Slashdot Mirror
Publishers Warned On Ebook Prices
An anonymous reader writes "The DoJ says Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan and HarperCollins conspired to raise the prices of ebooks. The report originates from the WSJ, but the BBC adds comments from an analyst bizarrely claiming increased prices are somehow a good thing and thinking otherwise is the result of 'confusion'. I'd like to see an explanation of why the wholesale model, while continuing to work fine (presumably) for physical books, somehow didn't work for ebooks and why the agency model is better despite increasing costs for consumers."
Exactly. Who would pay $18 or more for a book on iTunes that you can't even LOAN to a friend?
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
From TFA:
How are the DoJ dictating lower ebook prices? Aren't they just investigating whether there is price fixing going on in a collusion between publishers? Is this admitting that they are artificially inflating prices?
And I've gotten it that there are more costs than printing a book. But, how does that translate into forcing ebook sellers to use the Agency model? I used to buy all my ebooks from Fictionwise but have had to switch to Amazon because Fictionwise was unable to agree to the Agency model. They have definitely hurt competition with this.
That was even before the so-called "agency" model. There were ebooks available at Fictionwise for $20 years after the paperback had been released at $6.99.
Then they opened up on their feet with a fully automatic weapon, "agency," which attempted to raise eBook prices, banned things like discounts and rebates, and generally attempted to kill eBooks by overpricing them.
They also canceled existing pre-orders at the lower prices. I had a book on order at Fictionwise I had pre-ordered at $8. They forced FW to cancel the deal and refund my money, removed the book and a lot of other ones from fictionwise, and "generously" offered me the book at $12 at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble. My eBook buying, which included buying books at ridiculous prices but getting store credit as a rebate, dropped from over $2000/year to less than $200.
When publishers start acting sane (I'm NOT counting on it) I may go back to them. In the meantime, I've never stopped buying everything Baen brings out, and loving it and them.
Why not paypal the author a few bucks and torrent the ebooks? No trees getting cut nor used books getting shipped around and the author makes money. Keep doing this until publishers realize their short sighted stupidity and change their ways.
Except that, at least with Amazon eBooks, they appear to have left out the copy editor and the graphics editor. Typos up the wazoo. Horridly compressed jpegs for graphics. Pagination that makes little Johnny cry.
Maybe Amazon could crowd source those problems and give people a discount or something - but it gripes me to pay nearly full paper price for a substandard product.
I won't even mention the DRM since it's conveniently so easy to crack.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Baen has been doing well with that model for over a decade now, the other publishers don't care. Even when Baen was literally the only company making any money on ebooks none of the other publishers would even give that model a second look. If it's not loaded down with DRM and badly overpriced, they just don't see the advantage.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why?
Why should a publisher/author/whatever not be able to charge whatever they want for an eBook? If they want to charge more than the printed copy that's their choice surely? If they want to charge less that's also their choice.
Why does cost of production of some other thing matter to the price of an ebook? Heck what does cost of production of the ebook matter to the price of an ebook? Value pricing isn't exactly a new idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing).
Now collusion amongst the publishers is a different story - that's illegal without even considering the existance of physical books.
You probably should have checked your library to see if they loan ebooks.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Nobody sells e-goods, they're "licensed",
Really? So all those DRM-free books I've been buying in multiple formats from Fictionwise are ... ummm. Huh?
which means that I may use them as long as the publisher lets me in ways they like (which they may change at any time they like), or as long as the publisher or some unrelated third party who happens to own them at the time doesn't mismanage its finances and disappear.
Dell Magazines is going to have a real hard time finding all the copies of the magazines I've "licensed" from them should they ever go out of business and want to stop me from reading them, much less just change their mind about my being able to read them.
If you are paying money to people who can take things back from you at their whim, that's your problem.
But yeah, it would sure be nice to be able to buy e-books.
Yes, it is. On the other hand, there are so many free ones available, why do you need to buy any at all?
This is typical, and not even anecdotal. There's a certain price point at which people don't care Just look at Steam.
"We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40."
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/
That means, selling your product at 25% of your original price increases total sales 40 times over, or in other words you sell 160 times what you would have sold.
Indeed, if you earn a buck instead of 10 per book, your net profit is still up. Your profit margin, _per book "copy"_, is lower, but if you consider the fact that an eBook is zero marginal cost, it means that on a company-basis your entire profitability still goes up.
Google (the do no evil folks) offered to sell me a PDF book. I bought it... only to find that I had to install a special version of adobe to read it. It blindsided me. I had been down this road with music from itunes as well. Songs in a format that I could not play on another mp3 player (ie my android phone) and songs that my wife and I shared via home sharing that we could not play on each other's ipods.
So in the end, I downloaded the same songs in mp3 for free due to the frustration of trying to use songs I'd bought (ie licensed) from itunes.
Same for the books.... within an hour of downloading an encrypted pdf from goog books, I had cracked the encryption and could read it on any PC... like the one at work that doesn't allow me admin privs to install the silly reader.
Keep it up publishers... you are pissing off your market!