Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k. Locke says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies — about 800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner. 'These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.' Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. 'I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go,' writes Kelly. 'It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.'"

Comments

and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.

The way out is socialism. Readers will disagree because they're still on the winning end of having shafted their fellow man. But there's only so much people will take.

Re:and so society dies out

[mangu]

The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.

The way out is socialism. Readers will disagree because they're still on the winning end of having shafted their fellow man. But there's only so much people will take.

Let me understand this: if a book is sold at $0.99 that's capitalism, but if the same book is sold at $9.95 that's socialism?

Your point is that socialism is selling high priced crap?

Re:and so society dies out

[alen]

reminds me of when i first came to the US, parents had no money and my dad would say if you want to see a movie then think very hard about it to make sure you will like it since it's so expensive. same with buying a $25 book. with a $.99 you aren't going to think so hard about it since it costs less than coffee

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Socialism is worker control of, hence responsibility for, the means of production.

Capitalism involves a large underclass of "subservient retards", many of whom have been conditioned to find every excuse possible not to break free from their chains. So much easier to receive your orders, collect your pittance and exchange for shiny toys, isn't it? The wealth ends up in the hands of the same people who also exploited your labour.

Today you're pathetic and you'll amount to nothing, whether you're living on the bread line or have your nice house, yard and 2.4 children. Don't you want to be more than that?

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you want everyone else to be pathetic and amount to nothing, living on the bread line too?

FTFY.

The problem with worker control of / responsibility for the means of production is that it has been proven over and over that they're terrible at it. They lack foresight and they mismanage resources.

Re:and so society dies out

[somersault]

What exactly would qualify as "more than that", may I ask?

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. consider for a moment what is 'more social':

Situation A: A single person - the author - becomes a semi-millionaire.

Situation B: A multitude of people - the author, the people working at the publisher, the people working at the printing press, the people working in distribution, and so forth and so on - receive a reasonable, but not stellar, income.

The pricing in itself is not the mechanism, of course - but it is the catalyst.

As the author points out, soon every book will be about $1. That's great, but are people going to buy 10 times as many books as a result? There's still limited time to actually read those books, which is generally the real barrier (do I think this book will be rewarding enough in the time that I need to read it?) the price is secondary to that, but obviously if there's two reasonably comparable products, the cheaper one would win. So let's say optimistically that 5 times as many books would be sold. A mediocre writer (of which there are plenty) that could still make a living on $10/book is now forced to compete with great authors (of which there are few) that are selling at $1/book. If people can have a great book for $1, then why purchase a mediocre one at $10? But even if the mediocre author lowered his price to $1, why buy a mediocre book for $1 when you can have a great one for $1?

Although I don't think it'll be quite such a killer to the industry as far as non-stellar authors goes (plenty of people still read novellas as it is), there's certainly a potential for consequence that will separate the wheat from the chaff - but what do we, as a society, do with that chaff?

The common answer is "Not my problem". But isn't it?

Re:and so society dies out

[erroneus]

I like the idea of socialism... I like the idea of communism even better. But here's the problem. Every attempt in the history of man kind to achieve these noble states have resulted in a shift of power "from the elite business class" to "the elite government class" which results in even MORE abuse of the people than existed previously.

If I am wrong, please show me where in the world this idea has actually worked?

The problem is that this goes beyond man's nature to want to control everything for himself and is reluctant to trust or release control to anyone or anything else. Given that fact, it's clear the best answer is strong democratic government with term limits and a well regulated economic system which controls and limits what business can do.

Hrm... this is almost what we have here in the U.S. of A... problem here is that business is still too powerful.

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of whom can spell, unlike you.

Re:and so society dies out

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

No. I don't have to buy your inferior product. Neither does the rest of society. If your income depends on your skills at a certain task, like writing in this instance, you need to do a good job in order to make money. If you can't, that's what not being a writer is for.

Re:and so society dies out

[The Grassy Knoll]

I like the idea of socialism... I like the idea of communism

But which one's better? There's only one way to find out.... FIIIIIIGHT! .

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

This, to me, is the essence of socialism: A deep desire to stifle technological advancement so that the people who cannot or will not keep up can have an income that they normally could not have.

It may sound insensitive to touchy-feely types, but if they are obsolete, they must adapt. To encourage them otherwise, in any way, is a subtle, but in my opinion much more sinister type of oppression.

Re:and so society dies out

[Endo13]

There's still limited time to actually read those books, which is generally the real barrier (do I think this book will be rewarding enough in the time that I need to read it?)

That barrier goes away when the price is low enough. People like free or cheap stuff. Most people will take virtually anything they think they might have a use for if it's free (provided they don't perceive it as nothing more than junk or trash.) Heck, if they still have it in 5 years and still haven't used it, they can throw it away so it stops taking up space. After all, they got it for free, right?

The same thought process is basically what happens when you price something digital at 99 cents these days. It's low enough that people perceive it as costing basically nothing, or in other words "practically free". So they'll buy it on a whim, whether they think they'll have time to read it or not. After all, they have room for thousands of ebooks on their reader, and 5 years down the road, if they haven't read it and need the space, they'll delete it without a second thought.

So yes, it's entirely likely that most people will buy more ebooks than they'll ever have time to read, if they're priced low enough and convenient enough to find and get.

Re:and so society dies out

[anegg]

The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.

The way out is socialism. Readers will disagree because they're still on the winning end of having shafted their fellow man. But there's only so much people will take.

In order to make this statement, wouldn't one have had to have read the book in question to determine that it is low-priced crap? Another analysis would be that by providing a market with a low barrier to entry via Amazon, people who are practicing an art because they enjoy it (story telling, music. etc.) are able to make money, too. And because they love what they do, they can provide a quality product at a low price per item, because the reproduction costs are practically nil for them.

Before the book and recording industries got rolling (yes, I realize they got started quite a few years apart), minstrels traveled around telling stories and singing songs. They didn't get rich doing it, but they presumably liked what they were doing well enough. Once mass-market capabilities came about, the actual story or song creator was marginalized while the producer became king. The publishing houses and recording industry folks held the reins because they controlled the market. New technologies have altered that balance of power. Now, as long as a market like Amazon exists, the original artists can communicate directly with the market. I don't understand how this can't be a good thing. It is capitalism at its finest.

The capitalism denigrated in the quote above is the capitalism that has the few abusing the many to profit. That isn't the only face possible for capitalism to wear, any more than socialism is completely represented by the Soviet Union and Soviet-block countries of the last millennium.

Re:and so society dies out

[KahabutDieDrake]

I like the idea of capitalism. I like the idea of Corpratism even better. But, here's the problem. Every attempt in the history of mankind to achieve these noble states has resulted in a shift of power from "the people" to "the company" and then to "the Board", which results in even MORE abuse of the people than existed previously.

Scary how well that works, isn't it? Pretty much along the lines of "democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others". The bottom line is the problem isn't our societal, social, or financial structures. It is, quite simply, people. You can't count on a random human actually acting like a human being. Or caring 1 wit about his fellow men (her/women). While people are capable of such compasion, it can not be expected. Further, capitalism and corporatism (fascism if you ask Mussolini) put finacial incentives on all the wrong stuff. Even worse, they NEVER EVER put a human being first. PROFIT is first, all else can come begging on it's knees. Yeah, well, "More than that"? I'd like to live in a world where people take care of each other, our government is actually there for the people, and the corporations are the lap dogs. I know, fat chance.

Re:and so society dies out

[URL Scruggs]

If I am wrong, please show me where in the world this idea has actually worked?

Scandinavia?

Re:and so society dies out

[erroneus]

You just kind of made my point for me. The problem is people as we both have stated. It is man's own nature that prevents good human progress. We are great when we have a "common enemy" but when we become our own enemy, that's when man turns on itself in the worst ways.

For people to be happy, we have to have dreams and challenges to fulfill. "The Matrix" had it right when they built the perfect society that never worked because people ended up spoiling things for everyone. It's why we have laws in the first place -- we need to limit what people can do to each other to preserve the peace. This is even more important when it comes to large organizations -- they have to be limited even further to preserve the peace and to keep them from tearing society apart.

Re:and so society dies out

[tomhudson]

Nobody is going to buy a mediocre book for $9.95. That's why I can pick them up at the local bookstore for $2 in the remainder bin. That's a hardcover, edited, printed, by a known author (Harry Turtledove - Settling Accounts, Book 2)

The paperback version of that same hardcover that I paid $2 for is on Amazon for $10.85.

A downloadable version is certainly not worth $9.95. A buck? Sure. But that's about it. Times have changed.

Re:and so society dies out

[macs4all]

Situation A: A single person - the author - becomes a semi-millionaire.

Situation B: A multitude of people - the author, the people working at the publisher, the people working at the printing press, the people working in distribution, and so forth and so on - receive a reasonable, but not stellar, income.

But, in "Situation A", the electronic-distribution model, you have conveniently left out all the "support personnel" that are involved, from the IT people who maintain the distribution servers and network, to the web-apps developers who wrote the "bookstore" app, to the hundreds of hardware and software developers, marketing, manufacturing and distribution personnel that bring you e-readers like the Kindle, not to mention all the tens-of-thousands of people who maintain the underlying cellular distribution network.

So, as you can see, both "Situations" call for a LOT of support personnel, who, in addition to the author, are making a living due, at least in part, to the fact that the e-book is selling like the proverbial hotcakes.

And, unlike the dead-tree distribution chain, at least with the current e-book profit-sharing model, the AUTHOR actually has immense control over the pricing and marketing of his book; which has GOT to be a more equitable approach to the marketing of someone's brain-work than the old dead-tree sales and distribution model.

Capitalistic or Socialistic; who cares? There is absolutely no way that this is NOT an improvement over "The Way It Has Always Been(tm)".

Re:and so society dies out

[fractoid]

Although I don't think it'll be quite such a killer to the industry as far as non-stellar authors goes (plenty of people still read novellas as it is), there's certainly a potential for consequence that will separate the wheat from the chaff - but what do we, as a society, do with that chaff?

I believe that this will, in the coming decades, become the great moral struggle for humankind. You see, the threshold for being 'chaff' has been steadily rising ever we became human. In the middle ages, a halfwit could still help out around a farm or perform drudge work - spinning, churning butter, cutting wood. During the industrial revolution, machines began to take over the menial manual labour. At an accelerating rate, the capabilities of our creations began to overtake those of our less fortunate kin.

In the last few decades, industrial automation has removed many jobs. The overseer jobs remain (for now) but the workers have been replaced by machines. And this is just the beginning. For a while yet, there are still jobs that people of less-than-average ability - chaff, as you term them - can do better than machines. Those jobs are slowly disappearing; consider ATMs and internet banking. How often do you talk to an actual live staff member at a bank? I bet it's now a few times a year, rather than a few times a week.

For another example, take automated checkouts at supermarkets. That cluster of machines at the entrance has probably eliminated 5-10 part-time staff positions. Sure, there's still places for the sales assistant who helps out when your checkout gets confused. I bet ATMs had those at first too.

My guess is that we'll see a huge increase in service industries, including a reversion to the old practice of having house servants. As unskilled jobs dry up, the once-high cost of unskilled human labour will fall rapidly. Rich technocrats will employ increasing numbers of low-paid staff to attend to their homes. Having human subordinates rather than machines will be the mark of aristocracy.

Of course, this will only last for so long before robots are better servants than humans. By this stage, we'll have the technology to build a true post-scarcity society (or rather, a society in which the only scarcity is energy, and even then there's enough to go around). The questions are, how will we manage this transition? And more importantly, how will we continue to give meaning to the lives of those who literally have no way in which they can contribute to society?

Re:and so society dies out

[Lumpy]

Yup.

I can go to Tiffany& Co and buy some nice crystal glassware for $600.00..

Or I can find a local glass artist and buy some glassware direct from the artist for $350.00

I paid a LOT less and got a far better product, in fact I got 4 extra glasses just in case some get broken at that price. How? by not paying a bunch of useless people that did nothing at all in the creation of the product.

Ebooks allow me to buy a book direct from the artist or with as little middlemen taking a cut as possible. Etsy is also doing this for tangible goods as well.

I am loving this revolution, it's cutting the dead weight from society.

Re:and so society dies out

[0123456]

Scandinavia?

Scandinavia has significant oil income and has seen growth decline as it's become more socialist. It also appears to be a demographic disaster zone.

I certainly don't see many Americans queueing up to move there.

Re:and so society dies out

[xophos]

no what you are talking about is usually called intellectual property, not socialism.

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

I share your belief and it worries me greatly.

The only partial (and likely flawed) solutions I can come up with:

1). Channel billions of dollars more in to state provided education. The level of investment would need to be such that state schools and universities are as good as or better than private schools. So good in fact that they effectively remove the business case for having private education alternatives (barring specialist faith schools perhaps). I'm talking about much higher teacher salaries to attract the best talent, building thousands of more schools so that class sizes never grow beyond 15 and overhauling the current curriculum.

This gives every citizen an equal chance at being equipped to meaningfully contribute to society.

2). Extend basic state-provided free healthcare to every citizen. Keeps your citizens healthy and gives them more flexibility when choosing work.

3). Create a modern version of the Victorian workhouse system for those that still fall short despite being given the tools to contribute and compete in society. These workhouses would provide basic housing (a bit like South Africa's RDP housing projects), clothing and food. In return, the people would be used as unskilled labour and put to work maintaining the country's infrastructure (road repairs, public gardening, litter collection, public space upkeep etc.). Crucially, the workhouses would make training and educational services available free of charge so that people are given the opportunity to re-enter the mainstream job market if they are capable.

How do you fund this? Massive reductions in defence spending.

Re:and so society dies out

[nedlohs]

Surely the situations are more like:

Situation A: lots of people - the authors - earn a good income writing books they want to write.

Situation B: A small number of people gate keep and determine what gets published and whom gets paid, a small number of people get very rich.

Note that in situation A, the individual authors (or collectives if they so choose) pay other people to do things like editing, cover art and design. And the new publisher/distributors like amazon employ/pay people to write the software, develop the ebook hardware, balance the books, do marketing, etc.

Those great authors aren't going to be selling $1 books, once they are recognized as great authors they'll be able to charge more since people will be willing to pay more for their work since they know it is better than most.

And yes people may buy 10x as many, possibly more than 10x as many. I'm willing to take a chance on a $1 book by an author I've never heard of and haven't had any recommendations about. Whether I'll do that more or less than 10x as often as I buy a book that I actually try to determine if I'll like first since it costs $10 depends on whether the first dozen tries see any success at finding something I enjoy.

And what do you do with all the people who want to be accountants but fail 3rd grade mathematics? And all the people who want to be authors but aren't just mediocre but complete crap? And all the people who want earn a living sitting on their couch playing video games? Is it my problem? Do I have to work to lower the bars low enough so that they can make a living doing their desired career?

Re:and so society dies out

[jedidiah]

"intellectual property" is a form of socialism.

It's the government meddling in the market and granting monopolies and creating cartels.

Any monopoly is really socialism in disguise.

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandinavia is not that great. Norway works because it is living off oil revenue, when that dries up they are in trouble. Sweden is stagnant and the only thing saving it from being a complete disaster is the fact is has a tiny population. Finland fairs a bit better because they are more efficient per capita than the rest of Scandinavia, have a thriving wood industry and also benefit from a tiny population. The one good thing they all have is a highly educated workforce but this is largely possible due to their small populations.

Their interpretation of socialism does not scale to countries with populations in the hundreds of millions.

Re:and so society dies out

[heck]

Of course, this will only last for so long before robots are better servants than humans. By this stage, we'll have the technology to build a true post-scarcity society (or rather, a society in which the only scarcity is energy, and even then there's enough to go around). The questions are, how will we manage this transition? And more importantly, how will we continue to give meaning to the lives of those who literally have no way in which they can contribute to society?

I read stories published in the 80's and 90's where the premise was that the robots take over all manual labor, allowing humans to do what they want. Humans continue to work in the positions that require thought - judges, etc. - but most labor intensive repetitive tasks are done by robots. The premise was that with the robots working, there was tremendous oversupply, and the poor must consume a great deal to consume what the robots produced. The mark of the very rich is that they were allowed to consume less. So the poorest person had to live in a palatial mansion, while the richest were able to live in a two or three bedroom house. I am not saying that is what will happen, but it did make for an interesting read (and allowed the author to set up some imaginary issues and solve them).

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

"There's still limited time to actually read those books"
My eBook reader reads them for me, aloud during my commute.

Re:and so society dies out

[uniquename72]

No, a monopoly is the opposite of socialism. In fact, in pure capitalism, monopolies are nearly unavoidable -- the company with the most success will annex all lesser companies in the same business until only one remains. Dissolving the monopoly and distributing to the masses would be socialism.

Re:and so society dies out

[Technician]

Redbox and Netflix is doing the same thing to Hollywood Video and Blockbuster.

In a vain attempt to keep the ASP high to support the brick and mortar stores, MP3's and Napster, Limewire, and Bittorent set the value of digital music. (remember a CD is digital)

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

I'm not sure where you're going with that. I said absolutely nothing about intellectual property. I was referring to the attitude that everyone should have a job whether they deserve it or not at the cost of advancement.

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

The point is that encouraging able-bodied people to be reliant on anything other than themselves, be it their government, a union, etc. and passing it off as helping them is, in my opinion, the essence of socialism and it's oppressive.

Feel free to refute my point with actual facts rather than calling me a "fucking retard yank".

Please. Enlighten me.

Re:and so society dies out

[anyGould]

If I am wrong, please show me where in the world this idea has actually worked?

Marriage and roommates are the two examples that pop to mind (group control over group resources). But I'll agree that it tends to break down at larger scales (I suspect because once you don't personally know everyone involved, the temptation to skim off the top grows).

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

In fact, if you are the same AC I was responding to, you stated yourself that Situation B above was "more social". I was simply re-wording it for you.

Re:and so society dies out

[KahabutDieDrake]

It's actually kinda funny to watch the progression of commerce on the internet. At first, everyone was like ... uh, what is that thing? Then "retailers" realized they could sell all the stuff they have in stores, but ONLINE. It didn't really effect them seriously. Then came along places like Amazon, which is sort of a middle man multiplying agent. (ebay too) We went from a distributor/retailer model to a manufacturer - distributor - product carrier (non-stocking distributor) - Amazon - reseller - customer. By the time everyone is done taking their cut, the products costs considerably more than it should have.

The really scary part is the credit card processors. Those guys are cleaning up. On a typical Amazon purchase, you should expect to see this CC history. CUSTOMER>AMAZON>RESELLER>RESTOCKER>DISTRIBUTOR>MANUFACTURER>. Now, at typical rates, that's 3% of each sale total, and .23cents per transaction. What a joke.

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

See, there you go begging the question.

It's only capitalists who think of jobs in terms of "deserving" a wage.

To the socialist, who views humans in a far better light, people want to play a useful part in society to the best of their ability. The reward is the opportunity, through control of the means of production, to apply one's skills to improve the lot of humanity. To create a society in which everyone is able to play a willing part without being exploited - in the crudest sense, everyone "has a job" - is the height of advancement.

This was, to a limited extent, the goal of Platonic Greece - but what they achieved with slaves, we could strive to achieve with technology.

(In this particular case, we have just changed the middlemen from printing press workers and publisher marketroids to IT workers and Amazon marketroids. /.ers are so staunchly capitalist partly because they are the agents of the new generation of middle men.)

Re:and so society dies out

[Half-pint HAL]

I like the idea of socialism... I like the idea of communism even better. But here's the problem. Every attempt in the history of man kind to achieve these noble states have resulted in a shift of power "from the elite business class" to "the elite government class" which results in even MORE abuse of the people than existed previously.

If I am wrong, please show me where in the world this idea has actually worked?

I would have thought the original model of democracy as used in ancient Greece was the perfect example of communism in action. The town was run by the townsfolk, communally, and for the greater good.

Under the communal democratic system, many great feats of civil engineering were carried out, not least of which is the Parthenon in Athens.

Ancient Greece was responsible for the foundations of much of modern science, and this probably wouldn't have been possible in any executive-run society.

Communal responsibility FTW!

HAL.

Re:and so society dies out

[Profane MuthaFucka]

If they can't keep up, then I use them for food and for sex. I'm a fucking way better capitalist than you are.

Re:and so society dies out

[ShooterNeo]

Exactly. I have thought this for a long time. The only permanent solution to this problem is to create sentient beings with all of the good qualities of humans, few of the bad, and vastly better brain performance. These beings should be in charge of taking care of us, and should provide those of us who want it a route to achieving our own personal enlightenment.

Re:and so society dies out

[ShooterNeo]

Wait, what? Then why are online prices frequently lower than for Walmart?

There are two glaring holes in your analysis : one is that even if there are more middlemen, the internet means that each entity can perform it's role with less human labor (since computers do almost all of the work for most transactions except for someone who has to physically put the items in the box for very low pay).

And second, those credit card fees may steal 3% from the consumer -> online store transaction, but all of the other transactions, which are between trusted entities (some of that 3% is to cover the cost of fraud) are near 0 fee direct bank transfers.

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

It's only capitalists who think of jobs in terms of "deserving" a wage.

There's really no more to say than that.

Re:and so society dies out

[musterion]

Uhhh ... at $0.99 I might buy a copy just skim it to see if it is worth reading further.

Re:and so society dies out

[duffbeer703]

This is the hype of the dot-com era coming back to actually roost. This isn't "socialism", it's cutting out the middleman. The actual author is making more money and has more (ie. complete) editorial control over his art.

Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, retail placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft.

Re:and so society dies out

[dunkelfalke]

To make things short and simple, socialism is when the workers own the means of production.

Encouraging able-bodied people to be reliant on anything other than themselves on the other hand, has got absolutely nothing to do with socialism and everything with specialisation, which is a very important factor for technical progress - there is just no progress if everyone is busy at subsistent agriculture.

Do you feel enlightenend now?

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

You're purposely being disingenuous.

A capitalist provides for himself by producing something of value. When what he knows how to produce ceases to have value, he learns how to produce something that does rather than rely on others (government, union, etc.) to artificially prop him up.

He uses the value he creates to procure the other things he needs to survive.

Re:and so society dies out

[Illicon]

Self-interest is a powerful thing. A sense of common good, not as powerful. Like it or not, that's why capitalism works better than socialism.

