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Amazon Bypassing Publishers By Signing Authors Directly
Hugh Pickens writes "David Streitfeld reports that Amazon is aggressively wooing top authors, gnawing away at the services publishers, critics and agents used to provide. 'Everyone's afraid of Amazon,' says Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. 'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,' adds Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. 'Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.' But publishers are fighting back at writers who publish with Amazon. In 2010 Kiana Davenport signed with a division of Penguin for The Chinese Soldier's Daughter, a Civil War love story, and received a $20,000 advance. In the meantime Davenport packaged several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and packaged them in an e-book, Cannibal Nights, available on Amazon. When Penguin found out, it went 'ballistic,' accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competition, canceling her novel, and suing Davenport to recover her advance. Davenport knows her crime: 'Sleeping with the enemy? Perhaps. But now I know who the enemy is.'"
One Company to rule them all, One Click to find them,
One Company to contract with them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Profit where the Bezos lies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If the contract gave exclusive distribution rights to Penguin then the author is in breach of contract. Seems simple to me.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Maybe they got tired of having to qualify every eBook price with "This price was set by the publisher".
Want to know what's wrong with the eBook market? Just check out this page; $15 for a poorly scanned version of a book that was written more than 40 years ago, that's available new in paperback and even hardcover for less. Seriously? Who the hell comes up with these pricing models? Even as a huge eBook fan there's been plenty of books that I've passed on because I just can't justify the cost for a digital copy, even ignoring the fact that the digital copy is DRM'd to Amazon's tool set.
They'd offer her $40k + legal expenses. This is a pissing match, plain and simple.
Firstly, his quote is entirely untrue. If there were noone between the writer and reader, you'd end up with lackluster works. Secondly, which one is Amazon then--the writer or the reader?
You know, if her contract was specific to her new book, and she retained the rights to the short stories, then Penguin is indeed the enemy. But, really, hasn't Penguin been reading the papers lately? This Intertube thingy is catching on - you can get direct to user music and videos and shopping. Aren't they a little behind the curve here?
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
So, not sure where the fear is. Good publishers refine author's works into something readable in many cases and they distribute and market. Amazon is a solution for distribution, but it doesn't quite cut the mustard for the other two. Sure, for authors that are professionals, they need less help. Those that are starting out most likely need some help. It would be interesting to see the opportunity cost of an author using a publisher versus DIY either way.
I think some people are too quick to write off the publishing industry. They still provide things you won't find on Amazon, such as EDITORS. An early author may be able to put a book together, but sometimes they need a very experienced set of eyes to help them fix problems and eliminate some cruft. An experienced writer may not need one as much (although they generally still do), but starting authors almost certainly will. You also cannot get your ebook into nearly as many hands as a hardcopy. Any literate person with functional eyes can read a hardcopy, but you need a Kindle or similar device to read an ebook.
What I hope to see from this is two competing markets. Hopefully this will coax the publishing industry to give authors a better cut. Maybe that's a bit too pie-in-the-sky, but it's possible. Let's hope the publishing industry can adapt better than the goddamned RIAA.
So... if the publisher provides enough value, they'll be fine (either editing, advertising, business advice, advances to allow the writer to eat while writing, etc etc). Publishers will die if they:
Don't provide value...
or
Don't provide enough Value to justify the cost...
or
Amazon provides good enough value relative to publishers and is just easier to work with, or the writer ends up making more money...
Publishers either need to reinvent themselves to stay abreast of the changing business landscape. Railroads diminished in power because they thought they were in the Railroad business. They're not; They were in the transportation business, and failed to adapt.
This is just more market myopia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia
"The Myopic culture, Levitt postulated, would pave the way for a business to fail, due to the short-sighted mindset and illusion that a firm is in a so-called 'growth industry'. This belief leads to complacency and a loss of sight of what your customers want."
The more of these middle man made-up positions we can remove, the better.
Next up: record executives, realtors, and oil prospectors.
Publishers typically have been leeches. Sucking 98% of the profit out of a book.
It's high time that writers were able to sell to a reader and keep most of the sale, they did 90% of the work, they deserve 90% of the sale price.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not just writers and readers...any successful writer will tell you that editors are also an essential part of the process. Amazon will either have to provide authors with editors or come up with a situation where editors can work on projects as independent contractors.
