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Bizarro Kanyon posted:The article is completely right. Pricing the e-book at $9.99 makes it really hard to justify buying it. I love this book personally as it is my favorite book. I was really looking forward to getting it for my Kindle but that price is going to keep me from getting it. I'm a bit tired of people complaining about the prices of ebooks. It's simple supply and demand. Why would a publisher charge $5 for an ebook when people are buying it at $10?
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Nov 30, 2011 21:18
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Because more people might buy $5 ebooks? There are authors who've thrown their catalogs to Amazon for a couple bucks per books and become millionaires within the year. I think ebook price should reflect its ease of access and portability. Why do online music stores offer albums for $1-10 when there are still people buying CDs for $15? In the graphic novel edition of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury writes that many of his stories were inspired by a cop harassing him for walking at night. The root of crankiness?
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Nov 30, 2011 21:50
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commish posted:I'm a bit tired of people complaining about the prices of ebooks. It's simple supply and demand. Why would a publisher charge $5 for an ebook when people are buying it at $10? Supply and demand eh? What's the supply of those bits? What's the incremental cost to manufacturer that 1000th e-book?
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Nov 30, 2011 23:14
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I just want to say I've been playing 80s text adventures on my Kindle 3. It is aweSomEX. My case has a slip for holding notes/paper so I keep my maps in there. In conclusion: Get a Kindle 3, jailbreak it, install kif, download some sweet text adventures and start casting FROTZ
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Nov 30, 2011 23:34
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Lampsacus posted:I just want to say I've been playing 80s text adventures on my Kindle 3. It is aweSomEX. My case has a slip for holding notes/paper so I keep my maps in there. In conclusion: Get a Kindle 3, jailbreak it, install kif, download some sweet text adventures and start casting FROTZ That sounds rad, but googling "kif" isn't getting me anywhere.
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Dec 1, 2011 00:03
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Arnold of Soissons posted:That sounds rad, but googling "kif" isn't getting me anywhere. Both FROTZ and KIF are interactive reading software, I believe. Listed here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704 and scroll to Reading Environments and Firmware
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Dec 1, 2011 00:12
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The big publishers don't want to sell ebooks cheaper than regular books. They're afriad that it'll make the novel itslf lose value. Also 10 dollar ebooks don't sell that well. One author was giving out the data on his sales. For books priced at 7.99 at most he'd get 180 sales and earn $381. If he sold a book at $1.99, he'd sell 5,142 copies and earn $3,600. One blog looked at Kindle Daily deals to see how long books would stay on the best seller list after the promotion. Only a few lasted longer than a week. Most only stayed on the best seller list for 4-6 days before dropping back off.
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Dec 1, 2011 00:21
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Ereaders are a lot like ipods and mp3 players. While they make it easy to buy content, they also set you up to easily pirate that content as well, with minimal effort. When you already have a Kindle or a Nook, and some publisher puts the ebook up for $15, a lot of the more savvy users can quite easily say to hell with it and pirate, just like tracks on the iTunes store that cost too much were also there for the taking on Kazaa and such.
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Dec 1, 2011 00:25
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SlightButSteady posted:Both FROTZ and KIF are interactive reading software, I believe. Listed here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704 and scroll to Reading Environments and Firmware Thanks!
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Dec 1, 2011 00:46
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Hughlander posted:Supply and demand eh? What's the supply of those bits? What's the incremental cost to manufacturer that 1000th e-book?
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Dec 1, 2011 00:56
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:Bandwidth, digital marketing, and everything else aren't free, but the priciest part is the conversion. That poo poo ain't cheap, and major publishing houses are hiring new employees and even new departments across the board. They have to get that money from somewhere. In a few years, when they pretty much catch up with backlist and streamline their frontlist processes, we should see prices drop. Still doesn't justify the price fixing and keeping the price higher than the actual paper copy.
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Dec 1, 2011 01:03
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Perhaps you didn't read what I said, but for the digital copy they have to hire a new department of people plus offshore teams in India/China. They don't have to do the conversion on a paperback that's been sitting in a store for five years. I know other costs are cut, but don't underestimate that expense that only applies to digital. They are literally going back and having to redo every book they've published in the past, and rework them all within one or two years. If you count backlist, digital publishing (from major publishers) rapidly outstrips print. I work in digital publishing, so I can sperg about this a bunch (obviously) 
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Dec 1, 2011 02:23
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Ah, always a good reason to embrace anti-competitive practices.