Re:and so society dies out

[mijelh]

Scandinavia has significant oil income

Only Norway (by the way, the tinniest Scandinavian country in terms of population) has a significant oil income. Sweden even declared they want to be an "oil-free economy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_phase-out_in_Sweden.

and has seen growth decline as it's become more socialist

If anything the opposite is true, since the economy of Sweden started to decline in 2006 after the moderate party, which is centre-right, liberal and conservative, won the elections. Also, post hoc ergo propter hoc.

It also appears to be a demographic disaster zone.

why?

I certainly don't see many Americans queueing up to move there.

Good for them

Re:and so society dies out

[KahabutDieDrake]

1: yes, this is true. 99% of the 'work' done by the middlemen is just passing the order further on, and taking their cut.

2: Totally wrong. I know this is how lots of people think it works, but in reality, if you are buying from a reseller on amazon, you are wrong. Ever heard of dropshipping? Been there, done that, ran a DS company. Here is how it really works. I start a website like ... oh say... dropshipdirect.com. I call up a bunch of distributors or manufacturers and ask for wholesale pricing structures, dropship delivery and product info data. They send the data along, I plug it into my Estore website. Then I solicit resellers to use my estore as a product base to make listings on third party sites like amazon or ebay or their own estore site. Fast forward to an actual purchase. I'm going to use a real example order, where the reseller runs their own branded Ecommerce website. The chain goes like this. Consumer buys item on Reseller website. Reseller then buys item on my Distributor site. I buy the product from the actual distributor (or manufacturer) and the manufacturer/distributor sends the item by UPS/FEDex to the original customer. EVERY step in this chain is handled with a credit card by default. Now, processing fees vary wildly, but we were paying 3% and .25 per transaction. Most Ecommerce sites are getting something like that for processing rates. The relationship between the actual stocking distributor, and the manufacturer is not within my purview and may or may not involve credit transactions. It doesn't matter, because if you buy an Itouchless pepper mill from amazon, you paid with a credit card, Amazon paid the transaction costs, took their cut and send the rest to the reseller directly, The reseller used his credit card to place the order with his source, and his source (being a company like dropshipdirect) then used their credit card to pass the order to the stocking distributor (or in this case the manufacturer).

This isn't how ALL ecommerce goes, but a fairly large part of it is done this way, especially on sites like amazon. The reason the costs are still reasonable is simply due to the insane inflation that is retail pricing. Also worth noting, lots of specific goods don't fit into this model. You'll never see Playstations or Xboxs or Ipods sold this way, because the manufacturer controls the pricing so throughly that there are no margins for middlemen.

There are a couple of specific niche items I could point to, like Ghillie suits, where I can look at google shopping and see the typos I made 5 years ago in a product description. Because not only am I the point source for most of those product descriptions (I'm sorry), but I also had a hand in creating a great many of those images.

Incidentally, if you are buying off amazon (or similar), and you aren't getting a really great price, see if you can contact the manufacturer directly. Chances are you will pay less that way, even if it's a bit more hassle. Anything "Itouchless" brand is perfect example of this. Since they do single item wholesale dropshipping. **(the world wholesale has no agreed apun definition, it might be 50% of MSRP, or it might be 85% or it might be 10%, the many factors involved are not worth going into here)

Re:and so society dies out

[cartman]

As the author points out, soon every book will be about $1. That's great, but are people going to buy 10 times as many books as a result? ... A mediocre writer (of which there are plenty) that could still make a living on $10/book is now forced to compete with great authors (of which there are few) that are selling at $1/book... what do we, as a society, do with that chaff?

If consumers pay $1 for a book when they used to pay $10, then they will have $9 extra left over, per consumer, which they can spend on something else. Which means that some other industry will expand, and the mediocre author can go there (as well as the printer employees, paper employees, etc).

The end result of all this, is the same level of employment, but more is produced, which is economic growth. Previously, it took many employees to produce books, but now it takes fewer, and there are more people producing other things, which means that we as a society are richer.

The common answer is "Not my problem". But isn't it?

No, it isn't. It will work itself out without any effort from you. Society has already undergone many episodes where vast numbers of people became unemployed and new industries took up the slack, returning employment to normal. In previous eras, 95% of the population worked in agriculture. Almost all of them got laid off; and something similar has happened repeatedly as the economy has advanced. Are 95% of people unemployed? Have conditions grown worse? No, the level of employment is still near full employment (except during recessions, which are temporary) and the per-capita income has increased by about 40x.

Re:and so society dies out

[cartman]

To make things short and simple, socialism is when the workers own the means of production.

This is the traditional/Marxist definition of the term socialism, which is not how the word is generally used now. If we used this definition of socialism, then very few people advocate it anymore, since it was such a stellar catastrophe.

These days, the word socialism more often means that the state runs medical billing and pays medical bills equally for everyone out of taxes. The word socialism also sometimes refers to progressive income taxes and income redistribution, or some other form of welfare statism.

Re:and so society dies out

[cartman]

I'm not saying I agree entirely with the parent poster. However he came across as smarter than you; you appear to be throwing a tantrum.

Re:and so society dies out

[cartman]

To the socialist, who views humans in a far better light, people want to play a useful part in society to the best of their ability. The reward is the opportunity, through control of the means of production, to apply one's skills to improve the lot of humanity.

Why is it necessary to own the means of production in order to apply one's skills? The two are totally unrelated.

To create a society in which everyone is able to play a willing part without being exploited - in the crudest sense, everyone "has a job" - is the height of advancement.

In capitalism normally everyone who wants to have a job is employed, except during recessions which are temporary. Although there is a 4% unemployment rate normally, this is because some workers quit their old job in order to search for a new one, and will soon be employed again. In normal circumstances we have nearly full employment in capitalism. Is this the height of advancement? No, because what matters is not employment, but the amount produced, which is the purpose of employment. If we wanted more employment then we could just have everyone dig ditches.

The reward is the opportunity, through control of the means of production, to apply one's skills to improve the lot of humanity.

The reward of employment is money, otherwise it would be charity work and not employment. Of course charity work is highly commendable, but let's not confuse the two.

Re:and so society dies out

[shmlco]

Is education the Silver Bullet? Or is the problem simply going to be the simple fact that there's no going to be enough jobs... for anyone... with any level of education?

I've included a link to a NYT article, but basically automation, robotics, software, the internet, globalization, all are creating situations where more and more "work" can be done with fewer and fewer people.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/falling-demand-for-brains/

Entire classes of workers are either decimated or all but disappear: typesetters, telephone operators, the secretarial pool, news reporters, middle-management. Automotive assembly lines that once employed hundreds are managed by dozens. Groups of lawyers are replaced with software. Hospital radiology positions are outsourced to Israel.

Health care? Japan is already looking at creating robots to do the menial work like emptying bedpans. Surgeons? With telepresence systems, a doctor can operate on someone in NY from his dacha in Moscow.

I believe society is at a tipping point where there will simply be more people than jobs. Unemployment will be rampant across all levels.

And education won't matter. Learn to do what? Cross-train for what? That job space is filled too.

The best and brightest will have their pick. The rest of us???

Re:and so society dies out

[ShooterNeo]

Why did you use credit cards? 3% is huge with the margins you must have been under. Since you were an established business, and Amazon was, and the manufacturer was, surely you could have just done direct bank transfers or some other method.

Re:and so society dies out

[KahabutDieDrake]

Partly, because the whole industry is just barely above "fly by night" status. Partly because setting up proper billing and account transfers is a pain in the ass. And partly because credit processing is EASY and when you don't have any serious volume, or a great credit rating, it's the only thing left.

It's also worth noting that for every 100 resellers we signed up, only 10 ever placed an order, and only 1 of those more than once. So you can see why CCs were easier (if not sane and rational). One more note: Dropshipdirect is all but bankrupt, due to the insanity of the CEO and founder (not me). I didn't set it up, I didn't make the rules, I just worked for the owner. It was horrifying.

Re:and so society dies out

[fractoid]

Is education the Silver Bullet? Or is the problem simply going to be the simple fact that there's no going to be enough jobs... for anyone... with any level of education?

...

And education won't matter. Learn to do what? Cross-train for what? That job space is filled too.

The best and brightest will have their pick. The rest of us???

Exactly. The problem isn't so much that some people get stuck in the ghetto (although that is a problem). The problem is that, as technology advances, the percentage of humanity who can't effectively compete with machines increases. Eventually, even those best and brightest will be outpaced by machine minds, unless we can use technology to augment our own abilities.

Evolve to become superhuman? Or be left behind by the machines? Either way, the days of plain old unengineered flesh-and-blood humans are numbered.

Re:and so society dies out

[dunkelfalke]

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog?

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it necessary to own the means of production in order to apply one's skills? The two are totally unrelated.

Why is it necessary to own or rent a house in order to be able to sleep in its bedroom? Because otherwise you are at the mercy of the whim of the owner, who will probably let you do nothing at all in the house, but at best will only let you apply yourself to the extent that it furthers his profits.

The reward of employment is money, otherwise it would be charity work and not employment. Of course charity work is highly commendable, but let's not confuse the two.

This is the negative, narcissistic, selfish view of humanity. The ancient Greek view, or the socialist view, is that people enjoy applying themselves. They enjoy reward in terms of their productivity and chance to apply their intellect and complete interesting challenges. If you waste a significant proportion of your life doing something merely for money, you are doing yourself a disservice - and not needed anyway. There are enough people who are motivated primarily by love of productivity, even when they could choose something easier and better paid (many academics, nurses, etc. - all the essential workers for an advanced, comfotable society).

Re:and so society dies out

[Anonymous Coward]

Their interpretation of socialism does not scale to countries with populations in the hundreds of millions.

[citation needed]

Re:and so society dies out

[cartman]

Why is it necessary to own or rent a house in order to be able to sleep in its bedroom? Because otherwise you are at the mercy of the whim of the owner, who will probably let you do nothing at all in the house, but at best will only let you apply yourself to the extent that it furthers his profits.

You said "why is it necessary to own OR RENT" a house, but in that case you contradict your own point. Renting a house is not owning the means of occupancy. The question is: why must everyone own his house? Why should renting be illegal?

It's not required to own the means of production in order to exercise one's skills. Many people work in professions like programming, engineering, science, etc, and exercise their skills without owning the means of production. You might say "well what prevents the owner from just firing him" but remember that the owner is harmed by firing a productive or talented employee, which is why the owner paid him in the first place. However, in the case that an employee is fired, he can easily exercise his skills somewhere else if those skills are needed. I work as a programmer now, and I've noticed that nobody in this field who has any talent finds himself unable to exercise his skills.

Even if the employees were owners of the factory where they worked, it still wouldn't accomplish your goal. An employee could still be fired by the other employees or by whatever management the other employees had nominated. The other employees would still have to care about profits and losses, as much as a businessman, because otherwise the factory would not make enough revenues to cover its expenses. Nothing would change unless each employee owned his own factory. Nor would it change anything to eliminate the system of profits and losses because that would only mean that others would have to pay to supplement the workers at the factory, or there wouldn't be enough money/credits/goods/capital equipment/etc coming in to the factory for it to function.

Of course, anyone who feels that he must own his means of production is perfectly welcome to work for his own consultancy, or start his own small business, or work in an agricultural commune, etc. This is legal, at present, in capitalism, and should definitely remain so. The problem is that some people wish to make illegal anything else, or wish to take the property which others gained through their work or investment. That is simply a theft, and a kind of parasitism.

This is the negative, narcissistic, selfish view of humanity.

I'll confess that I find your morals to be truly disgusting. They make me want to vomit. Anyone who deprecates ordinary self-interest, and finds appealing the notion of selflessness or self-dissolution or the "greater good", frightens me.

I'm definitely not trying to insult you, and I imagine that you find my own view (self-interest) to be disgusting, which is fine. You should live as you wish, and if you wish to devote yourself to giving away your labor or not being paid, then you should do so. You should also start a small business if you really feel you must work for yourself.

The problem is that your morality necessarily involves force. Presumably you don't just mean that you wish to start your own company or join a commune, because those options have always been available to you. You have a vision for society and for others.

Personally, I would rather have 3rd degree burns than spend ten minutes in any kind of leftist utopia. What's more, I find the idealized descriptions of leftist utopias (such as are found in utopian novels etc) to be even more horrifying and disgusting than the actual practice. I find horrifying these claims that socialism was a great idea "in theory" but the practice fell short. Socialism was horrifying in theory, and the practice thankfully fell short. The only redeeming feature of any socialist society is that it's unable to exert

Math fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k

Erm.... That doesn't seem right

Re:Math fail?

[Bigbutt]

I suspect this part explains it:

turning his loss lead into his biggest earner.

It's selling more copies than his other books.

[John]

Re:Math fail?

[Nickodeimus]

I come to the conclusion that it will be about 722k after taxes, assuming the sales rate remains the same.

Re:Math fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I thought we were 1/3 of the way through the year. It's MY math fail, not the article. Bah

Re:Math fail?

[foniksonik]

350k for Jan - Mar or 3 months. times 4 = 1.4M * 0.35 = 490k but of course March is only half way, so round up.

Re:Math fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a hint: It's March. He started in January, and so the year will end in December...

Re:Math fail?

[Broolucks]

That's what I thought at first but that's 350k in three months. Still amounts to "only" $485k a year, though, so I figure they didn't do the actual math.

Re:Math fail?

[rwa2]

$350,000 in 3 months. * 4 * 0.35 to get his projected annual income.

Re:Math fail?

[Broolucks]

Wait, I'm an idiot. Only two months and a week have passed.

Re:Math fail?

[vlm]

>>> has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k

Erm.... That doesn't seem right

Part of that is the old printed way of selling books would mean:

99 cents retail
33 cents to retailer
33 cents (roughly half of wholesale price) cost of printing
33 cents to publisher

Of the 33 cents to the publisher, on a good day an exceptional author might get a bit over 10% royalties. More likely we'll round down to 3 cents per copy.

So at 35% royalty at Amazon to make 1/2 mil he had to sell about 1.4 million copies total.

Given that he made about half a mill selling at Amazon, how much would he have made from a conventional publisher? Well. 1.4 million times 3 cents each, eh about 43 grand.

Hmm 500 grand at amazon vs 43 grand at a conventional publisher (if paperback books could somehow be sold in that business model at 99 cents a piece) Thats the part that probably doesn't seem right to you.

Re:Math fail?

[Broolucks]

The actual figure is (350000 * 0.99 * (365 / 67)) * 0.35 = $660k

Re:Math fail?

[Xacid]

Wasn't just you so don't feel too bad.

Still...reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/605/

Re:Math fail?

[Illicon]

(350K * $0.99) * 0.35 = $121,275 That was made in a little over two months. How does that not add up to more than $500K annually?

Re:Math fail?

[anegg]

That's what I thought at first but that's 350k in three months. Still amounts to "only" $485k a year, though, so I figure they didn't do the actual math.

Its obviously "GRE math" - you are allowed to estimate and round.

Re:Math fail?

[sorak]

The math does work out, but the logic does not. Did he really spend three months writing that book, or did it take longer? Will the book still be making money six months from now? Will the model still perform nearly as well when the novelty has worn off?

This is like someone running around the office on payday yelling "In the last hour, I got paid $1500, at this rate, I'll be making 3 million dollars a year. Yippee!".

Re:Math fail?

[bemymonkey]

You read the part about "Since January 1st of this year", right?

0.35*350k*0.99=$121275. It's March now, so let's call it 4x that amount => ~$485k.

Sounds about right to me if we consider the three weeks or so still left in March...

Re:Math fail?

[nedlohs]

It took less than 3 months. If he spent 4 hours writing 5 days a week he'd write 2 books in three months, pushing 3 if they are all continuations of a series. Heck if he worked it as a full time job he could write 6 every three months.

He's not making the yearly income claim or extrapolation and that extrapolation and it isn't based of counting a larger time period of earning as earned in a shorter time period so your scenario is just irrelevant stupidity.

Given one of those books was released in February it's certainly not done with its run too. But obviously if he's sales have just spiked and he has 6 books out he's unlikely to maintain that sales rate since people can read faster than he can write so they'll buy all 6 (if they like them) in a shorter time frame than he can write the next six. Then again maybe his audience isn't done growing given he has two in the amazon top 10 kindle ebooks and hence a lot of exposure.

Re:Math fail?

[krnpimpsta]

Everyone.. it's not 1.4M sales in a year.

As of March 9th, we've had a total of 67 full days in the year. (31 in jan, 28 in feb, 8 in march). This year we have 365 days. Our year is only 18.35616% over.

350k sales in 67 days translates to 1907k sales in 365 days.
1907k * $0.99 * (35%) = $660.8k

Re:Math fail?

[sorak]

He's not making the yearly income claim or extrapolation and that extrapolation and it isn't based of counting a larger time period of earning as earned in a shorter time period so your scenario is just irrelevant stupidity.

Can you rephrase that a little more coherently, please?

Re:Math fail?

[KahabutDieDrake]

You work with Excel a lot don't you?

Re:Math fail?

[Broolucks]

Excel?!? Please, that's insulting :(

Re:Math fail?

[nedlohs]

He's not claiming a yearly income claim. He is not extraplating his earning from a short period. He is not counting earnings earned in a 1 month period as if they were earned in a 1 hour period.

Hence the office payday example is completely irrelevant.

Re:Math fail?

[sorak]

Thank you. My mistake. Looking over it again, I assume that the 500k figure is counting other income/income from the sale of other books?

Re:Math fail?

[gatkinso]

Extrapolation?

Re:Math fail?

[gr8_phk]

No, the problem is that 350,000 * 99cents * 0.35 = 121K and change, not half a million dollars. You can see a problem without doing any math if you notice that his profits from his 1 dollar books exceeds the number of copies even before you take the 35 percent into account.

Re:Math fail?

[gr8_phk]

How does that not add up to more than $500K annually?

If you want to project future sales based on current sales, then you should probably admit that we should consider the amount of time he spent writing the books rather than the time it took amazon or whoever to sell them.

Re:Math fail?

[Akzo]

The article itself doesn't mention $500k, I assume they multiplied the figure for his earnings from Jan 1st to now by the amount of time left in the year to devise the annual earnings.

Re:Math fail?

[NiteShaed]

It took less than 3 months. If he spent 4 hours writing 5 days a week he'd write 2 books in three months, pushing 3 if they are all continuations of a series. Heck if he worked it as a full time job he could write 6 every three months.

This seems really unlikely. Leaving aside that it doesn't seem realistic that he's churning these things out like a machine on a regular schedule, it seems to assume that the first draft is the one that gets released. One book, start to finish, including multiple drafts, rewrites and other editing in a year would be pretty quick. A "fun novel" that doesn't really require a ton of research and keeps things simple and fairly formulaic, maybe six months (which would still be almost blindingly fast), but I really don't see anyone pushing out novels that are at all good at a rate of two or three in three months. Even a Harlequin Romance novel, which is generally quite a bit shorter than Locke's books, and are basically new details hung on old frames as far as stories go probably can't be done that fast. As for pushing out a novels at a rate of six in three months, that doesn't strike me as unlikely, it seems impossible.
Writing fiction is a creative process. It can't be broken down easily like "it takes x minutes to put y widgets into a box, therefore you can fill z boxes in a week".

Re:Math fail?

[nedlohs]

The 500k figure was made up by the summary writer, most likely by doing the simple extrapolation. It can't be used against the author - from the interview he's a pretty long term business guy whose done stuff in a number of fields and is now doing boot authoring. He's not an "artist" who thinks he's hit the jackpot, it seems to be pretty methodical business work (though I assume, not having actually read anything he wrote, that he can string words together better than the average person).

The summary writer also ignored all his expenses that i'm sure the actual author knows all about (editors/reviewers/graphic designers/etc) since he mentions them in the interview as well. Which again reflects badly on the summary writer not the book author.

Way too high

[Bigbutt]

Considering the limitations of Electronic Books; can't give them to friends or family to read, can't resell them, can't return them, can have them pulled without notice, the price is way too high.

I've purchased a few novels at the too high price since I got my iPad but so far only the ones I already have in paperback and really love to read. I have picked up a few 99 cent books at recommendation from others and generally they're an ok read.

I've spent a lot more on gaming PDFs, especially the non-watermarked DRM'd ones (Shadowrun from the Battlecorps website).

[John]

Re:Way too high

[somersault]

If every book was 99 cents it would hardly be a big deal. You could buy the book for friends and family and it could still end up cheaper than what you pay already.

Seriously, 99 cents is "too high" because you can't resell or return the book? Who would need to buy a "used" copy if books were that cheap anyway? That's cheaper than most current used books already!

And why would you need to return an eBook - it's hardly going to be defective, and if the download was in fact corrupted, they would push it out to your reader again on request. You can't return a book simply because you "didn't like it" - or at least I'm hoping you can't. You can't get your money back at a theater if you didn't like the movie, or get a refund of your cable service because there were no good movies on on a certain day. You pays your money, you takes your chances. At 99c it's hardly a big deal, especially if you also base your purchases on recommendations from people who have similar tastes.

Pulling books without notice would be a big deal to me. I'd expect it of Apple of course, but not so much of Amazon. And if Amazon did do such a thing they'd probably provide a refund, their customer service has always been excellent in my book.. no pun intended.

Re:Way too high

[Ephemeriis]

Considering the limitations of Electronic Books; can't give them to friends or family to read

At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.

And if it's a family member, you can just share a single B&N account and have full access to the library without even having to lend anything.

can't resell them

This! This is the single biggest problem with ebooks. I'd love to be able to re-sell some of my ebooks after I'm done with them.

can have them pulled without notice

Depends on the format and the delivery mechanism. If you've bought your book through Amazon with their Kindle, yeah, they can pull it off your device. But if you buy it in a standard format like .epub from one of the many ebook stores on-line, it's just a file sitting on a device, and nobody can delete it. Well, I guess they could do a complete remote wipe... But you could always throw a backup copy back on the device.

the price is way too high

Depends on what you're buying, and where.

Depending on the title, I don't mind paying $10 for an ebook. Yeah, part of me thinks that it ought to be cheaper because there's no paper involved... But you've still got the cost of the editors and agents and authors and whatnot... So it isn't like all that expense just disappears because there's no paper involved.

But I've also downloaded metric craptons of free ebooks from various sites. Usually they're public domain stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Poe and Lovecraft... But you'd still wind up paying cash for a paper copy, just because of the cost to actually put it on paper.

And then you've got authors like Peter Watts who are making brand new ebooks available for free.