I didn't RTFA- [I don't read any articles that require me to log in first] so if I'm misunderstanding the synopsis- apologies in advance.
I've often considered writing a novel, there is an idea I've been burning to write for years. My terrible grammer has always held me back from writing.
IF I were to write though, I would not trust Amazon to publish for me. IF I write- I'd want my work to be available to as many people as possible- I wouldn't want to be limited by one vendor (as I suspect signing for Amazon would ultimately do).
Signing for Amazon would be the ultimate statement of "I've grown as much as I can, now I'll sell-out".
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
From http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide.
Maybe going off topic and I don't know if writing is all she does(http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/depression-and-writers.html) but wouldn't having a full time job be a solution to your debt problems instead of leading an "artists" life and if you can't find work locally its time to move on.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Cut the middle men away. Self-publish!
There's plenty of services, like lulu.com. Google for more.
Self-publish. You know how it's done, so what do you need Amazon for?
A good editor is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller. Very, very few writers produce a polished work right out of the gate.
But if Amazon wants to go this way, why not take it a step further and eliminate the distributor entirely?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Note to Authors: The old-line Big 6 publishing houses (you know who they are) still intend to own you. You are not an independent contractor working on an individual book basis in their eyes. They will lose this battle, but inflict a lot of pain on a lot of people in the process of this losing. Welcome to the 21st century -- all you books belong to us.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...by a traditional publisher? Not going to happen. Unless you happen to personally know a best selling author already in their stable, or one they are looking to help jump ship to them; they wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. They are -so- risk adverse they will not publish new authors, and if you self-publish, your on a blacklist - no one will touch you. Is it any surprise that there is a market Amazon has seen, and has decided to exploit? Basically, the publishing industry is in the middle of the largest death-spiral they've ever seen, and they won't pull out of it because they are afraid of books bombing.
Guess what geniuses? You need to promote your authors and books for them to sell, otherwise they will most likely bomb.
Traditionally, media companies charge more because they do the marketing. They're the distribution arm, after all.
Amazon can market authors much better than traditional publishers can. Good idea for everyone involved.
The problem in music is that people who try to do it alone don't have the marketing muscle. iTunes could be that marketeer, but it isn't. But if amazon succeeds, maybe iTunes will follow.
That would be a horrifying endgame for the labels.
I suspect that iTunes isn't doing that because, well, it doesn't want to be the music publisher for the world.
The broad availability the internet enables means middlemen left and right are going out of business. Either that or scrambling to find relevancy in today's modern world (RIAA, MPAA, lookin' at you).
As the world changes, it's perfectly normal that people/company/organisation/language/laws/product/... will become irrelevant. The real crime is not adapting and artificially insisting on remaining relevant. The record companies have been doing that for years, the book publishers as well and at a later time, the movie studios will to. The only reason it hasn't happened yet to the movie studios is the relatively high budget of movies as opposed to the one of books and music.
That being said, the internet is providing a direct pathway from the authors to the reader. Amazon is a publisher in this picture but it is selling directly to the reader so there one (or more) person to feed down the line. Everybody wins except the superfluous people who are not relevant and became greedy to compensate for a loss of revenues instead of adapting. Apple and Google will probably do the same and some artist/writers will try to sell directly to listeners/readers. It's all good and I'm alright with that.
This makes a nice business opportunity as long as ebook readers can read plain PDFs.
1. Make an open, DRM-free ebook store that can undercut Amazon significantly (easy to do). Remember it's mostly the publishers that want DRM, not the authors.
2. Amazon fails
3. Profit! And you made the world a better place by doing it, a twofer!
Yep no ??? step here!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
She's pretty hot
But wait until they have squeezed out the competition, and then everything will begin to look much differently.
If you were to actually read TFA by the NYT, you would find that Amazon employs editors of their own, which edit books published by Amazon's publishing wing (and which has so far published 122 books.) I would assume they pay advances and edit, in return for exclusive rights to the work, just like any other publisher.
This is distinct from the platform on the website that allows anyone to sell any eBook on the website.
