Slashdot Mirror
The Price of Amazon
An anonymous reader writes "As physical book stores continue to struggle and disappear, the NY Times puts the changing book industry into perspective as a cost of the existence of Amazon. Further, it's a cost that hasn't been fully paid, as other effects of Amazon's ascendancy have yet to be felt. Quoting: 'One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim. The first seeds of this can be seen in the Justice Department's suit against the leading publishers, who felt that Amazon was pricing their e-books so low that it threatened their viability. The government accused the publishers of colluding to raise prices in an anti-consumer move. Amazon was not a party to the case, but it emerged the big winner.' Economists, publishers, and readers no longer have confidence that a book will cost the same amount this week as it did the last."
Just Amazon? Just books?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This just in: the market isn't the same as it was 50 years ago! Some scientists are saying we need to observe our market differently. Panic ensues.
... Selection.
Amazon beats any bookstore at finding older books.
Brick and mortar stores are all about displaying 20 copies of the latest shit best-seller, sitting side by side, on the front shelves. No thanks.
... for the buggywhip makers.
What use is a physical book store when I do not want to buy physical books?
And it's not just physical books and bookstores. I have no local computer shop that carries even 0.01% of the inventory that Amazon and Newegg possess, and the stuff they do have is just purchased from Amazon or Newegg and marked up 30%.
Amazon is just better than shopping locally. Better in terms of selection, price, and availability. Best of all I don't even have to leave my house. Books are delivered instantly to my Kindle and there's a 2 to 5 days wait for physical-goods.
Economists, publishers, and readers no longer have confidence that a book will cost the same amount this week as it did the last.
Breaking news: prices of goods change based on supply and demand. Film at 11.
Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim
Well, gosh darn it all to heck! Price determined by demand? What's next? Sliced bread?
Welcome to the new publishing reality. Maybe when 'leading publishers' stop trying to push ebooks at paper copy prices, the demand will return in their favour. Until then, they are free to end their miserable unviable lives.
I'm in New Zealand, and a few years ago I tried to locally source an American title.
The first bookshop chain I contacted told me they didn't have it, probably couldn't get it, and even if they could and did, it would cost NZ$250 and take three months to arrive.
The second bookshop chain I contacted told me they didn't have it, probably couldn't get it, and even if they could and did, it would cost NZ$350 and take six months to arrive.
The third bookshop chain I contacted told me they didn't have it, couldn't get it, then hung up on me.
So I paid cash to my neighbour who then let me use her credit card to buy it online from the US publisher. That was on a Saturday afternoon. The book was on my doorstep when I got home from work on Tuesday. Total cost including priority shipping was around NZ$103, plus change.
As I said, I do love bricks and mortar bookshops, but, like film and so many other things, their day is done, since they can't or won't compete with the Internet.
'One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim.
How is that a consequence? Haven't books always been priced based on demand and whim? They don't think the price of a $200 textbook is primarily in the print materials, do they?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The marginal cost of 'manufacturing' and hence the long term price for any piece of information is $0.
A Financial Times photographer visits an Amazon fulfillment center in England. This is what your one-click purchases are doing to people.
The "BuggyWhip" makers morphed into GM.
I have read many books with my Kindle, the large DX e-paper version.
I have read so many out of copyright books, I still don't know what to do with myself. They continue in sites like Project Gutenberg, or any decent search engine with terms found through Wikipedia.
My collection is 100% legit, 100% copyright free in my county, and 100% better than whatever I'm missing out on.
I'm that asshole, the guy who thinks he's the representative, but in reality is the outlier, the person who has no business posting because it does not affect him/her.
But Amazon won a case against Big Ink. They are suddenly the bad guy?
Oh yes, this report was funded by big ink. I invite you to search for DAVID STREITFELD, "He won a 2012 "Best in Business" award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his New York Times stories on fake online reviews." 2012, who the shit gave credence to reviews last year? Calling Rick Romero, who gives a shit about online reviews?
"Streitfeld was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting," - Rick Romero
Sorry, that was Wikipedia, not Romero, but WTF does that mean?
Amazon will sell what you will buy. At the price you will pay. That's capitalism. Are the United States not a capitalistic enterprise? If not, maybe Socialist? Maybe something else?
Pricing is proprietary information. That's capitalistic rhetoric.