And B&N has a free ebook every Friday. Lately they've been pretty crappy things not even worth the bandwidth it'd take to download them... But They've also had some decent stuff for free.

And even when I'm paying full price for an ebook, they aren't all priced at $10. B&N has a huge selection of ebooks for under $5 - which is cheaper than most paperbacks these days. And there are plenty of other websites out there that'll sell you ebooks for less than $10. Sometimes significantly less.

Re:Way too high

[Neeperando]

I'm fairly certain the parent meant that the current "5-20% below list price" pricing structure is too high, and was agreeing with the assertion that $.99 books would be better.

Re:Way too high

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

"And if it's a family member, you can just share a single B&N account and have full access to the library without even having to lend anything." ....you forgot, "for now".

Re:Way too high

[Gleapsite]

If you're looking for gaming books, check out http://eclipsephase.com/

Its CC so you can find the PDF on torrents if you don't want to support them.

Re:Way too high

[tgd]

5-20% below list price would be nice. Since Apple jumped into the fray and Amazon lost its hold on the market, books have gone up a LOT. These days its not even remotely uncommon to see the e-book at 5% off the hardcover price... even when the paperback is out.

A perfect example -- a couple months ago I was at a talk/book signing. The author's hardcover book was for sale for $10 (and he'd sign it for that) -- not an unreasonable price. Amazon's kindle price? $35. Needless to say, I neither was going to pay 3.5x more for the book, nor was I interested in an analog book. Author lost a sale.

Re:Way too high

[hesaigo999ca]

I agree, and seeing the AppStore platform work so well for all those apps available to you with a small click of a button and a small charge of .99cents *usually), you will see many pop one here, or there, and at the end of the month the bill ends up being like a 10$ for all these apps(or in this case ebooks).

Re:Way too high

[Neeperando]

Well, shit. I haven't actually been paying too close attention. I suppose the last eBook I bought was the same price as the paperback, now that I think about it. Sometimes I check out paper books from the library, download the ebooks illegally, read them electronically, and return the paper book, just so I don't feel like I'm stealing (my library doesn't have e-lending). I can't tell if that implies there's something wrong with me or the system.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, 99 cents is "too high" because you can't resell or return the book? Who would need to buy a "used" copy if books were that cheap anyway? That's cheaper than most current used books already!

Don't try to argue with ebook anti-DRM fanatics. Some of them have actual arguments, but others steal those arguments and use them to push their agenda (lower priced books) without actually having any reasoning behind the arguments they're giving in the context they're using them in. It's basically high class trolling for people of lower intelligence.

Re:Way too high

[Lumpy]

":Considering the limitations of Electronic Books; can't give them to friends or family to read, can't resell them, can't return them, can have them pulled without notice, the price is way too high."

Price too high, agree. when a technical book is $59.95 in paperback and the E version is $56.99... they are on drugs.

But the affordables? no problem. I can lend ebooks, you cant resell, that is correct. you cant return them, but most book stores also have that now. Pulled without notice... Only kindle, and my way around that is to crack the DRM. So that is what I do. I crack the drm and convert to epub. you cant pull what you dont have control over.

Re:Way too high

[metrometro]

I actually disagree -- at $1 a pop, I can accept what is essentially a one-time-use license. And this is with full knowledge of all the freedom issues involved. Treat it like a rental, and suddenly it seems fair again. If I want the book on a new service/device, I pay a $1 fee. I'm ok with that.

Re:Way too high

[metrometro]

Oh, thanks. Missed that entirely.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

Pulling books without notice would be a big deal to me. I'd expect it of Apple of course, but not so much of Amazon. And if Amazon did do such a thing they'd probably provide a refund, their customer service has always been excellent in my book.. no pun intended.

Apparently you missed the part where Amazon already did exactly that (though not without a reason): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

Apple, to my knowledge, has never clawed back content from users who bought it, even in cases where they did remove it from the App store for further sale.

Re:Way too high

[SydShamino]

You can't get your money back at a theater if you didn't like the movie

If you walk out before it's finished, you usually can.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of retard are you? They stated that their own actions were indeed stupid, that they would not do it in the future, and some stuff was even settled in court regarding remote removal. You're probably an Apple employee so I understand if your boss told you to post this.

Re:Way too high

[somersault]

Not trolling, just saying what I think. I'm sure I've heard of Apple pulling apps from the app store, and even devices.. I don't follow all the sensationalist stories as much as your average geek though I guess.

Re:Way too high

[Shagg]

Those are all really limitations with DRM though, not eBooks. It's certainly possible to have eBooks without DRM, especially in cases where it's an independent author. It's mostly the brain-dead publishers that insist on restricting our rights via DRM.

Re:Way too high

[KahabutDieDrake]

Are the vast majority of /. not aware of the used book market? I mean seriously. .99cents for a paper back has been pretty much standard fair for... well, get off my lawn.

Not to change subjects, but if any of you happen to be in the SF bay area, look up Funders. Paperbacks are 1$, hardbacks are 2$. Bring donations of your own used books and trade straight across.

Re:Way too high

[somersault]

$original_post =~ s/book/eBook/g ;

Re:Way too high

[ShooterNeo]

According to the letter of the law, that violates several laws.

Acocrding to the actual circumstance - assuming you don't open the ebook when you don't have the paper book in your possession - it is no crime at all.

Re:Way too high

[ShooterNeo]

And that's not even true! It's a one person perpetual license, not a rental. If you want it on a new device, typically that device is supported. Any ipad, mac, pc, or kindle, or android device can read amazon's ebooks.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

can't give them to friends or family to read, can't resell them, can't return them, can have them pulled without notice, the price is way too high.

--Giving to friends or family to read is as easy as sending them a file. If I read a book that I enjoy, I sent it to my dad (who lives in a different state). This is considerably easier than sending a book through the mail (if you're going to bring up drm, stripping drm is trivial)
--If you keep backups stored on your computer, nothing can be "pulled without notice"
--Price too high is completely subjective. Many people are willing to pay for ebooks at their current prices

I bought an ebook reader about a year ago and love it.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

But you've still got the cost of the editors and agents and authors and whatnot... So it isn't like all that expense just disappears because there's no paper involved.

Yes, this is an oft-touted reason for ebook pricing, but it's laughable as those are all flat costs and so, provided you make any profit at all per sale, you can distribute them across many purchases for mass market books (and distrubuting 100 times the number of ebooks doesn't change the above costs at all). I doubt the fellow in the story didn't have any of those things (though I'd bet his advertising budget was way lower, being indie).

Thing about it this way, how many mp3s would you buy if they were 10 cents apiece? What about a penny?

Re:Way too high

[gatkinso]

Plus consider that lots of classics are free on the iPad.

I have bought a few overpriced e-books... no more.

Re:Way too high

[BarryHaworth]

I actually disagree -- at $1 a pop, I can accept what is essentially a one-time-use license.

I second that. At present my local library charges 80c to reserve a book. This is not much more than that, and you get to read the book again later.

Re:Way too high

[geekoid]

Those are becoming less and less of an issue.
WARNING - I have recently purchased a kindle and have become a huge Kindle Fan boy.
From http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200127470

Can I loan a Kindle book?
Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Not all books are lendable -- it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending.

Learn more: Lending Kindle Books

Can I share content with other Kindles?
You can enjoy your Kindle content on Kindle devices or Kindle applications that are registered to your Amazon.com account. There may be limits on the number of devices (usually six) that can simultaneously use a single book. Subscriptions to newspapers or periodicals cannot be shared on multiple devices. You can see all your Kindle content and send downloads to your registered Kindles or Kindle applications from the "Your Orders" section of the Manage Your Kindle page.

If you like stories, then the kindle seem to be the best read out there. Far better then the iPad or Nook.

The iPad does so many other things and is such a different device I wouldn't even compare them except for the fact that Apple sells that as a feature.

I bought a bunch of PKD short stories. 99 cents for 10 I think. Dated but interesting reads. No wan in hell I would ahve paid more then 99 cents for them.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

If I give you .99 for every book you buy will you STFU about not letting people borrow it?

Re:Way too high

[mattack2]

Lots of classics are free on (presumably) every e-Reader (or computer)... Even free via Amazon's service.

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

At 99c, it's cheaper (once you factor in time spent) to buy them than to pirate them. So you shouldn't need the DRM.

(The same thing doesn't work for songs, because you use more of them - they take a few minutes to consume, instead of a few hours. Price songs at 1c, and it would work.)

Re:Way too high

[Anonymous Coward]

As I remember it, it was a big deal some months ago. Someone (Amazon?) wanted more control over ebook prices, to offer some for lower, and the publishers vehemently fought it. Some publishers wanted to actually raise their ebook prices higher (from a baseline of, what, about $10?) to something in the $12, $15, $16, or even $18 range. (At the same time, Murdoch was throwing his own tantrum about free online news sources and pimping his locked down pay site, which opened later and, AFAIK, bombed horribly).

A few people in the industry were shrieking in the slashdot threads of the day, since most slashdot posters are all for more reasonably priced ebooks - and by more reasonably, I mean we wanted stuff to plunge into the $1-$4 range instead of rocketing to the ridiculous higher-than-print prices certain publishers were considering. We would point out that if author, editor, publishers, printer, shipper, and retailer were making a profit on $7 paperbacks, then there was nofuckingway that only author-editor-publisher-website could justify charging more than that for a book with no physical costs (no paper, no ink, no printing, no shipping, no stocking, no retail markup). VERY shrill complaints from authors and publishers here, and no reasoning with them at all.

Which makes Mr $1 e-Novelist Guy's huge successes hilarious, since it's a material proof of what the numbers told us the truth would be way back when. Amusingly, it's also pretty much a mirror image of the exact same anti-common-sense ranting that came from the music industry in the years before.

Re:Way too high

[tsa]

I can lend my Kindle and everything on it to someone else if I don't need it. I still read real books too.

Re:Way too high

[jarlsberg71]

I have 4 additional friends on 1 Amazon account. we have 5 kindles, (we also have 3 iPhones, and 1 Droid) and we can even read on any of 5 PCs (Mac|Win) I buy 1 book when it comes out, and everyone gets to read it as well. That and when any of us want a book except for the account holder, we just buy an amazon gift card (no need to "figure in" shipping or tax) for $7 or whatever, and apply it to the account so the purchase costs the account holder no $$$. Side note: Authors like JA Konrath have dirt cheap ebooks and they're really well written. Check out the Jack Daniel's series.

I TOLD you.

[unity100]

not only i told you, but many other people told this as well :

digital goods are easily distributable. make it something cheap that noone will hesitate to pay for, and A LOT of people will buy it - even people who think 'hey i may read/use this in future' may buy it if its 99 cents. same goes for games. a lot of people will buy games that they will never play, just to have them handy, or in their collection, or to have a more complete game arsenal. a lot of people will buy your software if its cheap, just to have it handy if they ever need it to do anything at some random point in time in future.

there is nothing barring you from doing that. the bandwidth costs are low, they are going down and down continually. you dont have to reproduce a digital good. all you need is :

- an easy to use website to buy from, and a short, easy checkout procedure
- a payment provider that is easy to use. (or a reliable credit card payment method)
- a digital download.

its THAT simple. no really, it is THAT simple. and the example is, in the article above.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

i second that - especially the games section, because i tt found myself buying some games from the steam-store when they were really cheap just to have them or complete a collection

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

So very very very true.
I pirated aoe3 years ago and played till sick of it. I still bought 3 copies when it went on sale for 99cents. anything for 99cents is pretty irresistible just to collect it. The next step is minimizing the amount of steps it takes to pay for something on most sites.

Re:I TOLD you.

[vlm]

make it something cheap that noone will hesitate to pay for, and A LOT of people will buy it

Would I steal something that "costs" $100? How about $1? Thats pretty much free. Less that two vending machine soda cans. I'm guessing the dollar store has a lot less shoplifting than "upscale" Target or Kohls.

I think intellectually the marketing people don't understand that when I pay $10 or more I'm thinking "own a book". Even if its digital thus I do not own it. But at $1 I'm thinking thats like a delivery charge or a tax to make it magically download itself into my kindle ipad app and its the fee for this nifty searchable website I found the book on.

Another think the marketing team (other than amazon) does not understand is I'm willing to "tip" an author thirty cents for his performance, but maybe not tip a paper publisher ten bucks. Would I give a street musician a buck if he was any good? Sure, have many times. Would I give $100 for a hardbound textbook err I mean a street performer? Heck no.

Re:I TOLD you.

[unity100]

isnt it ? its to have it "just in case".

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well music and movies haven't gone down in the last 10 years, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Renting a move from Redbox, in a store, on a physical dvd, is only $1, yet to rent a new release online, it's $4 or $5.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Kjella]

The question is whether it is just because he's one 99 cent man in a 9.99$ world or if it works just as well if the prediction comes through that all books will be 99 cents. It's highly unlikely that people on average would spend significantly more time reading books in their limited spare time and with so many other forms of education and entertainment.

That Angry Birds makes a killing at 99 cent is good for them, but it only works because they grab such a big piece of the market. On average I don't think the few extra games you buy make up for the dollar/hour burn rate going way, way down into the cents. I'm happy if a 50$ game gives me 50 hours of gameplay, that's 1$/hour. I'm not sure how many hours I've played Angry Birds but it's way lower than that. Even if you add the five games I bought and got tired of after 10 minutes to that it's still not even close to that.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a brilliant move on the authors part, it separates him from the pack and highlights his name at the top-seller list.

Unfortunatly, it will not work if everyone starts selling at that pricepoint. No matter how cheap books or ebooks get, there is a certain limit to how many of them I want. I might be spending 2-300 dollars to get 5-10 books now, but I will never spend 300 dollars buying 300 books per year. Most likely, I will continue to buy 5-10 books annually and waste the remaining 290 dollars on beer.

Re:I TOLD you.

[rhsanborn]

That may be true for this guy, in this market, at this time. And yes, many more ebooks will be sold when books are priced at 99 cents. But, the road is not all gold and riches for all writers who price their books at 99 cents. This guy is a novelty and he stands out for his low price. Think of the app store, when everything, or at least most things become 99 cents, it's much more difficult to stand out and get the critical mass needed to bring in those sales.

The points of coming in below the pain point and impulse buy are well received, and more books will be sold, but other authors entering the space are going to cannibalize his sales. The increase in sales will hit a ceiling for the 99 cent market as a whole, and then they'll be back to slogging it out against one another. All the better for us the consumer though.

Re:I TOLD you.

[tgd]

No, its not that simple. He sold a ton of 99 cent books (20x the $2.99) because it hit a sweet spot *relative to the other books available*. He got eyeballs because his book stuck out.

If all the books were 99 cents, he'd be lost in the noise and having to sell his book for ten cents to get that kind of bump in sales.

Price is not the issue, exposure is.

This is why he is a literary author, not an economist.

Re:I TOLD you.

[drinkypoo]

That Angry Birds makes a killing at 99 cent is good for them, but it only works because they grab such a big piece of the market.

yes, and they only grab such a big piece of the market because their app is 99 cents. I mean, seriously? Correlation vs. Causation, it's impossible to tease apart here.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve? Is that you??

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

digital gooda re easily distributable.

Funny thing about that. Every time I apply this addage to music and movies, and how copyright is essentially useless for a/v content now, I'm labeled as a pirate sympathizer and anti-market. I can download, or transfer a movie around the world, faster than it takes for me to go to the Redbox several blocks away. Hard to feel guilty about using the infrastructure to my advantage when content retrieval is instantaneous and I keep hearing about how I need to conserve energy.

Yes, yes, that arguments a stretch, but isn't that what we're essentially being asked to consider? Personal action, against every given sector, endeavour and behavior, and whether you will use less energy to do the things you want in your daily life.

Re:I TOLD you.

[cgenman]

The flip side is that once all books are 99c, being 99c alone will not be enough in and of itself to draw users towards you. iPhone gaming, for example, have hundreds of thousands of 99c games, whose creators are lucky if they see $100 for their work.

Ultimately, reading time is largely noncompressable. A user may watch 10 times more movies if they're cheaper, but they're probably not going to read 10 times as many books. While I agree that ebook prices have to drop, I seriously doubt most authors will see the kind of income increase this person has. Most will just go from being ignored at $10, to being ignored at $1.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Tragedy4u]

Would I steal something that "costs" $100? How about $1? Thats pretty much free. Less that two vending machine soda cans. I'm guessing the dollar store has a lot less shoplifting than "upscale" Target or Kohls.

The cost of the item has little to do with whether or not people will steal it, have you ever ran a garage sale before? People try to steal everything, even if it's only 5 cents.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Zerth]

He gets 10 times the royalty rate, we get ~10 times the books(depending on how many hardbacks/paperbacks/9.99 ebooks you bought previously). Even if the number of writers increases 10 fold, at worst he's back to where he was with a publisher.

Odds are, a writer's sales will increase, if a writer is any good. I know of several authors I would buy, except I have a limited amount of money to spend and other authors I'd much rather buy. Book prices would have to fall much more before I cleared out my wishlist.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm going to tell you this:
If the prices are so low I have to sell many thousands of copies to make a living, I have to write the kind of stuff that appeals to the mass market.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. This will also help to reduce illegal copying of e-books - if it's easier, (much easier) to get the genuine article from Amazon (or any other legitimate site) and pay 99c for it, I am positive that the vast majority of people would do this, after all, 99c for a book is a bargain, you will get a few weeks of entertainment out of it (depending on how fast of a reader you are, and how much time you have to read).

Re:I TOLD you.

[LWATCDR]

Most books do not make any profit. But let's say you make 66 cents per ebook. If you sell 2000 a month that is still $1320 a month Not great but not terrible. When buying apps or eBooks my wife likes to say, "99 cents is the same as free". It is less than a cup of coffee at that point so you may consider it a why not. So if you have four or five books out each selling that much you are making well over $70,000 a year. Not a lot but if you love to write and have a day job it would be a really good second income. If you live someplace really cheap it is probably a really good income. If you are retired and your home is paid off it is great.

I think that yes making a book that cheap would be a huge benefit for authors and readers.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Quirkz]

Well, just be the first to price your book at NINETY-EIGHT cents! Duh!

Re:I TOLD you.

[roothog]

make it something cheap that noone will hesitate to pay for, and A LOT of people will buy it

Capital letters are free, but I see you're still not buying.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Svartalf]

Depends on if the person's honest or not... You're going to get people that will steal anything for any price anyhow- so, why price it so that others now have more incentive to do so? Price it so that the bulk of people are going to not think twice about buying it from you and not concern yourself about the "losses" that the others present- losses that you're going to get ANYWAY.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is...you're aren't paying attention to the "economist's view" really. You just rattled off the economist's view to "invalidate" his own perceptions and thoughts, claiming that this is why he's an author and not an economist. The problem is...he IS operating on that premise, just not stating it. For it to be the "economist's view" here, you'd have to observe several things.

- Sales aren't what they "ought to be"- for ANYONE.
- The Economy can't bear all that much in what could be deemed luxuries right at the moment...worldwide.
- Items are priced at the Paperback price-point for e-books, regardless of the fact that there's no intrinsic REASON they're priced $9.99.
- Pricing them at less will raise awareness, but also lower the resistance to purchasing said luxury items (Sorry, novels, etc. don't feed me, etc. They're Luxuries.)
- When the prices are lowered, the volume DRAMATICALLY increases. (Is it because of exposure, because of what he attributes, or is it BOTH?)

Exposure's not the whole story- pricing's as much the story as he's attributed to it. If you don't consider both sides of that story, you're NOT talking economics.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, sure. Let's see what things look like for writers when the market is flooded with .99 cent books.

Re:I TOLD you.

[losfromla]

so, you're saying that movie watching time is compressible? I guess it is if you don't mind speeding up movies but I think that, unadulterated, movie watching time is un-compressible. OTOH, maybe with skill and practice, one's reading speed could be increased thus virtually compressing reading time (more like dilating?).

Re:I TOLD you.

[DerekLyons]

Indeed - and after that amazing initial surge in sales, his books will be like any other book - sales will drop dramatically. Selling $100k worth in the first month does not mean you'll sell $100k worth the rest of the year.

Re:I TOLD you.

[geekoid]

Not true.

As has been shown in other digital download, 99 cents is the sweet spot.
It's like saying you can;t have a famous 99 cents app because everyone else has a 99 cent app.

Re:I TOLD you.

[shmlco]

"...yes, and they only grab such a big piece of the market because their app is 99 cents."

That one doesn't follow. There are a ton of $0.99 apps, and few sell in those numbers. (Or, in many cases, at any numbers at all.)

As such, their success has much, much more to do with creating a fun little game than price.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Aladrin]

If those were the only factors, you might be right about the Dollar Store and Target. But Target pays a lot more money for theft prevention and works harder to prevent it, so the easy steals at the Dollar Store are pretty tempting as well. And don't forget that some do it for the thrill, not the dollar amount, too.

I'll throw a dollar at just about any old book to try it. $10 means I stop and seriously think about how much I want to read that book. I'll even preview it beforehand just to make sure, for that much. Most popular books would be a quick buy at $3.

If all books were only a dollar I'd end up buying more books than I read... I'm sure of it.

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

> make it something cheap that noone will hesitate to pay for

Who's this Noone guy? Is he cheap?

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I buy no book now, but at 99 cents, you just say wtf
It's the same with apps, I buy some, guess what at 10 or 15 dollar, I think : do I really need it
At one buck, I just buy it and find out
Of course, if all prices were equal he would have more competition, but they will never be and you will pay more for good stuff you really want
but it's like food, the cheaper it gets the fatter you get

Re:I TOLD you.

[Anonymous Coward]

TDG although I agree largely that this particular author will not stick out as much as say a better know author if all books were $.99. Keeping basic concepts in mind what we would likely see is those who buy e-books would buy more e-books based on cost. At just under a dollar for the download then taking a risk on a lesser known authors work becomes worth the risk even impulsive purchases would become more frequent.

Re:I TOLD you.

[drinkypoo]

That one doesn't follow. There are a ton of $0.99 apps, and few sell in those numbers. (Or, in many cases, at any numbers at all.)

So wait, you're suggesting that because other apps don't sell at 99 cents that their use of the 99 cent price is not a gigantic part of their success story? Holy logical fallacy, batman!

Re:I TOLD you.

[cgenman]

I more meant expandable, really. People generally read about as much as they're going to read, though they always seem to be able to watch more or listen to more music.

