User: casacorona Date: 2009-08-26 02:12 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Your publisher does not set the price on Amazon. Amazon sets the price. We have no control over what Amazon charges for a book, no matter what the format.

Just so you know.

User: oldcharliebrown Date: 2009-08-26 19:42 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Can you clarify? I keep seeing this statement spread around, but most publishers can set their own prices, to whatever levels they wish. This is part and parcel of the Amazon DTP system, and inherent in their agreement. Beyond that I haven't seen anything online that actually supports this statement.

User: ericreynolds Date: 2009-08-26 02:19 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: brd

Interesting. I just Kindled a Hadley Rille title recently. The publisher makes only a fraction of the 9.99--most of it goes to Amazon. Publishers make more on the printed books than on the Kindle versions.

User: temporus Date: 2009-08-26 02:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

As a Kindle user, I flip back and forth on this issue. Do I prefer the $9.99 or less books? Yes. However, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this. People seem to think Amazon had guaranteed that they will never pay more than $9.99 for an ebook. But that's not what was promised. They said that New York Times Bestsellers would be priced at $9.99. They never claimed they would guarantee anything else.

When Jim Butcher's latest came out, I didn't buy the Kindle version immediately, because it came out priced at $14.99. I had little doubt that it would come down in price, and indeed, a few weeks later it did, so I bought it. Frankly, had I bought it at the $14.99 it still would have saved me about $10 from what I would have paid in the store. And if I'd been aching to get it THAT DAY, I would have. I don't believe that I have some inalienable right to a Kindle book that is $9.99 or less. But in general, I will prefer to pay less whenever possible and if I don't feel compelled to own a book right away, I'll simply wait down the price.

Now, the one thing that I do find frustrating in regards to the Kindle pricing, is that sometimes, they keep the Kindle price pegged to an older version of the book, IE the Hardcover or the Trade Paperback, even when the MMPB is out. I think they should keep on top of that better, because I can't imagine too many people who would rather pay $9.99 for the Kindle version when the $7.99 mmpb is out on the store shelves. I think that's an area where there is significant room for improvement.

User: bluetyson Date: 2009-08-26 03:36 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Then there's the EOS insanity, released at the same time

Year's Best SF 14

MMPB $7.99
Ebook $14.99

User: archangelbeth Date: 2009-09-01 14:35 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

You may wish to re-search on a Kindle book which is still at the hardcover price; there is at least one Barbara Hambly book which has two Kindle entries -- one is pegged to the hardcover price, and one to the paperback price.

User: skaldic Date: 2009-08-26 02:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm fascinated by his "most kindle users"... I am a kindle user and I've never heard of the $9.99 boycott. Of course, I live in the real world, where I understand that Amazon only does the $9.99 price for big name books where it can be used as an encouragement towards getting a kindle. Unfortunately, that's doesn't tend to include that many SF/F books. And the idea that there are no publishing costs just because it's a digital edition? That's entertaining.

Such a boycott, quite apart from the effect on the authors as you mentioned, frankly smacks of entitlement. They've arbitrarily decided that because Amazon used the $9.99 price to encourage people to buy titles, they should therefore not have to pay more than that ever. But $9.99 or not, they're still almost always less expensive in kindle format than in dead tree ware.

User: ygolonac Date: 2009-08-26 04:54 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

"And the idea that there are no publishing costs just because it's a digital edition? That's entertaining."

So what are these costs?

I'm sure there are some costs, but, to my totally uneducated about the business of book publishing mind, it seems there would be a cost that both editions share, like the portion that goes to the author and editor and that bit, but once the book was ready to be 'printed', each dead tree version has a set cost to it while basically, each electronic one is nearly free.

User: cjmarsicano Date: 2009-08-26 02:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

"Boycotts" like this are absolute bullshit. I don't have a Kindle yet, but as a longtime iTunes/iPod user I think some people have this same lame, ignorant cheapskate mentality. I've bought single albums on iTunes that were more than $9.99 in the past and didn't care because of the convenience and such. If I had a Kindle, and a Kindle version of a book were $10.99 or more and I was sincerely interested in it, then I'd lay down the bucks.

User: ygolonac Date: 2009-08-26 15:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

"I think some people have this same lame, ignorant cheapskate mentality"

Right. Because I don't blindly blow my money on stuff without thinking I am ignorant and a cheapskate.