Holy shit batman. Someone REPRINTS an article, discovers sales are slow, and INCREASES the price? What the fuck would you do? Put your fist in your Aunt Bea? Hell no, you would charge market price, just like AMAZON FUCKING DID.
20 PERCENT, thati's Nazi pricing. Oh, $19, which I round up to $20, up to $24.95, which I round down to $20? That's a savings of, wait,
JACK
FUCKING
SHIT
.
Oh, cheaper than the bookstore by a price of WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU CHARGE FOR SOMETHING THAT IS OUT OF PRINT?
God dammit, I could have printed 30 novels instead of replying to you.
Cry me a river, buggy whip makers.
This is what capitalism and competition is all about.
I thought the whole point was that when books are in demand, prices increase, and as things fall out of favour, price decreases? Why should a book that few people want cost as much next week as it did this week? Compete, make a book people want to read, people will pay for it.
Oscar Wilde might have once said "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Price is supposed to be set by demand. And if it is set wrong on a whim, people don't buy it.
If by "fairly" you mean that bloated, overpriced, arrogant publishing houses with excessive internal costs can't force their customers to pay inflated prices anymore, then yes, they can't price "fairly" anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, the revolution in the book market isn't done until every single big 20th century publisher is out of businesses, and most authors sell and market their books themselves through convenient and inexpensive online services.
I don't know what the real price of a book is right now. Living in New Zealand, where book prices seem to range from the absurd to the absolutely fucking absurd, I feel that the NZ book buying community are already living in the world you describe. NZD50 isn't unusual for some trashy novel. Price already seems determined by whim. There are so few bookshops in NZ (everyone's too busy watching rugby to care about that literary shit) that it's actually embarrassing to walk into a bookshop and ask for a title that you can't find on the shelf, let alone falling over when they tell you how much it's going to set you back. Really fucking tragic.
The comment equating the price/value of a book with its manufacturing cost, and assigning that cost a value of zero, misses the larger point. Publishers are de facto agents for writers -- middle men who used to provide the service of editing and marketing and distributing a writer's creation. We can argue about the value of this service, but it did have value, both to the reader and the writer. The new system of direct access is transitional and of limited utility. Most Ebooks published outside the traditional publishing system are barely readable and their value as a result is minimal -- which is reflected in the minimal prices they command. Well-edited and curated books will command higher prices because the service provided by the editing and curating (call this part it marketing and distribution) will have value to both readers and writers -- separating the crap from the slightly-less crappy product, and promoting the less-crappy product to a wider audience. Because traditional publishers are committed to the traditional print-oriented system, they may not be capable of adjusting to the new reality -- but that hardly means the new reality will cease to have a place for editing and curating. The problem comes when the culture that supports this process either ceases to exist or is denigrated by ignorant consumers who equate cheap and free with some kind of idealized open-access nirvana. The truth is, quality costs. It may not cost as much as traditional publishers believe it should because they have traditional overhead systems to support, but it will cost something, and for the sake of writers and readers both, we should hope the transitional to the new model of curated publishing happens quickly and smoothly, for the benefit of all involved.
Does that mean no more confidence men in the supply chain?
Well, anyway, just apply Vegas/Wall Street rules and bet long or short
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seriously, anybody else buy food through them? They frickin' sell everything. And I own a Kindle, so sue me. Like another poster mentioned, why would I go to a physical store to buy something that is not physical? Since I got my Kindle I have not bought a single physical book. Why would I? The battery life on this thing is pretty amazing....
That is the "real" price. Basic economics. Any other price than one set by demand is artificial (as in "price-fixing"). If prices are dropping due to the advent of Amazon, there are a number of possible causes: Decreasing marginal cost of creating each book (especially since the marginal cost of an e-book is probably less than a few millionths of a cent), supply increasing faster than demand, more complete/accurate information traversing the market thus more quickly setting an accurate price than before, or a combination of some or all these factors.
In other words, the price mechanism is working exactly as expected. The poor obsolescent publishers and book stores don't like it because they can't keep up, but this is exactly how a free market is supposed to work. There's no story here, other than to report that yet another group of buggy-whip makers are bemoaning their own demise and trying to contrive a reason it's a bad thing.
Liberty in your lifetime
Not sure I see the problem here. Books are like any other good. They're "true" market value is only as high as the target market is willing to pay. This is going to shift frequently. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Quality and available will play the same role with books, as with anything else.
