Slashdot Mirror
How Publishers Are Cutting Their Own Throats With eBook DRM
An anonymous reader writes "Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has written a post about how the Big Six book publishing companies have painted themselves into a corner in the rapidly growing ebook industry. Between user-unfriendly DRM and the Amazon juggernaut, they're slowly pushing themselves out of business. Quoting: 'Until 2008, ebooks were a tiny market segment, under 1% and easily overlooked; but in 2009 ebook sales began to rise exponentially, and ebooks now account for over 20% of all fiction sales. In some areas ebooks are up to 40% of the market and rising rapidly. (I am not making that last figure up: I'm speaking from my own sales figures.) And Amazon have got 80% of the ebook retail market. ... the Big Six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform.'"
DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform.'"
Which is why I'm not buying books from Amazon or B&N at this point. Either it's without DRM, or I'm not buying it. Baen's Webscriptions for me, at least at the moment.
I don't read AC A human right
... pricing an e-book $13 when the paperback is $6 is a much more visible issue for the average e-book buyer, at least judging from the various comments on amazon's message boards.
-- the cake is a lie
I get asked all the time what eReader a friend or family member should get. I am constantly pointing them to readers other than Amazon's and explain to them that a purchase of a Kindle locks you into the Amazon eBook ecosystem with very few ways to deviate from it. I do wish that book publishers would see that people are becoming more aware of being locked into one company's ecosystem and offer an attractive alternative.
The price is too high.
I can't lend it to somebody.
The opposite of progress is congress
Why does every aspect of the publishing industry seem to fail at grasping the advantages of limited or no DRM and digital products?
and it's on the publishers. Tens of thousands of books are available on usenet alone. I regularly buy non drm'ed books, mostly from Baen. I'm not going to buy any DRM books. Not gonna do it. Especially not when they cost damn near what a paper book in a brick and mortar store costs. That's just wrong and I will not bend over and take it up the ass like that. Especially when so many pirated books are available free and easy.
If I could buy an epub file for a book, knowing that it is well-done by the publisher, and not just a simple OCR job of the printed copy, I would pay up to $5 for books.
More than that, and for any other format with or without DRM, and I don't buy it.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
This is why I REFUSE to purchase any e-media encumbered by DRM. If I cannot move my purchased media to any platform (phone, tablet, workstation, et al) that I own, then I will NOT support the publisher. FWIW, I purchase $1000 USD or more worth of books and other electronic media (CD, DVD, e-books) each year. Those that insult me and treat me as a thief will not get a penny of my disposable income.
It all ties together. Booksellers, whether retail outlets like Amazon or the publishers themselves, want to charge paper-book prices for e-books. They see DRM as a mechanism to enable them to do that. The alternative, which is to sell e-books for reasonable prices (i.e., prices which reflect the fact that printing and distribution costs for e-books are effectively zero) and thereby sell more books, is so far mostly the domain of the self-publishing and small-press world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Well, they aren't basing it on manufacturing cost, obviously. They are basing it on what they believe consumer value to be. Amazon is betting that it's worth $7 for me to avoid getting off my ass and going to the store just to get a book. They're probably right in most cases, as transportation costs money. Also, while they don't let you sell eBooks just yet, they do let you read them on your PC, Mac, Kindle, iOS or Android device, and (perhaps most importantly) online.
I don't like DRM either, but they do it in a way that there are very few limitations to most users, since they support most popular hardware/software platforms + the web.
Can you say "iTunes"?
RIAA insistence on DRM is what made the iTunes Store so big (iTunes [program] took MP3s, if you could buy un-DRMed MP3s from multiple vendors then Apple wouldn't have had as much control).
I really hope publishers cave in and figure out a way of pricing things better.
I think I should be spending more on entertainment; I'm starting to feel much guiltier about stealing everything but comic books, occasional paperbacks, and the three video games per decade I like enough to buy a collector's edition.
At the same time, the release prices for entertainment are completely batshit crazy. Games are $60, books are $35, and movies are $12? Who can afford that crap? Those prices all fall pretty quickly, but can't they come up with a better model than fleecing their most eager customers and then doling it out one step at a time to the next most impressive or convenient formats?
I don't know; maybe they can't. I just know I laugh when I see those numbers breakdowns, and I've seen them from official sources multiple times, in which publishers swear to God they only make a 1% profit.
As Mr. Stross points out, most English-language books are published by a few big players. With Amazon, they find themselves in much the same position as many restaurants do with OpenTable... they've got one gatekeeper between them and their ultimate customers.
And, as with the restaurants, the tools build their own gate are available: create or buy their own coop service, and stop doing business with Amazon. There would be risk, and there would be a short term loss of business. But, the publishers should ask themselves: who can survive without whom longer?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Especially now with amazon getting into the publishing business: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?pagewanted=all
At least with the music industry's drm'ed files they could be played on a multitude of devices from various companies. Amazon's ebooks only work on amazon hardware.
I also get the impression that pirating ebooks is far less common with Joe and Susie Consumer than with what occurred in the napster days with mp3s. I doubt ebook filesharing has much affect on the publisher's bottom line, since most of those who do it probably wouldn't have purchased the book anyway (and certainly not new in hardcover).
I'm very interested in the comments and opinions about this topic. I am currently researching e-publishing options for an upcoming Nonprofit Handbook (for my specific State; I work for our State's recognized nonprofit association) and I want to make sure we're able to reach a broad audience but still do what I can do protect the author's copyright, while taking fair use rights into consideration as well.... *head explodes*... We don't want to "penalize" paying customers with draconian DRM but it seems like it's either or - you can't have it both ways... :\
We have an electronic version of the older edition for sale right now and it's just a PDF with a disclaimer "Please support the author's hard work and don't illegal share this PDF!"... but they author's want more protection than just that disclaimer...
I think you're looking at used book prices. People will let those go for absurdly cheap for some reason. Have you seen some popular top seller/NYT top books? They're $30-50! Printing material can't cost that much! In fact, I've done covers for books and I know what they cost to print and they're exaggerating it. The ebooks tend to be a lot cheaper for big titles.
Pricing on Amazon is controlled by the publishers, not Amazon. They know their business model of shipping dead trees around is dying, and are doing their utmost to head-off the rising ebook demand with ludicrous pricing.
All that will happen is ebook readers and tablet owners will find DRM stripped titles and get them for free. Whereas all the publishers have to do is set the price to $1/title and reap a massive new income stream from many more customers than those that will buy pulp versions.
No one is forcing you or anyone to buy the e-book, I, for one, only buy kindle books when it's worth it (I payed 10$ less for A Dance with Dragos, 7$ less for the latest Dreaden Files and more or less 8$ less for the Inheritance e-book.
