The Amazon Kerfuffle

Slightly tangential, but I think what gets a lot of people confused about e-book pricing isn't that the cost of producing an e-book initially is zero (which I understand quite well that it isn't), but that the marginal cost of producing one more copy is nearly zero before considering royalties, given that there's no physical paper, no shipping charges, and only a much smaller cost for data transfer. As someone who has bought a hell of a lot more books than I've written (zero), my intuition tends to overestimate the effect of zero marginal cost, and so I typically expect e-books to be significantly cheaper than traditional books. Of course, as Scalzi points out, this would mean lower royalty payments, which indicates to me nothing so much as that tying author royalty amounts to the physical costs of production leads to some very strange economics.

e-books can still be purchased, just not that publisher through Amazon. I've been buying ebooks through ereader.com and webscriptions.net for almost 10 years. Both sites seem to start with high prices for new releases and drop prices over time. Ereader has a reward program and webscriptions is linked with the Baen Free Library.

The problem is people think new stuff is hard and the internet should be cheap/free so anyone who convinces the new user how easy their system is with low price product (iTunes anyone) starts the spiral towards a monopoly. It's a business model that Apple has employed with great success. What Amazon is forgetting is that Apple had a lot of media support (it was the primo publishing system for many years) and the look of an underdog working in its favour.

I'm sorry, but (being from Belgium) I'm a bit mystified by the sentence "it's always the writers who end up being Belgium". Most belgians are familiar with the English expression "But hey, I'm big in Belgium" to denote not so successful artists (we even have a - not particularly successful - cover band called "Big in Belgium"). Am I to understand that these days in the US "Belgium/Belgian" is a household name for "not particularly important, negligible". Hmm ...

@2, cass_m:

True, you can still buy e-books, but if you own a Kindle 2 or Kindle DX (the latter of which still has a corner on large-format e-book readers), then those other services you mentioned will be of limited usefulness to you. Currently, Amazon has taken the troubling position of making all formats other than AZW (based on, but not the same as, Mobipocket) second-class citizens at best. Missing is support for ePub or any other standard for e-books. PDF support is included, but is primitive next to AZW handling (no zooming, text size selection, annotations or searching). Thus, to some degree, I think that this kerfuffle needs to be seen as a reason that Amazon needs to open up the reader more. It will be interesting to see if, using the forthcoming KDK, developers will be able to make a native-ePub reading application.

The Belgium reference is to the fact that both World Wars began with Germany overrunning (or at least partially overrunning) Belgium. They were fought in and over Belgium, despite Belgium not being a major power.

Thanks for the clarification Chad, it all makes sense now. Highly appreciated.

Publishers may not be rapacious assholes (an arguable statement), but they, at least the big New York publishers, do have to answer to rapacious assholes. They all exist as parts of larger media conglomerates. And of course, the ones that aren't profitable enough to be rapacious are penny-pinching skinflints.

The publishers made a mistake, I think, in allowing e-books to be distributed in proprietary formats, rather than a common open format. The proprietary format makes them too dependent on specific hardware platforms. Having an open format makes it easier for other hardware manufacturers to offer alternates to Amazon/Kindle.

Re: "book publishers are not rapacious assholes", I'll accept that statement if it excludes textbook publishers.

I'm not jumping to a conclusion on this one, either.

I like Amazon just fine, but I'm not at all happy to have the book publishing market captured by them and their DRM and their fancy expensive hardware. Neither am I happy to have it captured by Apple with their higher price points and their own DRM and expensive, slightly more general purpose, hardware.

I'd like to pin my hopes on the not-yet-on-the-market Blio, but I think that has DRM, too. At least it's more explicitly designed for multiple platforms, and seems to pack more functionality into it's software. We'll see, I guess. (Blio is software, only, no specialty hardware to buy. Should work on laptops, smartphones, pads, whatever, as long as the hardware seller doesn't throw a hissy fit of its own and disallow the software.)

As an aside, most of the discussion I've seen talks about books that look like they're in the leisure-reading market. I'd love to see some discussion and analysis about the academic and textbook markets.

For the past year or so, I've been aware that there's a thriving shadow market of books out there, because I'll be doing literature searches through Google and run through the following sequence:

1) See an article or textbook that looks like I want to read it.
2a) If journal article, discover that neither I nor NG subscribe to he journal.
2b) Look through Google Scholar and hope (with about 70% success) to find that the author keeps up a copy on his site, download it quickly, because I'm not paying twenty five bucks for a single article.
3a) If book, discover it's either out of print, or costs two hundred bucks
3b) If still in print, discover Kindle version might be as much as ten whole dollars cheaper!
3d) Often discover that a site called "rapidshare" or something similar purports to have a full text copy for free.

Now, I can feel the sleaze emanating through the google page listing the rapidshare links. For various reasons ranging from moral purity through fear of consequences, I've refrained from even clicking those links at work, and usually forget about them by the time I go home.

And I've been known to spring for a $200 textbook in my time, but it's rare. $100 is more likely. $50 would have me spending hundreds of dollars a year, to my present, nearly none.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the authors and publishers, here. Getting a textbook on something like Finite Element Method analysis, specializing on computational electromagnetics is not cheap. And God knows it's a niche market.

So I have no other point here, other than, "It's a damn shame, isn't it?"

(And I agree about -gate and -fail. There is a special place in my heart for the vilification of -fail, which manages to be arrogant, presumptuous, and intellectually lazy all at the same time.)

As many others have pointed out, this particular kerfuffle seems to be over already: http://bit.ly/9zehXS

This is a pretty major deal.

Unlike paper books, e-books have no resale value and they cannot be lent to friends or customers. The publishers want to charge the same price for less, a lot less. When I buy a book, I usually resell it. Often, I take advantage of the fact that I can borrow or buy the book from someone else. Sure authors don't make money on loans or resales, but that's how readers tend to find new authors. I can't remember how many times I've read a book from the library or borrowed from a friend and wound up buying the entire series, often in hardcover.

If we go where the publishers want us to go, books will be more expensive. There will no longer be any lending libraries, and you can forget about used bookstores. When a publisher takes a book out of print, it will be completely inaccessible, unless, maybe, you can find an antique e-reader at an estate sale or the like.

That's a pretty sucky book world. In fact, that's even suckier than the music world today. Like the music business, the book business has been sold on the idea of having complete control of all distribution. It's a real wet dream, except that it will decimate the business. Look at comic books. They used to sell millions. Then, Marvel decided it wanted to control distribution. Now 100,000 is a big run, and most books sell less. Sure, you can still make money as a comic book artist, but there's a lot less money and a lot less work. Basically, the movie industry keeps it on life support as a farm team.

That's where the book publishers want to take us. I'm glad to see Amazon fighting back.