What's in a name?

[TheRealFixer]

I'd imagine his name might have had a small amount of impact on his popularity.

Re:What's in a name?

[mysidia]

I'd imagine his name might have had a small amount of impact on his popularity.

Yeah.. he certainly has a nice sounding name. I'm sure i've heard of that author, and I haven't even been browsing Amazon...

Specifically i'm sure i've heard of this of his eBooks before.

$500k?

[sanosuke001]

Okay, maybe my math is wrong but how is (350000 * 0.99 * 0.35) > 500000?

Re:$500k?

[sanosuke001]

Nevermind, I'm retarded. "Annual income" != income to date... /sigh

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he sold them since the first of January. so:

350000 * 0.99 * 0.35 * 6 = 727650

Re:$500k?

[radicalpi]

I don't know if they're trying to state the annual income, assuming the sale trend continues, or they just fail at math. It seems too obvious a mistake to be the latter, but more blatant miscalculations have been made.

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. It's "only" $121275, but that's since January 1 of this year -- only 2+ months! It's obviously debatable whether that sales rate will be sustained (unlikely), but even if the sales dwindle to, say, 10% of that rate for the rest of the year, that's ~$6000/month.

Re:$500k?

[Syberz]

It is wrong, it's 350 000 from January 1st to today, not for a 12 month period.

So it's 350 000 in 67 days or 5224 per day, so 1 906 716 per year

1 905 716 * 0.99 *0.35 = 660 677$

Re:$500k?

[asylumx]

an annual income well over $500k

$660,677 is well over $500,000 How are they wrong?

Re:$500k?

[Syberz]

I never said that the article was wrong, I was answering the parent poster who said "maybe my math is wrong".

Re:$500k?

[SigmundFloyd]

It is wrong, it's 350 000 from January 1st to today, not for a 12 month period.
So it's 350 000 in 67 days or 5224 per day, so 1 906 716 per year
1 905 716 * 0.99 *0.35 = 660 677$

Because OF COURSE his book will continue to sell the same figures for the whole year.

You and the author of this writeup should be forbidden from using calculators.

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

The prices were quoted in octal format. Not everyone uses base 10.

Re:$500k?

[Syberz]

Sheesh, don't get your panties in a bunch, I was just explaining the calculation used by the article's author.

Where exactly have I indicated that I agreed that calculating possible returns using that formula was right?

You should be forbidden from commenting until you learn to comment on what is actually written and not according to the stories you make up in your head.

Re:$500k?

[SigmundFloyd]

Where exactly have I indicated that I agreed that calculating possible returns using that formula was right?

Let's see...

So it's 350 000 in 67 days or 5224 per day, so 1 906 716 per year

• Matter-of-factly language... check
• No conditional sentence... check
• No "would"... check
• No distancing yourself from the erroneous claim... check

Gee... I wonder where on earth I got the "impression" you were agreeing.

Re:$500k?

[Syberz]

Fine, let's try this again, shall we? This time I'll spell it out because the brevity of my original statement seems to have confused some.

OP: [...] maybe my math is wrong but how is (350000 * 0.99 * 0.35) > 500000?
Me: It is wrong, you're using the wrong number of units sold per year. The 350 000 in the article is from Jan 1st to today and not for a whole year, so it's 350 000 in 67 days or 5224 per day, so 1 900 000 units for a year.

I did not distance myself from the claim because the subject wasn't the claim but rather the values used by the OP in the author's formula. I was explaining where the 500k was coming from, not that the number was an accurate reflexion of reality (which it isn't).

Am I allowed to use a calculator now? ;)

Re:$500k?

[SydShamino]

Syberz meant that SaNo's math was wrong.

Okay, maybe my math is wrong...

It is wrong...

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing to look at -- I think the article reversed the royalty rate - I thought Amazon took 35% and the rest went to the author.

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is a sockpuppet of commodore64_love, trolling himself in an attempt to gain sympathy mods

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU!

I'm glad im not the only one that thought the math was a little off.

Re:$500k?

[Anonymous Coward]

350000*.99*0.35 = 121275 Since Jan 1 until today (a little over 2 months)

The article says that this represents an ANNUAL income in excess of 500k.

If you multiply 121275 time approximately 6 (to annualize the amount) is far greater that 500k. Which is what the article says.

However, it assumes he is continuing to sell books at the same rate at the same price for the entire year.

Just like the music industry

[Scutter]

Just like the music industry, the electronic distribution of books has the publishers running scared. Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever. They can self-publish with little to no overhead and keep the profits for themselves. $9.95 (or more, oftentimes) is an abso-friggin-lutely ridiculous price to charge for an e-book.

Re:Just like the music industry

[john83]

All the more so as the modern publishing industry is often rather lax in proof-reading standards, making the one lasting use for them rather less important than it might otherwise be.

Re:Just like the music industry

[chemicaldave]

Unfortunately for many artists, unlike authors, it's too difficult to create and sell a song on their own. They need a producer, engineer(s), backing musicians, just to name a few. Even more than that if they want to tour.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Carik]

Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever.

Not entirely true. The publishing houses don't just provide printing and distribution, they provide editing, publicity, a route into brick-and-mortar retail locations, and often money to live off while an author is writing. Those are all important things.

I'm not saying there's no way around them -- for instance, many authors still work a day job anyway, and there are good free-lance editors available for hire -- but they're a good "one stop" way to get them.

Re:Just like the music industry

[jbssm]

I think you are making a mistake here. Now-a-days the power in the book industry it's not in the hands of the publishing houses, but in the hands of the distributors: Amazon, Barns & Noble, etc. These are the predators of the business and the ones bullying publishing houses and the writers with them.

Art quality cannot be measured in sale numbers. If the business model becomes: write some mediocre crap about vampires full of clichés that every teenager will read and sell it at .99$ for profit, we would stop having writers like José Saramago, Vargas Llosa, Orwell, Huxley, Edgar Alan Poe, etc.

Re:Just like the music industry

[NiteShaed]

Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever.

Well, sort of. I kind of hope that it does work out that way though.

Right now I'm working on my own novel (release in another couple of months, yay!). I'm doing it myself through a POD company, and it will be both print and digital. Doing it that way allows me to keep a much higher part of the sales (which I expect to be in the tens of copies), and more importantly, actually allows me to see it go to print as it's pretty damn difficult to get a publisher to even look at a book from an unknown author with no prior sales record.
The downsides:
A) It's much harder to be taken seriously with a book that's self published. Publishers bring legitimacy to a book, people assume that it's going to be better if it's been vetted by a publisher (and let's be honest, they're probably right most of the time).
B) Other authors will generally consider you to be "outside the club" unless you've racked up the kinds of sales that they themselves often don't see through a traditional publisher. Even then, often you're not one of them. I know this last part from reading various authors forums, not because I try to walk up to people like Neil Gaiman and say "Hey, I'm an author too!".

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run. Personally, I think self-publishing will gain more legitimacy, but self-published authors have to make sure the quality of their work is up there with the stuff coming out of the publishing houses (and yes, I know there's a ton of complete garbage with an impressive imprint on its spine). Self publishing allows anyone who thinks they can write to "be an author", and most of them really just aren't that good. It also allows people to push things out (print or digital) that desperately need a real editor, making a potentially good book seem amateurish because of errors or layout problems.

By the way, I also completely agree with the insanity of charging $9.95 for an ebook. I haven't settled on pricing for my book yet, but I know I'm thinking significantly lower than the print copy. 99 cents? I dunno, that seems exceptionally low, but I wouldn't rule it out. Generally I'm happy paying somewhere in the $3 - $5 range for an ebook, but maybe I'm the exception (TFA certainly seems to imply that).

Re:Just like the music industry

[Rayonic]

I'd say there's significant value in professional-level editing. One of the last "books" I read was self-published directly to the web, and while it was good fun and had an interesting premise, it was in dire need of editing/revision. Community input can only do so much.

Of course, just needing editing and maybe a little promotion cuts out a huge chunk of the existing book publishing business. Not to mention retailers.

(If anyone's curious, the novel I mentioned above is The Salvation War. The writer is a military geek, which can be interesting or a bit cheesy sometimes.)

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it hell, have you been on Myspace? Youtube? Last.fm?
Yeah, most are average (not that there is a difference, most people with a company behind them are still crap), but there are good people out there, quite a few who have then went on to do the whole label thing rather than staying independent.

Hell, someone i knew from school downloaded a program, played around with it and his instruments and is now making money from making songs on his own.
It is a hobby and now a side-income to his full-time job.

Trial and error with some audio program, a few friends to trial it, feedback, it's all you need to get started.
Then you go on and make a profile on music sites, label your songs, sit back and watch the results.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Buelldozer]

Printing and distribution? Don't need it for e-books.

Editing? Have you SEEN the shit quality of editing in e-books? Some of it is so bad it is surely being done on purpose.

Publicity? This one I'll give you.

Route into brick and mortar? B&M bookstores are dying. Why pay a premium to get into a dying business model.

Money to live on? Well if it didn't take 2+ years to go from concept to market perhaps it wouldn't be such a big deal.

I'm still failing to see what the big deal is about publishers.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Buelldozer]

No, the superior authors will be able to charge 5.99 and even in a .99 world they'll get it.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Carik]

Distribution is still an issue. Yes, you put it on kindle, it's on the kindle store. But it's not at Barnes and Noble, so people with their reader can't get it. It's not on a publisher's web-site so people with non-branded readers can't get it. (Well... not without breaking the DRM, anyway, which is easy for people here, but not as easy for the most people.)

Editing is still an issue. The fact that it's terrible right now doesn't mean it isn't necessary. My personal theory is that the big publishers are doing it to kill ebooks, but that becomes irrelevant once ebooks are the norm.

Brick and mortar stores may be dying, but they're not dead yet, and probably won't be for years. And, as things shift more to ebooks, they'll change. B&N already does a lot of business from the coffee shops in their stores... people come in with a Nook, buy a coffee and a pastry, sit down, test read a few books, and buy something on the way out. And remember... not everyone is as much a technophile as people on slashdot. The fact that the bookstores aren't doing well right now is as much a reflection of the economy as anything else.

True enough that the process is longer than it needs to be, but still... the publishers are providing a service. Perhaps that will be off-loaded to smaller companies that don't keep a physical inventory -- the article talks about Telemachus Press -- but they'll still be a publisher.

I suspect we'll see a move to smaller companies like Telemachus and away from big publishers, but some of the big ones have it right. Baen, for instance, is doing really good things. Their ebooks tend to be well-edited, non-DRM, and priced fairly reasonably. I've bought more books from them than from any other source recently.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how true that is. People have been creating tracks at home for a while now. Sure, it isn't as high-quality as recording in a studio, but the same could be said for indie authors who don't hire professional editors to review their work.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Buelldozer]

Please forgive my ignorance but if you've gone to the effort to load your creation to Amazon why can you not do this for B&N and also for iBooks? I'm not seeing your point with distribution. How is this a valuable service that only a publisher can provide?

Editing is an issue that the publishers are ignoring. It's laughable to use it as an example of of the value a publisher provides an author.

B&M is dying and your example of B&N proves it! Why would an author want to pay a publisher a premium to put a dead tree copy of their work into a B&N where people are purchasing e-books?! You may as well self publish your e-book to the B&N store and cut out the middleman!

Most of the value of a traditional publisher, with the exception of promotion and perhaps editing, is all tied to dead tree distribution.

If was I was in the dead tree publishing business I'd be very nervous and I'd be putting a a lot of work into getting my e-strategy sorted out.

Re:Just like the music industry

[cgenman]

1. Editing
    Nice, but freelance editors are reasonably cheap. And let's not forget the Editors are also your censor.

2. Publicity
    In theory, yes. In practice, Publishers tend to push the popular books, in a little bit of circular irony.

3. A route to brick-and-mortar retail
    And printed paper editions, of course. But we're talking about when physical books go away. It's not like many authors can live off of revenue from paper copies right now.

4. Money to live off while the author is writing.
    Hah. Maybe if the author is a celebrity writing an expose. Most of the writers I know don't get an up-front.

Re:Just like the music industry

[cgenman]

Do you really think Edgar Allan Poe wasn't a pop-culture vampire cliche writer back in his day? Or that Shakespeare wrote all of his penis jokes for high-level art? Edgar Rice Burroughs survived on the book equivalent of the 80's television soap drama "Beauty and the Beast."

Everyone that you listed (except maybe Saramango) has seen major commercial and pop-culture success. Old pulp junk that sticks around becomes high art. In 20 years we will see Harry Potter and Twilight worship to the same degree that we see modern reverence for Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, Tarzan, Heart of Darkness, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and iPhone app developers use this same strategy. It's a bit easier for app developers to offer their product for free with a 99-cent upgrade to a more feature-rich app. But writers can do this, too. They can provide alternate endings, or leave off the latter chapters altogether on the free version...try-then-buy it if the story is compelling enough.

It helps to have a great story, of course....

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

So artists, backing musicians and engineers are unable to come together in profit sharing companies? You participate in the projects you believe in, contributing your talent and/or equipment.

What is really hard is getting noticed amongst all the rest trying to be seen and heard. This is where you really need to be creative.

Re:Just like the music industry

[NiteShaed]

Publicity? This one I'll give you.

Don't be so quick to give that one up, actually. More and more new authors are being told that the publishing house will handle distribution, but publicizing the book is the author's problem. If you're not Stephen King, don't expect much in the way of publicity.

Re:Just like the music industry

[MMC Monster]

Who need brick and mortar sales if your ebook profits are > $500,000 per year on a $0.99 book?

Re:Just like the music industry

[chispito]

Just like the music industry, the electronic distribution of books has the publishers running scared. Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever. They can self-publish with little to no overhead and keep the profits for themselves. $9.95 (or more, oftentimes) is an abso-friggin-lutely ridiculous price to charge for an e-book.

You'll need to hire a competent editor or two, and probably have to invest in some sort of marketing scheme if you're unknown. Or maybe for marketing you just have a kickass blog.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Sabalon]

I like the rawness of the home recordings. Albums are WAY too polished lately. Each to their own.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites like smashwords.com will take your ebook as a Word doc, format it and submit it to many of the ebook retailers in return for a percentage of the proceeds. So if you can't be bothered to do it yourself there are others who will be happy to charge to do it for you.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Aldous Huxley released more than 50 books, or about 1.5 per year during his productive life. Even if they were as ordinary as The List, he would earn around $200k/year. Easily enough to keep such writers writing.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Carik]

How is this a valuable service that only a publisher can provide?

It's not. As I said in my first post, the value of a publisher is that they're a single-stop way to get all those things. They're not vital, but they are a convenience.

As I also said in one of my other posts, people DO still buy paper copies. Lots of people, lots of copies. Libraries are, for the most part, ignoring ebooks because the DRM is too restrictive. Lots of people don't have or want ebook readers. Heck, lots of people don't want computers, and don't use them if they don't have to... what makes you think they want an ebook reader?

If was I was in the dead tree publishing business I'd be very nervous and I'd be putting a a lot of work into getting my e-strategy sorted out.

That I absolutely agree with. As much as I like paper books -- and I still buy them and prefer them to ebooks -- they're not going to be the top form of publication for much longer. I doubt they'll disappear completely any time soon, but they're not going to make up the majority of sales for long.

Re:Just like the music industry

[icebrain]

One thing to point out about the online posting of TSW is that the version posted online is essentially a first draft. Mr. Slade's usual pattern is to post a story online, chapter-by-chapter as its being written, and then once it's complete, get it edited and revised before publishing in dead-tree format. At least, that's what he's done with his other books.

Also, he's not just a "military geek"... he started out as a naval architect and eventually became a defense analyst. I think he's met with a couple of Presidents before, and has plenty of published papers (though most of us probably don't have the proper security clearances to read them).

Unfortunately, the chances of Salvation War being published are about shot, because some jackass copied it over and put it on a torrent. No publisher will even look at it now.

Re:Just like the music industry

[cdrguru]

Unfortunately, most self-published books are trash. Even if the author has the multiple skills to write and properly proofread the book, it is very unlikely they are any good at being an editor. No, "editing" in this context does not equate to being moderately skilled at using vi. It means being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, being able to discern when characterization is adding nothing to the book and is just padding and so on and so forth.

Mostly, writers really suck at doing that. So you end up with a book that had it been 30% shorter would be good but at the length the author wrote it the story bogs down and ends up being unreadable. Stephan King had that problem with some books - there is the original "author's" edition of The Stand and then the published version. King could get away with releasing the longer (padded?) version of the book years after the original was published because people would buy anything he wrote and would clearly pay for more of The Stand. Robert Heinlein had the same problem with Stranger in a Strange Land. Asimov wrote about his adventures in the writing game early on and how valuable having a really good editor was. Of course, later in life Asimov clearly was in a different league and would pretty much deliver a manuscript to the printer and it would be printed - untouched. But I don't believe most writers are in the same class as Asimov was.

Absolute, if we throw out the editors and proofreading we can have $0.99 books. Or $0.25 books even. Or free, just for the gratification of the writer. But they will be unlikely to be worth whatever is being paid for them. And that is the problem with cheap eBooks - they aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. How cheap can a book that is professionally proofread and edited cost? Probably the lowest level is going to be around $5 or so and that may be pushing it unless it is very, very popular. Ordinary books are probably not going to really get to be less that $7-$8. Anything below that you can pretty much consider "vanity press" and assume the author did everything himself.

Having read a few eBooks that were self-published I'd say it gives eBooks in general a bad name. Typos. Formatting problems because the finer points of the eBook process weren't clear and the author was trying to do something fancy. Repetition is a huge problem where the author has the same block of text or very close to it repeated three or four times close together in the book. In short, editing and proofreading is critical and the self-publisher has no choice but to forego it. Which usually means the result is crap. Sorry, but I think the conclusion that cheap eBooks are going to be nothing but crap is invitable.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Quirkz]

I wish you luck! I've considered trying the same thing, but my own unpublished novel needs editing work that I don't have the time or money for right now, so I keep putting it off.

Sounds like you've got a pretty similar take on the situation as I do. I agree that Point A will go away with time, but I do wonder if part of that process won't involve either establishing trusted digital publishers, or means to assess the quality of the work before purchase -- possibly via tools on the distribution site, like Amazon, possibly via some other community or ratings system.

I think Point B, in the long run, is kind of moot. There'll always be some competition amongst people in the same business, and snootiness over the relative success. It'll probably be regardless of print or electronic later on, though -- any disdain based on publishing format is going to disappear with time.

Quality of work is a huge concern for me. I may be biased, having done some proofreading before. Proofreading is admittedly low-end, last-minute editing, usually after four to ten other pairs of eyes have already done serious work on the book -- and we're talking major structural stuff, like managing the complete organization of the work, or insisting that it be cut in half (or doubled) to get the right amount of entertainment and completeness. But even as a proofreader, putting on (supposedly) last-minute polish, I've caught major issues, like horrendous math errors, completely incoherent paragraphs, blatant contradictions in the text, chunks of simply missing text, and more. In a very rare couple of cases I even had to flat-out say things like "this nonfiction book doesn't deliver what the title promises" or "this entire book doesn't appear to have much of a purpose, and needs a complete rework." Of course nobody wanted to listen to the proofreader about starting over at that point, and I think they went ahead and published what they had, but they also didn't tell me I was wrong or out of line or fire me. Take away the editor or three, take away the proofreader, and you're almost guaranteed to have an inferior product.

People on this thread have argued freelance editing is inexpensive, but when you're paying out of pocket for something that may not make any money at all, it doesn't take much at all to make it unaffordable.

Re:Just like the music industry

[NiteShaed]

I wish you luck! I've considered trying the same thing, but my own unpublished novel needs editing work that I don't have the time or money for right now, so I keep putting it off.

Thanks, even if it doesn't really sell the dream is to see my book in print. If it does well, aside from being surprised as hell, I'll just enjoy that as an extra bonus! Good luck on yours as well, and I hope you get the chance to get it finished and see it in print before long :)

Point A will go away with time, but I do wonder if part of that process won't involve either establishing trusted digital publishers, or means to assess the quality of the work before purchase -- possibly via tools on the distribution site, like Amazon, possibly via some other community or ratings system.

This is exactly where things probably need to go for self published works. Right now, the problem is that a serious reviewer is less likely to pay attention to you if you're not published. Eventually I think that'll change, but for the moment we're kind of swimming against the tide of a very long standing industry with some strong opinions on "the right way to do things". The literary world has its own culture, and its not just about doing business for them, partly its playing by the traditions that culture has adopted over the years.

I think Point B, in the long run, is kind of moot. There'll always be some competition amongst people in the same business, and snootiness over the relative success. It'll probably be regardless of print or electronic later on, though -- any disdain based on publishing format is going to disappear with time.

Oh absolutely, but in the meantime, us POD people are definitely second-class citizens in the literary world (some, maybe most, deservedly so). It'd just be nice if the distinction of "Author" was less firmly connected to publishing. Hell, anyone who writes a book is an Author as far as I'm concerned, the distinction is whether you can prepend "Successful" to that job-title. Now defining "successful" in that context is another story lol

On the topic of quality, you've nailed it. I don't think people always realize the sheer amount of effort that goes into a book between the time it leaves the author's desk and gets to the bookstore. I'm trying to do this on a budget that wouldn't pay for a day in Disney World, but I'm lucky in that I have some people who are well suited towards doing some proofreading and a little editing for me on a volunteer basis. Even with their efforts though, I'm sure things will get by that would hopefully be caught by a professional editorial staff. Anyone who thinks they can proofread their own work though, they're just asking for trouble. I was horrified by how many corrections I got back, but in looking at it, I realized that I actually had a hard time seeing a number of the mistakes. My brain just "autocorrected" things as I went along at times, and even as I'd read a marked up copy it sometimes took a second for the mistake to register (probably didn't help that I wrote the first draft in VIM, with no spell/grammar checker, and went very quickly).

People on this thread have argued freelance editing is inexpensive, but when you're paying out of pocket for something that may not make any money at all, it doesn't take much at all to make it unaffordable.

And it takes an awful lot of 99 cent downloads to make that money back. There's sometimes an attitude of "Well, it's all just words that you made up so why should it cost so much?" People need to remember that there's a pretty vast difference between a professionally done novel, and the creative writing assignments they did in high school. Sure, if you sell a lot of copies, at 99 cents each you can do really well, but if you don't get masses of eager readers coming to you what you end up with is uncounted hours of unpaid work, a

Re:Just like the music industry

[adisakp]

Just like the music industry, the electronic distribution of books has the publishers running scared. Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever. They can self-publish with little to no overhead and keep the profits for themselves. $9.95 (or more, oftentimes) is an abso-friggin-lutely ridiculous price to charge for an e-book.