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Dec 1, 2011 02:28
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Anne Whateley posted:Perhaps you didn't read what I said, but for the digital copy they have to hire a new department of people plus offshore teams in India/China. They don't have to do the conversion on a paperback that's been sitting in a store for five years. I know other costs are cut, but don't underestimate that expense that only applies to digital. They are literally going back and having to redo every book they've published in the past, and rework them all within one or two years. If you count backlist, digital publishing (from major publishers) rapidly outstrips print. And then they're reselling the books. Printing, shipping, dealing with returns of unsold copies, versus running a .doc to ebook format program and giving it a cursory once-over? I buy a lot of ebooks at 9.99, and they're making an absolute killing.
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Dec 1, 2011 03:32
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Before Agency Model, a retailer could sell the book below cost cutting into their own revenue for the book and still having to pay the wholesale price to the publisher. But due to extra costs associated to ebooks  , the big six publishers can't allow that. They have to make sure that everyone is getting the same book for the same price everywhere. No retailer should be allowed to set the sell price and cut into their own revenue. When a retailer subsidizes the price, sales go up and makes more money for publisher/author. But for some reason, the big six doesn't want anyone to have any incentive to buy ebooks.
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Dec 1, 2011 03:52
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Let's not keep making GBS threads on the thread. If anyone wants an actual discussion, please e-mail annewhateley at gmail. If you want to keep scoring points and ignoring everything that doesn't suit your established opinion, don't bother.
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Dec 1, 2011 04:05
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e
usually fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Feb 21, 2012 |
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Dec 1, 2011 10:08
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As has been stated, in this thread, and others, many times before, cheaper ebooks sell more. Eg: http://gigaom.com/2011/10/05/what-happens-to-books-when-the-kindle-is-free/ quote:You might not think authors — or Amazon, for that matter — would be able to generate much from 99 cent books, but you would be wrong. Young-adult author Amanda Hocking has become famous for making millions of dollars from her Kindle books in less than a year, without the help of an agent or a publisher (although she has since signed a publishing contract). Other self-published authors such as John Locke have sold millions of copies of their books. Some authors, such as J.A. Konrath, have noted that when they lowered the price of their books to 99 cents, they sold orders of magnitude more copies. Now, I want to buy them. Amazon wants to sell them. But publishers, for whatever reason, block the sale. They are nothing to me but in the way. I have in the past made an effort to purchase some ebooks - including getting fellow goons to purchase them for me and me paypal'ing the costs. There of course a couple of other ways to pay for ebooks that publishers don't want me to buy like fudging my address at Amazon but ultimately, it's too much effort and I don't bother. So if there is something that I really want, I'll buy the hardcopy which is expensive because shipping costs more than the book. There are a lot of people less scrupulous than I am, that'll just look for torrents and be done with it. But if that becomes a problem, blame publishers.
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Dec 1, 2011 11:22
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"For whatever reason" is generally "they don't have the rights." It's not like they just inexplicably hate money or Australia. I see titles that we don't have world rights for on a daily basis. Everyone wants those rights, but it involves going back through 50+ years of contracts and trying to make new deals with authors and illustrators. As much as we'd like them to, not everyone is going to agree. I wouldn't have gone into publishing if I weren't a huge, huge book nerd. I probably read more than most other people itt. I do have a slightly different perspective, but I'm not a brainwashed zombie who's dying to form a pseudo-RIAA. I really want what's best for books, and for me as a reader, before I even think about what's best for me as an employee.
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Dec 1, 2011 13:24
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Anne Whateley posted:"For whatever reason" is generally "they don't have the rights." It's not like they just inexplicably hate money or Australia. I see titles that we don't have world rights for on a daily basis. Everyone wants those rights, but it involves going back through 50+ years of contracts and trying to make new deals with authors and illustrators. As much as we'd like them to, not everyone is going to agree. Take my rant as anecdotal, and more of a criticism of the Australian publishing industry than anything else.
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Dec 1, 2011 15:05
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When Amazon does their Daily Deal, do they loose money on that or is that only with books that the publishers allow to be sold cheap?
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Dec 1, 2011 15:10
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Publishers are stupid and don't really know what they're doing yet. Same thing happened with the music industry. I remember just as cheap MP3 players were starting to take off, some labels were putting those anti-ripping things on CDs. It'll all sort itself out as more and more people buy e-readers. It feels to me that this xmas might be the tipping point.
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Dec 1, 2011 15:29
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Similar to iTunes, it will probably be when ebook sales start to represent a large enough fraction of the publishing industry's revenue that Amazon and other distributers can dictate terms. For the past few years Amazon has needed publishers on their side a lot more than the publishers have needed ebook sales, but that will likely change soon.