But then I bought The Lies of Locke Lamora on paper.
And even though I don't regret it, I might not do it again just to save 2$. The convenience of the whole Amazon infrastructure combined with instant delivery anywhere in the world for free, not to mention the lousy quality of pocket paperbacks...
Go give the 2007 open letter "Thoughts on Music" a read.
I somehow doubt Jeff Bezos will publish a similar article.
DRM-free MP3 sales from Amazon only happened as a "fight back" against the "evil single source for music" that was iTunes at the time.
If we-the-public have got to rely on some similar benevolent dictator demanding DRM-free choices, is it gonna be Barnes and Noble's Leonard Riggio? I'm not holding my breath. :-/
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Umm any non DRM book + calibre = kindle e-book.. pretty easy process.
As far as the publishers 'becoming more aware', they really don't care. If you want the books they own the rights to, soon you will either do as you are told, or pirate it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not all eBooks are so expensive. Baen prices theirs at mostly $4 to $6, with a whole lot for $0. Yes, their ARCs (advanced reader copies) are $15, but those are a special case for hardcore fans (basically pre-release manuscripts direct from the author before they've been edited), and if you don't want to pay the $15, just wait for it to get edited and published and the cost will be in the $4-6 range as expected.
This pricing system is nothing new. All the modern Call of Duty games stay at $60 on Steam. The latest version rarely goes on sale, if so it's only like $10 off. Publishers of any sort only want to be paid what they think customers should pay.
Then, some indie mucky-muck makes something like Minecraft, Angry Birds, etc, charges so little, and sells millions. It's not fair!
"Here's a great book I just read. Let me lend it to you..."
absofreakinlutely. I can tell you i've NEVER decided not to purchase an ebook from Amazon because of DRM. I load them on my kindle and they work. What HAS stopped me is seeing a book (not even a recent book at that) selling for $10 or $15 bucks when the paperback is sitting on the shelf for $5. I don't care if it has DRM or not. At those prices I won't buy it.
they're getting out of the meat pie business?
Go to Stross's website and dig around in the side panel. He has a link to a series of blog articles he wrote describing the economics of the book publisher industry. In short, the vast majority of costs go toward paying editors and the like. The actual costs of paper, printing and binding are less than 10% (if I remember the % correctly - its been a while) of the production costs.
DRM isn't the issue. Its Vendor Lock-in. You can have the former without the latter. The author is using Vendor Lock-in to trash DRM.
in that case ebooks should cost 10% less than the paperback edition when it comes out, and 10% less than the hardcover before the paperback comes out.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Courtesy of the author of the original post is this nifty article. Note especially the comments in point one:
Now, you might argue that lower prices would lead to more sales and hence greater overall profit - but that's a very different thing to arguing that "printing and distribution costs for e-books are effectively zero", and hence implying that they're a significant chunk of the cost for the dead tree version ...
If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position.
You mean I can't buy from the likes of B&N already? Never mind they already have their own DRM. Also as a side note it would be interesting to both see E-reader sales and how much each purchaser buys?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I think you meant "hardback prices" for eBooks...
For the hardcovers, kindle books are cheaper almost every time. I bought my dance with dragons for 14$ when the hardcover used to cost 23$, and even now you still save around 4$ if you buy the kindle version.
On the other hand, the mass market paperback pocket books are usually cheaper than the kindle books, but the quality of those books pales in comparison to the service you get on the kindle.
And in the end, you're not forced into buying e-books, if the paperback is cheaper, buy it (:
Valve gets it because they've seen the data to back it up: 10% drop in price? Expect a 35% increase in revenue. Not sales, revenue. 25% discount, 245% increase. 50% discount, 320% increase. Crazy 75% discount? 1450% increase in revenue. Valve's own record, AFAIK, was when they dropped L4D by half and saw a THREE THOUSAND PERCENT increase in sales. And apparently the best sales bump ever was a third party game that went on discount and saw a 36,000% increase in sales over the weekend. These are numbers that bean counters would drag their dicks through a mile of broken glass just to LOOK at, much less claim. Yet out there in digital land the average product is priced equal to (if not more than) it's meatspace counterpart.
Insanity.
Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.
This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...
Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.
DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Ehh, I've bought the ebook when the paperback was cheaper before. It's more convenient. It takes up less space when packing, I can search for a minor character's name if I forget who they are, and if I'm ever stuck somewhere that I didn't prepare for, odds are I at least have my phone and can thus read my ebooks on that (not the best experience, but it works).
What exactly are YOU getting out of this? Some good publicity for your nonprofit?
in that case ebooks should cost 10% less than the paperback edition when it comes out, and 10% less than the hardcover before the paperback comes out.
And maybe they do "cost" 10% less. However, that's their cost. Their price to you, on the other hand, should be whatever they think you'll pay that gives them the most profit. It's how capitalism works: buy low, sell high. It really is that simple.
If they think you'll pay an extra $3 for the convenience of sitting on your butt while having the book whisked over the aether to your Kindle, then they'll happily collect it from you. If they think you'll pay an extra $5 for the smell of a dead tree, they'll be even more happy to collect that. And if they think you'll pay $79 for a Kindle today that will lock you into an investment of $15 DRM'd books, they're ecstatic.
The only part of the equation that matters is what the largest number of consumers are willing to pay in order to maximize profits to the stockholders. Nothing else, not fairness, not reasonableness, not public opinion, not whiny authors, not abusive commenters in the Amazon reviews, nor the public good, matters. Never forget that.
John
...except in Australia, where buying almost anything at all digitally/overseas and having it Fedex'd over here is still significantly cheaper than buying retail. I will definitely buy that $13 ebook since the paperback is $40+
I checked out their site; not much selection and a VERY limited selection of "free" ebooks.
Baen frequently releases CDROMs with specific hardcovers that contain near-complete back catalogs of that author, which can then be redistributed freely.
Check out the Annotated Baen Free Listing or the Fifth Imperium.
"I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read."
What are you, some kind of jazz musician?
http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/
They can't make a living at what they love to do either.
In particular, about 80-90% of the cover price of a book has nothing to do with the paper and ink object you buy in a shop; indeed, using current production standards, ebook production requires nearly as much work as paper book production. (Paper and ink are dirt cheap; proofreaders and marketing teams aren't.)
Didn't the publishing industry nearly double paperback prices just a few years ago citing increases in paper costs?
The market can fix the price IFF there is competition. DRM kills that.
The cost of the ebooks is the problem more than DRM.