The other amazing thing in this is Amazon is not very profitable. They have been reporting losses, not gain.
When expenses exceed income, shareholders have a loss negative earnings per share
Amazon has been declining, and yet the analysts have awarded them this amazingly high valuation, as if they were the next Microsoft or the next Walmart.
Guess what though... revenue doesn't mean squat, if your expenses are higher than what you make, and you therefore aren't able to convert that revenue into profits.
They've pretty much disrupted box stores, too. What if Walmart figures out how to "do" to-home delivery? they've got the logistical and pricing chops to do it if they put their minds to it, but the to-home delivery aspect could be too alien. Then they should buy Schwann's, who does do that part well.
Walmart+Schwann's would be good good in most rural areas.
Let me get this straight. Based on the "struggle" and "disappear" links in the summary, I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for Barnes & Noble as well as Borders. Is that correct?
It wasn't all that long ago people lamented how these mega-stores - specifically Barnes & Noble and Borders - were killing all the little independent book shops. Their response was they delivered what the consumer wanted at lower prices. Well, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot now! I actually felt bad about the independent book sellers (a few of whom have managed to adapt and do good business)... but not these guys. If they can't compete in the modern marketplace, that's their problem.
#DeleteChrome
Its the overheads which kill bricks and mortar book stores. Commercial rents will set you back at least £1000 a week, a commercial rent in a town in a big shopping centre? £1000 a day is not unheard of. Then you have business rates ontop of that. Then utilities. Then staff/ Then councils short on money will raise the parking charges and extend the hours. Manchester is about £7 an hour to park and you now have to pay from 6am to 9pm. Ontop of this stores stock bog all, so they say oh we can order it in for you.. Which makes highstreet book shopping (real paper or not) utterly pointless.
US$0.25 for paperbacks and US$0.50 to $1 at local flea markets, thrift stores, or hospice sale shops...
or better yet, free to read at my local library...
I live in Finland, where Amazon does not have a "local" presence and I've sometimes ordered stuff from UK, Germany and US Amazon. You'd think that international shipping would kill the idea, but you would be very mistaken regarding how bad the local retailers (and sometimes even local online stores) are.
I recently purchased a Mac Mini and wanted a DP-miniDP cable to connect it to my monitor. I looked the cable up in various finnish retail and online stores. Not a single retail store I visited had it, not even one. I looked up the local online stores and the cable + postage within 3-4 business days was 35-40 euro. I ended up ordering it from UK Amazon, with express international delivery (I literally had it delivered to my workplace in Finland by DHL in 2 business days) and paid 26 euro total.
The clueless retailers can die in a fire for all I care.
I think the point of the article is about: Do people want the changes that are happening to the main street to continue?
From a purely consumer standpoint, sure, cheaper is better. And as long as there's no development of monopolies or other devious practices, that's fine for consumers.
But. Stores closing down in your town leads to decrepit town centres; decaying cities aren't nice and have other, unpleasant consequences. Massive corporate tax avoidance (partly why Amazon has such great prices in the UK?) actually is a bad thing too -- for infrastructure, and for your own personal tax bill. So yes, these changes have a cost -- to society. But, damn, that USB memory/ LED monitor/ Android tablet is cheaper there. Yay!
So basically, Amazon is trying to turn all of us into Lisp programmers?
Ezekiel 23:20
If you are talking about the content, i.e, the information in a book, there has NEVER been a 'real cost of the book'. It has always been, like for any information resource, dictated by how valuable the information is to a certain set of people. What value a publisher sells the book is determined by the highest price the publisher think he can sell the book at. A little thing called the 'free market' principle that seems to be lost on TFA.
If you are talking about the physical object (paper, binding etc.) , yes, e-books have reduced that cost and transferred it to electricity and bandwidth requirements. The real cost of medium through which the information is obtained has been diminished. That's one of the things progress is supposed to do. Suggesting that it is a problem is one of the moronic statements in TFA.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Here's an anecdotal story. I've been wanting to buy the CD version of the Transformers (2007) Score for years now. I check off and on for for years and the price fluctuates but never to a reasonable level. I even wrote Amazon once, but nothing.
I once heard the price is partially based on how much others are selling it for and I've heard of spirals where Amazon bases it on Place A which bases their price on Place B which bases their price on Amazon and the price spiral upwards into the thousands of dollars for even things like obscure books. Who knows if it's true, but it's an interesting story.
