so Apple and Amazon prices should be identical in the future, but Amazon doesn't force prices to end in .99. What this means is that an e-book that the author was quite happy to sell for $2.29 or $2.49 is now going to cost $2.99 from everybody. While that sounds like only a few extra cents, it adds up over time and can lead to resentment against authors for charging higher prices, even though they have little real control over pricing. I, for one, do not understand why Apple computers only understand numbers ending in .99, or just how Apple is making it better for the consumer this way."
every other day a new stunt and im sure apple is still not evil and there will be people to defend apple's non evilness with me to the extent of defending some private corporation sending private 'representatives' (non pi, non law enforcement) to SEARCH your home as 'not creepy'.
but im waiting. im wondering the precise point at which they will start to realize that if something is going upside down, it means that the going is bad.
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I have been in a iPhone SDK group that has been testing out iPhone's implementation of HTML5 in Safari, and it looks like Steve Jobs has delivered on much of the Flash-like capabilites, especially in graphics. That means you can have peristence data (read: book) too. All told, someone could implement a web application that Apple cannot control which serves books much like the iPad's app. BTW, you could run it easily on Android too. At first, this might seem inadequate. But if you write a generic iPhone application that uses the SDK's WebView to read public domain works, you can customize it more and even put the DRM (if you want it) solely on the server. The point is that the web (and HTML5) may be the thing that gets the Genie out of the iBottle.
While this method would also work for Android and Palm, it probably would NOT work for Windows Mobile 7 which will use IE8, LOL!
Looks like you've shown yourself to be an ass on other topics too, Tom. Gathering yourself some "fans", LOL.