When the cost is the same or more than the mass market version, I have little incentive to purchase the ebook. And right now I am not even buying the mass market versions, instead I am finding cheaper alternatives. Like Baen's, or independents.
The publishers are screaming bloody murder, claiming they need to recoup their costs (and trying to claim that formatting an ebook costs more than formatting a normal book) yet look at some old books. Books the publisher should have recouped their investments years ago. And they are still the same price, or more, than mass market paperbacks.
The actual costs of paper, printing and binding are less than 10% of the production costs.
Great, thats awesome, so why is that I can purchase a mass market for 10% cheaper than an ebook (or sometimes for half the cost of an ebook?)
Explain to my why 30+ year old books, where they've already paid the editors and the like, are still 7.99 and up?
There are a lot of new books I want to read. But I refuse to pay MORE for them just because they are on an ebook. But because an ebook reader is convenient I am not even bothering with the mass market books anymore either. So they lose.
On the other hand, the mass market paperback pocket books are usually cheaper than the kindle books, but the quality of those books pales in comparison to the service you get on the kindle.
It doesn't pale in comparison. It is easier to browse a bookstore than to browse Amazon's website, well for stuff I don't know about. I don't need batteries to read a paperback. The stewardess won't tell me to shut off my paperback (otherwise the kindle might crash the plane) If I accidentally leave my paperback, or I drop it. I'm not out an expensive ereader
I like my kindle. It was nice to be able to download a new book for free, while waiting at the airport in Lima. It is nice not to carry a half dozen paperbacks with me on a trip. But I paid for that convenience when I bought the kindle. I don't need to spend more money to purchase each ebook. If they can sell them for more, good for them. I'll find something else to read.
For any good, there is a price point that will result in the highest profit for the seller of that good. If selling the latest AAA game title at $40 instead of $60 would lead to more profit, logic says that games companies would be doing it.
After all, the goal of any publicly traded company should presumably be to make the highest profit possible.
no, they aren't. they are barely 30, and always on the best seller 20% off section. realistically, I have never paid over 25 bucks for any new book.
And weren't they saying recently that profits are up despite a decline in sales because e-books are far more profitable than paper books?
Not just insanity. Immorality. Especially when they get laws passed as an end-run around your rights, making it illegal to space-shift what you already bought (something that's supposed to be legal).
This space available.
anything bashing DRM automatically makes front page,
anything bashing, you know, stealing other peoples creative work is modded down to -20.
unless of course, someone is stealing GPLed copyright code, then you get front page.
Let me correct you on this - Amazon does NOT want to do this. In fact you will note that almost all of their book prices specifically state that they were set by the PUBLISHER and not by Amazon. Why? Because Amazon WAS selling books at pretty reasonable prices aka under $9.99 for even new best sellers and then Apple released the iPad and gave the publishers the ability to set pricing - which they then demanded from Amazon. Amazon tried to fight this but in the end knuckled under and we have the Agency Pricing Model that we have now - and we have Amazon acting as a publisher for many smart writers. Amazon doesn't like this but they have no choice, in fact someone is suing Apple and the publishers for this now.
End result? I no longer buy many books and I think this industry will be learning a very hard lesson just as the music industry did. In fact it will be WAY worse since books are WAY smaller (say 4megs with multiple formats) and because books aren't read over and over quite like music is. A real shame too since I and many I know were buying books more and more frequently prior to this truly stupid move by the publishing industry.
P.S. MacMillen was one of the big publishers leading the charge and on their blog, I shit you not, they actually tried to defend their pricing by stating how expensive PRINTING presses were! The mind boggles - these dinosaurs aren't long for this world...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I work for a small publisher. I don't particularly agree with our pricing scheme nor DRM but that's not my department. If you want your books on the millions of Kindles out there then you had better have it available via Amazon. It's a simple as that. We will sell our books to practically any retailer and we have a growing number that sell ebooks. In terms of Amazon using their monopoly ... they already had one with physical books and all the arm twisting and discounts stuff applies equally there.
Not only that bust as many authors are finding out ebooks don't have limited shelf life. In the paper world a book is only on the shelf and then in print for shipping for a limited time. An ebook on the other hand need never leave the shelf - it's ALWAYS available for sale. Many authors are waking up to this and telling their old publishers to take a hike when they come calling asking for rights to the electronic copy and doing it themselves. I cannot find the blog now but there's a guy out there who's making huge bucks on books the paper publishers REJECTED and laughing his way to the bank using Amazon. The faster the old school paper guys go under the happier I will be, we need less greed in the world.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
you're paying for the content... not the dead tree pulp
Because the correct price for a good has nothing, zero, zip, nada, to do with the cost of producing it. The correct price for a good is "all the market will bear". And claiming the price is too high is simply not moral justification for stealing a book, electronically or otherwise.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Industry standard DRM" is an oxymoron. If you can't implement it, then it's not a standard. You're locked into the sole supplier of the trade secret. When you mentioned that everyone has to run Wine just to be able to read the book, didn't that clue you into how ridiculous you must have sounded? How about the part when you mentioned a .. I don't know what to call it .. a "spec"(?!) that has one particular companies' name in it. Seriously, you might as well say the XBox is an industry standard; that wouldn't be any sillier.
You know what's an industry standard? You're reading it right now. HTML. (And that's a fragmented and contentious one!) You would never even be able to guess which browser I'm using because it doesn't matter. HTML just works, with more programs than you can shake a stick at. And if you don't like any of them, you can even write your own. Text. RTF. Even PDF -- it's hard to say this with a straight face -- but even PDF is standard compared to that other Adobe thing you just mention that nobody else in the world has ever heard of, which probably explains why nobody ever makes readers for it.
I cannot find the blog now but there's a guy out there who's making huge bucks on books the paper publishers REJECTED and laughing his way to the bank using Amazon.
Konrath, I suspect. If I remember correctly he said recently that he'd made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from some books that were rejected?
Along with paper and ink, shipping cartons, shipping costs, inventory management, retail floor space costs (IOW retail markup), damaged and unsold merchandise, etc. All essentially zero cost. Just like digital. That's why the pricing is the same.
Sure.
The most outright annoying thing though is regional restrictions, I understand its a carryover from paper publishing but to be honest I dont give a ...
If I want to buy a book, I put my address in, I provide my phone number, progress all the way through to payment, and its not till I've finished entering my CC card I get a failed message, and its due to geographical restrictions. Its amazing how buying a ebook legit can be more hassle than going to a store and buying the paper back or just getting an illegal copy of it.
Surely they can look at the music industry and learn from their mistakes not repeat them!