User: bluetyson Date: 2009-08-26 03:33 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Your publisher refusing to sell it to the rest of the world ain't going to help, either, speaking of being marginalised.

User: mcurry Date: 2009-08-26 03:36 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: minifesto brandeis

I don't think it even occurs to many readers that there's a connection between the price of the book and the income of the writer. Even if they do they likely think that all writers are pulling down six figures or more a year anyway, so it's not like it actually *hurts* them to have the price be lower.

User: jaylake Date: 2009-08-26 12:01 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Oh, yeah, six figure income. Is that why I drive a 10-year-old Chrysler and use a 3-year-old computer? Heh.

User: joncwriter Date: 2009-08-26 04:04 (UTC) Subject: We Were Promised Jetpacks Keyword: Groucho Marx

Seriously? The sky is falling because a book is marginally more in price? And I'm guessing still less than buying the book in hardcover? Yeesh. This is just like the tirade going on over at eMusic because their prices changed because they picked up stuff from Sony. Or like the LJ boycott when the Commies a company in Russia bought it. Like every other drama on the internets, it all boils down to people whining because they didn't get their way.

The ones that really want to pick up your book? Will buy it regardless.

User: ygolonac Date: 2009-08-26 04:46 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm not a Kindle user, mainly because of the price of ebooks. The concept of the Kindle sounds great and when I read about it I want one, but I think even $9.99 is too much for an electronic version of a product.

When prices for such things get closer to rational, I'll consider buying an ebook reader, but till then I'll continue to spend my money on something a bit more solid, something I can loan out to friends or even resell if I want.

User: amysisson Date: 2009-08-26 05:28 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I don't mean to be argumentative, but I've seen two unrelated instances in the past few days where an author has pointed out that a boycott (the other was of an Orson Scott Card-related product) hurts the author most (who wasn't Orson Scott Card in this particular case), implying that the buyer really shouldn't boycott because it hurts the innocent author more than the publisher.

The thing is, that's all buyers have -- their only power is to not buy something. So I'm not sure it's fair to essentially guilt trip the potential buyer by saying they're hurting the author most. That may be so, but they are also hurting the publisher, even if it's in a very small way. And that is the point. They don't personally have an obligation to make sure the author is "OK", or that the author is hurt more or less than the publisher.

Again, I really am sorry if that sounds argumentative. There have been many unrelated things online lately (not just boycotts) that have made me sensitive to the impression (whether justified or not) that authors think the public owes them something: attention, a living, or anything else. I just don't think they do.

(I'd not heard of the specific $9.99 Kindle boycott, by the way. But I do not buy Orson Scott Card related products. It's a shame, but I feel too strongly about his hate-mongering.)

User: jaylake Date: 2009-08-26 12:03 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Actually, I wasn't trying to imply that the buyer shouldn't boycott. I was trying to imply that the buyer should understand the impact of their boycott. I certainly don't think the public owes me anything, I'd just prefer that my books have a chance to stand or fall on their own merits, rather than because one third party (the buyer) is unhappy with another third party (Amazon).

User: dinogrl Date: 2009-08-26 06:01 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: bookish robot

Such a can o' worms. I'm livid at Amazon about the Kindle for many reasons. However, I think there needs to be a full blown discussion at the pro level on this. Maybe a missive to Mr. Hartwell about programming this item at WFC?

User: derekjgoodman Date: 2009-08-26 07:18 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I get around the ridiculous prices of the ebook editions in a very simple way: I buy the paperback, and I buy it from my local independant bookseller. That way the author gets some money, the publisher gets some money, the bookseller gets money, and Amazon gets squat. So I guess in a way I was already participating in the boycott by default.

I suppose if people are boycotting the Kindle editions but not the books themselves, there's nothing wrong with it. If they're completely avoiding a book they might enjoy just because one edition has a wonky price, then that's a little ridiculous.

User: amysisson Date: 2009-08-26 15:40 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

This is well stated. As you say, there's a big difference between boycotting a specific edition for a specific reason as opposed to writing off the work itself.

User: stephcampisi Date: 2009-08-26 09:03 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

This notion of ebook = no publishing costs is extremely frustrating.

Of course, living in a kindle-less country (Australia), I'm a touch out of the loop, but really the reason I would expect lowered costs would be more to do with DRM fiercely restricting my access to the content I've purchased.