Yes, I could buy the MP3s for less, but I like having the physical media that I can rip that hasn't been compressed with a lossy algorithm. One day I'll probably buy the MP3s. Besides, it's harder to accuse me of pirating if I can produce the physical products.
Today's price for Transformers? Here you go. As of this writing, it was $59.99.
Oh... and say what you will about the movie (which did suck), but the second Transformers has a really good score.
quote "no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand".
This is no different from the pre amazon situation. Nobody has ever payed the "real" price, except for those who commissioned a book for their own singular use.
http://cdn.meme.li/instances/300x300/39485780.jpg
I understand it's difficult for many people to accept the price fixing of goods but some country use that system and it works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement
But price fixing is a double-edged sword.
The Publisher choose the price of the book ( depends of the country sometimes it's a range ).
Every bookstore buy the books at the same prices so you your local book-store even in small cities can compete with amazon.
Publisher support part of the risk of book pricing. If publisher want store to have more stocks of his books he make a deal with store of quantities and he have to buy back unsold items
For the books ordered by the bookstore the publisher have to buy them back too (not full price because of transport...)
It's not perfect but it keep local store, and when you see a book somewhere you can buy it directly because you know that's it will be useless to wait, go to amazon and buy it as it will be the same price.
A Kindle book is a rental that you pay buyer prices for. In many cases, Kindle books are more expensive than paper books, sometimes ridiculously so. Yet, you cannot do any of the things with a Kindle book than you can with a regular book: you cannot lend to as many people as you'd like; you cannot keep a personal backup copy; you cannot resell it; you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle.
The story for Amazon MP3s is nearly as bad, with one saving grace: they give you a physical copy of the file, so you can back it up and play it on any device you want. The terms of use, however, legally forbid virtually all of the uses you would be entitled to if you bought the physical CD: you can't lend it, or sell it, or donate it.
These are bad deals for the consumer. They are charging us as much as they used to, yet not offering anything like the same terms. Personally, I am willing to purchase an MP3 through Amazon, but I refuse to buy a Kindle book until I have at least a downloadable copy I can play on any device I own.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The supply of good writers is only a factor if you assume that the supply of ebooks is limited by the production of new books.
We've reached a point where the current supply of existing content exceeds the average person's lifespan by several orders of magnitude.
If authors were to stop writing books tomorrow, there would be no shortage of books available to read. The world might be at a loss, but the supply would still be far greater than the ability of readers to consume.
I worked as a book store manager in the early to mid 90s. I handled ordering, read heavily in industry and business news, and had friends all over our large city in the book trade, as well as friends and relatives in publishing, From that experience I can tell you this: most everyone back then saw the writing on the wall when Barnes & Noble and such came into being. They were Amazon before Amazon. These companies were getting better prices for books than small chains and independent sellers. We simply couldn't match the prices. And most of the customer bases of the "little guys" have not shit one about anything but price. And since most people who read were reading stuff like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and the latest bodice-rippers, they didn't need the specialized services the little guys provided. (Special orders, curation of sections, readings, knowledgeable staff etc.) In fact many people dislike those things, considering them snobby, undemocratic, effete, etc. So a lot of people were relieved to get out of the "snobby" local bookshops. So those shops turned to coffee and pastry concession, more frequently children's events, and so on. But we all saw it coming then. AT THE SAME TIME, Bertelsman and others were already starting the consolidation that is still going on now, though slower because it's pretty complete. That had pretty negative impact on what the biggest publishers, like Random House would do in terms of variety of titles and support for new authors. I could go on, but in the interest of avoiding "tl;dr" I'll just say that I think "Amazon" and the e-publishing it's showing to be viable may actually be a positive, returning some of the variety to the book trade. But, yeah, I think you can stick a fork in the "mom and pop" book stores, at least outside of specialist niches.
Price will be determined by demand
"The horror ... the horror ..."
- from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
I don't own a reader and haven't purchased a new book other than required textbooks, in over a decade. I pay anywhere from almost nothing to 10% of the cover price.
Or in the world of e-books, even exist at all..
There is no "real" price. Prices are determined by what sellers can get for a product, and what people will pay.
This isn't even about "real" prices. The big publishing houses have for years inflated prices because they could. Now an upstart comes along and starts to eat into their profits, and the old school publishers aren't happy about it. Of course not!