A book is essentially data. I just want that data I dont want it to be served to me in a stupid layout with silly fake paper pages,drm layden to hell destroying any battery life, instead I want pure text that I can reflow in my desired ebook application on my desired ebook device
Hehe. You said "logic".
This is valid when we're talking about a manufactured good with a material production cost. The manufacturing cost of a single copy of a console game, sold in a store, shrinkwrap and all, is pretty small. I don't know the exact numbers, but it can't be much more than a couple of bucks, especially with the cheap 2-3 page black and white manuals that have shown up in the game boxes lately. The manufacturing cost of a digitally distributed game is zero. In both cases, there is a fraction of overhead, in terms of distribution, marketing, etc. While a whole lot of people will buy games at $60, there are a significant number of people who will not pay that much for games. Just as there are a significant number of people who won't pay $30 or $40 for a new hardback book.
When you price things at "impulse buy" level, you sell a lot more. When Steam has one of their huge sales, people start buying up tons of games that they otherwise would not have bothered with. I spent well over $100 on games during their sale this past summer - money I would not have spent on games if not for the sale. A few hours of entertainment that may or may not be good is really only worth about $15-$20 for me, and that's pushing it. Gambling $60 on the chance that a game will have enough content at a high enough quality to keep me interested for a couple of weeks or a month is just not going to happen.
Books, music, movies, and games are all competing for our entertainment dollars. Whoever provides the biggest value for the money generally gets the sales. For me, that value is reduced the more the item is restricted. I used to buy a lot of books, but paperbacks are increasingly inconvenient for me, and an e-reader would be the perfect solution... except that those e books are usually saddled with DRM or are more expensive. Computer books, such as those for various industry certifications, have always been expensive, but when the electronic version is even more so, it's just insulting.
If I could find a large selection of $5-$10 novels that interested me in electronic format with no DRM, I'd be buying them up. But right now the value proposition just isn't there to justify the initial purchase of a Nook or Kindle.
As for space shifting, nobody will sue you for OCR'ing your paperback books or typing them in by hand. Just because it's legal for you to do it yourself doesn't mean they have an obligation to make it easy, or to do the conversion for you for free.
How long will it take for you idiots to realize printing and distributing a dead tree book costs less than $1 per book?
I think the problem is probably that the legacy MBAs think they can get even more profit by using artificial scarcity to hike prices. In fact, I think the legacy MBA culture of greed is closely related to rent-seeking.
Well, that's interesting. And apparently they're on bittorrent.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Reader: I'd like to buy your book please.
Publisher: Buy a Kindle first.
Reader: No, I don't want a Kindle. Sell me a book?
Publisher: Buy a Kindle.
Reader: If I buy a Kindle, can I read the book without it?
Publisher: No. But buy a Kindle. I don't even care if you buy my book. Just please, buy a Kindle.
Reader: What is this, a MLM scheme? Do you get paid for Kindle sales?
Publisher: No. I just want you to buy a Kindle.
Reader: Whatever. Anyway: money. Here is some money. Want my money? Sell me book. Book. File. No Kindle. Not any particular Kindle competitor. Data, not tool. Book. Sell me book. Money. Money. Here is some money. Money.
Publisher: Fuck off.
Reader: [blink] I think we had a misunderstanding. Let's try this one more time: money. Money. Here, please take my money.
Publisher: Fuck you and your fucking money. I don't want money.
Publisher Stockholders: la la la I am blissfully unaware. The management is trying to increase revenue. The management is trying to serve my interests. I will not sue them, or even fire them. la la la la.
Publisher: Fuck money. Money is bad. I hate stockholders. Die, stockholder. Die, author. Die, customer. Everybody die. Fuck you all! RAAAA! Buy Kindle. *drool* *ramble* *rant*
Reader: Hey, this torrent site is pretty nice. And everything just works!
Amazon: You know what else just works? Reading those pirated books on a Kindle.
Reader: ok. Here, have some money.
Amazon: Moooney! Woohoo! Here you go. Enjoy your Kindle. Wanna buy some books?
Reader: No thanks, but I gotta admit, this Kindle is actually pretty cool. And thanks for pointing me at those torrent sites.
B&N: Wanna buy some books?
Reader: I didn't know anyone was still trying to sell books. No thanks.
Borders: please, money .. i need money.
Publisher: Money baaaad!! No money.
That is what DRM is all about. Saying no to money, in order to advance someone else's interests at your own expense. DRM means "Fuck you and your fucking money." That's about as rational as DRM gets, if your business is content. If your business is selling the one legal implementation of that DRM, though, it's reasonably sane.
not a moral justification, but certainly an economic one.
Great points. For me it is about storage space. I already have hundreds of books I have to store. I would rather have new ones on my Kindle. They are also much easier to find and I can read a sample before I purchase it (which means I am much more likely to read it).
... pricing an e-book $13 when the paperback is $6 is a much more visible issue for the average e-book buyer, at least judging from the various comments on amazon's message boards.
Considering most e-books should be like $2 to $5 dollars at best?
Books - like I stopped buying CD's and DVD's when they started restricting how I could play things, and how I had to watch commercials and couldn't skip them. It was a LOT easier to just get a ripped copy on-line - which is what I do for the most part. If they priced things reasonably and didn't have all of the DRM crap, I would buy things - but as long as they restrict my freedom to enjoy music, movies, and now books only in the way they want me to - I will look to "alternative" ways of getting those items which I can enjoy the way I want.
It is simple economic - when they give me what I want, I'll buy it - till then, I won't. Maybe they will learn before they go belly-up - if not, such is life.
I have a collection of computer books on my bookshelf. There are many more I wish I owned but I just cant justify spending the huge prices publishers in this industry seem to demand.
Same thing with science fiction, I just LOVE curling up in bed with a good SF novel. But when the greedy publishers want upwards of AU$25 in some cases for a paperback (one example price I found for an Orson Scott Card book) I cant justify it (which is why I get most of my fiction books from 2nd hand bookstores these days)
It's easier to download samples in my bedroom/bathroom/trainstation than find a bookstore for stuff that no bookstore can afford to carry. If my house burns down, I'm only out a 150 dollar ereader, not several thousand dollars in books. If I forget to bring a book.... actually, as long as I have my ereader or internet access, I can't forget a book.
And I don't feel the least bit of guilt buying a paper version when it is cheaper and then torrenting the electronic version.
Yes, but to make that kind of money you need to have a decent product. Most game publishers peddle shit. I think EA understands the market very well.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Amazon's the only one who's been stealing e-books around here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
You are already at 5, so I'm adding my $.02 worth. This is exactly right. My mother has a Nook, but has YET to buy a book from B&N because she goes to Costco, and buys the Paperback for less than 1/2 price of what B&N charges.
