Amazon Now Discounting HarperCollins EBooks

Nate the greatest writes "Late last week three publishers and the Department of Justice finalized an agreement to settle the claims that the publishers conspired to raise ebook prices. One of the terms of the agreement was that publishers were going to have to allow ebook retailers like Amazon to set the price of ebooks. Today it looks like the new prices have gone into effect. Amazon, B&N, and a small indie ebookstore called BooksonBoard are all offering HarperCollins ebooks at a discount. B&N and Amazon seem to be using the same price book, while BoB is having a 24% off sale."

Comments

Good for Whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know many on Slashdot are going to proclaim this as a victory for the consumer because lower prices are always good. Yes. They are. I will never complain about getting something I want at a lower price.

But.

There is a very real danger that the drive to force prices down is going to harm a lot of businesses. Sure, companies like Amazon don't care that much if that happens, but book retailers, who are forced to attempt to make a living off of thinner and thinner margins are going to have troubles making ends meet. Publishers are similarly going to have troubles paying the bills as their margins shrink further and further. And, the eventual outcome is twofold - there will be less and less choice for consumers because retailers and publishers will stop taking chances on titles that aren't obviously going to make their profit by numbers, since their margins are too small and thus we'll lose out on choice. Further, and more importantly, companies will start going out of business because the margins are simply too thin, further limiting our choices.

Now, I'm not saying that prices must stay high but there is a very real concern that prices being driven down is going to negatively impact the industry which will, in the long run, negatively impact our choices.

So, before you cheer this as a victory for the consumer, think about the bigger picture and imagine what would happen if your company was forced to operate on razor thin margins. How much would you be cheering?

(Disclaimer: I've worked for a publisher in the past that ended up going out of business so I am somewhat biased on this subject but I think my point stands regardless of my past.)

Re:Good for Whom?

[smittyoneeach]

So, before you cheer this as a victory for the consumer, think about the bigger picture and imagine what would happen if your company was forced to operate on razor thin margins. How much would you be cheering?

Capitalism is to economics as natural selection is to Darwinism.
Would you contend that people should do something un-natural?

Re:Good for Whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the fat middlemen publishers who live off the writers and provide little value to the consumer? Once publishing is all digital and instant they might have to get a real job! As far as limiting choice that is pure FUD, anyone with a computer could write a novel and have it published. Unlike the old days of publisher monopolies.

Re:Good for Whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly have never read an unedited manuscript. If you had, you'd never suggest anyone with a computer writing a novel and having it published.

Re:Good for Whom?

[Karlt1]

" Capitalism is to economics as natural selection is to Darwinism.
Would you contend that people should do something un-natural?"

The publisher is not getting smaller profits. What Amazon and the rest are doing are doing are selling books below the cost that publishers are charging them to distribute the book. Amazon is taking a loss on the ebook sell to encourage sales of the Kindle and to run other booksellers out of business. What do you think is going to happen when Amazon gets its monopoly status back?

Re:Good for Whom?

[Karlt1]

"Uhhh. . .in a fair market, cheaper competitors emerge?"

How can cheaper competitors emerge when the monopolist is charging less than the cost of goods sold?

Re:Good for Whom?

[Digital Vomit]

There is a cost to produce. Writers, editors, designers, artists, typesetters, and the rest cost money.

Printing and distribution is a small portion of the overhead for book publication.

Authors get upwards of 10% of the cover price. Editors are typically paid a flat fee (per page, per book, etc.), as is the cover artist (a few hundred to maybe a thousand), and the typesetter (something like $30 per page).

The publisher gets around half the money from the sale, not a "small portion".

Re:Good for Whom?

[digitig]

Capitalism is to economics as natural selection is to Darwinism.

And regulation is to capitalism as medicine is to natural selection.

Would you contend that people should do something un-natural?

Use medicine to prolong life? Absolutely.

Re:Good for Whom?

[anethema]

Far and away now a days I read more self published books on amazon. Their editing standards are not usually up to published quality, esp for an author's first book, but I'm more and more convinced that publishers have been more harm than help in the book work anyways.

For example here is a category of books I enjoy, and the top books in it:

http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Science-Fiction-eBooks/b/ref=amb_link_7192512_3?ie=UTF8&node=158595011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=18Z89FBPQX256PRKTBVW&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1300192942&pf_rd_i=668010011

On the first page alone I think there might be 1-2 non self published books.

SO maybe because they are so cheap, they are popular and sell a lot. Let's try by customer rating:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?qid=1347374427&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A!133141011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cn%3A158591011%2Cn%3A158595011&sort=reviewrank_authority

STILL almost entirely self published books.

So yeah while the editing standards might not be quite up to snuff, the storytelling has been great and once the author hits with one book he gets almost all the sales money so makes much more than an author under a publisher. Then he has the cash to hire editors etc etc and the result is there have been some amazing series published on there.

Thanks to my kindle and all these 99c self published books, I read MUCH more than I would have otherwise and found some real gems. These days the publisher is just a money sucking middleman that I'm not convinced is really needed anymore.

Re:Good for Whom?

