Yes, let’s not forget that the changing contracts with the agency model also meant that publishers CUT the % going to authors from eBooks.
HarperCollins is supposedly not renewing with Amazon, and will send their ebooks directly. Brave move, but unless some other marketplace or entry point for book search arises, I doubt it will work out for them.
It’s “just not Amazon”. So if you have anything BUT a Kindle, you can get them from the B&N store, or Smashwords, or…
They’ve been doing that since 2013. Using what I believe is a fairly poor store and reader of their own, using MOBI (some DRMed, some watermarked). Yea, never used it either.
The new stuff will all still be on Smashwords, B&N, etc. though. (And of course the pirate sites, sigh)
It would be a bit foolish of publishers to not at least explore these kinds of options. After all, if $9.99 does become the standard price point for new ebook releases, why not try to get all of that $9.99 instead of giving 30% of it away to Amazon and other online retailers? I can even see the argument that since Amazon doesn’t need to house ebooks or maintain brick and mortar stores to sell them, 30% is too high. Why shouldn’t Amazon accept a slimmer margin? Maybe if they would the publishers would be happier with cheaper ebook prices. I wonder if Amazon offered that? What’s magical about 30% Why not take 15% in an agreement to lower ebook prices?
I buy ebooks from Amazon all the time, but I think it’s important to remember that just like Harper-Collins and the other publishers, these companies are in it for themselves and are not champions of the consumers. It wasn’t long ago Amazon was removing pre-sale options from publishers books, which was not consumer-friendly, and as someone commented in another thread Amazon has now made magazine subs only readable on an Amazon device rather than the Amazon app – hardly consumer-friendly. Also, Amazon using a proprietary format for ebooks instead of epub, which would give choice of e-ink readers to consumers is not consumer-friendly either. Why shouldn’t I be able to buy books from Amazon for my Kobo Mini?
My participation in this discussion isn’t about how one side or the other would benefit consumers anyway. I am not rooting for one side. I see them as giant corporations much more interested in their own interests instead of mine, and I have been commenting more as a matter of how their struggle interests me, because it does interest me. I can see the merits of both sides. Do I want cheaper ebooks? Of course I do! I just see how the publishers feel a need to protect their business models during this time of transition. There’s nothing innately unethical about either the agency pricing model or Amazon wanting ebook prices to be cheaper.
In the beginning the publishers were keeping the prices of the ebooks high and it felt like they were trying to destroy the ebook business when this began. I had an old rocket book reader and it died because they kept the prices at hardback price point.
Amazon kept the price reasonable at $9.99 which allowed the kindle to establish a beach head. I do not believe ebooks would have gained the momentum without someone pushing the envelope (IMHO).
I agree the publishers should have treated ebooks just like a paperback and kept the prices the same for both. The problem was most of them did not do this.
I do not feel bad for the publishers at all. I was reading an article by a mid level author who had the ebook rights to his older books. He started publishing his old books at 2-3 dollars a piece and was making more money than he did with the printed versions with a publisher (who often will not print old runs of older books).
I am hoping that ebooks will help authors make more money in the long run. At least they have other options of self publishing.
30% is both far lower than previous models, and what’s been settled on by about everyone as the store’s cut, I note.
Yes, but these are not physical books being stored and shipped. Amazon puts up a storefront and most of the process is automated.
Anyway, I’m just saying Amazon could offer taking a smaller slice in return for publishers agreeing on the $9.99 price point. That could be a negotiating point.
Nobody but nobody else with a storefront would be happy with Amazon for that, and rightly so.
Moreover, as I remind you, this ISN’T about what revenue the publishers got. They got more for the books Amazon was buying before this all started, it’s about control.
Early on I wrote to both HarperCollins and RandomHouse and told them I wouldn’t be buying any ebooks over $9.99. I ended up eventually caving and buying a couple of RandomHouse books at $14.99.
Given that for most of its history Amazon has operated at a break even (a small loss last year), it is pretty hard to argue that Amazon is getting rich. It makes zero economic sense that ebooks are typically priced higher than paperbacks. For me if a paperback is $7.50 and ebook is $9.99 I’ll actually pay the extra $2.50 for the convenience of having the book on my Kindle. This is great deal for the publishers,authors, and Amazon. At the $14.99 ebook price point, I’d buy the paperback which is a lose lose for everyone, including the planet. I wonder if Amazon blog considered behavior like mine.