Seriously, can it cost MORE to make an ebook than a dead tree version, shipped to a store? You want us to believe that? The Publishing Industry should learn from Apple/iTunes that DRM will eventually fail, books will leak onto Torrent sites (already have) and unless you make it 1)Easy, 2) Convenient, 3) Inexpensive people will search for something that is 1)Easier, 2) More Convenient, and 3) FREE and you will lose.
People, in general, do not want to "steal", but will when faced with the idea that the only other option is to be raped (metaphorically).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I took the original to mean that 80-90% of the cover price of a book has nothing to do with printing OR distribution, not just printing itself.
But even if you disagree with me there, distributing an e-book is not zero cost either. Digital distribution on the scale of what Amazon does requires datacenters, bandwidth, maintenance/operational costs, software devs to continue to write/maintain/enhance the software stacks that manage databases of books, handle payments, etc. Sure, if you want to slop your e-book on your personal webserver and manage that all yourself, go ahead. Or you can hire Amazon to do it for you, for a non-zero cost. Lower than printing? Sure. Zero? Absolutely not.
I'll tell you where they actually go "wrong" in their thinking. It is about perceived value, in their estimation. The next paragraphe I'm going to write, is from their perspective.
A $1 game is cheap (less value) than one that sells for $30. One that sell for $60 has more "value" yet.Therefore the "Best Games" need to be sold at HIGHER prices, to reflect the Value in them. We cannot sell MW3 for less than MW2, nor can we sell MW2 for less, just because MW3 is out. We will sell both for $55 regardless because both offer equal value.
Now, AngryBirds and Zinga have countered with $1 games (or in game enhancements) Those games (and similar) are selling not only more copies, but making more money than many other Big Name Games running on the latest consoles. This confuses many of the bigger games companies, but a few are starting to "get it" by offering more "expansion packs" for inexpensive prices, following after the AngryBirds and Zinga Models
Profits don't come into the equation, because of the need to protect perceived value by the companies. THAT is the problem and why they don't get the solution. It is why people risked playing AngryBirds and found it addicting, after all it only cost $1 (or whatever it is). Angry Birds have 500,000,000 players world wide*.That is 1/2 billion. How many game companies would kill to have that number of "success stories" for any one of their products???
*I've never played AngryBirds and I have a Droid Phone
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
When it comes to discounting, psychology plays a role too.
I recall my brother-in-law once tried to run a small shoe shop. You know such a 3x3m shop in a mall stocking mostly cheap shoes, the low-to-mid end $150-250 a pair made-in-China stuff they bought on the wholesale markets across the border in mainland.
They were selling shoes at well about $180 a pair, but sales were not good enough, and they found their margin too small. So what did they do? They discounted the shoes: "30% discount! Original price $300, now $210!" And guess what, their sales went up. Significantly.
So in case of Valve, they may sell more if they discount from US$60 to US$30, than what they would have sold if that game had been US$30 all along. People seem to value goods partly by the price tag that's attached to it, and a 50% discount deal sounds much better than when it's the normal price already. So leaving it at a high price may actually help sales - it makes people eager to buy but they think it's too expensive, and when there is a temporary discount they put themselves under pressure to make the buy, as it's a good deal and who knows when it comes along again.
What is the correct price, then, for water? petrol?
The "rule" you quoted is for monopolies, not for competitive environments, and it is something we try hard, and even regulate, to avoid.
I won't say it never happens, because sometimes it does, but people act like its normal, and its really not. In general, the electronic edition is the exact same price as the mass market paperback.
Hey they have to amortise those idle presses somewhere! For lack of paper book sales they just add it to the e-books.
In cases of non-trivial production costs it certainly is a consideration (or will you make that up in volume?). And markets with real competition (copyright being a monopoly) definitely tend to run up against that barrier.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Last time I checked Amazon charged me much more than that for just the warehouse-to-my-home part of the distribution...
in 2009 ebook sales began to rise exponentially
As a geek I'm honor-bound to demand some sort of support for this mathematically interesting statement. Were ebooks really adopted at a rate proportional to the number of ebooks already out there? It's plausible, but sadly I suspect this is just careless hyperbole.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
Considering most e-books should be like $2 to $5 dollars at best?
Especially since the editors, distributors, cover designers, cover artists, proof readers, copy editors, slush readers, accountants, lawyers, human resources, typesetters, and most of all writers don't need to be paid. Oh, and the rent, utilities, internet, computer equipment, and furniture can all be got for free.
Oh wait, you're willing to pay $2 for an e-book instead of $35 for a HC. Well, if my experience as a publisher was anything to go by, about $5 is the printing and distribution of the book, so I guess they only need to take a 93% pay cut... Silly me.
I find it a great justification - they strive to maximize they profit, and so do I.
Talking about being "forced into buy e-books" is a lame cop-out of the important social issues at the heart of DRM—readers rights: what rights do readers have with the work they legally acquired, who benefits from the loss of readers' rights, and should readers stand for the loss of their rights.
DRM reduces (sometimes eliminates) reader's rights to resell the work, copy portions of the work, or experience (in this case read) the work whenever the reader chooses and do so without monitoring. That is unacceptable at any price but it's not the price that makes these restrictions unacceptable. As to the cop-out issue raised by the poster who started this thread (DRM not being "the biggest issue at the moment"): DRM is a huge issue that will only get bigger as time goes on as DRM appears in more electronics. Users do notice DRM all too late. I do my part to warn them against doing business with any organization that sells DRM-encumbered products or services, but people invariably figure it out with some inconvenience.
But this is the thin end of the wedge. Right now this inconvenience means something relatively small like not being able to read some e-book they acquired legally because they're outside an acceptable zone for reading a particular book. But miniature electronics are inside people's bodies now and DRM there could be deadly. Karen Sandler, co-host of the Software Freedom Law Show, has an enlarged heart. She wears a monitor/defibrillator on her heart to keep her heart in check. I'd hate to think what someone would suffer if some business plan meant installing DRM code onto a medical device like that and failing to operate because the owner was on the 'wrong side of the tracks'. Technologically speaking, there's nothing to stop this from coming to pass. We, collectively, are in a weaker position thinking of this in a technocratic way by waiting for some horror to pass and dreaming up technical workarounds to make bad outcomes less likely than we are to assert an argument that says what the allowable limits of debate ought to be. Politically I think we have a better chance to educate the public about the problems of DRM and make it less likely to become an accepted way of doing business now that it's relatively new and not yet installed everywhere.