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Dec 1, 2011 15:42
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Anne Whateley posted:Bandwidth, digital marketing, and everything else aren't free, but the priciest part is the conversion. That poo poo ain't cheap, and major publishing houses are hiring new employees and even new departments across the board. They have to get that money from somewhere. In a few years, when they pretty much catch up with backlist and streamline their frontlist processes, we should see prices drop. How exactly does the conversion affect the incremental cost of the 1000th book? That's a sunk cost from the first book. I still don't see what the 'Supply' of an electronic book is that costs a billionth of a penny to replicate.
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Dec 1, 2011 15:53
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:When Amazon does their Daily Deal, do they loose money on that or is that only with books that the publishers allow to be sold cheap? I haven't seen anyone talk about the daily deals directly, but one author was talking about how her publisher did a one day promotion on her ebook. I don't think it was part of the Kindle Daily Deal. But it was the publisher who changed the price. Here is her blog post about it: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/949857-results-are-in JA Konrath talks about ebook pricing quite a bit too http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/09/ebook-pricing.html http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html
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Dec 1, 2011 16:12
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Hughlander posted:How exactly does the conversion affect the incremental cost of the 1000th book? That's a sunk cost from the first book. I still don't see what the 'Supply' of an electronic book is that costs a billionth of a penny to replicate. I could see why the extra costs might adjust the wholesale price, but the major publishers don't sell books that way. They force retailers to sell the same books at the same price, with everyone getting the same percentage cuts. I don't see why that pricing model is a result of added costs on ebooks.
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Dec 1, 2011 16:35
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Sperg Victorious posted:I could see why the extra costs might adjust the wholesale price, but the major publishers don't sell books that way. They force retailers to sell the same books at the same price, with everyone getting the same percentage cuts. I don't see why that pricing model is a result of added costs on ebooks. My posts were in response to Anne Whateley assertion that the costs of an eBook are due to supply and demand, and I'm asking how does supply of bits fit into the discussion. Supply and demand can fit into the sale of an automobile, you need X number of people to assemble it, you need Y tons of steel to produce it, the difference between making 1000 eBooks and 1001 eBooks isn't measurable. That's all I was getting at. And I'll end the de-rail here. Go favorite eBook Reader!
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Dec 1, 2011 17:05
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Honest answer, we don't sell 1000 copies of an ebook unless it's a big deal. We need to be able to say "we have a million titles available!" and we need to not piss off that one guy who wants to buy a paperback from the '80s, so that means converting stuff that isn't a surefire seller. We lose a lot of money on the majority of ebooks. This summer, we spent a couple thousand dollars (not counting all our internal salaries) converting a book that has yet to gross -- not net, gross -- $100. This was expected. There are a lot of books like that. The business is based around losing money on plenty of titles but recouping it based on runaway bestsellers. This has worked fairly well in print, but it's not translating well to digital. I don't agree with the principle of agency pricing myself. However, I don't really see better options. Amazon is trying to undercut publishers, drive them out of business, and establish a virtual monopoly. I don't know how to prevent it. Purely as a selfish reader, I'm going to be really upset when that happens.
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Dec 1, 2011 17:08
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Hughlander posted:My posts were in response to Anne Whateley assertion that the costs of an eBook are due to supply and demand, and I'm asking how does supply of bits fit into the discussion. Supply and demand can fit into the sale of an automobile, you need X number of people to assemble it, you need Y tons of steel to produce it, the difference between making 1000 eBooks and 1001 eBooks isn't measurable. That's all I was getting at. And I'll end the de-rail here. Go favorite eBook Reader! I understand. I agree with you. I'm just pointing out that no one can say that it's all supply/demand when the big publishers are engaging in price fixing with every retailer.
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Dec 1, 2011 17:11
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Also, claiming that all high ebook prices are because they had to convert from print is silly. There's books coming out now that cost $15 and there's no way in hell those publishers only had paper copies of books printed in 2011. Besides, if the publishers weren't asshats they could still be selling the books to Amazon for $15 with amazon taking a $5 loss on every copy, and have both the publisher's wallet and my wallet a little bit fuller.
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Dec 1, 2011 17:36
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DVD Drive posted:Ah, customers shouldn't complain because the company is making money. Durr. Oh no, complain away, but don't act like you can't fathom why a publisher would charge $10 for an ebook when the answer is pretty obvious. Because people like me will buy it.