Publishers take a lot of the profit from successful books. They also end up paying a lot of advances on complete duds on which they lost money. (Same thing with music labels.) Vanity publishing has always been available to authors that think they can make more money by cutting out the middleman. (If you could convince a bookstore to carry the things... most booksellers have better things to do than wade through self-published crap.)
I agree that the traditional publishing model is now becoming outdated with the advent of e-books, but it had it's purpose at the time.
Amazon was able to get into the publishing business because of the publishers unwillingness to change. It is a big shift for the industry and the publishers that are willing to embrace it will survive and that ones that aren't will die.
There is no self-publishing "blacklist." What IS blacklisted is individual works that have already been "published" by a vanity house like PublishAmerica.
And they "will not publish new authors?" What kind of crock is this? There are plenty of new authors that get published every year. Yes, most of the publicity, and sales, goes to proven authors, but that is to be expected.
Spot on: the question whether we want Amazon to be the only place to get book is THE question, which is neatly illustrated by this fine piece of Newspeak uttered by the Amazon's top executives mentioned in the summary:
The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader
Meaning: The only necessary part of the book publishing process (as demonstrated in the music and the film industries) is distribution and we are now going to take care of that.
If Amazon is both the largest seller of books and then uses that position to shove it's way into controlling the publishing space, that is a very bad thing. I hope they are found to be in violation of anti-trust laws. It is just as bad as MS using Windows to push IE.
I was looking forward to the Internet leading to self-publishing replacing publishing companies. But it now seems like Amazon is going to subvert that. Instead of self-publishing, authors will be forced to enter into exclusive contracts with Amazon, and they will control books. Through Amazon Silk, they will also control the very content of the Internet itself. Going to Amazon to buy the books they like will be fast an easy. Going to an alternative book-seller, or a blog of someone who gives their writings away for free, won't be so easy.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I don't know about anyone else; but I now know what MY next ebook purchase will be - if only to spite the publishing racket's more vengeful flavor of dinosaur (even if I hate the rigmarole I have to go through to convert Kindle books to epubs: Bleh).
Which authors have been forced into exclusive contracts with Amazon?
Which authors have been forced into exclusive contracts with Amazon?
None, the parent's jumping to some understandable, but (to me, at least) unwarranted assumptions: namely that Amazon will become so dominant that they try and lock out any competition. Many company's have certainly gone that route; but Amazon hasn't yet and there are good reasons to doubt they will.
Currently, Amazon doesn't give a whit whether you publish with anyone else - in fact, Smashwords' whole business model's predicated on that fact. As things currently stands, Amazon's primary ambition seems to become a universal marketplace that shaves a few percentage points off from every transaction and beats it's competition by providing the most flexibility for content providers and third party retailers to sell the way they prefer.
'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader'
............
shouldnt it have been like that in the first place. and not only in writing sector even ?
Read radical news here
Amazon is a shelf. You put your shit on the shelf and they show it to the public and handles the cash register and the accounting.
Amazon has zero experience or value to add as a publisher.
Anyone who's read books published by authors without the benefit of a professional team of editors at a publishing house knows that such books have interesting ideas but read like crappy books, or read well but have crappy ideas, or are just crappy through and through.
The rise of Amazon as a publisher should be much less scary to publishers than the rise of another actual publishing house.
Publishers who panic just because authors are moving to Amazon are failing to recognize that in the end they will survive because they add value and Amazon does not, and there will be some segment of the reading public and the writing community who value what they add.
Yeah, I saw that and I started wondering who's doing the typesetting? (Last book I bought from Amazon didn't indent paragraphs. It was slightly annoying...)
I was depressed earlier today, but after reading this article I am less so. Yes, Amazon could become evil, but in the mean time, it's breaking up other evil, (to put it simplistically) and that's a good thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Ebook pricing is one of the reasons my ebook catalog hasn't passed my physical books in number of titles I've obtained.
With ebooks, I get maybe a 10% discount off of the physical MSRP. Thing is, if I get less than a 25% discount off of MSRP at the store for a physical book, I'm not trying. 33-50% off is pretty standard, and that's for a new book, that I can(if I get my pack-rat tendencies under control) sell to a used book store, donate, whatever.
The reasons I want ebooks includes that I DO have so many physical books that I need the space, that I have a tendency to end up working away from home for months at a time and a nook/kindle/computer can carry a LOT of books for the space it takes.