Digital Citizen
Shipping a single item to a *house* is not the same as shipping a giant truck full of books to a specific retail location.
> And claiming the price is too high is simply not moral justification for stealing a book, electronically or otherwise.
How the fuck do you "steal" a number (that represents reality such as textual, audio, and/or visual information) ???
ALL of reality can be represented numerical, you stupid smeghead. The only thing you can do, is COPY the _representation_.
Any "moral" justifications are a) RELATIVE / ARBITRARY, and b) ORTHOGONAL to the issue of copying.
Of course. But that's where the distribution ends: when it's in my hands. Somehow it has to be paid for.
And no matter what it's added in the price of books: within the US Amazon offers "free shipping" (of course I don't know the exact terms as I'm not in US). And you bet this shipping cost is included in the book price already!
So you have two options: the e-book (very low cost, just some server storage space and band width) versus the paper book (which has to be printed, quality checked, packed, shipped to Amazon's distribution warehouse, and then shipped to the customer's home - involving many people working on it, trucks that have to run, warehouses that have to be rented and heated/cooled, etc). Note that indeed I do not include cost like authoring, editing, marketing, whatever as those costs are the same for the printed and the e-book.
With all that extra cost, I just don't believe the extra cost can be just US$1 for a paper book.
And if you still think it's really that cheap, please show me some references with actual, realistic cost breakdowns of the COMPLETE process.
Sure it is. It's complete moral justification. They price it at what they think you would pay for it. You pay what you think you should pay for it, which is nothing. It goes both ways.
The reason why they can do this, is because they don't have competition to do what competition usually does, compete, lower prices, improve services etc.
I was informed of the Baen Books website about 9-10 years ago. [here on /., actually] :-)
The 'Baen_Library'[sub-folder' of my ''eBooks' folder] takes up around 15-16 GB's of my back-up drive.
The Fifth Imperium website is about half of the aforementioned 15-16 GB's., the rest I've bought from the webscriptions site.[1]
As a side note, my 'eBooks' folder is about 21 GB's currently. It's size and contents change a lot.
I am an insatiable reader. Really.
[1]Real easy, and they do not spam your inbox, or anything else.
a. create account and log on info
(non intrusive)
b. log in, set up your pref's and info
c. browse and purchase, read the first part of the book as 'sample chapters', or what ever.
d. The webscriptions site keeps track of the books you have purchased, so you can access those books to re-download from any PC you can log into the website from.
What's not to like?
My historic 'travel habits' were to pack my bags, go to the airport early, browse the bookstands, and buy a book or two fr the flight[s].
I now find myself looking exclusively for books by authors I have been exposed to from Baen Books.
(but, I don't travel air anymore because of the TSA BS., but was true for the past 5-6 years)
I know that I may sound like a Baen shill, but I am not...I am just that much of a fanboy. :-)
*credits to 'Guspaz (556486)' who started this thread.*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I love the Baen Books and 5th Imperium web sites.
I have made many purchases from from Baen due to exposure from the Baen Free Library.
"The SHADOW knows...."
I remember that radio show. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It's a crime to defeat DRM due to the DMCA. That's the end-around. Space-shifting was guaranteed under fair-use, USa Inc. didn't like that, so they made space-shifting impossible without breaking DRM, and then made breaking DRM illegal.
May not get me sued, but still shows you how things work around these here parts... what the motivation is, and who gets listened to.
Immoral. Whether they sue or not.
This space available.
They don't charge me that much at all. I just buy more books, I usually have 10 books (and a couple of BluRays) so I can divide the shipping cost over all of them. I'd expect that to be bloody obvious...
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
You're paying for both.
For new books it almost makes sense. I'm seeing the digital versions at about 1~4$ cheaper, which may account for the price difference for trees, ink and shipping.
But for older books (sometimes just 1 year old), the price falls much faster for physical books than for their digital versions.
I suspect that it's because digital books don't have to compete with the second-hand market.
I'm just waiting for Amazon to sue Apple for copying their content-locked-to-tablet-like-device practices.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Your way of saying:
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it
Publilius Syrus (~100 BC)
I don't believe that there is no significiant cost difference between paper and electronic book.
If it was true, why are so many paper books out of print if the price for printing/transporting/storing and selling them in brick and stone shop is so low?
That's the cover price. The "standard discount" at big box stores like B&N is about 30%, right from the start.....
I vaguely remember that in the UK (maybe Europe in general, not sure) there are some rules around that; you're meant to have the item at the pre-sale price for a certain length of time, i.e. no doubling the price and then announcing 50% off etc...
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can't read those locked Kindle ebooks
Yeah, and that's DRM working as it was designed to. And it seems to be quite successful too.
the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy[*], it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers.
Ah, so the Big Six have effectively handed over control of their DRM tool to Amazon, which of course is now leveraging that tool. What else did the Big Six expect Amazon to do?
And unlike pirated copies (which don't automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers
Ooh, now there's irony. All that effort, all that money, all that time spent to stop "pirates"... and now they'd be better off without it at all.
I don't think this is so much a case of hindsight, but more of a case of <facepalm> given what so many people have been saying for so long against DRM. Being afraid of trying new things tends to lead to slow suffocating death, while calculated and carefully thought out risks and experimentation (in this case into other business models) can lead to greater success.
If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position. But it's not clear that the folks in the boardrooms are agile enough to recognize the tar pit they've fallen into ...
Too bad. On the other hand, it may give other smaller businesses a chance to make it big.
Yup, thank you! That guy has been publishing all sorts of good information but I can never remember his name and I don't read his type of books. Really like what he's doing!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yeah, I wonder how that's working out in the long run? I suspect they are going to be learning a very hard lesson if they don't make some changes, it will be interesting that's for sure!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
How are the publishers losing out here? If anything Amazon is helping them out. Regardless of the popularity of ebooks there is always the need for physical copies. This means that the authors are going to go to the publishing companies. They then allow Amazon to sell their ebook for the Kindle and what is the cost to them of doing this? They don't care about the delivery mechanism as long as they get their profit from each sale. The chances are that they make more from the ebook sales than the equivalent physical copy.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Those are closely related. If you make it cheap enough, then I won't want to lend it to anyone - I'll just buy them a copy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most publisher don't own the presses. They contract out the actual printing to other companies. However, if they can't shift a certain volume of the printed version then their prices are going to be very high...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Um, no. That has virtually nothing to do with MS's dominance in the market.
Probably the biggest single factor was getting PC makers to pre-load Windows on computers. Most folks just use what the PC had on it when they bought it. That created a huge market for application developers.
