I received an email today that I’ve received $19.71 in credit at Amazon from the price fixing settlement. According to what I found online:
Anybody who bought an ebook from Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin or Macmillan between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 gets a credit of $3.17 if that book was a New York Times bestseller at any point in its publishing history and a credit of $0.73 if the book was never a NYT bestseller. (The only exception is if you live in Minnesota, which reached a separate settlement; Minnesota customers get a credit of $3.93 or $0.94 per ebook.)
This is consistent - $19.71 is exactly 27 x $0.73. 27 books isn’t a lot for 2 years, I tend to buy >100 books a year, but presumably I was still doing some buying from Fictionwise during that period, and many that I did buy weren’t from those publishers.
The problem with that is Amazon doesn’t want to even talk about how the publishers are trying to protect hardback prices. The traditional pricing for paper books has hardbacks exclusive for a period of time. If you want the book, you buy it in hardback because it’s not out in trade or mass market paperback yet.
Imagine a publisher releasing a hardback and mass market paperback simultaneously. The paperback sales might cut into the hardback sales. It’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t.
Amazon doesn’t want to acknowledge this. I am all for cheaper pricing, but I don’t really have a problem with publishers staging price breaks so hardback sales aren’t hurt. If I want the latest Stephen King book for under $10, I exercise patience and wait for the price drop. Amazon doesn’t want us to wait. Amazon wants that price drop to occur on the day the book is published.
It’s not hard to see how this might be damaging to publishers. Maybe publishers have it all wrong and most books should be $9.99 or less on the day of release, but I think publishers should decide that, not Amazon.
If I want the latest Stephen King book for under $10, I exercise patience and wait for the price drop. Amazon doesn’t want us to wait. Amazon wants that price drop to occur on the day the book is published.
Amazon is talking about e-book pricing. Hardbacks aren’t in that discussion at all.
E-books are like paperbacks. If publishers want to keep prices higher than $9.99, then they shouldn’t release hardbacks and e-books simultaneously. Amazon wants the price to drop on the day that the e-book is published.
If ebooks are like paperbacks, then why aren’t paperbacks released simultaneously with the hardbacks? It’s not that simple. Let’s say you really want that latest book by Stephen King, and it’s $16 in hardback after some steep discounts, but $9.99 in ebook format? Aren’t ebook sales likely to cut into hardback sales? I believe ebooks and hardbacks ARE released simultaneously.
I just checked – his latest, Finder’s Keeper’s, is being released on June 2nd in both hardback and ebook format. Why shouldn’t the publisher be allowed to set the ebook price so it doesn’t cut into hardback sales, and then drop the ebook price once the mass market paperback comes out?
Yes, I’d prefer a $9.99 ebook on June 2nd rather than paying the $14.99 that Scribner is charging, but that’s still cheaper than Amazon’s discount price on the hardback which is $19.05.
I’ve always waited for mass market rather than pay hardback, except in a few cases, so I can’t really fault Scribner for not wanting the hardback price undercut even more than it is. Amazon may be right about the pricing, but is Amazon factoring in lost hardback sales? I kind of think they are deliberately not discussing that.
Baen release the ebook at the same time as the hardback. For $9.99. Then they reduce it when it comes out in trade or mass market paperback. Baen are doing so well they’re expanding. As a mid-list Scifi/Fantasy publisher. (This is “what the freaking hell?” land).
They get you to pay $15, by selling you the galley draft as an eARC. Then you buy the final thing again. And you get it 6 months before it hits the print shop, not 12 months after. Heck, some of their authors “snippet”, giving you up to a quarter of the book in little bits, for free, on the internet.
(For that matter, Baen only takes non-exclusive rights to eBooks from it’s authors. Yes, really)
So please. (Also, you’re not counting the marginal costs involved in producing and especially shipping the books…)
And the publishers lost in the EU and US, we don’t need to re-hash the same thing when the legalities are clear. I posted what’s some helpful information on hard statistics.
Publishers decide when an ebook is released. But they can’t have their cake and eat it too. If they want to release the hardback at the same time as a cheaper version - whether paperback or ebook - then they should expect the latter to decrease the sales of the former.
It really isn’t Amazon’s concern whether the publisher profits more from exclusive hardback editions or from the increased volume of paperback / ebook editions. Publishers can make their own calculations, they aren’t forced to release paperbacks or ebooks until they are ready. But if publishers give Amazon ebooks or paperbacks to sell, then as retailers Amazon should get to choose the sale price.
This is the same as in most other industries: constraining a retailer’s freedom to set prices is generally met with skepticism by the courts. When multiple publishers team up to enforce resale price controls, it’s most definitely an anti-trust violation.
What the publishers objected to, at least in part, was Amazon selling ebooks below cost. To me that’s close to dumping when you control the percentage of the ebook market that Amazon does.
I think publishers are fine with $9.99 ebook prices. They just want to stage the pricing the way they do with paper books, releasing the premium-priced version first and then cheaper versions later.
Anyway, at this point it’s up to Amazon and the publishers to come to some kind of agreement. If Amazon only will sell their books without an agency model in place, then publishers get to choose to stay with Amazon or pull their books, or Amazon gets to choose to refuse their books.
I don’t have any problem with the agency model. I will never run out of free and cheap ebooks to read, and publishers will reduce prices over time regardless. I don’t think the agency model damages Amazon in any significant way either.
I think Amazon is far more concerned about lost ebook sales, which is their primary market. When an e book comes out with prices at the same point as the hard bound book, Im willing to bet the e book doesn’t sell well at all. Its a wasted listing for Amazon. I get the publishers side of things as well. They would prefer the big dollar hardbound sale and don’t want those cut into by a reduced priced e book.
I go with Amazon on this. Who is agency model benefiting? As a writer, not me. As a reader, I don’t know, but I don’t think so.
It’s not clear to me why I should worry about the big book publishers in this case. It’s like worrying about the big record companies getting their fair share of the pie. Who cares? I want the music, not the success (or failure) of a business model. In this case, I want the books. If the big publishers were to go out of business tomorrow, would I still be able to get books? Absolutely. Small presses, the viability of ebooks, and the internet all seem to make that a sure thing. Why should I give a crap about the big publishers? What have the big publishers done for me? As a writer, very little. As a reader, they’ve produced books from my favorite authors, but it’s not clear to me that those books wouldn’t get produced some other way if the big publishers weren’t around.
I have no idea what the discussion about hardback vs. paperback has to do with anything. I like hardback for reference books or certain select books I want to own, or if I want to maybe give a gift. Maybe hardback books would become more rare without the big presses, but I’m not sure I care about it enough.