Yeah, Does it makes sense to pay $9.95 for magical e-data when I can go to a bookstore (if any are left) or go on Amazon and buy an actual physical dead-tree paperback copy for $5.95 ???

Maybe $0.99 is too cheap but it doesn't take too many brains to realize I should be paying less for simple data than the equivalent in a bound physically produced object. E-Books at $2 or $3 would probably sell pretty darn well compared to a $6-7 paperback but $10 is ridiculous.

Re:Just like the music industry

[RobbieThe1st]

I would not be surpised to see a "new generation" of lightweight publishers who, for $10 will publish it to all major ebook markets, convert it to all major formats for you, and possibly run it through a spelling and grammar checker script for you(Possibly an interactive editor). And heck, they might even submit it to a onfdemand publisher for you, giving you a way to sell dead-tree editions too!

Thing is, most of what a big publisher would charge $$$ for can be done for just a few $ thanks to APIs on the big sites and some simple scripting by some kid in his basement.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Carik]

I'd expect the cost to be more than $10, but I suspect it will happen. The author in the article has a company that does that for him -- editing, cover art, formatting, conversion to all file types, and submission to the major ebook stores -- and they charge just under $1000.

I suspect that there will be a range of services available, ranging from "We'll put it on all the sites without looking at it" all the way up to "We'll edit it for spelling, grammar, and style, provide you with cover art, get it submitted to all the sites, and provide print-on-demand for anyone who wants to order paper copies." The former will cost very little -- $10-20, probably -- and the latter will be fairly expensive.

Some of them -- and I expect the current big-name publishers to be among them -- will also be fairly choosy about what manuscripts they accept. That way they can advertise that you KNOW you're going to get good editing and well-written books from them, because they won't print just any piece of junk that comes along. Granted, they'll still publish quite a lot that I think is junk, but the percentage will be lower than most vanity-press labels put out.

Re:Just like the music industry

[BLKMGK]

The author in question even speaks to this if you read his blog much. Publishing houses do a shit job of publicizing his print books and he did much touring himself in order to try and drum up sales - time that took away from writing more books. He has now retired from the touring and is spending his time writing as he desires. Publishers don't have any idea as to how to publicize eBooks either. All of the services needed to publish a book are readily available now, he has had some very good posts discussing this if you read through the history of his blog - good reading BTW.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but disagree. Giving away most of a book's profit for the convenience of one-stop production services is a very bad bargain. And there's no guarantee that a traditional publisher will get your book into brick-and-mortar stores either.
L.J.

Re:Just like the music industry

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.twincities.com/ci_17569329?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com&nclick_check=1 St. Paul, MN Pioneer Press

Amanda Hocking, 26 yrs, Austin, Minnesota gets publicity by sending free hard copies to blog reviewers, buys editing, sold 227,000+ $.99-2.99 E-Books in the
month of Feb. 2011. The money to "live off of" since she started really selling in August 2010 is closing on a million USD. No printing or distribution costs to speak of. Quit her "day job". Now agents and publishers and movie options (District 9 screenwriter) are banging down her door. And she still OWNS ALL RIGHTS TO HER WORK. The money to "live off of" from a NYC publishing house? 0, nothing, nada, zip. She had thousands of rejections over 6-7 years of trying to be published, just like most authors. She will get published now, you betcha.

So much for your "important things" and "one stop shop".

Re:Just like the music industry

[kryliss]

I could maybe see Harry Potter but Twilight? Come on. In 20 years it will still be crap, not only that but you probably won't even be able to get 99 cents for Twilight...

Re:does not compute

[Rob Kaper]

That's $122K since January 1st, just ten weeks ago. If he were to keep up sales to that extent for a year, his annual income is indeed over half a million dollars.

Re:does not compute

[Chris Kaczor]

The 350000 books have been sold "since January 1st of this year" - so if they keep selling at that rate for the rest of the year......

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Fnkmaster]

You hear the name John Locke and you think of some TV show? Seriously?? Not the philosopher considered the founder of Liberalism, nor his theories of continuous consciousness or tabula rasa?

Our educational system has truly failed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

And if they get a cut, I wonder if they're paying their dues, since they stole / borrowed / used the name as an homage.

Can't help but note the incongruity...

[dominique_cimafranca]

...how we're talking about an e-book writer today making a fair bundle, and just a few Slashdot articles earlier, we learned that the creator of Trumpet Winsock made very little money from his creation twenty years ago.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about "friction".

Back when Trumpet Winsock was asking for money, I had to write a cheque, address an envelope, find a stamp, etc.

Now that I likely have already found the eBook via some iTunes/Kindle/etc. device that has billing built in, the payment has lower "friction" so is more likely to be made. While I might be able to find it by other (read: pirated) means, that would take more work, and I'd rather spend $0.99.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[Silentknyght]

Mod parent up. I like to describe the phenomenon as "inertia" against that impulse buy, but "friction" is an equally apt metaphor. The easier it is to make a purchase, the more likely said purchases will occur.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[corbettw]

The important thing to learn here is, Trumpet Winsock was shareware that charged $10. The interviewed writer himself says it was after he lowered his price from $9.95 to $.99 that things took off. Maybe if the guy who wrote Trumpet had charged $1 per copy, he would've gotten some actual sales.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Trumpet Winsock developer had sold it for $0.99 instead of giving it away (it was shareware), he could have made money too.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO - the problem with Trumpet Winsock was that there wasn't an EASY checkout/payment method. It took a bit of work to write/cut a check, address an envelope, pay extra for a stamp, and actually get it to the mailbox. Essentially, INERTIA was the problem. With modern digital downloads, INERTIA works the other way - you're planning on buying a product already and your in that mode. The price is the resisting force slowing things down. The lower the price, the lower the resistance, the more likely to consumate the sale. Although it does at a glance seem ironic, the reality is that it makes a lot of sense.

Re:Can't help but note the incongruity...

[wvmarle]

In case of Trumpet Winsock the vast majority of people didn't know it was not a part of Windows. That it was some third-party piece of software instead. That it was even possible to pay for it. Let alone knowing how to pay for it. PayPal didn't exist; on-line credit card payments were unheard of. Sending out cheques or doing an (international) remittance were the only options of making payments at the time - and for such small amounts an international remittance simply is not an option.

Without the possibility of doing online payments iTunes wouldn't exist. Amazon may exist (they are basically a mail-order company so relatively easy to offer traditional off-line payment methods). And it also left lots of shareware makers out in the cold: ease of payment is an important factor in having people actually make payment.

VAT Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Because i Live in finland, and amazon sees fit to add some kind of VAT to ebooks, all these 99 cent books appear magically as 3 dollar books. what's the deal with that?

Re:VAT Sucks

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Come to the UK. Books are one of the only things where there is zero VAT, others being children's clothing and some foods.

Re:VAT Sucks

[Nerdos]

It's a data charge. Amazon has its content delivered by Sprint US, so data in the US is entirely subsidized by Amazon (through the purchase of the device and book sales), but there is a surcharge in other countries ( same 2 $ charge in Canada).

Re:VAT Sucks

[tomhudson]

Come to the UK. Books are one of the only things where there is zero VAT, others being children's clothing and some foods.

I guess the Queen's English is well and truly dead, even in the home country, when people in the UK use Americanisms that don't make sense.

1. "one of the few things" == correct, refers to one of several
2. "the only thing" == correct, refers to only one thing
3. "one of the only things" == language fail

Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[shoemakc]

Why would anyone pay $9.95 for an Ebook when your average paperback novel costs the same (or less) at a brick + mortar store? I think the issue is that retailers still see Ebooks as an "upgrade" over a standard paperback, and prices them accordingly. While Ebooks certainly do have many advantages over a paperback, I think people realize that since printing and distribution costs of Ebooks are basicaly zero and should be reflected in a lower price.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

The BIG BIG difference here is that any budding author can publish the book themselves. They can cut the publishing houses out of the loop entirely.

A friend of mine has done this with a dead tree book. He uses Amazon's Print on Demand service. I think it has made him a little money.

Now going forward to the electronic era:-
I have a story that has been rejected by pretty well every publisher around. Ok, I accept that my theme is not exactly mainstream.
Now I can really start to think seriously about having it published ONLY in electronic form. If I were to price it at ay $0.99 a time then $0.66 is a darn sight better than nothing at all isn't it.
The more I think about it the big publishing houses seem to be more like the record labels every day. Doomed...

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[SpinningCone]

i think its both greed and a catch 22. 9.95 is bout right for a book at a bookstore. so since its the same product the ebook goes for the same price.

logic would say that the cost of distribution is lower so the ebook would be lower.(in reality printing has been pretty cheap anyway so that's not a big deal)

so you lower the ebook to match peoples perceived value (it's the same price i could own something tangible), then people buy more ebooks, but the paperbacks suffer because the ebook is so much cheaper ("its half price online, why buy the book"). then as paperbacks go away our acclamation to higher prices of the physical product goes with it. mostly it seems to be a game of artificially inflating value. these damm small time writers and their 99 cent bullshit are messin up all their hard work and profitessss :-p

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[Sockatume]

The retailers don't have a say in the matter, really. Previously, publishers would set a "wholesale" price for the book and the retailer got to keep whatever margin they wanted. Now all of the major publishers are on an "agency model" where they set the price, and the retailer has to abide by it in exchange for getting a fixed percentage off each sale. It's partly publisher greed and partly Apple's opportunism. They were willing to adopt an agency model for iBooks at a time when Amazon was holding out, and they require that publishers adopt the agency model when they're selling to anyone else too.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Distribution costs are 30% on itunes and kindle (I assume nook is the same or similar).

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[jmadams]

wow. score 5 insightful for a question with an obvious answer? i read. i read a lot. i can read a typical sf/f book in a few hours. i read series. i like to go back and correlate facts and passages across books in a series. i like to re-read favorites. with my [specific e-reader no specified], i can carry a nice chunk of my library ANYWHERE. especially on a trip where i don't want to carry ten or more paperbacks.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[SydShamino]

My wife buys them because she can do so at 11:57 PM from our bed, just as soon as she finishes the last book.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[martyros]

"its half price online, why buy the book"

I'd buy a paper copy of a good book for more than an e-book, because it's more valuable. There's no way I'd buy an e-book for anything more than half of what I'd pay for a dead-tree copy.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[geekoid]

convenience, but that doesn't matter.

The market seems to think the 99 cents for a download of something is reasonable. They will need to eventually meet that to optimize sales. It doesn't matter if the damn thing give a hand job. 99 cents is the price point to optimize sales.

Re:Ebooks vs Paperbacks

[blarkon]

Space. I have so many books that space is more a limitation than cost. Ebooks neatly solve that conundrum.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[James_Duncan8181]

"I'm sure his name (John Locke) helped sales a bit. I wonder if the t.v. show producers get a cut."

I laughed, then realised I wasn't entirely sure this comment is satire.

Similar story from the UK

[goldcd]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/27/kindle-ebooks-amazon-stephen-leather

Re:does not compute

[SJHillman]

That's 350k from Jan 1st to NOW, not 350K annually.

Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The Econ101 theory of product pricing has always been "Pick the point on the demand curve where unit profit*units sold is the largest possible number(unless that number is always negative, or is never higher than fixed costs, in which case GTFO).

The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve... I suspect that, for behavioral economics reasons, there are probably weird little discontinuities(ie. 99 cents is an impulse buy, while $1.21 'feels' more significant, even though you might not pick up the difference between the two if you saw those coins scattered on the side of the road...); but, given that the cost of production of a ebook is dominated by the fixed cost of writing the thing, and getting it in some semblance of acceptably typeset order, I suspect that there is a lot to be said for the "stack 'em deep, sell 'em cheap" model.

This does not apply, of course, to low-readership specialty stuff; because you can be assured that you'll never sell more than a smallish number of copies no matter how cheap it is(as with specialist academic texts), nor does it apply to books that can command higher prices because of celebrity authorship or some sort of necessity(ie. Steven King's N+1th book, or a textbook)

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[unity100]

irrelevant.

all the economic theories and their founding principles stem from 18th century. they perceive and keep the basis of that reality.

the fact that someone sitting on its ass in a living room would be able to buy something for a dime and have it delivered instantly to its own living room with almost nonexistent cost, was never a reality at any point in time up till this decade.

econ 101, 102, do not apply anymore. many of the people who are buying that book, actually are not even demanding that book - they are buying it for 'just in case', because its cheap enough to not even care about its cost.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you are talking about. Luckily what you write is in little demand, so we can all hope that this comment supplies more then enough of your "insight".

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Ok, I explicitly disclaimed that theory as the "Econ101 theory"(though it is still the case that you want to hit that point on the demand curve, it's just that the rest of Econ 101 tells you fuck-all about how to find that point). I then pointed out that(much more recent) behavioral economics work about the psychological quirks of price-perception, especially at the low end and in terms of the last couple of decimal places, almost certainly introduced curious discontinuities in the demand curve, which make Econ101 even less helpful in hitting the profit-maximizing point on the curve.

The fact that digitizable goods exhibit a ratio of fixed cost to unit cost unheard of at any prior point in history certainly does allow exploration of areas of the demand curve that would previously have been irrelevant; and our study of behavioral economics strongly suggests that (especially in these newly relevant areas) the demand curve is not some kind of Homo Econimus nice, smooth, well-behaved ideal; but a fairly wonky set of discontinuities, impulse-purchase points, and assorted demonstrations of the quirky sense of cost and value among humans.

None of that changes the point on the demand curve that you are attempting to hit, it just has a substantial likelihood(except in the particular special cases noted) of changing the price at which you hit that point....

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[maxume]

All demand means in economics is the number of people willing to purchase something or another, it cares not for their motivations (hilariously, this is often used as a criticism of such economics).

And authors are certainly still going to be considering the commercial viability of their works; just like today, there will be plenty of creations that are not at all commercially viable, but cheap distribution doesn't make those considerations go away. "Tip jar" books may indeed insert themselves between the commercially viable and the unheard of.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love incoherent arguments. In what way does the Econ 101 observation that you sell more at lower price points contradict the empirical observation that authors sell more ebooks... at lower price points?

"They are buying it for 'just in case', because its cheap enough to not even care about its cost."

If they are buying it "just in case" they are obviously demanding the book. Enough to buy it, even.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[Sockatume]

Nobody ever bought anything "just in case" in the 18th century?

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[pz]

The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve...

Bearing in mind that, although not often mentioned, the curve is dynamic. My less-than-stellar experience with marketing folks would suggest that they generally don't understand this idea, instead throwing their arms up in the air when their assumptions are no longer valid and declaring, "OMFG THE MARKET HAS CHANGED!!" But the dynamic nature of the curve means that today's advantageous price point of USD 0.99 may not be valid in two years, or even two months. Pricing is not absolute (although there are absolute psychological factors, like 0.99 is perceived as disproportionately less than 1.00), but relative to the current market.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

True enough. The reason that the "demand curve" is so simple and elegant is that it hides all the ugly stuff in the fine print at the bottom of the page.

Now class, here is a demand curve(or demand-sloped-line if this is econ for pre-calc...). Just draw the supply curve in and find the point of intersection!

Oh, did I mention that the demand curve is of unknown shape, may or may not exhibit continuity, is not constant over time, and may in fact change in response to your pricing actions? Well, that's an, er, exercise for the reader. Gotta go!

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[unity100]

do i need to remind you that, in engineering and applied sciences in general, depending on context, a number that is close to zero enough, is taken as zero ?

the 'supply/demand' in regard to cost is so irrelevant in this case that, it is at a point of 'nil' in these calculations.

you will need to analyze the situation as 'attractiveness of the product' versus 'the hassle to acquire the product' and so on. not in regard to price. because, it is at a price point at which people are thinking that it is free.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite the opposite. This modern day marvel of a phenomenon sounds like the age-old theory of the impulse buy. How long have stores kept impulse buys right by the register? You're already in line, so it's convenient, and the cost is nominal so you don't mind spending it.

Digital downloads are just another gumball machine in the high traffic areas of life.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[unity100]

its not 'impulse'. its 'safety' buy. 'just in case' buy, or maybe 'thats almost free' buy.

Re:Seems reasonable enough, in some cases...

[geekoid]

For the most part, I suspect low readership books will go away to be replaced with a wiki or something similar.

Meh

[lennier1]

Simple sales psychology. Place the price below the product's usual "pain threshold" and the casual buyer's willingness to shell out money will skyrocket.
It's the same reason commercial websites will sell more subscriptions if they lower their price from $15 to $9.99. The trick is to determine the sweet spot.

Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[91degrees]

I seriously doubt that the book will sell in the same numbers for the next 10 months.

Could happen but it seems a little too optimistic.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the danger in linear extrapolation...

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[unity100]

if its good, it will.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he'll be so pissed when book sales drop off and he only makes 200k off a single book this year. Boo-Hoo.

I'd kill a man and eat his baby to be making 200k+ for doing something artistic everyday instead of real work.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[countertrolling]

Damn! He better get crackin' and write another one before the year is out... I wish my job paid me for ten months with one performance.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. However, $120k+ so far isn't bad, and even if the rest of the year was 10% of the rate so far it will amount to over $5000 per month. That doesn't seem bad at all.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to. He made $350K from his current books. He writes more books, and makes more money. He doesn't need every book to be an 'evergreen best-seller' to make a living.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[sandytaru]

Yep, my friend Rachel who is a brick and mortor style author only got a $60K advance from her publisher for THREE books. 120K for a single title is off the charts.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the experience of Baen's electronic library, which has also had the effect of increasing sales of paper volumes.

I got myself a Nook last year, the only non-free downloads I have on it are the books that came on the disk that came with the hardback Cyroburn. Almost all of those I already had in paperback. Because of DRM issues, I'm a cautious adopter. But the Nook does support several formats, including ePub and PDF.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[caseih]

That doesn't matter; he essentially writes serials. So his existing book may sell like hotcakes for only a year, but that's enough. He'll have the next one out soon. That's the way pulp fiction works. It's like today's mass-marketed music. What's hot today will be forgotten in six months.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[91degrees]

The question was whether it was realistic, not whether it was adequate.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[Xphile101361]

Does it matter? If he already sold 350,000 of the books and made 122k. That alone should set him up for the next year or so to put out a new book (and depending on the quality, it might not even take him that long). His biggest problem is going to be staying popular enough that 250,000+ people will want to buy it every time he puts out a new book.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[BLKMGK]

Go read his damned blog! He has sales figures for many of his books up and while it's true that sales taper off they don't drop off a cliff like his PAPER books do when they get pulled from the shelf. This is a guy who has published books in paper with big publishing houses, seen himself getting screwed, and found a better way. Even better - he has books that the big houses rejected(!) that he is now selling and making a living off of! He's no dummy and this IS sustainable for him. He never thought he'd be making a really good living at this - but now he is and he is man enough to show others how to do it too. He even highlights other authors to try and get them exposure - he's a class act IMO. Very cool...

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[geekoid]

The tail of books sales with ebook is MUCH longer the traditional houses.

Re:Is a linear extrapolation realistic?

[91degrees]

A royalty and an advance are different though. An advance is just a prepayment to allow the writer to write their book. Once royalties have repaid that, the author will get more money.

Pulp fiction

[gig]

Yeah, pulp fiction books need to be cheap. If I can buy a movie of a pulp fiction book for $10 then yes the book should be 99 cents.

Plus, a Kindle book is throwaway, just a printout with DRN. If you want to charge more, you have to build something more.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Zembar]

If he called himself Harry S Truman you'd wonder if the people behind Twin Peaks got a cut, right?

This eliminates poor people, Socialism etc.

[cvtan]

Combine this with "Buy Real Estate with No Money Down" and the read and green stock purchasing arrows software and all poverty will be removed! All we have to do to improve this is to consider Twitter/Facebook posts to be "books" and charge 99cents for each one and we'll all be rich!

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Broolucks]

Well, if you watched the show, you would likely have had more exposure to John Locke the character than you ever had to John Locke the philosopher, which will change what you think of first when you see the name. When I see "John Locke", the character pops to mind, then the philosopher a second later, at which point I beat myself up for letting TV shuffle my associative memory around :(

If the name had anything to do with popularity, I'd wager the TV show is to thank. Nobody cares about philosophy, unfortunately.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[vlm]

I'm sure his name (John Locke) helped sales a bit. I wonder if the t.v. show producers get a cut.

I don't think TV viewers, in general, read. Reading is not part of the "sports bar" and "reality tv" mindset.

A philosophy student whom downloads his little crime drama thinking its a study guide or cliffs notes for "Treatise on Civil Government" is going to be mighty confused at test taking time.

Would buy an eReader -Today-

[rotide]

I would go out and get an eReader _today_ if all books were 99 cents. At that price, I would purchase on impulse any time I finished a book. Don't like the book I just got? Get another one from another author. I could buy a few and sample until I find the set I wanna go with. Maybe a few books for different moods, etc.

The problem with books as entertainment right now is that they are an investment. Maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't even really read as a hobby, it's more of a time killer in the car, at work, or in bed if I can't sleep. Charging me $9.99 for a book is basically telling me not to bother unless I "know" I'm going to like it (friends/family reviews).

But again, make eBooks 99 cents and the investment aspect is gone and people like me who just want to kill time with them will start purchasing them.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[Gondola]

All books are free if you know where to look. If you end up liking the book, support the author by purchasing their books. If you don't like a book after the first couple chapters, just delete it.

That's a good idea, actually; give people the first few chapters of a book for free. If they like it, let them purchase the rest. Oh wait, then only quality would make money instead of overrated garbage; can't have that. At least with music, you usually get to hear the "best" track on the radio, and if you want you can just purchase that track (only an option relatively recently), or try to find the rest of the band's music online to see if you like it and want to buy the album.

I got a Kindle for Xmas. One of the best things ever. I've read over a dozen books since I got it, and at that pace I will have read 10x as many books as I read last year.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[Anonymous Coward]

All books are free if you know where to look.

Your house? I will take few of them, thx.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[Shikaku]

You can't impulse torrent a book. The availability of a $foop2p ebook goes from moderate to impossible to download. Of course you have to know what the best $foop2p is to begin with, and know where to look.