The collusion between Apple and the publisher to change the model are raise the price was clearly anti-competitive, and while I am ardent supporter of capitalism, crony capitalism pisses me off.
I happily side with companies be they Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Google, or Tesla that break existing business models to bring me lower prices/better products.
I’m just talking about Amazon’s own storefront for ebooks, not about any third-party vendors that may be selling stuff through Amazon. Right now you have booksellers selling used books for $0.01 plus shipping on Amazon. They will be mad at Amazon for giving publishers a bigger cut of ebooks? Maybe Barnes and Noble will for their Nook business, but why should Amazon care about that?
Anyway, it’s big business dealings between giant companies. Any good that comes out of it for consumers will be incidental.
Strollen - Yea, in the UK pretty much everyone told who was over 30 remembered the Net Book Agreement, a long-standing (95 years, since since 1900) price fixing agreement for books here and was outraged. It’s more socially acceptable to work for a bank than a book publisher these days…
Mark - Some of those are 1c/1p sellers are charities with the mission “share books”, of course, like World of Books.
Amazon gets rich on manipulating markets, and from the consequences of its control of equity and markets, not on sales. That’s how they’ve always been, since they first established themselves by deliberately losing money to gain market share.
In effect their early business model was “send us $1 in cash and we’ll send you $1.05 in value” with something very like money-laundering occurring through the incidental business of selling discounted books to people. And since at the time .com stock price was determined almost entirely by sales (really it still is) they suddenly discovered they had billions in market cap and plenty of shares available as equity, and from that point on they had a lock on things.
So they literally made up their losses in volume.
I am kind of over e-books, really. I still buy e-copies of books I want to take with me to have at a moments notice but I have gone back to buying hard copies of everything I want to read and not just revisit while waiting at the Dr’s office.
That’s mostly true. But so what? The end result to consumers was vastly lower prices and wider selection first for books and now for a huge variety of products. I am looking at their last 10 years of financial. The most money they made was just over $1 billion on $34 billion in 2010. Over the last 10 years the profit margin has averaged about 2%. They currently have a PE of about 100-1, at any moment, Mr Market could decide that they think Amazon’s growth is slowing and the stock price could collapse.
Sounds like a business model that’s good for the economy!
This is in general not true.
They are just all about volume and efficiency. Buying books by the ton and selling them for low margins in high volume. If you’re a big seller, you can get good enough rates from shipping companies to make it work selling books for $3-4 total. This of course drives smaller sellers out of the market (because their shipping rates are 50%-100% more and they pay a more for their inventory), but thus is life.
Anyway, the people talking about not needing publishers have hopefully bought some books from independent authors on Amazon. There are a lot more spelling/grammar/etc mistakes than you’d see in a publisher backed book. This pisses some people off to no end, but i really don’t mind unless it is completely unreadable. I personally love the “smaller authors” these days who don’t even have a physical release of their books. Most of the new books i buy are these guys.
Murbella - I buy ebooks from independents frequently. But as I don’t have a Kindle, Amazon is my last port of call. Honestly, Smashwords is pretty good.
I’d also be interested to see some stats on charity sales on Amazon - I remember reading WoB was one of the largest “sellers” of second hand paperbacks in the UK on Amazon, but can’t find the post about it…
While it sounds like they donate some money (only from sales on their own website, where you don’t have to pay amazon their cut), they do sound like they are for profit.
There’s this idea that a traditionally published book is nurtured by the publisher, but in many cases that’s not true. They get little promotion and not a lot of editing beyond some proofreading and a nice cover with artificially created blurbs. The heavy lifting the publisher does is printing the first run and getting copies to bookstores.
One of the best things about ebooks is it lets people self-publish and gives readers a chance to find these books. Amazon has been amazing for that and should be commended. A lot of them do have errors, but the good ones do have polish and good writing is good writing, whether it comes from Hatchette or the guy who lives in B13 down the hall.
It’s nice that the guy who lives in B13 finally gets a chance to have his voice heard instead of piling up 14 rejection slips. Of course sometimes the guy in B13 is better not heard, but go to any used book fair and look at the used paperbacks from NY publishers from years ago and see all the uninteresting writing and then the B13 madman doesn’t look so bad in comparison. The big publishers push out a lot of dreck year after year. They may be purveyors of fine writing at times, but they also are swelling landfills with instantly forgotten books.