So since I have had one of the early ebook devices (Sony prs) I have always had to look for ebook stores outside of the big 3 that are linked to the devices. Here are some of the ones where I shop:
no starch press
fictionwise
wowio - graphic novel ebooks
oreilly technical books
smashwords
Baen web scription
the ENTIRE Vorkosigan Saga
You don't have to capitalise your errors, we can spot them just fine without the extra hint.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Except I don't believe the quote.
This subject has been hashed over many times on /. itself by people smarter and more experienced in publishing than me, and we came to ebook cost-of-production nowhere NEAR 90% of paper books.
90% sounds pretty much like a number pulled from one's butt, frankly, particularly when he talks about thing like "formatting and typesetting for ebook format" being actually a significant cost. (Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if there's someone with this job, considering how hidebound publishing is as a business...)
Let's review his "a manuscript is not a book" stages for costs?
The author writes a manuscript - no costs, except advances which are supposed to be based on expected revenue anyway.
The author or their agent send the commissioned manuscript to their editor - cost for an etext, zero.
The editor reads the MS. labor cost, probably $100/hour, say 10 hours for a thorough editing, and lets say 5 sessions of 10 hours. $5000 in labor?
Scheduling. essentially zero
Copy editing. included in editing, above. Seriously, if a book takes more than 50 man-hours of proofing, wtf is the AUTHOR doing?
The author reviews the CEM. - zero
Advance Reading Copies - zero
Book design, cover design, front and back flap copy, and cover artwork - as much as you want to spend, from $0 - whatever.
Marketing copy - zero
Review page proofs - say another 10 hours of review, $1000.
Collate advance orders and order the print run. - say another 10 hours of bureaucracy $1000
The print run - zero for an ebook
The printing process - zero, for an ebook.
Invoicing and accounting. - hahahahah.
So, $7000 in costs for a novel-length book, generously.
Typical hardcover price, $20.
Sell 100,000 copies = $2 million. Profit to be shared between publisher, agent, and author $1,993,000.
So where's the 90% number, or ANYTHING close to it?
So sorry, I call BS on the "90% of a book's cost isn't in the physical printing and distribution of a book".
-Styopa
The other day Amazon had a deal on hundreds of ebooks. I looked through the list and soon found one I liked. Then I thought do I want to go thru the hassle of stripping the DRM or loading up kindle on my android to read this one book? No. And I decided not to buy it. On the other hand, I've bought maybe 30 books from oreilly for the simple reason they don't have DRM in their books.
Library.nu, you'll thank me later.
Yes, it's total BS. Paying printing factories, warehouses to hold the books, transportation costs, book returns disposals and refunds to stores. All sorts of middle man costs. These have to have a significant cost added to the book that an electronic version doesn't. Hell the publisher doesn't even deal with the bandwidth of the books as the ebook stores transfer it.
If I may, I'd like to ask y'all a question I haven't found a satisfactory answer to on Google: how do you get rid of "social DRM" on ebooks (typically epubs) that have it? The net has plenty of posts about people removing Amazon-style encrypting DRM, but very little about how to strip your name and credit card number from your ebooks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I assume he was emphasizing that the increase was not in the number of sales (which, at a lower price, may or may not mean an increase in revenue), but the amount of $monetary_unit brought in...
Yup, that's the #1 reason I've bought a total of only 2-3 books for my Nook (and almost never touch it any more) - paperbacks are cheaper, which is utterly stupid given the significantly lower cost to produce!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No, really.
Well, them and the Sales and Marketing departments, combined with general PHB syndrome permeating all of the publishers' management and general employee base.
"X people pirated our book! There's X seeds on a torrent and it's been up for Y days, thus there's X*Y people pirating our book instead of buying! Of course that's why it sold poorly!" followed by "Our new DRM is/will be impenetrable and is the perfect choice for any author/publisher to use!" and a general self-feeding cycle.
Capitalism is also about reducing the gap between cost and price by having that gap smell juicy enough to attract a little thing called competition.
Actually, copyright laws outright make this entirely illegal; Canada is a bit stricter on it than the US (the limit is around 17 pages allowed to be photocopied or scanned if the book is educational; 10 if it's, say, a novel) but there's still a fine copying limit.
As a purchaser of many of Valve's discounted games, I can tell you that the price drop does matter. We all know how much the game goes for at retail. I for one am not paying 60 bucks for the new Batman game...but I'll wait and pay 25 for it. ;)
Android Sex-Selection Fertility Calendar [amazon.com]
Given that sex is down to whether the sperm carries an X or a Y chromosome, how does conceiving on a particular day affect the sex of the child? Ovulation is clearly periodical, sperm production not so.
Am I missing something?
Thanks for the tip about smashwords.
That's a more general question. Why do big companies buy bad products?
The explanation is that decision makers in big companies are removed from the consequences of their decisions by several layers, and are easily conviced (by honest or dishonest means) to act against the company's interest by vendors with a big enough budget.
Rethinking email
am i correct from the story title that Amazon is requiring that you use your ebook downloads only on the Kindle instead of lets say any smartphone or tablet?
You would think that they would have learned. The EXACT same thing happened with Apple and the music industry. DRM kept music purchases restricted to ONE DEVICE from ONE COMPANY, and Apple ended up being able to dictate to the RIAA. Now, the publishing industry has handed the keys to the castle over to Amazon. Madness.
Having worked in the publishing industry, I can tell you that a lot of the business is still dominated by middle aged to older women who *hate* technology, hate thinking about technology, and whose heads would explode if you asked them to think about adapting to evolving ecologies of technology. DRM is conceptually simple enough for them to wrap their minds around, so that's what happens.
Netflix, for $8.95 a month, made it not worth downloading content illegally. It's too easy and cheap to stream it. That kind of subscription model would work for books as well, but it's unlikely that Amazon or other DRM promoters will get it any time soon.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"These are numbers that bean counters would drag their dicks through a mile of broken glass just to LOOK at, much less claim."
ROTFLMAO, Thanks, now I need a new keyboard but it was worth it 'cause I've known a few bean counters that needed to be dragged through a mile of broken glass.
That's why you pirate the eBook, and if you like it, buy the paperback. Loan the paperback to your friend or email them the ebook, whichever they prefer.
There's no reason to buy before you try these days. Reward quality, not deceptive advertising and horrible DRM that only punishes you for paying.
Where the fuck do you live that brick buildings are held together with stone?