User: green_knight Date: 2009-08-26 10:30 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: Never Enough

As it appears that it is Amazon setting the profit on this, it seems writers would be better served by people waiting and buying the paperback. (How much do Kindle sales go into a publisher's consideratins of whether a writer is profitable? If the Kindle profit is very low, maybe not so much.)

As a consumer, I feel that paying more for an eletronic edition _that may be recalled by Amazon and that I can only download a very limited number of times etc_ than for a paperback with all its printing and distribution costs (and which will be MINE forever hereafter and endure for the rest of my life) is insane. I see electronic books more on par with cinema tickets - you pay to enjoy it once, and any other use you get out of it is a bonus, and there's a limit of how much I am willing to pay for that experience.

User: temporus Date: 2009-08-26 15:37 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

The limit to the number of downloads is with regards to the number of DEVICES you can download your content, not the number of TIMES you can download the individual file from Amazon. It also doesn't restrict you on the number of times you can read it.

You can manually backup every file off your Kindle, and keep them in multiple locations (I do) just in case you want to be able to reload them. Frankly, its a good idea because you never know if Amazon might go out of business. (It's not like we haven't seen some major corporations that no one ever believed would go under, go under within the past year or so.)

I agree, you shouldn't pay more for an electronic edition than you would for the print edition. (I won't.) However, the $9.99 boycott is not about that. It's about the misunderstood impression that some people got that Amazon promised no ebook would ever be more than $9.99 and that's just not true. Amazon never said that. They only promised that a limited subset of books (NYT Bestsellers) would be made available at that price.

The books that people are boycotting would still be saving them over $10 compared to the price of going out and buying the hardcover.

Pray tell, what do you spend on Cinema tickets? Around here it's over $11 a movie. So if you're saying you would spend money on ebooks as if you would on movie tickets, well....you're already there for most of them.

I've bought about 14 books on my Kindle so far. I've yet to pay more for that ebook than the cover price of the currently exisiting version of said book in physical copy. I've also "purchased" through amazon nine books for free that were basically publisher giveaways. All of which were first books in series.

User: klingonguy Date: 2009-08-26 11:59 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm a big fan of Amazon when it comes to buying books, but I reverse myself 180 degrees when it comes to Kindle.

Reading the Kindle contract (posted with commentary some weeks back by SFWA) I was utterly appalled, stunned, and disgusted.

I'm holding out hope that once the Kindle gets some serious competition the situation may improve.

User: temporus Date: 2009-08-26 20:27 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

If this is real: http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#1KzQRw/www.emagazines.com/shopcontent.asp?type=devices/

I think then you just might have some major competition that will bring market forces to bear.

User: icedrake Date: 2009-08-26 12:26 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Data point: $10 for a book you are essentially *leasing*, and that after you've spent $300 or so for the device to enable you to read it in the first place? Cold day in hell before I buy either a kindle or a remotely-deactivated ebook to read on it.

User: gvdub Date: 2009-08-26 15:30 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

The whole DRM thing is one of the reasons why the newly announced Sony wireless touchscreen e-book reader sounds attractive. Sony has announced that they're going with the ePub format, which is open, so you're not tied to a single vendor or to DRM'd nastiness. As long as it has decent pdf support as well, I'm so on board with it once it's released. I already have one of the earlier Sony readers, and have been pretty happy with it, aside from the pdf support being so-so.

User: peanut13171 Date: 2009-08-26 16:41 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: dos santos warbreaker

Just read in today's paper that Sony will also allow you to download ebooks from your local library for 21 days. Hands down, this would be my choice for e-reader.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-sony26-2009aug26,0,3428395.story

"Sony's readers have another feature that's not present in the Kindle: All of the devices are capable of displaying digital books that have been borrowed from thousands of public libraries that lend electronic books.

The Daily Edition goes one step further by finding local libraries with a digital-books collection that let users wirelessly download the book for 21 days -- provided they have a library card for that particular library."

User: the0phrastus Date: 2009-08-26 20:58 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I think it's crazy to think that "almost all Kindle users honor the $9.99 boycott of digital books." I have a Kindle and a Sony and the Kindle Reader on my iPhone. I buy textbooks, programming books, many books over $9.99 for my Kindle. Most of the Kindle users I know buy books over $9.99. Maybe the boycott only applies to fiction?