Convenience is worth a lot to consumers. If you have popular/good books, and they are easy to find, and they are cheap ($3 can be a good price versus $.99) , you have lots of sales.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[geekoid]

I have a kindle and I agree with you..but.

There are a lot of books for 99 cents that wouldn't buy otherwise. Like a book of Phillip K Dick Shorts.
No way in heel would that have made it to the shelves for 99 cents.
There are a bunch of free books.

And yes, there are ebooks going for ridiculous prices like 9.99 and 14.99

However it isn't one or the other. I can still go buy a physical book for some things, and an eBook for others.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[geekoid]

With a kindle, you have 7 days to return the book. So you cans till get it, read a couple of chapters and then return it.
This is better because it's more data for the author about their sales.

You can also preview the books.

So I'm not sure what you are complaining about.

Re:Would buy an eReader -Today-

[Rinikusu]

That's pretty much my feeling on the matter. Maybe it's time for books to go the way of the CD/Album. Physical products will become limited, niche products catering to hardcore fans with extras, like maybe an interview CD or a sketchbook (I'd totally love to see what Neil Gaiman sketches out), character studies, plot iterations, even rough drafts and the like. I'm tired of physical products, for the most part, though. Give me my digital download with the ability to download it again later if I lose my device, give me a reasonable price (and 99 cents is more than reasonable... impulse, more like it) and I'm good to go. Otherwise, if you price it up there with the physical product, I won't purchase it at all and would rather find it at the library. Give me a reason to give you my money. Price and/or features, please.

BTW, this is also why I use Napster and the like. I don't mind spending a few bucks a month on a subscription to streaming music I like. I'm loathe to spend $10 on a digital download of something I can buy for $10 at the store. I know I lose access to streaming music if I don't pay, and I'm okay with that. But, make albums $2 or $3, I'd buy a whole lot more.

Re:does not compute

[stewbee]

Ahh... I missed the operative word 'annual'. Should teach me to post before caffeinated.

Is the record industry reading this?

[louic]

Not that I ever illegally download a discography, but if I did it would be because the price of buying music is just way too high.

OFFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Why 99 cents instead of a dollar?

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[silentace]

So your mentality is that if the average person doesn't know a bunch of random historical characters then our education system is messed up? I believe you sir are the fail in this situation. I guess you haven't heard of people that don't enjoy/care about history.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. I'm tired of people like you thinking people are stupid because they don't remember some relatively unimportant (to them) fact from long ago. Yeah, I remember learning about Locke in school. That was many many many years ago. I learned it, probably had to remember it for a few weeks until the test (or maybe the final exam), and then the knowledge gradually faded from my mind. More than a decade passes and the knowledge of Locke has served me no real purpose in life, and it's been buried so deep in my brain that even when a TV show has a character named Locke, it doesn't trigger my memory. Then I watch the 121 episodes over a period of 6 years (not counting the ones I watched multiple times). That's some real reinforcement into memory. So then less than 1 year later the name comes up, and you expect the first thing that comes to mind is not the reference I've heard hundreds and hundreds of times over the last 7 years, but rather the reference I heard a few times 15 years ago and then not at all since?

If our education system has failed at something, it has been in teaching people critical thinking...useful for figuring out why somebody might think differently than you.

P.S. I'm not the OP you replied to, but I made the same association as him upon hearing the name.

If that's the definition of "society", so be it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Situation B: A multitude of people - the author, the people working at the publisher, the people working at the printing press, the people working in distribution, and so forth and so on - receive a reasonable, but not stellar, income. [...] there's certainly a potential for consequence that will separate the wheat from the chaff - but what do we, as a society, do with that chaff? The common answer is "Not my problem". But isn't it?

No, as a matter of fact it is not my duty to support pointless middlemen that increase the overall price. It is also not my fault that they are not providing value. It is refreshing to consider a possible future where leeches on a process would be recognized and removed.

Allow me to spin your philosophy around on its head: if the author is creating the value (ie. the book), then why do these unrelated third parties deserve to extract money from the author's efforts? Fortunately, socialist insanity like yours didn't reach a fever pitch in the USA until after many of our institutions were in place. Otherwise, we would still be paying a 37% surtax on all new car purchases in order to "offset the harm" that automobiles were doing to the buggy whip industry. I mean, it's either that or "thus society dies", right?

...oh, wait, that's right, society survived just fine without them. As a matter of fact, systems perform better without parasitic loads. So, not only did society survive, but it is healthier without the buggy whip manufacturers. These dead-tree process middlemen need to evolve.

The Price Does Work, to a Certain Extent

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that my book, The Righteous, is enjoying a lot of success as a 99 cent book (currently ranked about 300 out of 350,000+ titles), but my thinking is that this is to introduce people to my writing. I hope that after they enjoy a book purchased with little risk, they won't mind spending a very reasonable 3-4 dollars for one of my other books. I personally believe that the natural price of ebooks should be significantly less than DTBs, but when I'm spending 5-10 hours reading a book, I don't worry overly much if my cost per hour of reading is 20 cents or a dollar. I'd rather spend ten bucks reading a great book than 99 cents reading something mediocre.

Unlike chocolate, however, the price of a book does not correlate very well with its quality.

Re:The Price Does Work, to a Certain Extent

[HikingStick]

If Konrath's observations prove even marginally true for other authors, like yourself, you might want to keep that $0.99 price point even after you are well known.

when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies

Would you rather sell 1,000 copies at $3.00 and make $1,050, or 20,000 copies at $0.99 and make nearly $7,000?

1000 x ($3.00 x 0.35) = $1,050.00

20,000 x ($0.99 x 0.35) = $6,930.00

Even if your increased volume is not 20-fold, you still stand to make a lot more by selling as few as five times more copies:

5,000 x ($0.99 x 0.35) = $1,732.00.

While you might feel better knowing your books will sell at a higher price (it's a nice stroke for the ego), your pocketbook will feel better if you can sell vastly more copies at the lower price.

That, after all, was Sam Walton's original premise: he preferred to sell 10,000 of something and make $0.50 on each over selling only 1,000 of something that made him $3.00 each.

Re:The Price Does Work, to a Certain Extent

[0123456]

1000 x ($3.00 x 0.35) = $1,050.00

20,000 x ($0.99 x 0.35) = $6,930.00

Even if your increased volume is not 20-fold, you still stand to make a lot more by selling as few as five times more copies:

Amazon's royalties increase to 70% at $2.99. So you need to sell six times as many at $.99 to make the same amount of money.

independance

[Ephemeriis]

These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.' Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. 'I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go,' writes Kelly. 'It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.

This, I think, is the key.

Authors today can self-publish very easily. B&N offers a service to publish ebooks, as do plenty of other places. You don't need to go to a big publishing company to get your work out there.

So all that overhead - all the editors and agents and PR folks and whatever else - is gone. Sure, you're paying something to the folks creating your ebook... But it's usually a fraction of what a big ol' publishing company would take.

So you can price your books lower, and get a bigger chunk of the profits, and actually come out ahead.

And the traditional publishing companies are going to have to compete against that. Not just for customers... But for authors, as well.

Electronic publishing and distribution has the potential to shake up the world of literature at least as much as the printing press did.

Re:independance

[BLKMGK]

Read this guy's blog - he gives a great deal of detail on exactly this. He runs the numbers, he shares his details, and he also highlights the work of others and who he uses to do his art etc. I'm a huge fan of his guy even if I don't buy his books because he's showing the way to others - my hat's off to him!

Re:independance

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one hope that editors don't disappear - I don't want to read something that is draft quality, I want something that has had improvements suggested and made, typos corrected, etc.

Re:does not compute

[Neil Boekend]

I thought the three strikes law was frowned upon here?

99 cents can be profitable

[Drakkenmensch]

Just ask the makers of Angry Birds!

Re:99 cents can be profitable

[coolmadsi]

Just ask the makers of Angry Birds!

I heard (on slashdot a while ago) that they made a lot more money from adverts than they did just selling it. I've not actually played it so I don't know how accurate that is.

Big fish in a small pond?

[shish]

when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies

And when 20 other people see this profit and copy him, will they still sell such high volumes, or will they go back to their old volumes at 1/3rd the price?

Re:Big fish in a small pond?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather spend $10 on ten books, than $3 on one book.

I don't know about a twenty-fold increase, but I would sure spend a lot more money on books when the price drops to these levels. It is all about perceived value for money. It has been said a millions times, but it bears repeating: I won't pay paper prices for an e-book.

We'll see how this plays out.

99 cent books are nice

[countertrolling]

Now give us a $49.95 reader. Right now they are one of the most overpriced items in the marketplace today. Total rip off..

Re:99 cent books are nice

[b0bby]

I don't think that a light, slim device with great battery life & an e-ink screen & wifi for $140 (base kindle) is really overpriced. I just don't like that they won't support epub, which is why I haven't bought one yet. Sure I'd like them to be cheaper, but I'd also like a pony.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[countertrolling]

I don't care if the thing can fly me to the mountains on weekends. I only care how many man-hours it takes to make one, from the mine to the shelf. The engineering has long since been paid for. It's all marketing now. That's where the money is going... beyond the coke and hookers

Re:99 cent books are nice

[Gondola]

I agree, it's not overpriced right now as an early adoption technology. It's not like you can't read any books without it.

As time passes and Amazon makes back their investment, more competition gets into the market, and manufacturing processes drop even lower, I expect decent reader prices to drop near the $50 mark or lower. ...as long as booksellers stop this ridiculous overcharging on mainstream ebooks and drop them to a reasonable range. There have been a lot of great ideas killed by greedy people taxing it or overcharging it into oblivion. Or deliberately making something unprofitable for political or strategic reasons.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Now give us a $49.95 reader. Right now they are one of the most overpriced items in the marketplace today. Total rip off..

Better yet, give me one that's safe to take in the tub. I like to read while soaking in a nice hot bath, and while I don't mind dropping the occasional book, dropping an E-reader...well, I'm more worried about that. Not being electrocuted, but damaging the device. I got some water on the touchpad of my laptop, and somehow that caused a bit of a covering to peel off, which hasn't hurt the touchpad sensitivity (so far), but yeah, I don't want something going wrong.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[cos(0)]

I don't care if the thing can fly me to the mountains on weekends. I only care how many man-hours it takes to make one, from the mine to the shelf.

This is a frequent yet fundamental misunderstanding of how pricing works. A price is set by what the producer thinks you'll pay -- not as a fixed amount/percentage above the production cost. There are many products in the marketplace with a very high profit margin (Apple products for example), and likewise some loss-leaders. The sooner you give up on the notion of matching price with "man-hours it takes to make one," the happier you'll be.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[countertrolling]

I know perfectly well how the market works. I'm saying it's long time past making the shift to the proper way of measuring things. We can start by reprogramming the consumer to ask the right questions. The only relevant question is how much did it cost to make. I have no interest in market politics

Re:99 cent books are nice

[cos(0)]

I'm saying it's long time past making the shift to the proper way of measuring things. We can start by reprogramming the consumer to ask the right questions. The only relevant question is how much did it cost to make.

That's my point -- the "proper way of measuring things" has little to do with how much it cost to make.

I consider myself very close to a perfect consumer (rational, well informed, with a long-term view), yet I don't care how much my smartphone cost to make. I only care about whether the $200 I spend is worth the benefit I get out of having the phone. In my opinion, THAT's the proper way of measuring things. My smartphone may have cost only $50 to make, but I happen to think it's a bargain at $200, because I know I'll get much more than $200 of utility and enjoyment out of it. If I turn up my nose because the profit margin is higher than is "proper," I am hurting only myself since I am denying myself the >$200 of benefit from owning the phone.

When there's large participation in the market, prices will naturally approach the "cost to make" as each item becomes commoditized—but until then, your choice is to pay what the market wants for it, or to go without. I happen to think this is a perfect system.

For what it's worth, governments sometimes think the same way you do, and try to do the "proper" thing by instituting price controls. Those always fail, and the market always finds a way around them. Just look at the price controls on rent in NYC.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[BLKMGK]

Kindle supports ePub just fine via Caliber. MANY of the books on my unit began life as ePub format. The DRM has been trashed too so IMO the Kindle is an awesome buy. One thing not widely known too is that if you have multiple Kindle on the same account they can all share books freely among them - awesome for a family IMO.

Re:99 cent books are nice

[geekoid]

We people say things like that, they mean natively.

At $0.99, it's not worth pirating

[naasking]

If you have e-books selling for $9.99, those who don't really want it will just skip it, and those who really want it figure they can just download it for free somewhere. At $0.99 though, those who don't really want it may still buy it on a whim, and those who really want it recognize that they'll spend more than $0.99 of their time trying to find the book for free (and you may not even be able to considering it's so cheap, people may not even think it's worth it uploading).

As long as it's reasonably priced, people also prefer legal options, so I'm not too surprised by this data. Kudos to this author!

Re:At $0.99, it's not worth pirating

[ian_from_brisbane]

Piracy is not just about money though. Not having to have a credit card or give out your details makes things worth pirating, even if it were priced at $0.01.

Probably.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

I've randomly thrown a dollar at steam games I've never heard of just because it's a buck (or five, still cheap for games).
I'd say it's not that far of a stretch to say eBook buyers have a similar train of thought.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Yuioup]

Ohh man I've always wanted to do this ....

WHOOSH!

Man that felt good.

I was being ... what's the word ... sarcastic.

Maybe you should look it up. No then again maybe you shouldn't. I'm being sarcastic.

Poe probably not the best example

[langelgjm]

we would stop having writers like José Saramago, Vargas Llosa, Orwell, Huxley, Edgar Alan Poe, etc.

Considering Poe had serious gambling debts and long struggled to make any living off his work, then essentially died in a gutter in Baltimore, I'm not sure he's the best example for you to choose. He clearly wasn't in the business to get rich.

In principle, though I agree with you. Quality isn't measured by quantity. J. K. Rowling's or Stephanie Meyer's works might not have artistic merit commensurate with the money they're making. I think the point being made here, though, is that cutting the price has the potential to drive up volume and increase overall profits, especially with purchases of unknown quality. Really good quality stuff can still be priced higher... as long as word gets out that it's worth it, people should recognize the quality difference and be willing to pay a higher price.

It's really tough to convince me why Kindle editions typically run only a few dollars cheaper than real editions... and in the case of used books, often the Kindle edition is several dollars more. The whole "publisher is taking on risk by publishing" doesn't work as well when you're talking about digital goods.

Re:Poe probably not the best example

[cdrguru]

The publisher isn't taking a risk but they are investing in the work. The editing and proofreading as well as having someone on staff that actually knows how to put together an eBook.

Look at self-pubished cheap books on Amazon and you will find that for the most part there has been no editing. Nothing, Nada. Editing is difficult and time consuming and most authors aren't really capable of doing a good job on their own work. Except for a few well-known cases (Asimov for one), every writer has needed a good editor and when they don't get it, it shows.

The other major failing that is clearly visible on Amazon is the lack of ability to use the tools available to make an eBook. No, you really can't just take a Word document and push it through and come out with a properly formatted eBook. But that is exactly what some folks have done. And the result is often unusable. They didn't check to see if whatever fancy stuff they tried to do with graphics was going to work on a Kindle. The graphics they used were too dark for a B&W display so they come out as a solid square of black. The text that was supposed to be near the graphic isn't. The table of contents is run together with the text of the first chapter. On and on,endless examples.

The problem is authors write and aren't so good at all the rest. Maybe they can take a stab at it but in many ways it is a waste of their time to try to learn all the ins and outs of publishing an eBook. It is like a musician trying to figure out how to do the band's taxes. Probably not the best use of their time.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[tophermeyer]

I don't know that I would call John Locke a historical random. His philosophies have had a pretty significant impact on a lot of modern thinking.

And just so my opinion is clear, if people are allowed through an education system without knowledge and understanding of history then it's pretty clear that the education system failed. That would almost be the definition of a failed education system.

What does a publisher offer an author?

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to a small book signing, greet & meet for two authors. Both had agents. Both had publishing deals. One of them even had two of his novels optioned by some big-name Hollywood producers. You'd think with this kind of track record they'd be marketed by their publishers. They both told me they have to do all of their own marketing. Considering how difficult it is to acquire an agent, and then get published, then they don't help with the marketing of your book, which would be in their interest, it's no wonder some authors are now taking their chances with ebooks. The 99 cent price goes a long way towards offsetting the lack of marketing.

Re:What does a publisher offer an author?

[0123456]

I went to a small book signing, greet & meet for two authors. Both had agents. Both had publishing deals. One of them even had two of his novels optioned by some big-name Hollywood producers. You'd think with this kind of track record they'd be marketed by their publishers. They both told me they have to do all of their own marketing.

Then they have crappy publishers. You don't pay someone a $50,000 advance for a book and then not try to sell it.

As to what publishers offer in the ebook era, the answer is packaging, marketing, and a sign that the book doesn't suck. I've read sample chapters of $0.99 ebooks and the reason why most of them are $0.99 is because they suck so bad that no-one would even consider paying more than $0.99 for them (heck, few people in their right mind would consider paying $0.99 for them). In this case the writer has made a name in traditional publishing, has an established web presence and apparently writes good books, so his experience is vastly different to that of Joe Writer who's putting up their first novel on Amazon.

The $0.99 price point will soon be full of the ebook equivalent of what you find on fanfiction.net; finding anything good is then going to down to word of mouth, reviews or a seal of approval from a publisher you've heard of.

Re:What does a publisher offer an author?

[herojig]

I agreed with you RE: what it's all going to come down to up to the point where you mentioned "seal of approval from a publisher." I don't think the brave new world gives a hoot about any of those guys. A respected reviewer will have more weight then any publisher in the next wave...

Will text books come down to $0.99?

[netdigger]

I'm a student and one of the major expenses for my self and many other students is text books. Text books can easily run upwards of $100 and most of these are not found in an electronic format. I have been fortunate enough to find some of my books in an electronic format for a "reduced price", but these still cost in the neighborhood of $50. To say that all electronic books will be $0.99 is insane. These publishers know that students are going to buy the books regardless of the price. I do believe that more text books will released in electronic formats but will never be offered for $0.99

Re:Will text books come down to $0.99?

[sandytaru]

Likely not. Textbooks are how many professors make a living, and they're one of the few guaranteed places of profit for publishers. What you can do is determine what books you need before the semester starts and try to check them out of the library, and then put it right back on reserve any time it is recalled. Most school libraries will keep 1-2 copies of each textbook used in each class. You can save several hundred dollars a semester this way.

The long tail

[bradley13]

Another thing that publishers are totally screwing up: the long tail. Ebooks give them the opportunity to get some last sales out of older books.

As an example: my kids are reading an old series that contains 20-odd books. These books are no longer in print, but you can easily find them in a used bookstore for about 50 cents each. The original cover prices were $3.00 to $3.50. I thought - hey, we have an ebook reader (Sony), let's see if the publisher has them, and we'll just get the ebooks. I would have happily paid $0.99 per ebook - twice the cost at the used bookstore, but hey, they do have to reformat the things.

Sure enough, the publisher has all of the books on offer as ebooks. Price: $9.99 each, and no extra charge for the DRM.

Is that insane or what? Charging 20 times the price I would have to pay for the physical book (and three times the original cover price). Meanwhile, their DRM is not compatible with our ebook reader. Yes, I could strip the DRM off, but I shouldn't have to.

Faced with such utter stupidity on the part of the publisher, most people will make the obvious choice: it takes only a few minutes to find a torrent containing all of the books - free and without DRM. The pointy-haired managers at the publisher will, of course, draw the wrong conclusion. They will say "piracy costs us sales." In fact, their idiotic pricing and DRM policies cost them sales.

Re:The long tail

[H0p313ss]

A mod point, a mod point. My kingdom for a mod point.

+1 Insightful

Re:The long tail

[Gondola]

Excellent comment. Friends who own ebook readers have said the exact same thing to me. This is not an uncommon phenomenon.

A few game companies are doing this sort of thing for old school games, like Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 anthologies. Other industries should catch on.

Re:The long tail

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

Re:The long tail

[BLKMGK]

Ah but you see this is an ADVANTAGE of an eBook over a published book. And you know those printing presses cost money to support so eBooks should be more expensive. Seriously, these are the kinds of ideas that MacMillen publishing has actually had the balls to post in their blog. They are batshit crazy!

Ever since these boobs got together with Apple and shit on the price of eBooks I have stopped buying. Just like I did with music until Amazon had nice unencumbered MP3 copies for 99 cents which I now buy quite a few of. I'm doing the same with books that I did with music - finding "alternative" sources. However with books I have noticed an interesting phenomena. You see an MP3 can be multiple megs but a book? FAR smaller. So small in fact that it doesn't make sense to just make a single book available but to instead offer an entire catalog. So these authors who's publishers are such stupid asshats as to charge as much, and sometimes MORE (I shit you not), than cover price for print are really getting screwed. Worse? They get a FAR smaller percentage of their sale of a paper book than they would with an eBook published via Amazon.

This author reveals his sales numbers, he reveals his methods, he tells anyone that will listen how to do it - and authors are slowly beginning to get a clue. Even more interesting is he's urging these authors to sell off their back catalog. He's also urging them to reclaim rights of books that publishers have left fallow and off the shelf. He's urging them to just say NO when those publishers come knocking offering to sell the books for the author out of the back catalog and he shows them how to do it themselves. Interestingly enough one of the hurdles has been the cover art on books so he's showing them where to get new quality art. His site is a really good read!

Big publishers of books for casual readers are about to get a rude awakening I think. In the next few years they are going to have their lunch eaten and I'm going to laugh and laugh. When books become affordable again, and $9.99 or less was my previous price point but might not be low enough now, I'll start buying again. Until then I'll watch them burn...

Re:The long tail

[geekoid]

" the obvious choice: it takes only a few minutes to find a torrent containing all of the books"
most rational people would select 'buy the book for 50 cents"as the rational approach, not 'look we can get something for free'.

Yes, 9.99 is way to high and I hope you contacted the publisher and point blank told them. I can get your book for 50 cents and you get NOTHING, or you can charge 99 cents and you get something. Typically 35%

Re:The long tail

[DarwinSurvivor]

Don't forget, they'll report your torrenting the series as $199.80 in lost revenue in their lobbying to the government, when in fact they only lost a POTENTIAL $19.80 (what you were willing to pay for it, had they offered)!

