DRM Lawsuit Filed By Independent Bookstores Against Amazon, "Big Six" Publishers

concealment writes "Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the playing field for book retailers. If successful, the lawsuit could completely change how ebooks are sold. The class-action complaint, filed in New York on Feb 15., claims that by entering into confidential agreements with the Big Six publishers, who control approximately 60 percent of print book revenue in the U.S., Amazon has created a monopoly in the marketplace that is designed to control prices and destroy independent booksellers."

Comments

Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[Anonymous Coward]

Prices for most ebooks from amazon are priced correctly. best sellers being 15$ where a hardcover is 32.... raise that 15 and watch piracy skyrocket.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[pwizard2]

Even $5 is too much for a ebook unless it's brand new. I can buy a dead-tree version of a paperback novel for less than that if I wait until it's on the clearance rack or get it secondhand. A dead tree book has to be printed, bound, and shipped someplace and there are inherent production costs. A file can be replicated an infinite number of times so there's no cost involved in production after the publisher has paid someone to convert the original text to pdf, epub, or mobi format (unless you count the cost of bandwidth, which is negligible). Everything they make on ebook sales is pure profit.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[hawguy]

I hope you're joking. $15 for any fiction ebook is not a sound business model. I'd buy a good ebook for $5, but not $15.

I can only accept prices like that for certain kinds of non-fiction works where the market is smaller and the production/compilation effort is way higher.

I agree - if I'm going to pay for an eReader that takes away nearly all of the printing and distribution costs of a book along with most of the marketing costs, then I expect a significant discount on a $30 hardcover that's routinely discounted to $17 which is later sold as a $12 paperback discounted to $8.

$5 - $7 sounds more reasonable. Many Kindle books are priced higher than the discounted paper edition - even though I find reading the Kindle to be more convenient, I usually end up buying a used paperback (or even hardcover) because they are usually less than half the price of an eBook. I could even sell the used book after I'm done for a few dollars, making it even cheaper (though I usually just donate them to Goodwill)

So instead of getting $5 from me (minus the bookseller's profit), the publisher gets $0 from me for most of the books I read.

Re: Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. You obviously need to spend more time with pre-edited books- most novels before editing are barely readable. The editors work for the publisher, who also promotes the book and acquires the copyright in most cases.

As long as the author was getting at least a third I'd be ok.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[dgatwood]

Except that it's much, much easier to prepare a book for print than it is to prepare an eBook. Preparing a book for electronic publishing is a bit like designing a web page in the mid-1990s, except that there are a lot more eBook reader vendors than there were browser vendors. Each one has its own set of quirks, some of which are... shall we say rather sizable sets. A single copy of your content has to look at least acceptable when used with all of those readers.

As much as I swear about the amount of time it took to create several thousand lines of custom LaTeX macros when designing the print edition of my novels, it pales compared with the amount of time I've spent on EPUB, MOBI, and KF8 versions. It has taken at least an order of magnitude more work, and that's a conservative estimate.

In addition to working around all the reader bugs, you'll also find yourself swearing at the lack of good fonts that can legally be distributed in such an easily opened format, particularly if you are distributing your books DRM-free. A big chunk of my time has been spent taking existing SIL-licensed fonts and redesigning parts of them so that they actually look acceptable. That's a lot harder than it looks.

Finally, the tools out there for doing electronic publishing leave much to be desired, particularly when it comes to working around all the aforementioned reader bugs. The folks working with major commercial design packages are having just as much trouble as those of us who are writing our own tools from scratch—maybe even more so, given that they don't have an easy way to fix bugs in their tools.

If my time has any value, I can't foresee a future in which the electronic versions of my trilogy of novels ever break even. I'd have to clear at least a couple hundred grand. That's a heck of a lot of books at ten bucks apiece (of which the publisher gets a lot less than ten bucks). Perhaps in ten years, when the technology has improved dramatically, eBook sales will be pure profit. Today, however, except for very, very basic transfers that eschew formatting altogether, I'd imagine that most eBooks are loss leaders.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[fish waffle]

The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.

No, it's not. People accepted physical book prices because they had no way to print them as nicely (yes, that does include the hard/soft-cover, dust-jacket, as well as actual binding, however shitty the glue-binding of current books), and they were willing to attribute some costs to transportation, shelf-stocking/presence, staff in the stores, and so forth. That was made books of value to your average consumer. E-books take that *all* away. The only thing left is a piddly bandwidth cost, and hard to quantify-or-appreciate, mysterious marketing/administration/editing costs. Whether that was actually the bulk of the cost or not doesn't matter---the price of actually printing a book is not the important part here, it's the perception of the price of a printed book. A physical object still seems inherently more valuable than a license to read a book on a device you have to buy separately.

Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[dgatwood]

Worse than that. Depending on the sales model, publishers may get less money from an electronic book than from a print book, even after printing costs are taken into account.

For example, with Amazon's KDP program, you either get 70% of Amazon's current price (which is not your cover price) or 35% of your cover price, at your option. If you set the price at a fairly typical $10, you get $3.50.

By contrast, with print publishing, you get anywhere from 45–80% of the cover price, depending on how you set the discount (which affects how broadly you get distributed, but it is your choice). If you assume that a typical hardcover book costs under five bucks apiece, and you set the cover price at a fairly typical $25, even at a 55% discount (you get 45%), you get $6.24.

And at a more typical small-press hardcover discount of 30%, even if you set the premium at your actual manufacturing cost plus the eBook cost ($15), you get $5.50—significantly more than you get for the electronic edition at the fixed 35% royalty rate.

So there's really no guarantee that people are making more money off of electronic versions of their book, even ignoring the much, much higher cost of designing the electronic edition in the first place. Once you factor that in, you should be glad it doesn't cost several times what the physical edition costs. :-)

Re: Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[Meski]

I disagree. You obviously need to spend more time with pre-edited books- most novels before editing are barely readable.

Sadly true. Authors that are capable of self editing are a tiny minority. Five dollars would be a good price for the conditions attached to eBooks, that are not attached to dead-tree books. (not able to gift/sell the ebook when you're done with it, and with device specific DRM attached to it (I know, DRM is trivial to remove, but it's there))

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[3Cats]

Two things never discussed in the ebook / paper costs debate are the costs of warehousing and taxes on unsold inventory and availability of "out of print" books. One of the reasons it's nearly impossible to get older works is they are purposefully allowed to go out of print. No publisher wants to do another run of 40,000 copies of "Pride of Chanur" and then hold onto them as they trickle out to bookstores and buyers. Publishers want the latest flavor of Teen Paranormal Romance which is selling NOW. They want to print 10,000 copies and then move on to the next latest Zombie Teen Paranormal Werewolf Romance. There's thousands of excellent books no longer available even used at a reasonable price. Ebooks allow publishers to warehouse zero copies, saving the tax on inventory and space requirements. Ebooks allow YOU as a writer ( assuming you've been at it a while ) to sell your backlist to new readers. Some of the great SF authors of the 60's and 70's have dozens of titles that are impossible to find. For the cost of converting or creating an ebook, you will continue to have a copy available to sell, in theory, forever as it will never go out of print.

Re:High or Low?

[Obfuscant]

I guess you're too young to remember how Microsoft "abused its monopoly" by bundling Internet Explorer with the OS for free.

Nobody seems to remember the even worse abuse, where they required vendors to sell EVERY computer with a copy of a Microsoft OS if they wanted to sell ANY system with a copy. I lost count of the number of new computers I bought where the first step was to format the disk and then install Linux. That wasted a lot of the taxpayer's money, since I was buying each one off of a federal research grant.