I don't read AC A human right
Kris Rusch has been specifically writing about the change in the publishing/writing business for about past 6 months or so.
Very interesting, inspiring and great work.
(Note: "should" is a tricky word. I like many of the benefits of brick and mortar bookstores, but the real question is whether we are willing to pay the premium to support their business model in order to keep them afloat. If not, then for all that we might moan about it, it's inevitable that they'll die.)
You do realize you're referring to the same people who buy everything overseas these days and barely produce any physical product.
And solely because it's cheaper.
The barrier to entry is so high that company A doesn't need to rely upon customer or author/publisher loyalty, and they don't need to rely upon subsidizing their business model to offer the best deal: they now offer the only deal.
They still have to compete against paper books and piracy.
(+1, Disagree)
Maybe the slashdot geek crowd will grok this better using a Star Wars analogy: a good editor/publisher does the same things for even a good, professional writer that Gary Kurtz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kurtz did for George Lucas. Lucas with editing/production feedback from Kurtz = Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back. Lucas without editing/production feedback from Kurtz = Return of the Jedi with Ewoks, The Phantom Menace.
If you like to read books, that thought should give you pause when you contemplate authors abandoning editors and publishers so they can grab for bigger personal compensation.
The power of traditional publishers inherently derives from their control of the means of production, which itself derives from the large overhead of printing and distribution of physical books. It now seems inevitable that physical distribution will increasingly become a niche form of publishing devoted mostly to things like art books, with conventional publishing being replaced by electronic distribution and (to a lesser extent) print-on-demand. It is unlikely that Amazon would be able to step into the role of the traditional publisher as the gatekeeper to the means of production, because Amazon's strength as a retailer is largely dependent upon its inclusiveness. Locking out authors would only make them vulnerable to competition, and e-retailing is less dependent upon large physical investment (yes, Amazon has server farms, but they are not the only provider, and for similar reasons, it does not pay to deny access to competitors, such as Netflix).
This implies a fundamental shift in the power relationship between authors and publishers--for example, publishers will have less power to demand subsidiary rights. So instead of the current situation in which authors sort of work for the publisher, we are likely to see evolution of a system in which publishers work for authors--or at least a more equitable relationship than currently prevails.
With production no longer part of their business, the main services that publishers will be able to offer to writers will be editing and promotion (and in some cases, translation). These are areas where current publishing houses have considerable expertise. Virtually all writers require editing services, of course. Promotion is probably less important to writers who have already established a large following (or those who will never appeal to more than a niche market), but is likely to help those who have the potential to break into large mass-market sales. However, this is an area where e-tailers like Amazon will have an inside track, perhaps by offering promising writers promotion of promising works on their websites and ebook readers in return for an additional cut of the sales. However, there may remain room for independent promotion firms as well. It seems likely that the boundaries between literary agents, publishers, editors, and advertisers will increasingly become fuzzy, with multiple ways of combining these services to appeal to authors.
Even if Penguin wins, it will still die. The pittance it can reclaim from this single author will not be enough to keep it afloat as new authors continue to sign with Amazon instead of Penguin.
Penguin can rage at the dying of the light....but that will only make it run out of breath sooner.
PDF is not a suitable format for eBooks, as it relies on a predefined format e.g. 8.5x11 that does not fit well paperback or smaller smartphone screens. There's been plenty of discussion on /. regarding the proper format for eBooks, PDF is epic fail, epub or mobi seem to be the top contenders.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
If the services of publishers becomes otherwise unnecessary, the editors might not have the choice.
Publishers and editors have long done an important service to written works by doing an appreciable job of seperating out the crud and cruft in selecting which books to publish. Sure, I'm certain that potential masterpieces were sent back, and plenty of crap still got published, but they cleaned out the worst 90% pretty well.
Still, in the digital communication age, we may need to find other means. There are other models out there where good editors can still make a good steady wage, without working for a publisher.
I don't read AC A human right
Yeah except authors like to do things like "eat" and "wear clothes" and "have somewhere to live" and I'm guessing you can't afford to provide that for all of them, so we needed another system while the technology caught up.
That's actually a good example.
The reason it's a good example is that the book you refer to has been professionally editted.