Re:The long tail

[jwhitener]

I can understand frustrations about pricing of digital content, but my frustration comes from lack of availability most of the time.

20,30,40 year old movies that are impossible to find through any legal means sometimes, short of buying a physical DVD if you are lucky. But that snail mail system completely destroys the well known advantage that impulse buying has for content owners.

I just can't imagine why any media publisher (music, movies, books, tv) wouldn't want 100% of their content available for purchase right at a person's finger tips at all times. Case in point: Blade Runner, the re-mastered version. I got the urge to watch it after the recent slashdot thread about prequel/sequels possibly coming out. I power up the xbox: check netflix, nope. check zune video store, nope. Why? I managed to find a copy at one of the few small DVD stores remaining in town (the big ones are, of course, bankrupt).

TV shows on Hulu are the same way. Some let you view a full season. Some only 5 shows, and the most popular ones like American Idol, not at all. There is no legal way to watch an American Idol if you missed an episode. In the mind of Fox do they think I'll wait an entire year, then buy the Idol DVD set, just to watch the one episode I missed? Surely some revenue is better than none, put the damn thing on Hulu.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[sznupi]

Though even successful education system doesn't equal assuring that historical names stick (which OTOH might take forms dangerously close to rote repetition). Certainly it's not the same thing as trying to learn lessons of history, etc.

In this pause...

[H0p313ss]

And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage

Heck, I'd buy his books just for that sentence.

Re:In this pause...

[Anonymous Coward]

And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage

Heck, I'd buy his books just for that sentence.

Yeah, I read that and thought, maybe I'll go buy some of his 99 cent books right now.

Sure you can hand it to friends and family to read

[Shivetya]

Family is easy, just hand them the Kindle. Oh, wait, since its an electronic device we inherently think of it differently. It suddenly is ours, something we don't want to share.

How cheap can we get? 99 cents? I pay seven times that to see a movie at the theater and I cannot share that, except buy buying another ticket. There are books in our house only I have read and some I have never read. I can't recall the last time a friend asked to borrow one. A DVD cost $14.99 but I can share that, sure I get them cheaper, but in the end I am handing over the physical item.

99, 1.99, 2.99 or such to me is so cheap to private all the time access I could care less that I can share. Having to buy it at the costs of what it cost in hard copy might make me think different about it.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[Lumpy]

Exactly. I know a writer. her books sell for $19.95 on the bookshelf.

She get's $0.50 a book sold. ALL THE REST goes to the middle men. She recently stopped writing dead tree books and started ebooks only after her contract ran out. She sells 1/4 the books now but makes 5X the profit per book, I sent her this article and she is considering testing the waters at the $0.99 price point on amazon.com when her next book comes out, lower the price of the previous ones. even at that price point she will be making close to what her dead tree publisher was giving her.

Who will lose is publishers, the middlemen that do nothing at all for content of the book. and honestly, every writer will say "good riddance"

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

for
fuck's
SAKE

why did you use "whom" there? come on, explain to me why the stinking FUCK you used "whom" there? you're not in dative or accusative case, you're in nominative. the philosophy student is the subject of the verb (hence nominative), the little crime drama is the direct object (hence accusative). so explain to me, why did you use "whom"? was it a typo? it's a pretty fucking strange typo to jump from the o on the top of the keyboard down to the m on the bottom, for no fucking reason. no, it's not a typo. is it grammatically correct? no, it's not. "whom" is dying from the english language in the first place but when it was used and used properly, it was used in accusative and dative cases. NOT nominative -- indeed, nominative is the only case where "who" was ever used so you fail on very many levels.

so why was it? oh, yes, i know, it's because you wanted to look all clever and smart and use the language properly. in doing so, you showed yourself up as a total fucking RETARD.

if you can't use "whom" fucking let it die already.

the real competition is lulu.com

[rlseaman]

Publishing physical books and e-books are two different things. The market niches are complementary. If a company like Borders goes bankrupt it's because they've failed to comprehend the complete mix of markets they compete in, not because one part of the business cannibalized another.

There are reasons to be skeptical that paper books will become extinct any time soon. The great strengths of e-books are also their weaknesses - in particular the book is only as permanent as the battery in the e-book reader, and the reader is a fragile device. A fat paperback can even be ripped in half down the spine to improve portability without harming the reading "experience". Textbooks? Artbooks? Etc.

The success of the physical book business is only loosely tied to the satisfaction of the readers. It is much more tightly connected to the profitability of the publishing workflow. As soon as Amazon, etc., solved the mail order scalability problem - an issue related to physical books, not e-books - physical book stores quaked. Really, the readers are more product than customer here - their loyalty traded back and forth between vendors vying for their business.

The next step in dismantling the publishing industry is the printing workflow itself. Send a PDF to lulu.com and you can immediately order a very nice paperback with a single copy price of $5.77 (depending on page count, etc.) Chop a couple of bucks off of that for an order of a few hundred.

Re:the real competition is lulu.com

[JamesTRexx]

That weakness will become moot in the future, most e-readers have enough battery power for the average reader and battery lifetime is a hot topic at the moment in research.
By the time an e-reader runs 24 hours everyone will be used to reading from that instead of a real book and the people (like me) who prefer the bonded stack of faxes will start to get extinct.

Re:the real competition is lulu.com

[geekoid]

You seem to by under the misconception that if your eReader breaks, you loose the books.
For the kindle at least, that isn't true. You can buy another and then download it from the cloud. No charge. Can't afford a new one? you can download the book to any other device running the free kindle reader.

Lets see you do that when you lose a physical book.

Had you read the article, you would have read the Lock pays about 1000 dollars. That art, distribution on many formats and he gets 35%.

Re:the real competition is lulu.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Borders moved in and crushed local bookstores that couldn't keep up. I realize that you are talking about the ecology of the system, I am not going to mourn the loss of the big bookstores. It is my hope though that second hand bookstores can find a place in the new space.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[NiteShaed]

I don't think TV viewers, in general, read. Reading is not part of the "sports bar" and "reality tv" mindset.

You probably think wrong then. Most people are not of the "I don't own a TV because I'm too intellectually superior to everyone else to have one" mindset. I think you'd find plenty of people who read avidly and yet still watched Lost. That even includes philosophy students, assuming they can find a way to afford a television.

A philosophy student whom downloads his little crime drama

Oh, way to go minimizing the guy's work. I assume you've written a number of books yourself that are of far better quality and higher caliber than his "little crime drama"? He's done well, and his audience seems to respond very positively to what he's written, I'd say he's done a pretty damn good job for himself there.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

And just so my opinion is clear, if people are allowed through an education system without knowledge and understanding of history then it's pretty clear that the education system failed. That would almost be the definition of a failed education system.

Check your premises. You incorrectly believe that the purpose of government schooling is an educated populace. It is in fact the exact opposite.

If people are allowed through an education system without knowledge and understanding of history then it's pretty clear that the education system SUCCEEDED. That would be the definition of a SUCCESSFUL education system.

In soviet Russia

[Chemisor]

> Your point is that socialism is selling high priced crap?

As a former resident of the USSR, I can tell you that socialism is exactly that. Selling high priced crap, and buying high priced crap (when you can get it, that is)

It's the return

[idontgno]

of the penny dreadful.. Although not aimed specifically at the juvenile market, like the historical precedent was.

I wonder if the big publishing pigocracies will find some wild-assed way to try to intervene in this process? The mindset of the large media incumbents seems to be that if money is being made and they're not getting some of it, it's wrong and bad and evil and piracy.

Compare, for instance, various attacks (such as improper DMCA takedowns) on indie music distributed directly from performer to purchaser.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[bigstrat2003]

And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books. I dread the day when real books become considered "obsolete" and are no longer published. That's the day I stop reading books.

Actually, it's $1.99

[Plekto]

If you calculate in the payment that Amazon makes to the author, the break-point is actually $1.99. Books under $1.99 get 35% and books $1.99 and over get 70% profit to their authors. He should have read the terms and done the math a bit more carefully as he'd have made twice the money, even with half the sales.

350,000 X .99 X 0.35 = 121,275
175,000 X 1.99 X 0.70 = 243,775

If you are selling it for 99 cents, you're actually throwing away profit, because under $2 is the actual magic price-point where people impulse by almost anything these days. You'd probably see closer to 200,000 sales or more at that price, since due to inflation, most people would still buy something for $1.99 on a whim just as readily as they would for 99 cents.

The price floor won't be 99 cents, it'll be $1.99, or until Amazon changes its payment schedule.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[jo_ham]

Perhaps, but his income depends on readers - if he sells twice as many, even if he doesn't make quite as much raw profit per sale, he'll have more eyes on his books and likely attract more repeat readers. For a little less profit in the sort term, he could be ensuring his future earnings.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you miss the point and make assumptions. Go write your own book, release it for $2 and see how many you sell. Then come back and tell us. Less than $1 is change, $2 is a beer. That pause the author mentioned will kick in and sales will be lost.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting piece of information. I know everyone thinks that anything digital should be sold for no more than a dollar but there's another issue. It's fine when you can count on hundreds of thousands of sales but say you are part of a nitch market and can only expect 10,000 in sales on a book you spent 6 to 12 months writing. At 10,000 in sales you'd qualify for food stamps. If there's a solid market for your work and you can only expect limited sales then the cost per copy has to go up or you simply have to stop writing books. If cost is the only determining factor in buying books then expect quality to drop like a rock. Odds are because of the move to cheaper and cheaper products 90% of the writers out there will stop writing over the next 10 to 20 years. Here's a shocking fact. I know a lot of writers and very few aren't already struggling and I do mean full time professional writers not wantabes. It wouldn't take more than a good sneeze already to drive most of them out of writing. I'd say half of them I know have already left the profession. Self publishing is a good option but until you are known it's tough for a writer to develop a market.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you didn't read carefully. He said he gets roughly 20x the sales at $.99.

So,

350k * .99 * .35 = 121,275 YTD
vs
350/20 = 17.5k
17.5k * 1.99 * .7 = 24,377 YTD

That is to say, ebook purchase price curve is highly elastic. My own buying habits conform with this observed behavior: $.99 is always a no-brainer.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever it is, it's a lot lower than $9.99.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite correct.

The minimum a book can be in the 70% royalty program is $2.99 and the max is $9.99.
The 35% royalty program is a bit different. The minimums change due to size in megabytes.

http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com/kdpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=453

I'm note quite sure where you're getting these numbers from, but if you can cite where you're getting your numbers I'd happily cede the point to you.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

If you calculate in the payment that Amazon makes to the author, the break-point is actually $1.99. Books under $1.99 get 35% and books $1.99 and over get 70% profit to their authors. He should have read the terms and done the math a bit more carefully as he'd have made twice the money, even with half the sales.

350,000 X .99 X 0.35 = 121,275
175,000 X 1.99 X 0.70 = 243,775

I'm still tryin' to figure out how the story shows his income as $500,000
My calculator agrees with yours: $121,275

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

assuming that at least half would by for 1.99c.

I can get used books cheaper than that.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably obvious, but your model breaks on 'even with half the sales'. I've never seen or heard the price/sales relationship being that sort of linear. If a seller cuts the price in half, they *always* sell more than 2x as many. The economic question here is how many more? The break-even at 99c is near 4x (one fourth of the sales one would see at 99c). And I think you underestimate the emotional difference between $1 and $2 items.

There's also dynamic possible at 1.99, assuming AMZN hasn't blocked temporary discounts. If a mystery novel is priced at $2 or more, but has an annual 'Ellery Queen Birthday Sale' price of 99c, the feeding frenzy of a sale, the marketing attention a sale gets, and the people that recommend the book they bought at 99c to friends that buy it at the higher price can be more profitable than a static price.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth noting: Amazon has a "Kindle Singles" program for works that are between 10k-30k words and that are priced between $0.99-$4.99. Under that program you can get 70% at the $0.99 price point, but it currently seems like Amazon is being a bit choosy about who gets in. If this program does well I'd bet they'll either open up the Singles for more users or allow everyone to get 70% at $0.99.

Amazon press release:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1481538&highlight

Article about the whole thing
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/review-my-amazon-kindle-single-publishing-experiment/43911

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon only allows the 70% US royalty rate on books with a minimum list price of $2.99. Please correct me if I'm wrong and they have updated it.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Plekto]

That is a valid point. I'd try putting his next book at just above the break-point and see how it works. I bet he makes a decent amount of profit.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis assumes a strictly linear relationship of price to sales volume. I doubt it is such, but hey, might be worth it to him to experiment on the price....say 1.99 for first 6 or 12 months of release and .99 after.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[kramerd]

Except that in the summary, it was pointed out that the price was reduced from 2.99 to 99 cents, and sales went up 800 times, not double.

350,000X.99X.35 = 121275
438 X 2.99 X.7 = 917

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[kramerd]

Ok, I misread that, it was 20 times sales, not 800.

That makes the second number 36628 rather than 917, but still less than 1/3 of the gain.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Plekto]

True, but he should have tried $1.99 first as $1.98 and below is where Amazon rapes its authors. I suspect that he'd have done nearly as well.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[geekoid]

He sells 20 times more at 99 cents, not twice as much.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the price to get the higher royalty is $2.99.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

If you calculate in the payment that Amazon makes to the author, the break-point is actually $1.99. Books under $1.99 get 35% and books $1.99 and over get 70% profit to their authors. He should have read the terms and done the math a bit more carefully as he'd have made twice the money, even with half the sales.

You're missing the point. At a $.99 price point his novels are now impulse buys. For less than the price of a soda out of a vending machine, someone can buy his book and read it. If you buy it and don't like it, no big deal you're only out $.99 which is a whole lot better than being out $1.99.

Would he have sold half as many if the price were $1.99? I doubt it.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. I was seriously worried that no one would do the math...

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Except he didn't get twice the sales by dropping the price from $1.99 to $0.99, he got *20* times the sales.

10,000 x $1.99 x 0.70 = $13,930
200,000 x $0.99 x 0.35 = $69,300

He's doing just fine, thank you very much.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Iunder $2 is the actual magic price-point where people impulse by almost anything these days. You'd probably see closer to 200,000 sales or more at that price, since due to inflation, most people would still buy something for $1.99 on a whim just as readily as they would for 99 cents.

Isn't that an assumption? I wouldn't for one, if my experience on the itunes appstore counts.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, but there's incredible value for higher readership - return customers. I'd sacrifice 10% if I knew I had twice as many people willing to come back. Because when I release book 2, the extra 175,000 people have influence over 1 million more potential readers if they loved the first book.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the break point is 2.99. You can check with Amazon 2.99 - 9.99 Authors get 70%, less shipping, if sold in US, UK or Canada; everywhere else 35%.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

So why are tunes 99 cents?

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be true, but we really have no way of knowing just how many sales he'd get at $1.99 - personally, I'm far less likely to buy something at $1.99 than at $0.99, regardless of what it is, but that could just be because I'm relatively poor. I almost never impulse buy anything that's more than a dollar. So, perhaps he'd have sold 175,000 copies, and perhaps not.

What we do know is that he had 20 times fewer sales when his book was priced at $2.99:

17,500 x $2.99 x 0.7 = $36,627.50

Lowering the price to $0.99 more than tripled his income. Not too bad, in my opinion.

Re:Actually, it's $1.99

[Plekto]

He problem was that the didn't try the $1.99 break-point first. If it didn't sell at $2.99, it might have sold much better at $1.99 and given him better profits. He only has to sell 1/4 as much at $1.99 as 99 cents to make more money. Jumping from $2.99 to 99 cents was likely an over-reaction.

That said, I really need to write a cheap novel. Heh. That's silly money.

Basic economics

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing needs to happen to the movie industry.. at $2-3.00 a movie, I'd certainly buy my movies rather than download them all via bittorrent for free.

There is room to improve the model, not sure why the film industry hasn't caught on to this - even at $2.00, they might as well get something for their movies, because i'm certainly not paying the $50.00 required these days to see it at the theatre.

Re:Basic economics

[Gondola]

Agreed! Considering I have a high definition 65" screen at home, free food and a pause button to use the bathroom means the theater loses almost every time (Avatar and Tron: Legacy in 3D being notable exceptions!). Even buying it at full Blu Ray price is a better deal than paying for tickets and concessions for me and my wife, but it's still beyond the "impulse buy" limit for something that loses almost all of its value after one screening.

Re:Basic economics

[GodfatherofSoul]

You almost can. My local Blockbusters have 4 for $20 sales regularly on movies that aren't new to DVD. For the past 10 years or so, rather than renting I'd just go get 4 at a pop and watch them at my leisure. Nice way to build up a DVD library, too! Even the slightly more expensive buys are only $10/DVD which is still pretty cheap to purchase own a DVD that probably been out for little over a month or so.

Re:does not compute

[CastrTroy]

Obligatory XKCD. More seriously, maybe he has exhausted his audience and he will make no more sales for the rest of they year. Maybe this slashvertisement will grant him $1 million in sales. Overall it's hard to say.

Re:Sure you can hand it to friends and family to r

[taustin]

If I own two paper books, I can loan one to a friend while I read the other. If I have to ebooks on my Kindle, I cannot read one while I loan the Kindle to a friend. They are inherently different.

library

[irrational_design]

There are four books I currently have on hold from the library. Some of them I am something like 145th in line. It will be many months, at least, before it is my turn for most of the books. But I'm willing to wait that long to borrow them from the library rather than buy them (in digital or analog format). But, if they were available for .99 right now I would buy all four in a heartbeat. I might even buy two of them at 1.99. But, at least for me, anything above that will see me waiting for them to come in at the library.

How to eBook?

[stkpogo]

Where's the .99 how to eBook, to write & sell .99 eBooks?

Where did they get that math?

[g0bshiTe]

350,000 downloads @ .99 each at a royalty rate of 35% is not 500k. 100% of 350,000 .99 downloads isn't even 350k. WTF?

Re:Where did they get that math?

[thepainguy]

They lose money on every sale but make it up on volume.

Re:Where did they get that math?

[SleazyRidr]

He's sold 350k units so far this year. Assuming he keeps up that rate all year he'll make ~$660K.

Re:Where did they get that math?

[Cowmonaut]

They are talking annually, whereas the 350k figure is from a ~2.2 month period.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[Takichi]

It's unlikely all paper editions of books will cease to exist. The record industry is probably a good model for what will happen. The vast majority of content is digital, but there is still a strong niche market for vinyl. Vinyl is adored for the experience it provides, much in the same way paper books are.

Nice name!

[antdude]

I guess he is doing it froom the island. ;)

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[perpetual pessimist]

And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books. I dread the day when real books become considered "obsolete" and are no longer published. That's the day I stop reading books.

Which "real, dead tree books"? There are the books made by publishers like Easton Press, which are made with high quality paper, leather-bound, and gilded edges; these books are very expensive but will last literally (all puns intended) generations. Then there are the usual hard-back mass produced books, which have the cardboard binding and fair quality paper; might get a few decades out of them, but at least they don't cost too much. Then there's the cheap paperback books; read 'em twice and they're starting to fall apart.

I used to think just like you: I love books, I want books, and to hell with these e-reader things. Then I got a Kindle (long story). And I realized I was not quite right; I do love the high-quality leather bound books AS books. But the cheap stuff are just delivery methods for what I really love: stories. I love stories. And e-readers give me the stories in a far better delivery method than a paperback.

The high-quality book publishers will still hang around and produce their specialty products. The mass publishers are finding that their delivery methods are being overtaken by technology, just like the music and movie delivery middlemen have had happen to them.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[Quirkz]

What's your friend do for editing with the ebooks? Does she edit her own? Hire a freelance editor? That seems to be one of the sticking points for DIY publishing, and I'm always curious how people get around those obstacles.

Who will lose is publishers, the middlemen that do nothing at all for content of the book. and honestly, every writer will say "good riddance"

Perhaps a bit harsh. I agree authors get a shockingly small cut, presently. But there are services publishers currently provide: editing, layout, distribution, marketing -- real stuff involved in making a book readable, or getting it to customers. Obviously Amazon is stepping up to be the distributor and essentially provides some of the marketing, and they still take a cut for that. Layout tends to be tossed out the window with ebooks right now, and that's mostly acceptable (though I suspect design will creep back in as a valuable service as readers improve). Editing is tough -- some authors can do a pretty decent job on their own (though most still have blind spots or need an outside perspective here and there), but others absolutely need serious help with major points like structure, plot, or coherence before they can have a final product that someone would rather read than set fire to.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[uniquename72]

No one believes you (and "woosh" doesn't really work in that situation anyway. "Woosh" is generally applied to misunderstanding the context of a comment, not missing someone's sarcasm. The fact that you can't tell the difference gives weight to the opinion that the only John Locke you're familiar with is on TV).

Microtransactions.

[wild_quinine]

Potential authors really need two things to make this stuff work: consumer friendly microtransactions (no 'pause' required), and exposure.

The old-school publishers will have a welcome role in the new era as gatekeepers of those microtransactions, if they play their cards right. I think they're going to need to work on their royalty models, though.

As it stands, most authors need editors - no, really, they do - and the publishers aren't picking up that tab any more, in our brave new world of indie ebook publishing. If costs like that are coming out of the author's slice then publishers are going to need to find a more appropriate gatekeeper cost, or start adding value in other ways. (Amazon take note. Apple take cover.)

Exposure is anyone's guess. If we could all manage it, we'd all make it.

-Quinn Wilde (a Creative Commons licenced author)

Re:Microtransactions.

[geekoid]

Cost like that have always come out of the authors slice. The only difference now is the cost is up front, but much cheaper.

Amazon doesn't care about the price. As long as there cut is more then there cost for infrastructure, their golden. They will make money with volume.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[anyGould]

What's your friend do for editing with the ebooks? Does she edit her own? Hire a freelance editor? That seems to be one of the sticking points for DIY publishing, and I'm always curious how people get around those obstacles.

Generally hire their own. And for first-time authors, there are resources out there where people volunteer their time to edit.

Digital selling means that "Hollywood accounting" will start to decline. While you probably still won't be able to prove that they're screwing you, you will be able to pay others to do it piecemeal and see that they're keeping more money.

well when it comes to technical books...

[ganjadude]

I can justify the added cost IF the book is fully searchable. If I can search the document electronically, that would save me loads of time when i need to find some obscure command to work with

Re:well when it comes to technical books...