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Dec 1, 2011 17:45
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commish posted:Oh no, complain away, but don't act like you can't fathom why a publisher would charge $10 for an ebook when the answer is pretty obvious. Because people like me will buy it. Except when they lower the price, more people buy the book and they make more money off the volume. So why keep the book priced so high?
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Dec 1, 2011 17:56
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Sperg Victorious posted:Except when they lower the price, more people buy the book and they make more money off the volume. So why keep the book priced so high? Same reason that before Amazon came around, ebooks usually were priced ridiculously high - go to archive.org and type in mobipocket.com in the wayback machine thing and check out the prices ebooks were in about 2005. For example, some random mystery book, $17.95 http://web.archive.org/web/20050618002731/http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/BookDetails.asp?BookID=24693
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Dec 1, 2011 18:01
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commish posted:Oh no, complain away, but don't act like you can't fathom why a publisher would charge $10 for an ebook when the answer is pretty obvious. Because people like me will buy it. What you're saying reminded me of the story behind CDs carrying a $15 list price when they first came out in the 1980s. The standard excuse was lack of manufacturing capacity, and that the price would drop when it didn't cost so much to grind 'em out, but by the time the supply chain did get stronger, the recording industry had realized that people will actually pay $15 for an album. So that was the standard price we were stuck with for a few decades because hey, whatcha gonna do, buddy? Learn to play the guitar?  I still hold that publishers are going to snap out of this agency pricing bullshit once they realize that they've been handed a format where secondhand and remainder sales are impossible.
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Dec 1, 2011 18:41
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Install Gentoo posted:Same reason that before Amazon came around, ebooks usually were priced ridiculously high - go to archive.org and type in mobipocket.com in the wayback machine thing and check out the prices ebooks were in about 2005. Even in 2005 on that site, you had best sellers on that site priced less than half that. I'm guessing they were probably making more money than that $17.95 book too. Edit: Angels and Demons was cheaper in 2005 too. http://web.archive.org/web/20050418013220/http://www.mobipocket.com/EN/ebooks/bookdetails.asp?BookID=12249 http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Demons-ebook/dp/B000FBJFSM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322761865&sr=1-1 Sperg Victorious fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Dec 1, 2011 |
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Dec 1, 2011 18:48
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I just bought a copy of The Annotated Lolita for my Kindle which has a ton of endnotes but no direct links to them from within the text. What is the best way to quickly switch back and forth between text and endnotes (using bookmarks and the back button somehow, I'm sure) so that I don't go insane trying to read this on the Kindle?
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Dec 1, 2011 23:54
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Eurgh, I hate it when they do that in Ebooks. It's one of those things that really ruins a book with a lot of critical notes. If I hadn't of had that option for when I read The Count of Monte Cristo I wouldn't have enjoyed the book half as much.
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Dec 2, 2011 00:54
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EasyEW posted:What you're saying reminded me of the story behind CDs carrying a $15 list price when they first came out in the 1980s. The standard excuse was lack of manufacturing capacity, and that the price would drop when it didn't cost so much to grind 'em out, but by the time the supply chain did get stronger, the recording industry had realized that people will actually pay $15 for an album. So that was the standard price we were stuck with for a few decades because hey, whatcha gonna do, buddy? Learn to play the guitar? Once ebook readers get prevalent enough, ebook piracy will get just as prevalent as mp3 piracy was and the ebook market will collapse until Amazon or some other provider is allowed to sell ebooks at very low cost. It's already happening to some extent.
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Dec 2, 2011 01:09
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Once ebook readers get prevalent enough, ebook piracy will get just as prevalent as mp3 piracy was and the ebook market will collapse until Amazon or some other provider is allowed to sell ebooks at very low cost. It's already happening to some extent. Ebook piracy is probably already as prevalent as MP3 piracy was back in the day (Remember that most people still had dialup up until 2004 or something, mp3 piracy wasn't really viable for a lot of people). There's no reason to expect this to cause the ebook market to collapse tho, the digital music market certainly didn't collapse from piracy at any point.
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Dec 2, 2011 01:18
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Lascivious Sloth posted:Eurgh, I hate it when they do that in Ebooks. It's one of those things that really ruins a book with a lot of critical notes. If I hadn't of had that option for when I read The Count of Monte Cristo I wouldn't have enjoyed the book half as much. I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, actually, so I definitely understand what you mean. It's really jarring going from a book where the notes are so well done to a book where they're not really done at all. I guess I'm just going to have to remember what page I'm on in the notes section and use "Go To Page" and the back button to navigate.
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Dec 2, 2011 02:03
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