Sure, that's a definite part of "all the market will bear", as the market comprises buyers and sellers! And copyright isn't a monoply on "books" or "fiction" or "novels".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Thieves always have excuses for stealing, it seems. Slice it as fine as you want, "taking without paying" is immoral, unless it's offered for free. Creative definitions won't change the underlying morality.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Any "moral" justifications are a) RELATIVE / ARBITRARY,
You may lack a moral compass (or maybe I'm reading too much into those few words), but that doesn't mean that "morality" is meaningless.
and b) ORTHOGONAL to the issue of copying.
Taking something without paying for is it immoral, unless it was offered for free.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Because the correct price for a good has nothing, zero, zip, nada, to do with the cost of producing it. The correct price for a good is "all the market will bear". And claiming the price is too high is simply not moral justification for stealing a book, electronically or otherwise.
Sure it is. If your high prices are due to a high margin (or for that matter high costs) that's an incentive for someone else to step in and sell for a smaller profit or figure out how to reduce costs. But this is not happening here because the publishers have monopolized the market and made it difficult for others to enter it, thanks in no small part to draconian copyright laws and terms which allowed them to amass and control the entire cultural wealth of this country for the past 100 years and more.
I was just thinking "This is exactly what happened with music and iTunes!"
Because the correct price for a good has nothing, zero, zip, nada, to do with the cost of producing it. The correct price for a good is "all the market will bear". And claiming the price is too high is simply not moral justification for stealing a book, electronically or otherwise.
Ah; but correct price defines your market. Lowering prices expands your market. I'm not going to touch the theft issue.
Printing (as in putting ink in recognizable patterns onto pages of paper, binding said paper, affixing covers to each stack of paper, and packaging stacks of same paper for shipment) and Distribution (physically determining which and how many stacks of paper to send where, packing the stacks of paper into cartons or other containers for shipment, arranging physical transport of the cartons, etc., then actually moving said stacks or cartons of paper from the location they were produced and loading them onto transport vehicles, then transporting said cartons, etc., in the right quantities and of the right types, to multiple locations around the globe, using multiple methods of accomplishing said transport.) does add a lot to cost and probably accounts for half or more of the overall labor cost of producing the product. Editors and proofreaders are outnumbered by pressmen, shipping clerks, production workers, etc. who produce and do the distribution of the physical product. BTW, The industry "Giants" in publishing, music, and movies thrived in an environment in which actually getting the product to the customer required a huge infrastructure and was a large part of the product cost. Today, they are fighting for survival, because their main reason for existing has disappeared - distribution is something anyone can do at essentially zero cost for anything that can be reduced to bits and bytes instead of atoms.
They're extinct. They just don't know it yet.
Well, I can at least see some of the rationale with video games or other software.
The distribution is cheap, but the original creation of such a work is actually fairly expensive - especially with the big titles that have lots of polish.
Now, arguably they're still overpriced but nobody would put that much money into a game if it was only going to sell for $5/copy. The kinds of games that sell at that price don't have a lot of expensive actors, polish, etc.
With books the situation is a bit difference. The original creation costs are much lower since almost all the work is done by one person. For paper the distribution costs are considerable in comparison, but for ebooks they are not. There is no reason really why an ebook should be MORE expensive than the paper version. They still need to cost more than just the disk space and bandwidth since the author needs to be paid, but I agree that things are seriously out of whack.
The "rule" you quoted is for monopolies, not for competitive environments, and it is something we try hard, and even regulate, to avoid.
Except in the case of copyright, where the distribution monopoly is enshrined by law, and is something the publishing industry and government collude on very closely, and even regulate, to protect.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
And "books" are not direct replacements for "books". There is competition for your entertainment dollars, but there isn't competition to bring a cheaper and more universal e-version of Twilight out.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Don't forget the cost of Intelligent DRM Design! And of course the Kindle Remote Kill switch -- priceless!
This guy has his focus all wrong. Blaming DRM for the problem is bass ackwards. You don't see the music industry blaming DRM for their problems with digital music. They, and rightly so, blame Apple's domination for their quandary. The same can be said for DRM on ebooks. It is not DRM that is the problem. It is the domination of the entire market by a single vendor. Fix that problem and DRM no longer is an issue.
Physical books have Rights Management built right into them. It's called buying a single copy of a book. You don't demand unlimited copies of a physical book from a bookstore so why should you demand unlimited digital copies?
The main cost of creating an ebook in fact remains the main costs of creating a book, period. The writing. The editing. The fact-checking and cross-checking. The images. The index building, oh gods, the index building. The cover. The marketing. The accounting. Making deals with the distributors. Negotiating with the goddess Ingram, goddess of the bottleneck of publishing. The poor bastards who have to clear copyright issues for, say, song lyrics.1 All of this adds up to the point where the cost of paper printing is dwarfed, as is the cost of creating ebooks (once we get a standardized workflow. Printing sure wasn’t fun before people knew what they were doing).
http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/2009/10/01/a-brief-drunken-comment-on-the-cost-of-making-ebooks/
No. Capitalism is only about maximizing profit. We consumers desire competition because it limits the prices we pay. Should those prices rise beyond our value, we'll stop paying them. Sure, if those prices are below our value, but far enough above the cost of goods, a competitor may try to offer a substitute. But they won't do it if the profit is too low. And they won't survive if the monopolist temporarily drops their price to kill them.
It's not the job of anyone in a capitalist economy to control the market. If consumers are unhappy, they'll probably have to unionize somehow to oppose the monopoly. Swear oaths to never buy from the monopoly. Donate to libraries. They may even print their own books. But don't be surprised if the monopoly treats you as the competition you represent.
John
If you have a monopoly big enough to keep everyone else out it's no longer capitalism.
Communism is still communism even if the party in question lacks any de-jure sovereignty.
The attitude I described isn't limited to big-name publishers, either. I peruse Gamasutra often, and there are a good number of smaller/indie developers that find charging $5 instead of $15 an insult to all the work they put into their game. I really don't understand it. If I could make 36,000% more total sales, I'd let my ego take the hit...
Which is why Baen prices them at $4-$6
Funny you should mention that! Macmillan has pretty much admitted this is the case - read para 4 of this link from their blog -> http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/answers-to-some-questions-from-the-comments/#more-60
Gee, they still have to pay for printing presses and the overhead of having them so we pay more for digital copies.....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
And my comment was really intended to be "funny" not "informative"...
Maybe so but surprise it really is the case with these guys that they wish to prop up a failing model by crushing a new one. Now where have I seen that before....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Totally agree why are ebooks more expensive than printed ones, surely it should be cheaper and they would still make more profit???? This is a larger issue in the uk market. the conversation usual goes I have to buy hardware to read them and then more again for the book than if printed no thanks!! when they are even just slightly cheaper i may put my toe in the water and buy a ereader......