I average a book a day, and have since I was 4 years old. As far as I'm concerned eReaders are cool only because you can hack them to run other software. They are certainly not for reading books. Copyright law exists in exchange for getting rid of book licenses, and here we are, back to books as licensed content.
I've seen a number of eBooks that were effectively self-published like the Amazon model, and they were very much crap. Duplicated words at the end of a line and the start of the next line, obvious grammatical errors, spelling errors, and in one case, a character name change after chapter 3 that wasn't a plot point, it was just sloppy search and replace.
I've gone away from eBooks because of crappy editing practices. About the only good eBooks I've seen are all retroactively eBooks, rather than original release as eBook. If it comes from Project Gutenberg, yeah, I'll maybe use it in a eReader, but new books? Almost every one I've ever gotten has been The Suck as far as editing has been concerned. I read a book to read a book, not to come away from the experience wanting to claw my eyes out to retroactively edit the thing.
-- Terry
Well, I jump to the conclusion that a business like Amazon bases it's decisions on amoral profit calculations. If they are the publisher of a book, why should they put they sell the book through other distributors? If an Amazon competitor comes out. I think it's clear that Amazon won't put books it publishes up for sale there. Also, Amazon publishing doesn't really have to operate at a profit, does it? It can exist just for the profit of Amazon the distributor.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
but technology caught up.
Read radical news here
These cartels don't get nearly as much coverage or visibility as the movie studios and record labels, but they're every bit as evil. These entities were pulling the same crap the RI/MPAA types were with "intellectual property" a couple centuries before the *AAs even came into existence.
Liberty in your lifetime
Spot on: the question whether we want Amazon to be the only place to get book is THE question, which is neatly illustrated by this fine piece of Newspeak uttered by the Amazon's top executives mentioned in the summary:
The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader
Meaning: The only necessary part of the book publishing process (as demonstrated in the music and the film industries) is distribution and we are now going to take care of that.
Yes the current quality of modern film and music are something that the book industry has been dying to copy... Get ready for Justin Bieber and Spiderman 17...
You're comparing apples to tractors here.
Well, they both come in red, or green. Or occasionally yellow.
How am I doing?
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Might as well confuse romance with small-engine repair.
Hey now, don't go getting all prejudicial just 'cause some of us get all happy with our spanner sets.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Actually block paragraphs have been part of the MLA style since I was in college in the 90s.
My comment in that thread was that 90% of the workforce will be unemployed within half a century on present trends. We're heading into a post-commodity winner-take-all employment climate. You'd like to think present trends will change. But how?
I once read a lot about the publishing industry. There were a lot of people in publishing who really cared about books. They faced an increasingly faced a harsh reality, until only the harsh survived.
For every Rowling making a billion dollars (she says less) there are thousands of small time authors crowded out of the marketplace.
Does disintermediation contribute to a long tail wagging happy to see you? Or do we just end up concentrating more wealth among the winner-take-all block busters, while the back-catalog brims with also-rans and failed contenders that never cover the author's outlay?
So books are catching up with musical artists who directly sell their works. What a shock. And you can bet Amazon won't be the only one offering a similar service. Some music score books are now published one at a time according to the order payed in advance. No waste, no shop wear and no inventory tax penalties in such a business make it a solid idea.
In reality, ebooks are a boon to publishers. They cut the costs of printing, binding, boxing, shipping, and all the man machine production and distribution expenses.
If only they can now do what Amazon does, or now that they don't need all that staff, can they live with smaller profit margins?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
And while there is definitely some good cover art out there, I have *many* *many* books where the cover is a complete turn-off. What annoys me the most is cover-art where it's pretty obviously the artist never even peeked at the book, and designed characters which have little in common with those in the actual book other than perhaps gender.
In Amazon's Android market, Amazon sets the pricing. You get a percentage of the price they set, with no recourse. Sometimes, they set the price at zero. There was a story on Slashdot not long ago (too lazy to search for it) where the developers were essentially screwed... on the day Amazon set the price to zero (without warning), they got a huge spike in downloads that crumpled their activation server, a huge load of support incidents, and zero revenue. The developers pulled out of Amazon's Android market -- it cost them too much to be there.
So if Amazon abuses Android ap authors, what are they going to do with book authors?