The book publishing industry is now following the same path that the music industry started following when iTunes disrupted their little racket back in 2001. The book industry has been ripe for change for years. It's nice to see it finally happening. Now if we could just see the same thing start happening to textbooks!
Book Appraiser: you read a book and offer your expert opinion about what the real price is.
(This is a joke, btw. Note that it is a silly, nonsensical concept -- whether the object is a book or a house)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
That actually publishing a physical copy of the book is hideously expensive. An ebook not so much. Doesn't require the infrastructure to do it and Amazon realizes this.
I almost refuse to pay more than $9 for an ebook. That doesn't mean there are occasional exceptions. And I can't stand authors who won't make their books available in digital form.
Re: "u cannot keep a personal backup copy; ... you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle. "
Check out Apprentice Alf's blog. Thanks to that (and help from his predecessors, such as "I love cabbages"), my Amazon ebooks are on my Sony and Kobo ereaders. I have also been using that "technology" for my B&N books to read them with FBreader.
YMMV
I mean, seriously? This is news?
Extra! Extra! Companies that can sell cheaper makes the ones that can't close. Companies that sell big can force producers to adjust their prices. Companies change prices based on what customers are willing to pay. Extra! Extra!
Whoever wrote this, the moment he said "real price", he just won the moron of the year award.
morcego
also, when buying a textbook/reference book
I think it's more along the lines of "Who buys reference books when there are reference materials available without charge on the Internet?" nowadays.
The e-book marketplace is pricing at the whim of the seller.
The dead tree marketplace prices at the whim of the publisher.
Is this a case of Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? No.
We've cut the publisher out of the look on pricing, and made it possible for authors to bypass retailers. Looks like win-win to me.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Yes it is priceless. I do not understand how someone can put a price on the world treasure, the lungs of the world, a space for unknown number of flora and fauna and even never before seen tribes of humans. Instead of chopping those trees, we are better off reading from a Kindle.
Books are like clothes. The price is double what it should be. And books are about 40% off online. Books are simply catching up to modern pricing trends, a little later than other commodity items. I'm starting to see trade paperbacks jumping from the $16-18 price point to over $20. But, online, prices are about the same. In bookstores, prices are full cover price (minus a trivial discount for having a store card) so the stores need to catch up.
Dover's price increases are dramatic - in the past year or so, their math books have gone up significantly in price. But, online, the price is about the same as it was. They've had to increase the price to give sellers room for a discount.
In Canada, book sellers were happily getting away with charging 25%+ extra for U.S. books. They blamed it on the disparity in the dollar, when $1CAD was $0.80USD.
Then the CAD went up. At some points being worth more than the USD. Book prices stayed the same. Some even went up.
They started blaming it then on the cost of transportation, difference in market size, etc. Often even for books that had a bigger local market.
Beyond that, I got to deal with series that were generally 1-book short (often in the middle), were mixed with paperback/hardcover, and the growing tendency to stock the latest "bubblegum" authors. I also found more recently many books containing terrible grammar, flow, and glaring typos.
So really, my answer is FUCK EM. I bought approx 100 books in the last year. I found TONS of book by authors I've never heard of, that I'd never seen on the shelves, and frankly that beat the pants off the local books all for a lower price. Even better, with Kindle I can shop the U.S. or CAD stores, and the only extra I pay for buying the US store is the exchange.
We still get screwed on Amazon's local non-book selection though.
Price will be determined by demand
the end is near ...
For those who know and those who do not, I recommend to read an excerpt from Candide by Voltaire called "The Surinam Nigger". Candide is the hero of the story, he is a naive and nice guy who has been expelled from his castle. At the gate of Surinam (An african-exotic country) he met a black slave who has been mistreated by his master. His foot has been amputate because he tried to escape and his hand is also cut off because of cotton working accident. Candide cry when he see this poor guy treated like a less than nothing, but a few minute later he go his way. Anecdotic. "Such are the conditions on which you eat sugar in Europe!" http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/voltaire/candide/chap19.htm
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You mean to say that the market will set the price. How novel.
Interesting that both links to support the opening "As physical book stores continue to struggle and disappear" statement are about Barnes & Nobel locations.
My recent understanding is that in the US is that the number of book stores are actually increasing. B&N managed themselves into the toilet, and are providing an opportunity for the smaller independent bookstores to come back.