[tsa]

I bought the Kindle version of a book lately for 2$ more than the paperback version, and it turned out that all the illustrations were left out! Amazon didn't say that on the website. I wonder if I will ever buy an ebook from them again.

It's not so dire.

[jvonk]

And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books.

You are conflating the issues. Publishers don't really provide much value anymore, and they engage in protectionist gatekeeping crap that squelches smaller authors or those who don't wish to "play ball". There are many analogues in other businesses. Take, for example, Ticketmaster... how the hell can they call it a "convenience fee" if I am buying the ticket at the venue's box office? But I digress...

I believe technology will also come to the rescue wrt your dead tree book concerns: Print on demand

As this technology evolves, there will be almost no overhead that the B&M's currently face, due to zero inventory. Just as digital photography hasn't killed the glossy print, I don't believe the popularity of e-books will kill the dead-tree market. Hell, a few years back Apple integrated into iPhoto a way to get your digital photos delivered as a printed book. The future could even be brighter than the present: what if you could inexpensively custom order your books to have leather binding, be a particular color, be in your favorite 'easy to read' font, etc? These value-adds would be fairly inexpensive to produce in a PoD scenario. Furthermore, "out of print" would become an obsolete concept: no more searching high and low, then paying an exorbitant price all for a thumbworn used book.

BTW, I have nothing against publishers if they evolve and actually provide value commensurate to their cost. Editing, "packaging" the book with cover art, marketing, etc, could all contribute value. However, "you have to use us or we will keep you from being able to sell your book because we have locked up the distribution channels" is the antithesis of value.

Problem of Trust

[Roger W Moore]

At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.

You can only do this because, at the moment, B&N let you. What happens if they have a change of mind because they are not making enough money? What happens if they go bankrupt? What happens if some company comes up with a "magical and revolutionary" device and despite the horrendous hype you decide to switch from a Nook to that?

When I purchase an analogue book the transaction is over and complete and the book is mine to do with as I will (except to copy). The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.

Re:Problem of Trust

[Ephemeriis]

The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.

Which is why you buy DRM-free ebooks in formats like .epub and .pdf - and you can use them on whatever device you like and share them with anyone you like.

Re:Problem of Trust

[Kadin2048]

Not sure about the Nook but it is trivial to strip Amazon's DRM right now. So the easy solution to all your problems is just to download and strip the DRM from your purchased books, then store them away somewhere. No worries about Amazon getting retroactively grabby or changing the rules of the game later on.

People tend to forget that the e-readers, although in some respects tied to a "store", can also get content from other places, including just copying it directly over USB. You could buy a Kindle and never buy a book from Amazon, if you don't want to (of course, it's really convenient to get books from AMZ...). And once the DRM has been removed from an Amazon purchase you can use it the same as just about any other Mobipocket-format book.

I would never purchase a device that could only obtain content through a store, or where the content wasn't able to be freed into an archivable, widely-accepted format. Thankfully the Kindle, at least in its current incarnation, is neither of those things.

Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought...

[herojig]

Funny, I just installed the iBooks app today and expected all the prices to be $.99. I was surprised to see total crap for the list price of a good paperback - what a rip I thought, and downloaded some free Isaac Asimov and Agatha Christie. So not disappointed really... On another note, just to install iBooks I had to take a 3G and run redsn0w what seemed like 20 times on two computers over two hours before I got onto iOS 4.2.1 from 3.1.2. What a total joke. If they made opening a paperback book back in 1935 that hard, they would have never sold more then a few hundred.

It is wrong

[Roger W Moore]

Claiming this as an annual rate is actually wrong because it assumes a constant rate of sales over a year when in reality you would expect a peak and then a decline. So claiming an annual income of over $500k is not supported by the available data and so is arguably wrong...just for a different reason.

This Changes Nothing (If Anything, It's Better)

[kyrio]

I'll buy an excellent book, with good quality paper, and beautiful art/pictures (if it applies inside the book, at least on the covers), that I can have and hold and read at my leisure, anywhere in the world, at any time. It's the same reason I'll buy a beautifully made, limited edition, fully loaded CD/DVD/Bluray box set with excellent music/videos/information included.

This will be the future. I can buy any crap for $1, or I can get things of actual value (where value is material), for $10/$20/$50/$hundreds, etc.

Re:This Changes Nothing (If Anything, It's Better)

[rfc1394]

On the other hand, they can offer all of these. An inexpensive version you read on the Kindle. A more expensive printed version (because of the extra costs). A slightly more expensive audiobook. A more expensive enhanced printed edition, perhaps including the audiobook. Signed Limited Editions. There can be something for everyone.

Now if you can get textbooks to go the same way...

[DemonNiko]

Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. Meantime a college textbook costs 70$ in digital format and they limit you on how long you can keep it. Get digital textbooks down to something students can afford without selling blood, sperm, organs and getting a loan from their parents and you'll find you're going to have happier students.

Random Historical Characters?

[srobert]

You make me laugh. John Locke?, random historical character?. Well yes, I guess that is my mentality. The educational system has in fact failed if the average person doesn't know anything about John Locke. Here's a short list of "random historical characters" about whom I think every educated person should know at least something:
Socrates, Isaac Newton, Cyrus the Great, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Lao-Tzu, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammad, Karl Marx, Christopher Columbus, Helen Keller, Mohandas Gandhi, oh and yes John Locke and many others.
If you don't know about anything at all about most of these people then, yes, I'd say that education has failed.

Re:Random Historical Characters?

[sznupi]

Oh come on, using "Siddhartha Gautama" is just mean to those people... ;)

Kindle Limits Low Level of the Price

[sarbonn]

If you want to sell your book on Amazon (Kindle) like the person of the original article is, you can't take the 70% rate from Amazon. You have to choose their 35% rate instead, so instead of making 70% of $2.99 (their lowest rate), you end up making 35% of $0.99. Not a lot of profit. Granted, the author probably makes a lot more because of the volume of sales, but if you don't sell a lot and have good marketing to boot, you're going to get taken big time.

Re:Kindle Limits Low Level of the Price

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering he says his sales went up by a factor of 20, I don't think he got taken...

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the character was (of course) named for the philosopher, and it's completely reasonable for people to think of the TV character first.

That doesn't mean nobody knows or cares about the namesake.

So relax a little with the condescension. It'd do you good, as we don't consider you a scholar for knowing there's a philosopher named John Locke... just a bit of a jerk for pointing it out in such a judgmental way.

PS - One minor remark on /. is no indication of the quality of our educational system. Though our educational system should have developed your critical thinking skills better than that.

Re:Sure you can hand it to friends and family to r

[ShooterNeo]

Actually, you can. Assuming your friend has a kindle compatible device (ipad, mac, pc, or a kindle) you can loan it to him.

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[kwoff]

Sorry, but that's a silly, melodramatic argument. If you really love books, you have stacks of them laying around and will never have time to read them all, so what does their being published have to do with your reading them?

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

You're speaking from a US PoV. For example, in England, an arrest does appear on your criminal record even if you aren't charged, let alone convicted. And this record can be searched by any prospective employer, and is routinely used against people.

The state of UK government is so bad right now, the only thing I hate more is the people for not walking out of their houses and workplaces and protesting.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[cartman]

You're speaking from a US PoV. For example, in England, an arrest does appear on your criminal record even if you aren't charged, let alone convicted. And this record can be searched by any prospective employer, and is routinely used against people.

Oh crap, that's terrible. I didn't know it was like that in England. Whatever happened to presumption of innocence? Didn't you guys come up with that idea?

It's about time!

[BLKMGK]

I've mentioned this guy in countless rants concerning eBook prices and the way the PUBLISHERS, not Amazon, are screwing us. MacMillen in particular who started this mess. This guy's blog is a fascinating read and it's been very interesting to see him making a living without having to tour his brains out and do all sorts of hoop jumping like he used to with paper books. Paper books sit on a shelf for a limited period of time and then go into a back catalog that the author can't do jack with. Electronic books are always right in front of any search and can be long-term money makers for an author - a point he really hammers home by revealing all sorts of information about his sales that has got to send shivers up the spine of the large publishing houses. He tells everyone who he uses for cover work, editing, and he even promotes other writers - he's doing a service. Sadly his books aren't a genre I would enjoy but as a human being this guy deserves huge props for trying to help others get the same success he has!

I'm thrilled to death to see a story about him here, I just wish I'd been the one smart enough to think to submit it :-)

Re:It's about time!

[geekoid]

With eBook self publishing Authors are their own boss.

With he traditional big house publisher, authors are their bitch.

Re:It's about time!

[BLKMGK]

Reminds me of another industry - the music industry!

But this is an example of capitalism working best

[SuperKendall]

The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.

In this case it's reach the point of greatest efficiency, a real writer selling a quality product and being able to afford to lower prices drastically because of the efficiency of distribution and the least number of middle men in the transaction possible make truly mass purchase possible and realistic.

The only way communism would "help" is to mandate that you had to pay more for books, or mandate that no author could charge what they liked so the good ones would stop bothering.

Basically here you have an example of capitalism working at the absolute peak of perfection for both producer and consumer and you want to abandon it? Madness.

Author author!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that the author is the one being abused in this case. His royality cut is only 35%.

Knowing nothing about e-publishing (you've been warned) it seems highly unlikely that the costs of re-formating his Word (or other) document into ePub plus all the costs of editing, distribution, marketing, profit margin, etc etc total to 65%.

Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ seems to do a fairly decent job of converting from one format to another and it's open source. Surely the publishing houses have access to re-formatting tools? Even if they put a team of 4 people on the editting, re-formatting, etc etc for two weeks, each at $200K per year that's only about $25K of costs. So let's just times that by 10 to cover errors. The cost is then $250K, with a 30% gross profit margin, we're still under $350K for the publisher. I have no idea who else gets a piece of the book, Amazon, ??, and ??.

So if the author's cut is $550 at 35%, then the publisher and others are raking in $1.5million.

Seems to me it should be more like 65% to author, and 35% to everyone else.

Something is terribly wrong.

99 percent correct article

[kite43]

Either my IQ is particularly low today or there are some grammatical errors in that article and it's not 100% correct. First of all let me say that I wouldn't normally post on here but I am an author on amazon too (try Lazlo Ferran) and although my book Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate has been selling well on Kindle over the last few months at 99 cents, I recently felt the market would stand an increase to decided to try it at 2.99 dollars. Disaster! Only sold 1 in the last 7 days so this article really interested me. However I read it several times and clicked through to the blog post referred to and found that the book The List is NOT written by John Locke, as the slashdot article implies but by Joe Konrath who also goes under the name of Jack Kilborn and his book is not ranked 35 but more like 27th in the Kindle store which is quite a different thing to the Amazon top 100 paid rankings (although I will give him the benefit of artistic license in the way this is written).

So assuming that they are not the same guy just doing some devious self-promotion and conning slashdot into the bargain, he does make some interesting points. The main problem I have with 99 cent kindles though is that, as somebody else has stated, people will buy it whether they seriously intend to read it or not and I would judge that in my case, most probably don't cos I haven't had many reviews at all and almost no other feedback. So although I might go on selling at this price for another year or two while writing my next book, if those people don't feel a personal investment in the project and at least READ the thing, then there is no chance of a snowball effect - the 'curve' will just be flat. For this reason alone a higher price has to be sought and a way of selling them. I like the idea that maybe 1.99 dollars might be a good cut off point although I think I would prefer the this 'golden, sweet-scented pause' even if I lose a large percentage of potential purchasers if the people who DO go on to buy feel that they have taken a risk and therefore they will want to at least give the book a good go. So I think I will try a price of about 2.15 dollars.

Just like $2 DVD's at pawnshops

[future assassin]

I go there to browse and see if there's anything I want BUT a lot of times I end up buying movies I might not necessarily watch because its only $2 and end up walking out with 5 movies. AND those cheap dvd saves me WAY more money by getting the kids $2 moves which saves me $48 by not going to the movies since I can always reload on $2 kid flicks any time of the week.

MOD PARENT UP

[cartman]

I liked your troll ;-) ... it ought to provoke lots of responses.

Those without jobs become prisoners and are hauled off to be warehoused for the rest of their lives, just like what happens with the insane... The courts make money from people dragged in front of them

I'm sure you know that unemployment is not currently a criminal offense. I was once unemployed for 2 years (although by choice, living off my meager savings) and I wasn't imprisoned.

Police departments show they are nailing felons (when a felony could be a guy pissing on a bush in his backyard.)

Pissing on your own bush is not a felony.

Don't forget the debtor prisons. Debtor prisons are already a reality for parents who can't pay child support

There aren't debtor prisions. Also, being unable to pay child support is legal; it's refusing to pay despite being able which is a problem. Also, child support is not a debt.

So, for the people who are not trust fund babies, nor have a skillset, there is a big future awaiting them in the US: An inmate at a correctional facility.

I know many people who have no skills and who inherited nothing but avoided prison their entire lives.

Even without a life sentence, even a *mere* arrest (not a conviction) is a guarantee of not finding work, so it likely means an eventual return to the slammer.

Arrests without convictions are not included on your criminal record, and have no effect on your employment prospects.

a *mere* arrest (not a conviction) is a guarantee of not finding work...With the three strike rule, it isn't hard to see people winding up with a life sentence without actually committing a mala in se crime against property or person.

Three strikes refers to three convictions, not three arrests.

Dude, your troll was awesome. You skillfully navigated the boundary between genuine hysteria and sarcasm.

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[NiteShaed]

Funny, I just installed the iBooks app today and expected all the prices to be $.99.

Why would you expect that though? At iTunes, you don't expect to get the new $MUSICAN album for 99 cents, do you? Individual songs, sure, but not the album. A song is not a novel, it's a chapter.

When did writers become the absolute bottom of society when it comes to value of their work? A musician gets $10 or $12 for an album (assuming it's actually worth buying all the songs from it), a waitress gets $3 or $4 for bringing me a sandwich and a coke at my favorite diner, and the homeless guy in the subway has a good chance of getting a buck or two if he's polite, yet we want to give an author less than a dollar for 250 or 300 pages of a story that we're presumably interested in.

Yeah, I've heard the argument that the author is "getting rich selling the same thing over and over", but really, that's only true of a tiny fraction of writers who are working today. There's a far larger number who are just hoping for middle-class from their efforts, and those efforts are paid for by spreading the cost of their time across as many readers as possible....

Re:If that's the definition of "society", so be it

[inflex]

> And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books

On some readers, eBooks are awful, on the Kindle 3 it's a blessed experience. There's countless scores of people who swore they'd never like an eBook only to turn about and give away their DTB novel collections once they had a Kindle3 in their hands for a few days. Some people still don't like it admittingly, they can be used for anecdotal evidence that "ebooks are inferior" but their numbers are a small percentage of all those who have tried and now love the ebook experience. (For novels, in mobi/epub format, not PDF).

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[herojig]

| Why would you expect that though? Nothing deep. That's all I have ever paid for anything in the iTunes store. .99 cent songs and .99 cent apps. As an author I agree with you 100% that writers should get paid more, but I just don't think it's gunna happen in these economic times. However, I think the argument has been made well (here) that 14.99 for an iBook is just too much. If an author can sell more / make more at 1.99, then they should do that. I'd certainly pay that much for a book that I might be interested in...but no way am I going to ever pay over that for an ebook. [Note: I balked at getting paid a penny a click a few years back, but now I see the light; I am getting compensated much better (for articles published on the web) then under the old publishing model of pay-once-per-article. Perhaps there is a comparison?] Cheers!

Corrections of fact

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a few errors in the post above by Hugh Pickens...

"Locke says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies — " This is incorrect. The List is a book by Joe Konrath, who has been experimenting with ebook pricing by lowering the price of one of his books (see here for background: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/02/list-hits-kindle-top-100.html). John Locke writes the Donovan Creed books. He also sells those for .99c. You can read the background and what the author has actually sold in his own words, here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html

Cheers,
Simon

Re:Corrections of fact

[Hugh Pickens writes]

Dear Anonymous Coward:

You are correct. There is an error in the story I submitted.

The original story said that:

Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year which with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k. Locke says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book "The List" from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies - about 800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner. "These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale," says Locke. "And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause - this golden, sweet-scented pause - that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value." Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. "I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go," writes Kelly. "It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable."

The story should have read:

Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year which with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k. Konrath says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book "The List" from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies - about 800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner. "These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale," says Locke. "And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause - this golden, sweet-scented pause - that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value." Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. "I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go," writes Kelly. "It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable."

In spite of the error, this particular submission is very thought provoking as evidenced by the number of comments it received and is one of my personal favorites. Please accept my apology for my mistake in attributing the statement about "The List" to John Locke, the subject of the interview, when the statement was actually written by Joe Konrath, the man who conducted the interview. I assure you that the mistake was completely inadvertent on my part.

Best Regards,

Hugh Pickens

I love the comment Locke has on his website

[rfc1394]

In my opinion, this is how you sell books:

1. Identify your target audience
2. Find out where they live
3. Shove your book down their throats

I wish I'd thought of it! This is much better than the typical Slashdotian satirical "1. do this. 2. do that. 3. Profit!" remark. I have been trying to figure out how to get people interested in the books I've written, I never thought of pricing them as low as it is possible to sell them and still get some money out of them. I think if I had known you could sell books on Kindle for 99c I might have done that myself. I think I will.

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[rfc1394]

Funny, I just installed the iBooks app today and expected all the prices to be $.99.

Why would you expect that though? At iTunes, you don't expect to get the new $MUSICAN album for 99 cents, do you? Individual songs, sure, but not the album. A song is not a novel, it's a chapter.

When did writers become the absolute bottom of society when it comes to value of their work? A musician gets $10 or $12 for an album (assuming it's actually worth buying all the songs from it),

Actually on the typical album the musician gets ZERO. First, the music label contract makes the recording a 'work for hire' of the record company so they own it, not the musician. Now the record company pays the musician an advance. The album is charged for all costs in its production. There is supposedly a percentage of the profit that comes back after it makes the costs. If it doesn't make back the advance and all costs to produce the album, the musican gets nothing from it. Also, the advance is against all royalties the performer's work generates. So it means if a performer gets $10,000 as an advance, the record costs $150,000 to produce, it sells 20,000 copies at $20 of which, say, half goes to the distributor and retail seller and the musician is supposed to get a 10% royalty, it means the record company made $200,000 of the $400,000 the record made. From that they take the $160,000 and now the record only made $40,000. 10% of that is $4,000 so the performer still owes the record company $6,000 since his advance wasn't recouped!

So the musician basically becomes a chattel slave of the record company. Most of them only make money from performing, not from their records. You either have to have the will to walk away unless you get a good contract or be a big star before you make any money. Or start your own record label. A&M Records, for example, stands for "(Herb) Albert and (Chuck) Mangione", who probably got sick of being screwed over by other record companies (and decided to do some screwing over! :) .)

makes ya wanna write a book ... with a soundtrack

[Anonymous Coward]

likewise, if iTunes et al sold music for $0.25 per song instead of $0.99, you'd have bigger profits and little or no piracy. my $0.02 anyway. ($0.022 CND)

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[NiteShaed]

I'm not going to argue any of that, all those numbers are more or less what I've heard them to be. Pretty much the same thing happens with writers really, 60% to the bookstore, 20% manufacturing/shipping, x% to the publisher, and then a few cents left over for the schmuck whose name is on the cover. My point is really about total price, not breakdown, and what people want/expect to pay. Simplify the entire thing so that we're talking about indies (writer/musician). Music has already settled to around 99 cents per song, which would net $10 or $12 for an album. A novel is more akin to an album than it is to a song, but the idea of pushing the price on that novel is being looked at as being equivalent to a single song. A complete novel just seems like an awful lot to expect for a buck. I'm not necessarily saying that a novel should be $10 or $12, but I'd think at least around $5 or so shows at least some level of appreciation for the effort that the writer put in.

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[NiteShaed]

That's all I have ever paid for anything in the iTunes store. .99 cent songs and .99 cent apps

I know, that's what set off alarm bells for me. We're heading down a road where people are starting to think song == novel, and I just don't think that's a fair way to look at it. It's really about framing what people are getting for their money. Right now, it's starting to look like it all boils down to the number "1". 1 song, 1 app, 1 novel, but beyond the quantity of "things", they're not really comparable.

As an author I agree with you 100% that writers should get paid more, but I just don't think it's gunna happen in these economic times.

Sad but true.

However, I think the argument has been made well (here) that 14.99 for an iBook is just too much.

Agreed. I think somewhere in the $5 neighborhood is fair, but that's just me. It's not just the money that's getting me, it's what the money means. A dollar is a throwaway, it's inconsequential. If you buy something for a dollar, and you lose/break it ten seconds later, you don't care, you just get another whateveritis or just forget about it. Saying that a novel is only worth a buck is kind of like saying to the author that his work has no value to you, or minimal value at best. "Hey author, your book has the same value to me as the pack of gum that I bought, tried, hated and threw away."

[Note: I balked at getting paid a penny a click a few years back, but now I see the light; I am getting compensated much better (for articles published on the web) then under the old publishing model of pay-once-per-article. Perhaps there is a comparison?]

That's fantastic, I love hearing about people who do well with writing. Hell, I'm thrilled for John Locke and his 99 cent ebooks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this price point shouldn't be done, or is a horrible thing to do, or anything else. If I had a book in the Kindle market right now, I might be inclined to try it myself to see what happens. My points here are really more philosophical than purely economic. The 99 cent ebook may be a huge hit, and maybe more authors will make better livings from it. That would be great. I'm just a little stuck on the "value" issue, and how people value an authors time and effort.

Re:Funny, I just installed iBooks app and thought.

[herojig]

yesterday's dollar is today's penny...as my dad would say.

Wow.

[sundog61]

I'm late to this thread, but some people are bitching about a 99 cent book being too expensive? It's a dollar. Unless the ebook is truly horrible, you'll get a dollar's worth of entertainment.

E-Book $Million Author in Minnesota, 26 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.twincities.com/ci_17569329?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com&nclick_check=1

Started in April 2010, Million bucks by April 2011, selling over 227,000 in Feb 2011. Amanda Hocking 26 years old.

Italians do it better

[Anonymous Coward]

Kai Zen, the band of italian novelists that publish with mondadori and others are ready to give their work by free offer... from € 0,00 to X...

http://kaizenology.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/le-book-e-mio-e-me-lo-gestisco-io-una-questione-open-source/

99 cents on Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

Expose me.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=White+Lightning+GC++Smith&x=26&y=26