The "no publishing costs" error is also common. Time is money, and I know how much time it takes to convert, test, review any book that goes from one format into another--and the crazy things that happen to characters, line-spacing, paragraph styling, chapter headings, tables of contents, when books are fed through automated converters. It's a costly process.

I'm wondering if what's really happening here with the pricing is that Green is out in hardcover, and Tor wants to drive buyers to it. Seems like good sense to me. Tor can, at any time, go in and change the Kindle price to suit the market, to suit the shift to a new edition, to suit any ebook strategy they're working. It's not like the book price is printed on the cover. It's changeable.

Here's what I know about item pricing for the Kindle:
A publisher can set any price between USD $0.99 and $200, and the publisher will always receive a set percentage of that suggested retail price, even if the product is sold at a lower promotional price by Amazon. The standard is 35%, but I imagine the big pubs negotiate a far better rate.

Chris

User: barbarienne Date: 2009-09-01 02:57 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

As a book production professional, I was outraged by this:

With no publishing costs

This person has NO FUCKING CLUE what they're talking about.

Every ebook sold is a paper book not sold. Therefore, ebooks must contribute to the production and overhead of the book in whatever format.

The only costs an ebook doesn't have that a dead tree edition has are PPB, otherwise known as "paper, print, and binding," and freight charges to move the books around.

However, an ebook has costs a paper book doesn't have. A short list based on my experience at a major NYC publisher:

1. Converting typeset files into ebook formats. Note the plural there. FormatS. I expect that will come undone at some point, but for the past decade it's been at least five versions. This involves hiring people who make the conversion and then check it for accuracy. While much of the conversion can be outsourced for cheap to Asia, no one wants to leave the "checking" phase to people for whom American English is a second language.

2. Storage of files in a robust archiving system, and all the backups that entails. One person's files may be storable for a few bucks a year on a third-party server somewhere, but a company that publishes thousands of books a year has endless reams of files, gigabites worth for each book. These must be kept in a facility with an interface that newcomers to the company can easily learn how not to fuck up. (And believe me, even the old hands fuck up archiving too often.) This facility must also have offsite duplication somewhere, and an army of IT professionals to keep it running.

One might argue that the archiving system would have been a good idea for paper books, but I can't help but notice that at my company it only arose once the notion of repurposing content--as ebooks and other things--became a company directive. They paid a bloody fortune for the thing to get it correct from the outset, and the only reason they spent that money was because they figured to earn it back in new markets.

3. Whatever it takes to set up the connection between the publisher and the seller. I don't know what-all this entails, but I'm sure someone had to come up with the script for downloading files to Amazon, B&N, and everyone else who sells the things. This script has to be secure and accurate. It has to be robust enough to adapt to changing conditions--new pricing, sales run by the vendor exclusive of the publisher, retractions and corrections--and it has to be maintained and updated regularly.

"No publishing costs." ::rude noise:: I wish there were no publishing costs. It would make my job a hell of a lot easier.

Edited at 2009-09-01 02:57 am (UTC)

User: julesjones Date: 2009-09-01 06:49 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

"No publishing costs."

I see this a *lot*, being published by one of those "ebook first, print later if at all" small presses that are doing well in the romance genre. A lot of people loftily declare that they're being ripped off by a small press ebook costing as much as a mass market paperback, because it costs nothing to print and ship an ebook. These are the same people who will mock bad cover art and complain bitterly about lack of editing and proof-reading. (And in vain do I point out the economies-of-scale realities behind the phrases "small press" and "mass market paperback".) There is such a fixation on the cost of printing and shipping, and denial of the costs of industrial grade webshops, that I think a lot of people simply cannot believe that an intangible thing like a file actually costs money to create.

It seems to me that if you reduce the production costs on a book as significantly as you do with e-books, the author should get a much greater share of the profits than he does with traditional, "dead-tree" books.

If I were a publisher, I'd be handing out e-readers like candy trying to get people to convert (obviously without MP3 players, bells, and whistles attached), especially since the authors aren't demanding their fair share. Sell the ink, not the printer. Pass 'em out at colleges, science fiction conventions, and Deb Maccomber events. Anywhere people buy more than forty dollars worth of books in a year. (I'm betting you could put together a slick little machine for under 40 bucks, and sell Harlequin or bestseller subscriptions, make up your money before the customer hits the door.)