[SB2020]

But affect the publishers ? It shouldn't.

Until Amazon are the only retailer and then they can start to make demands to force publishers to reduce prices. See also the current fight over milk prices in the UK. The big supermarkets are abusing their virtual monopolies to force farmers to sell milk for less than it cost them to produce, driving farmers out of business. Clearly unsustainable.

Publishers profits from the 50Shades and HarryPotters are used to support and nurture titles/authors that are only marginally profitable or even unprofitable but culturally important. It's what gives us choice on the booksellers shelves, at least until they are all squashed and you can only buy from Amazon.

Treating all books as pure commodity will lead to the only authors able to make a living are those aiming for the mass market and you will only be able to buy 50 Shades of Grey - sensationalist crap that barely qualifies as writing.

Re:Good for Whom?

[radish]

If they were a monopoly they wouldn't need to sell below cost. The only reason to do that is to bring people into your store/platform where you hope they'll buy other stuff to make up for your initial losses. If they don't, of course, you eventually go out of business.

If you're already the only player (i.e. a monopoly) there is no competition - that's where you raise prices - not lower them. Amazon may want to become a monopoly in eBooks, but this tactic indicates they're clearly not one yet.

Re:Good for Whom?

[morcego]

I can understand your worry but, again, that is just part of capitalism, albeit the bad part.

However, in this particular case, Amazon has enough strong competition (B&N, Fictionwise, Apple etc), this isn't likely to happen.

Actually, there is a bigger problem than price setting that can affect this: availability. I live outside the US, and there are several books that are only available to be from Amazon. Even when they are available somewhere else, like Fictionwise, the publisher
will tell them they can't sell outside the US, pretty much giving Amazon a virtual monopoly. I expect there are other restrictions that also apply only to some of those stores, and not others.

Re:Good for Whom?

[RabidReindeer]

What is the point in these "publishers" and "book retailers" when we can buy and sell our books online now?

Good luck selling eBooks from your collection.

The point in "publishers" is that they take care of the proofing, typesetting (yes, even an ePub looks better if it was formatted as something other than a raw text dump), marketing, artwork (nice covers sell better), and so forth.

The point in "booksellers" is that you get one-stop shopping, and the publisher and author don't have to set up and maintain retail accounting systems and delivery servers (or did you think the Internet is powered by fairies? Those books come from tangible source machines with tangible operators powered by real live electricity).

Yes, one person can do it all, but doing everything yourself doesn't always mean it gets done well. If my favorite author can be more creative and more productive because he or she or they or whatever have outsourced the grunt work, I'm willing to pay for a middleman or 2.

Not being an idiot (no matter what they say), I won't pay more for electronic books than their dead-tree versions, but I don't consider paying a resonable price for intermediary services as a complete waste of money.

Re:Good for Whom?

[boyfaceddog]

I write stories and have a book coming out next year so I have a dog in this one.

What I have seen and what I have been told by Tor is that ebooks will split the market. You will have a flood of cheaply produced, low-cost titles and you will have a small boutique market of high-end interactive books that cost a fortune and will be updated from year to year.

Every house wants their boutique titles. In the early 2000s those would have been the Harry Potter series. Tie-ins and marketing galore. That was a publisher's wet-dream. The boutique titles, as seen right now, will be a mixture of interactive magazine, tv show, and music video. Sort of like a subscription to a super-version of your favorite cable channel. Words will make up some of the content but a lot of it will be pictures and music. Like mystery novels? Think what you could do if you had four or five top writers pumping out a dozen titles, all tied together, and with it's own episodic tv show. Science fiction is a no-brainer, as are fantasy and spy 'novels'.

By the way, we already have all of this, only the stuff is spread out across a dozen studios and publishers. What will happen is a single house making all things. Okay, maybe a little cooperation.

On the other end of the scale are the books I will be writing. Text edited by a professional and thrown into an ebook template. IF my book sells and IF there is a little interest by Barnes & Nobel and IF I can pull together a tour, Tor *might* do an actual print run - paperback - very limited. Tor said they will help with some local tour dates in the midwest but all travel and hotel costs are mine to cover.

Nearly everyone can be published now. The downside is there isn't any more money to o around.

Welcome to the new publishing.

Re:Good for Whom?

[somersault]

I meant selling books that we'd written ourselves, not selling on books that we've already read. If eBooks were sold at reasonable prices then the "used" market would be redundant anyway.

"Book retailers" in the post I was replying to was intended to mean brick-and-mortar book stores, and I was using it in that context. Of course sites like Amazon and other eBook sellers are still worthwhile in today's world.

I don't want to pay more either. I haven't even bought the latest DiscWorld novel because it's still at full book prices. When eBooks come down to around 5 GBP or below then I consider them reasonable purchases.

additional info very important to this story

[slashmydots]

From a different article about this story:

The one place you won't find such discounts, however, is the iBookstore, Apple has opted to fight the Justice Department and go to trial alongside Penguin and MacMillan next year.

Why am I not surprised? Price fixing and monopolistic bullshit even when they don't actually have a monopoly is Apple's bread and butter.