So the author signed a contract, extracted a nice advance from Penguin, then broke the terms of her contract and she is complaining that they want their advance back?
Fuck her.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Publishing has never been the problem. The problem has always been after publishing, where most writers end up being as unknown as they were before they wrote anything.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
They are a small independent that care for their authors. I'm a first time author, completely unknown and I received a healthy advance, worked with an excellent editor and proof reader over a period of two months and have been very well supported by my publicist. The book is called Inside the Priory of Sion and we've even manged to get it on Slashdot... : )
Robert Howells
What publishers use this practice? Just looking around online, including many sites advising authors on negotiating contracts (including the Author's Guild), none mention advances having to be repaid. Wikipedia mentioned this was not uncommon in the film industry, but was rather rare in book publishing.
I believe it is not unheard of for a schock publisher negotiating a multi-book deal to try and push for earnings from hits offsetting advances from flops, but that's a long way from requiring the author to pony up a repayment.
Back in the early 1990's I wrote a book about how to migrate from mainframes to Unix. I got a good advance and the first printing was for 10,000 copies. I received a statement every month until the royalties owed matched the advance exactly, to the penny. The statement said that they had sold about 7500 copies but they were declaring the book to be out of print. No one could tell me where the extra 2500 copies went or how my royalties could match my advance exactly. All I was told was that I was free to pay for an audit.
Needless to say I never wrote for them again.
I wonder who proofreads the e-books, most of the ones I get seem to have the same stupid OCR errors (we'll showing up as weil) it is almost like they just let the computer do it and forget that computers suck at reading...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
When your wife finds you knocking up that two-stroke in your lawnmower don't say I didn't warn you. But hey ... there's nothing wrong with that.
... so long as you've remembered to disengage the blade first, of course.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
just because they CAN doesn't mean they will. Computers haven't destroyed our need for paper. just because i shop at walmart doesn't mean i don't still go to the "shop around the corner" it's capitalism, competition is healthy.
Oh, I understand the reasons completely. I was just venting that I get pissed that they consider ebooks 'cheaper' when they're a buck or so less than MSRP(~10% today), but you sign up for a B&N card you get 10% off just about everything(matching ebook prices), 40% off things like new hardcovers, and they regularly ship you coupons worth another 25-50% off. None of which are valid on the ebooks.
I consider a valid ebook price for a book available as a $10 paperback to be $5, not $9.
Take David Weber's just released 'How Firm a Foundation' - $13 ebook, $16.80 for the hardcover w/membership discount. Okay, a fair deal. But what about 'A Mighty Fortress', the previous book in the series? The paperback and ebook are both priced at $9. But with a discount I can get the pb for $8, assuming I'm not picking it up at a store that offers 'all' paperbacks at 25% off, dropping the price to $6.75.
I never bought many hardcovers, both due to price and space. But the price, combined with DRM, has driven me to Baen's webscriptions. Isn't it odd that it's the rightwing/libertarian publisher that offers the 'best' ebook pricing today? DRM free ebooks(available in rtf & html even!) that you can read on a computer with no additional software but your web browser? Very good!
Example: "Voyage across the Stars" by David Drake - $6. It's effectively $3 if I buy it as part of the 'webscription' of 7 $6 ebooks for $18. Buy 3, get 4 free!. Paperback price is $10.29. A 40% discount, even off of paperback price, not penalty for DRM, has me sold.
I don't read AC A human right
Wait until Amazon gets in the PoD business for those of us who still like real books. :-)
I would kill to be able to customize a set of say, LoTR or Harry Potter, instead of taking the publishers mainstream crap.
I've long thought there's opportunity for an intelligent forum and recommendation tool that's either specific to self-published books, or at least places a lot of weight on them while also including traditional books. I think Amazon *can* provide that service, but I think right now their recommendations are weighted heavily if not entirely to the traditionally published works. I would gladly (and probably voraciously) tackle a lot of inexpensive self-published works if I could trust the recommendations I was getting. With self-published books I'd definitely want a recommendation system that took editing and design factors into consideration as well as the quality of the story.
If something like this exists, I'd love to know about it. If it doesn't, I'd be tempted to start it myself, though there's some serious danger Amazon could eventually catch on and swamp an indie effort long before it could really take off.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay