“Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site,” Brad Stone and Motoko Rich report for The New York Times. “The publisher’s books can be purchased only from third parties on Amazon.com.”
“Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99,” Stone and Rich report. “Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week.”
“Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week,” Stone and Rich report. “Apple will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. Although the prices will be tethered to print book prices by a formula that will generally yield prices between $12.99 and $14.99 for most fiction and general nonfiction, that is significantly higher than $9.99 discount that Amazon offers on its Kindle.”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iBookstore will be available when the first iPads hit the U.S. in late March.
Stone and Rich continue, “Publishers have been concerned that such pricing devalues books. Tensions between publishers and Amazon have been rising as publishers have withheld select e-book editions for several months after the release of hardcover versions of books. It is not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. Antitrust lawyers said it could raise legal issues.”
MacDailyNews Take: The paradigm has shifted, Jeff. Try this on for size: Apple’s iBookstore, The Earth’s Biggest Selection of Books.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “James W.” for the heads up.]
Ahh. The demise of the kindle will be ever so sweet.
So MDN, where’s your attack on publishers for ripping off authors and customers ?
Quick question for a math wizard:
Can someone estimate how many fiction novels the first gen. top level iPad could store?
The first iPod could hold 1,000 songs.
Funny how Steve Jobs was applauded for sticking to his guns for so long with keeping iTunes Music pricing firmly at $.99 each (yeah yeah… he caved finally), yet Amazon is being slammed for doing the same with e-books. Books SHOULD be cheaper as an ebook… there are NO printing costs involved!
Hmm… what’s the iPad going to be like for reading books?
Seriously, isn’t eyestrain going to be a huge problem?
who actually pulled the books? Did MacMillan pull all of them from Amazon? Or did Amazon pull the physical books in protest of MacMillan pulling the electronic books?
(I assume it’s both the physical and electronic books.))
Why do we have to bash the Kindle and Amazon? What have they done to us? The kindle is very good at what it is designed to do: replace a print book. That’s it. That’s all. Competition is good, people. I hope the kindle gets better and better and pushes Apple to keep improving the iBooks app. Competition on book pricing is good, and Amazon is fighting that battle well.
So Apple screws the consumer, forces us to pay $6 more for books, and even that is just fine MDN?
At a certain point the fanaticism on this website goes beyond irrational.
The paradigm has shifted, bend over.
agree w/ the 2 guys before me
double standard much…funny how Apple is applauded when they refused up the price from 0.99 and yet Amazon get slammed for essentially doing the same
Books will be priced lower after a while on iPad. I agree that Apple is two faced regarding books while low pricing tunes.
Agreed – WTF!
We praised Jobs for fighting to keep .99 songs but Yay! He’s taking book downloads up $5 each – right on!
BOOKS COST TOO DAMN MUCH.
I’m with Bezos on this one.
@whocares, I agree. I admire the Kindle for what it tried to do. I thought e-ink was an amazing advance. Now I’m not so sure.
I’d like to think there will be room for computing devices that do just one thing, but do it very well (like the Kindle, the classic iPods, GPS, and VoIP phones), but can they keep up?
Something tells me we’ll always have free-standing cameras — I can’t see the Kindle surviving the decade (and probably less than a year of two).
Whocares: why? Because the air is rotten and might I’d right and everyone can pound their chest and proclaim death to anything that isn’t how I see it …. Yeah were all retarded in today’s world wher you have to demonize and polarize and be moronically dogmatic and … I was just thinking too, why is it death to any oppnent and mass mob knee jerk reaction to everything we don’t understand, or agree with …
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, if not for mediocrity or crap how would Apple shine so bright?
Books have value, regardless of whether they are in print form or electronic. $9.99 is too cheap. Songs often sell in the millions, the vast majority of books sell in the few thousands — so higher pricing is warranted. Otherwise, no one can afford to write and publish them. I read 20-30 books a year and am glad to pay what I consider to be a reasonable price ($15 – $25) apiece.
@Roy virtually no eye strain since you can adjust the size of the font. Plus, you can see one page or two depending on which way you hold it. I’m guessing you haven’t seen the keynote yet? Spin up to about 55:40.
I see some irony here. If Amazon sells the iPad on its site, it will likely be the one of the top selling tech device on their electronics section. Yet they’re upset with Apple.
By the way, I agree with those who point out that Apple should be fighting to keep costs down. It costs much less to produce a book than a “twelve song music compilation,” formerly known as an “album,” and most of those are still $9.99 at iTunes. And with no printing, the total cost should go way down for the consumer. I’m disappointed with the price tag they are setting.
No way in hell I’m paying premium book prices thru Apple! It doesn’t cost publishers a F’ing penny to sell these things electronically! They should be severely discounted as such! $15 for an electronic book that you can’t even resell is ridiculous!
“Can someone estimate how many fiction novels the first gen. top level iPad could store?”
@Dank!: Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations hardcover edition is a total of 799 pages (3 volumes), and the plain text eBook is 1MB in size. Assuming a full 16GB of available storage on the entry level iPad, you could store 16,384 copies. Given that the average novel is probably closer ⅓ the size of Great Expectations, it’s probably safe to say 40,000-50,000 average length books. Double that for the 32GB iPad and double it again for the 64GB iPad.
@Preston, publishers have minimal overhead for digital bioks. And yet typically they pay authors even less – typically 5% for sale below a threshold, for example 10,000 copies. If you think the music industry is the pits, publishing is worse. Apple is complicit in screwing authors.
Why is Amazon afraid of Apple?
Um, so where are the sources for these quotes, exactly? Steve Jobs has already gone on record saying “the prices will be the same” as Amazon, when it comes to e-books:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/29/steve_jobs_ipad_to_offer_word_support_10_ebooks_6_days_of_music.html
Just because Apple will allow publishers more leeway in pricing, doesn’t mean the prices are all going to be jacked up. It’ll probably be similar to the .69/.99/1.29 pricing tiers you currently find for music. (Well, .99/1.29 really, since the greedy labels couldn’t be bothered to move anything to .69…)
Can’t we all, y’know, WAIT to actually see what the pricing is, BEFORE the Apple-bashing? Sheesh.
Yikes, I’m in full agreement TheloniusMac.
Sure sign of the Apocalypse, er, no, actually just of MDN’s outrageous hypocrisy…
PS: Apple is looking to get all publishers and content providers to offer their products on the iPad and to showcase the interactive features, capabilities and potential of this Future Computing Household Staple…That is Apples main goal right now.
Apple has probably learned from the standoff with the music labels, that in the end, a lot of time gets wasted as a result, to the detriment of the end users and consumers and that the best way to influence the publishers’ pricing is by the consumer reacting to their pricing by voting with their wallet…
If publishers see that their high pricing is causing a freeze is purchasing , they will, as is common in retail, lower the prices…
In the case of fighting for ¢99 songs, Apple’s fight was over changing long standing prices and terms that were already established in iTunes and by doing so, alienating existing customers. That fight now is Amazon’s and Apple should concentrate as it is, on building it’s content offerings and at the same time exposing the publishers to the iPads huge potential and capabilities that will serve them well.
whoa… lay off Amazon. Alongside Apple, Amazon is one of the great Internet companies. Bashing it Kindle is stupid — it seems to be a reasonable choice if all you want is a bookreader (and many people seem to). Bezos has done all of them a great service negotiating the $9.99 price limit.
I’m probably going to buy an iPad (or whatever they change the name to) but I bought a Newton also… who really knows the future of the iPad.
I really have begun to think all this fanboy amazon bashing is coming from a sense of insecurity not strength.
wake up… competition and choice are good things.
oh well….
tom
I don’t see why digital books have to cost more than $10. I bought Dan Brown’s new book for $10 on the Kindle iPhone app. The hardback version is ~$20. I wouldn’t have bought the digital version if it was more than 10.
Also with a paper version you can share the book with family, friends. You can even sell it or buy it second hand. All of those are legal.
You can’t do anything like that with the digital versions. Why should the price be so high then?
Steve Jobs. “We are standing on their shoulders….”
Soon he’ll be standing on their neck!!
Why does it have to be all or nothing, my way or the highway…?
Amazon is a good company, Apple is a great one .
What if we wanted to kill all the morons that have stupid things to say…?
Morons have mothers too you know?
Ironically I would probably have paid more for the books from the iBooks store because reading them on the iPad would be a superior experience.
I feel that forcing Amazon to raise their prices is just plain wrong though.
Stephen King will be the first author to capitalize on iBooks. This is something he has been hoping for, for some time now, I’m sure. He’s experimented with this in the past, but the process proved to be too cumbersome.
Now, however, I can see him publishing a book right from his Mac and uploading it directly to iBooks for immediate sale. I’ve no doubt he could live off the 70/30 split.
If the process proves successful, up and coming authors will finally be able to sidestep the agent/publisher meme and report directly to their audience.
Publishers beware!
It has already been said, but I want to say it again: Apple isn’t always right! Apple was lauded for standing up for the customer in the digital music pricing battle and Amazon is catching flak from us? Why should I ever be forced to pay the same price for a digital copy of a book that includes no printing costs? I would also think distribution by web would have to be cheaper than moving physical books around.
Just like I shop both iTunes and Amazon.com and select the least expensive version of the same song – so too will I shop around for the best book prices. Competition is great for the consumer. Wise up and stop signing Amazon’s death warrant. That’s a recipe for overpriced goods and services. Yes, even from Apple.
@breeze
Morons have mothers too you know?
That’s right! Let’s get their mothers too!
Wasn’t expecting this. Check out the top 3 items when searching for iPad at Amazon.
Apple iPad Tablet (16GB, Wifi) by Apple
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Vote with your wallet!
Dualies Ghost:
hahaha
Why buy a Kindle DX? $10 bucks less than the least expensive iPad and 1/100th the functionality.
-Competition is good
-Let’s hope authors get a chance to publishbtheir books directly without going through publishers
-Bashing is how competition trys to slow the competition, just read all those who are dependent on PC market bashing iPad
heh, no one reads books, Steve-o.
Here’s the Amazon press release that illustrates how they were raping the authors and publishers, and why they might be revolting against Amazon:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1376977
And, a snippet from the above release:
*****
Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.
“Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “We’re excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties when readers choose their books.”
*****
So, you can see under the OLD royalty rate Amazon was paying about $3.15 on a $9 ebook, to the publisher, of which about 80 cents goes to the author.
You gotta laugh, when the VP of Kindle Content says, “We’re excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties”
So, what stopped Amazon from paying authors a higher split in the past?
I want to see books cheaper, and I think they will get cheaper, but the royalty rate that Amazon has been paying to the publishers and authors has been ridiculous.
After initially thinking that this was bullshit – I have to reconsider. Let the marketplace decide upon the price. If they price books too high – people won’t buy them and that’ll drive the price down. They’ll soon learn that a 99 cent app sells by the millions while a comparable $10 app languishes.
Apple lets Developers set their own prices – why should Publishers be denied?
From Wall Street Journal:
Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he visited Amazon on Thursday in Seattle to discuss “new terms of sales for e-books” and that by the time he returned to New York, he’d been informed that Macmillan’s e-books would only be for sale on Amazon.com “through third parties,”
Looks like Mr Sergent and Mr Bezos won’t be having happy hour anytime soon.
Common sense says the iPad will not have an eye strain problem. Besides SJ’s hands-on approach in its design, there would have been a great number of designers and engineers using it for hours on end in the development stages. These people could have had the intelligence of a cucumber and not failed to notice eye strain, if there was any.
There may be issues when it goes on sale, but I’d say eye strain from continued use will absolutely not be one of them.
“what’s the iPad going to be like for reading books?
Seriously, isn’t eyestrain going to be a huge problem?”
Judging from my wife’s and my experience over the last couple of years reading books on the iPod Touch, no eyestrain isn’t a problem. And the iPad should be even better for reading.
NOW JUST WAIT A SECOND HERE!
WHY IN THE HELL IS MACDAILYNEWS DEFENDING THE BOOK PUBLISHERS TO RAISE RATES ON CONSUMERS?!?!
AND WHERE IS APPLE DEFENDING CONSUMERS WITH LOW BOOK PRICING?!
It costs NEXT TO NOTHING to create an eBook, and the $9.99 Kindle price was actually SOMEWHAT reasonable (if not a tad bit overpriced already). So now we have to PAY MORE MONEY for the exact same product??
And neither Apple nor MDN is going to stand up for consumers on this topic?
@theloniousMac:
“So Apple screws the consumer, forces us to pay $6 more for books, and even that is just fine MDN?”
Check back after someone tells you that the book publishers, not Apple, set the price of their ebooks.
Amazon is one of my favorite companies, and I buy from them fairly often. That said, I’ve heard a rumor they might buy Netflix. I sure hope that never happens.
Steve Hix:
Apple has nothing to do with the pricing it has conceded that to the publishers. In case you don’t understand that, it means :
The publishers decide the Price.
Steve Hix:
That was misdirected to you
As was noted earlier, why do publishers even need to be part of this process. Now, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can be a “published” author. I can foresee a thriving industry for really good editors to help authors achieve commercial quality but then it’s straight to the iBooks store!
Umm…I don’t think Amazon is being “slammed”. Their device is simply irrelevant now. Statement of fact.
Apple’s not in charge of maintaining Amazon’s pricing standard. If the price of e-books is going to make or break the iPad, so be it. Of you’re thinking of a device just to read e-books, you’re probably not going to buy one anyway. I personally think the device’s added value is going to make people more willing to pay more for books on an iPad.
Vote with your dollars, people. Apple’s not holding a gun to your head.
Well, apparently, practically nobody here knows the entire story, which is why they are so ready to defend Amazon for “pushing the price lower” and bash Apple for “raising the prices”.
Publishers didn’t set the $10 e-Book prices. They set prices for their books and got paid based on those prices. If you are a publisher and were selling a book on Amazon for $15, you would be getting your share of that $15 from Amazon, regardless of which version of the book was sold. Amazon is the one that defines the ultimate sale price; they reserve the right to lower the price as a part of some promotion (“30% off on all self-help books until end of January!” and similar). Amazon chose to sell all e-Books at discount permanently. They were still paying the publishers their full share (which was abysmal, according to the original contract), but were selling e-Books at steep discount in order to motivate customers to buy the Kindle, as it would give them access to same books with better prices. In other words, book publishers were unwilling participants in plugging Kindle for Amazon by selling e-Books. And Amazon could easily afford such steep discount, since they were paying publishers so little in the first place.
It took the appearance of the iPad (and Apple’s agreement with the publishers) to quickly force Amazon to change raise the payout on books. To put it simply, before Apple, book publishers were getting screwed by Amazon, getting abysmal percentage of retail sales and being forced to participate in Amazon’s shameless promotion of their e-Book reader. As soon as Apple appeared on the scene, Amazon quickly re-wrote the deal with publishers and is now finally much more generous. Obviously, with this kind of payout, it is unlikely that Amazon can afford to keep selling those $9.99 e-Books, unless they decide to lose money on them in order to sell Kindles.
Now, tell me again, how is Amazon good here and Apple bad?
It’s business as usual.
On the other hand, I can see how, from consumer’s perspective, paying $9.99 for a book is better than paying $14.99. Especially if that book is read on an iPod/iPhone. The user got a book at steep discount (which Amazon was giving in order to stimulate people to buy the Kindle), and Amazon never got that user to actually buy that Kindle.
It was very nice when the payout was so small; Amazon could artificially reduce e-Book prices and still make profit. Well, not anymore, Amazon.
A good consequence of this might just be cheaper books overall. Now that the payout to publishers (and authors) became much bigger, books no longer have to be as expensive in order to make same amount of money for publishers/authors.
The market will decide.
Isn’t that what you monkeys keep screeching?
The are a whole bunch of unknowns in this subject. Some points:
1) I’ve read the music labels sell music to Amazon at much lower rates than to iTunes. One Apple executive said that Amazon can SELL music cheaper than Apple gets wholesale from the music labels i.e there is a two tier system. This is music industry to break the itunes ‘monopoly’.
2) why is Amazon angry? Could it be (I could be wrong) that Amazon just like in music wants a two tier system i.e it gets ebooks cheaper than publishers will sell to Apple? And Steve Jobs after being burnt by music says ‘no way’. If publishers want to sell books more expensive on iBooks i.e 14.99 or whatever then they should also charge Amazon the same. Makes some sense doesn’t it if this was the case causing Amazon to blow up. Steve Jobs in the Mossberg interview said that books will be “same price”.
3) Steve Jobs also has to add an incentive for the book publishers. They are tied to Amazon, just see what happened to MacMillan. And many content providers like TV producers are leery about Apple (the iTunes monopoly). So many content providers are terrified of Apple gaining too much power since the music labels blame their dropping revenues on iTunes cutting their prices ( although of course in truth piracy probably has more effect). That’s why you see the difficult terms TV Movie producers have given Apple (one of the reasons holding back Apple TV).
4) Amazon only recently changed its royalty structure recently to follow Apple. It changed it to offer 70% back to the publisher for books 9.99 and under. It’s original royalty was 35% which still applies to books over 9.99. (35% and people saying Apple is gouging).
5) An interesting aside is the extreme action Amazon is taking. A section of pundits like Dvorak, Scott Moritz etc is saying the iPad is a failure. Seems like Bezos doesn’t think so, if he thought it was as Moritz calls it ‘an iFlop’ and won’t sell he’ll just be laughing instead of acting so ferociously.
@theloniousMac
You seem to be of the view (widely held by Americans I notice) that the consumer should always get what he or she wants… But the author and publisher have rights too. After all, they own the product until you buy it… I’m sure you wouldn’t sell your possessions to your neighbours at the prices they set…
Some of these arguements remind me of a yard sale my wife and I had one time. We were blow away by how cheap people really are. We laughed as this woman was pissed that we would take $10 for a set of lamps we were asking $25 dollars for.
“Well, that is just an outragous amount of money.”
Little did she know, the outragous part is what we paid for them initially. You get what you pay for. If you choose to pay that price, that is what the price is.
Most of you sound like the Athlete that signs a contract for seven years. In year two of that contract he wants a new contract because he is playing well. Would he/she give any money back if they were playing bad?
To all, especially those who actually create things, get what you can get. Fuck the consumer. If they want you product they will buy it, if they don’t want it they won’t buy it.
jarrettdailynews
I like your thinking and I despise your spelling and grammar.
P.S. jarrettdailynews
I hope you don’t mind if I run with your ideas?
Can you buy a book to put on a Kindle, then transfer it to an iPad?
Books may come out at 13 but drop to 9.99. Makes sense that publishers have leeway. Now they withold the book for months. I think apple is right
@bjh
I am not defending the apparent double-standard between music and ebooks. But how in heck do you figure that “Apple is complicit in screwing authors” by allowing publishers to charge higher prices? After all, Apple does not control the contracts between publishers and authors. And the situation was quite a bit different this time around – Apple couldn’t hogtie the publishers like they did with the clueless music labels who figured that they had nothing to lose with an iTunes experiment.
But consider the possibilities now changing in favor of authors, just like they have done with internet music distribution. The barriers to competition are now lower and there are lots of indies selling more music than ever and making more for the artists, too. The same thing can and will happen in the ebook market. After all, who needs the big publishers? All you need is a competent editor and a friendly and efficient storefront (which will soon exist courtesy of Apple).
The price of books is different to the price of music. Music can be done by large groups of musicians …etc
A book on the other hand takes a lot of time by the individual to script and write. Also books have many variances and therefore it’s makes sense to have difference in value.
For example, I paid $21 for a iWoz book but for a detailed history on the silk road, the extraordinary photos of pre-communist occupation, that I paid over $300 for. I wouldn’t mind doing the same for the iBookstore
OK the .99cents a song is 1 song. If you bought the whole CD you were still roughly the same price as a store bought CD. Sometimes a little cheaper depends on where you go. Some stores are higher then others depending on where you live.
I think that Apple was just trying to get the music publishers to not overcharge.
For the eBooks i think that we have to draw a line somewhere. Yes with an ebook there is no printing cost and all that but at the same time 9.99 while a agreat price i read that everytime a publisher sells a ebook through Amazon they lose money.
SO yes we bought songs at .99 cents. But if you bought the entire CD it was still $10-12. So having an ebook at $14 is still a good price if the printed edition is say 25 or something because you are buying the whole book. Some of you are acting as though the ebooks should be $5 or something because its not printed but just think in a couple years ebooks could contain lots of things printed ones dont.
For instance Travel guides some of these are outdated as fast as they are printed. I know when my wife and i went to Walt Disney world a few years ago we had the latest guide book yet it was outdated. Just think with an ebook if minor things change it could be updated through some subscription or something for free as part of the ebook rather then having to wait a year for another book which again will be outdated by the time its printed
Lets not forget all you cheap bastards, intellectual property should be payed for at a fair price. Ever since the internet revolution, people what shit for free.
“It is not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. Antitrust lawyers said it could raise legal issues.”
What a stupid comment!
All publishers have to say is sell it for the same price as Apple. If Amazon doesn’t want to sell it for that price, it’s up to Amazon to pull it.
Why would Apple allow publishers to sell their books for less at Amazon than at Apple?
The tethered idea sounds like a good plan, but not if publishers allow Amazon to sell it for considerably less.
BTW – Audiobooks sells their stuff for less than you pay on the iTunes store. The high price for audiobooks, especially on iTunes, is why it never took off.
Macmillan is going with Apple so they can sell books and readers at a higher price than Amazon … and Mac idiots on MDN cheer “go Apple!”
… says it all.
I think MDN (and anyone else who thinks that high [and higher] prices for ebooks is going to gain mass acceptance) is dreaming.
IMO, excepting the small percentage of readers willing to pay the kind of prices that some Apple buyers are willing to pay, most consumers aren’t going to be willing to pay the kind of prices that the publishers are going to want (and already trying) to charge.
I think it’s already evident that the publishing industry hasn’t learned anything from the music industry cluelessness. 99¢ for a digital song is one thing, ebooks are quite another.
Most people simply aren’t going to value ebooks the way the publishing companies clearly thinks they should. I’ll go so far as to say they already don’t value them that way. Otherwise, I think the Kindle would have done so well that Amazon would be bragging about actual numbers. And they would have sold a lot more Kindles and ebooks.
I say this as an avid reader. I like books and I see the incredible potential the iPad offers, but… I’m simply not going to pay $15 to $20 for a digital file. I won’t even pay $9.99.
And if you think I’m not a typical Mac user because of my price objections… well maybe I’m not, but I have bought four iMacs, a 17″ MacBook Pro, a 12″ PowerBook, and 2 iPods directly from Apple.
I’m sorry, but Amazon has it right price-wise. If anything should change, it’s that the typical price of ebooks should come down even more.
Digital publishing eliminates the vast majority (75% if not more) of the expenses of print publishing of any kind. Digital pricing should reflect that to some extent, and $15 to $20 for an ebook just doesn’t do it. I doubt $9.99 does, either.
I see the potential digital represents for a publishing revolution. It just won’t be with the publishing companies… unless they radically rethink and re-do their position in the publishing hierarchy. And authors may have to do that, also.
I think that in the not-to-distant future, the most successful publishing will be done by authors who 1) take it upon themselves to learn and use technology to self-publish their work, thereby eliminating the publishing company middlemen; or 2) hire (or sub-contract) someone to do the technological “dirtywork” of epublishing, while all the author does is write.
And I think the most successful publishers will be those who help “old school” authors in the number 2 scenario above. They won’t offer advances, but they will work for a small percentage or flat fee, and they will be small tight operations.
There’s a lot of potential here.
Anyone want to start a new publishing empire?
What if a market of eBooks emerges for which there are no paper/cardboard equivalents?
What if a market of eBooks emerges where traditional publishers aren’t calling the shots?
Wouldn’t that drive prices down, increase competition and reward authors better?
Of course there remains a cost of presentation/editing to pdf or similar, that is not necessarily within the capabilities of authors.
Lets get this in perspective and add some reality. Apple came in for massive criticism over its pricing in music. In the end despite its domination it actually had to be more flexible to retain that position. Do you people really think that they could pull that one off again from zilch? Don’t you think as with the movie industry that the publishers were seriously let a similar situation develop? Apple needed their content simple and it did not want to fight another war like it did with the music labels, if it wants the tablet to succeed it can’t afford to. So get real and accept that this is Apple trying to be flexible and work with the publishers rather than constantly battle against them. In the end the market will decide what price they should be and publishers most of whom are not making massive profits like the music labels used to, might actually survive the move from paper to digital content.
I fully understand Apples position I am only a little surprised that they have been quite so flexible but then only they fully understand the problems for them that the music wars have generated. Companies like all of us have to change to prosper and that is not hypocrisy.
@ Predrag – Thank you for some much-needed perspective on this “issue”.
(Doesn’t stop the mindless Apple bashers, of course, and they’ll all mysteriously disappear or go silent once their predictions fail to come to pass…)
They are more than welcome to price these things at whatever they want, but $15 for an ebook is ridiculous. I can get a new release at Amazon for under $10 in hardcover sometimes. Why would I pay $15 or more when there’s nothing physical involved? The book company has no printing costs, etc. They’re trying to prop up their business model. That’s just ridiculous. At least I can burn purchased music to CD if I want.
And yes… the market will decide.
@ Bob and all the other something for practically nothing advocates.
If you’d ever tried to make a creative marketable product, something that you literally sweated blood to produce, you would not want to virtually give it away to undeserving assholes like yourselves.
While your intentions were good – let me make your apologies for posting when you obviously a bit fuckered up.
@Steve Hix….
Amazon had negotiated price with the Publishers allowing for attractively discounted titles to be sold to the consumer… you and I. Amazon even then went so far as to say they would take less of a cut to maintain the discount.
Apple, in order to force a wedge between the publishers and Amazon comes in and says, “Hey, you guys should be getting more for books.” The publishers of course are all over this and demand that Amazon price books the same way.
Apple is the instigator here whether they actually set the prices or not.
You know as well as I do if it were Microsoft causing prices to go up everyone here would be in an uproar.
In effect Apple has come along and caused a rift between Amazon and Macmillian and I am sure the same thing will happen with the other publishers as well.
We’ll see how you feel when you pay the same price for e-books that you pay for hard bound books on Apple’s store and Amazon doesn’t carry major publisher books anymore.
So how’s that hangover workin out for ya? How bout that decision to waste your days typing random rants into random forums. Your father would be so proud.
@bryonic…
Huh?
I am of the view that the market should set the price. What is unique here is that I am getting decidedly less material for decidedly more money, in terms of e-books vs. real books.
I’m looking at an entire 500 page e-book. It’s 33MB. 33MB delivered electronically minus the cost of printing, binding, shipping, etc. From Amazon it’s $9. From Apple it will be what, $14.
That book is viewable from my Kindle, my iPhone, my Windows 7 Parallels/Bootcamp partition, and soon my Macs. For $9.
When the iPad comes out it would be presumably viewable on the iPad. Alone. For $14. What do I get for the extra money? Ooooh. Page turn animation.
I am sure the iPad will be a hit. I am sure the market will accept the pricing that APPLE Encouraged. I will not forget that Apple paved the way for higher priced e-books though.
So the price war begins. Funny, that used to be good for the consumer.
@Predrag
Excuse me, but that’s the exact same story as Apple and the Music Publishers but everyone went nuts hating the music industry when prices went up.
Ultimately after sleeping on it I don’t have an argument here, except one and that is when some other company or publisher causes prices to rise in the future, I hope people accept it as well as they accepted Apple + Publishers causing the rise of e-book prices.
I don’t really mind paying $15 for a book, as it is the content I’m after anyway and I know that sadly I would pay the same price for an electronic version of a book that I would pay for the hard bound version. The value of the e-book is content + convenience + no atoms. I hate buying atoms. Price is not a factor. In fact, content + convenience + no atoms is actually worth more to me than the hard cover book and I’m terrified that publishers will figure that out.
AMZN has been screwing the publishers and the publishers have been screwing the writers. AAPL will take a smaller cut from the publisher but it is unlikely much of the larger cut to the publisher will pass to the writer although I am sure some will.
“It costs next to nothing to create an ebook”
However, it still costs the same amount for the publishing company to go through all of the review and editing processes they do for a print book. Ebooks are cheaper than print books, but just because it may cost less to create an ebook vs. a print copy (and that is an assumption) doesn’t mean the overall process is that much less.
For a print book, most of the cost is in the physical printing process. Preparing the book for printing is easy – most books are just text. An ebook; however, at least as Apple envisions, will likely have links, video clips, images, and other interactive features. Those certainly cost more than typesetting.
Someone mentioned Dan Brown’s new book. It was just text. Now put it on the iPad, and you could have interactive maps showing the Vatican, images of the statues and clues, and other items. A much more fulfilling experience, but one which costs more to produce.
I think all of this Amazon and Kindle bashing, and Apple bashing, needs to stop until the iPad is actually released and people can use the thing before spouting off at the mouth. As with the iPhone, you can’t appreciate the iPad until you use it, and even then, the full abilities won’t become clear until new apps are created and ebooks designed specifically for the iPad come out.
Anything beyond $9.99 for an electronic book is outrageous. We are talking about a 400 KB file. There are no printing costs and minimal distribution costs (5¢?). I don’t give a crap about how much the publisher, distributor and author gets. They need to work that out between themselves. If these files have DRM (which I’m assuming they do), unlike a traditional book, you can’t give it to anyone else when you’re done.
None of this will matter when the authors start bypassing the publishers and deal directly with the iBook store.
That will be the tipping point for pricing, and the final nails in that coffin delivered by a nail-gun on full auto.
What everyone is forgetting is that Amazon pays publishers about $15 for ebooks and discounts that to $9.99 as an incentive to buying the Kindle. Amazon then pays the Publisher a percentage of the $9.99. Thus if Apple sells ebooks for $15 consumers are pay the same wholesale price that Amazon pays.
I want to see some of the bigger authors self publish to the iBook store. I wonder what they would charge?
If you think that ‘competition’ keeps prices down, you must be as dumb as a sack of hammers.
Prices are ALL artificially high because the market rules everything.
Why do we have a world like this?
Because we are too damn selfish to share.
BTW, the iPad might sell, but its really a worthless piece of eye-candy, perfectly suited to our stupid world.
@ Dualies Ghost and @ KenC
When you are right, you’re right.
And you are both right.
Read Stephen King’s view on e-publishing ‘Bullet’ as he calls it. He said it was so easy and he made so much money. His only concern was how much readers would like/dislike eReading.
Prices will come down as publishers realise that lower prices will drive volume sales.
An interesting possibility for authors, as musicians are discovering with iTunes, is Apple will likely allow Indies to self-publish and keep the whole 70%. Wow! That would tempt many known authors to go it alone once they are out of any contractual obligation. Watch out agents, who also feed from the author’s work.
Kindle will slowly since there are whole sections of reading material that it is useless for – colour books, mags and the coming multimedia newspapers perhaps.
iPad is great as intro model. It will only get better and better.
I am a happy fan, owner and (modest) shareholder.
Also, many existing eBook publishers, like Pragmatic Programmers charge $25+ for pdf or epub versions
Reading some of the contents ~ people are getting it.
{elsewhere in cyberspace, it’s all tampon jokes and moans about no flash or USB}
AUTHORS who can spend YEARS writing a novel or the one text that will be their life’s work ~ for example, ‘The AQUARIAN GOSPEL of JESUS the CHRIST’ by Levi ~ have been paid little, really, compared to the cut for publishers and bookshops.
STEVE… STEVE JOBS changes all that ~ no wonder this Great Soul {before he returns to his home planet?} said:
“This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done”
{Can you see in those words a hint He won’t stay with us very much longer ~ oh Steve, don’t go! We need you, man.}
LIKELY iMags will have ads to help finance them, just as normal. iBooks by new and recent published authors will give writers a better return for all their effort.
POSSIBLY ~ whole new writers will arise who will give their works free. People who got nothing but rejection slips will now find a readership via the iBookstore ~ sure, quality will be patchy as will a more affordable “vanity publishing”, but gems will be discovered.
Although, NO, We can’t have again the centuries-old treasures that hid in the National Library of Iraq {burned by U.S. troops as a “psy-op”} which, who knows, may have included tomes that escaped the rampages at Alexandria?… Books out of print, neglected, beyond copyright, forgotten, previously unknown ~ people will copy out these texts and SHARE them with the world.
That’s MY hope. (Remember the iPhone app where you got what’s generally regarded as The Works of Shakespeare FOR FREE?)
By the way… SHAKESPEARE, speaking through a medium, said: HE wrote the plays of William Shakespeare; eh some have yet to be found; eh ‘Julius Caesar’ was written for a puppet theatre; and eh more recently he ~worked on~ the 1960s TV series ‘Star Trek’.
INEVITABLY and thanks to this RIDICULED pad thing…[now we know why it’s called the EYE-Pad ~ it’s for people with vision]… somewhere, some day soon, a 7-year-old kid in her room {very probably an Indigo child}… having spent all her pocket-money, will have downloaded and be discovered by mom… to be reading PLATO.
STEVE you have been such a gift to Humanity. Maybe the tablet would have been less disappointing if you hadn’t been coping with major surgery! i for one hope and pray the iPad won’t be the last of your JOBS
“iPad ~ can you get it?”
Hue Carroll
I agreed with much of what you said until this phrase; “{burned by U.S. troops as a “psy-op.” Go to hell you bastard!
Hugh Hue Carroll:
Who the fuck paid you to talk such shit?
So Apple is possibly raising the price of books. That actually sucks. It just perpetuates the myth than Macs are more expensive. Mac OS and Mac HW is far superior to wintel machines, so it makes sense to pay a few extra bucks for quality. But a book is a book is a book. To pay more for it sucks. I think Apple is going to see a backfire on this move. Bummer for Apple. Bummer for the consumer.
I guess the market ultimately will set the price… sort of, oligopolistic practices can influence any market like this.
For me personally, I value eBooks slightly below paperbacks. I don’t care if it has cool colors and videos. I can’t loan it to someone or resell it. It’s actually slightly less portable… for example, a lot of people like to read by the pool/beach or in the bath… you won’t take your iPad there.
Whether it makes sense or not, I’m just not gonna pay old prices for an eBook. Conceptually, I know they’re not having to cut down trees, print them, drive them across country, and store them in valuable real estate. Server storage and bandwidth are pretty cheap for 10MB (or whatever they are) books.
I’m not talking about author’s cuts… they should certainly make a living.
eBooks aren’t the “killer app” for me anyway. If I ever get an iPad, I’ll use it to check out books from my library’s online catalog (free… I’ll get an e-mail and pick my books up on the way home from work like I do now).
And stop building libraries so that libs can retire in them and spread their ideology to our young brain-full-o’mush kids. No more libraries needed, we have enough of those edifices built with our taxes.
Hugh hue – you were probably dragged up in one.
Looks like Amazon caved:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/technology/companies/01amazonweb.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Physical books are all printed in China these days. To print them and ship them to Amazon warehouses (or physical Borders / Barns & Noble stores) costs no more than $0.80 per average book (fifty cents). Consequently, one would think one would need to charge no more than $0.50 less for an e-Book in order to take advantage of the savings and still make same amount of cash.
What Amazon was doing was predatory, in a way. Somewhat the same they did with the music business, only there WAS a difference. Music industry was complicit in the scheme, offering Amazon discount pricing compared to iTunes, in order to undermine Apple’s dominance in the industry. With the e-Books, however, publisher had nothing to do with it. They had a very bad agreement with Amazon that paid them dismal percentage of Amazon’s revenue. This gave Amazon plenty of maneuvering space, so they were able to steeply discount e-Books and still make money. With the emergence of Apple on the scene, publishers finally got a fair share of the profits, and Amazon was suddenly found selling e-Books well below cost.
As I said, this is definitely NOT the same as music business. Publishers had nothing in this, and what Apple did was allowed them to claim greater share of the book revenue. This can only lead to ONE thing: lower prices overall.
In the end, everybody here seems to totally ignore what Steve Jobs said right after the keynote (in an ad-hoc interview with Mossberg); prices on Apple’s Book Store will be SAME as prices on Amazon.
One other thing; nobody (not Jobs, not Phil Shiller, not the guy from the Times) mentioned ANYTHING about DRM. All they said was that the format was going to be EPUB, which is an open-source e-book format (unlike Kindle’s proprietary AZW format). Consequently, you should be able to read e-Books from Apple’s book store EVERYWHERE (unlike books from Kindle, which you can only read using Amazon’s proprietary software, and only on the machine where you bought it).
But don’t let any of facts or reason get in the way of slamming Apple (or defending Amazon) over what iPad will do for the world of print publishing.
When it was Apple against the RIAA, most notably Warner, you were against the “MiddleBronfmans” of the music industry. Now that Amazon is taking the same stand, you flip arguments with no supporting logic.
The only explanation is blind fanboism. That would make you not a critical observer and commentator, but a TOOL- plain & simple.
@Predrag,
I’m sure you’re more familiar with the details of costs in this industry; however, by the time you add up shelving and storing books in a real Barnes & Nobel (Amazon.com may be different), there’s a lot more costs in physical books. To be honest, even if there wasn’t, they would be worth more to me. Just like I’d be willing to pay more for a physical CD than an electronic download. For a number of real and non-sensical reasons.
I got to admit @Flip-Flop-Fanboism has a point. However, Amazon was doing some serious loss-leading too. Either way the market should figure some of this out… looks like it’s already happening.
Flip-Flop-Fanboism should be called Dip-Shit-Moronism.
The only “TOOL” here is you, idiot — and all the fools who think Apple did anything inconsistent. There are plenty of well-thought-out posts in this thread pointing out how this has leveled the playing field and forced Amazon to PONY UP THE DOUGH to publishers that they were previously screwing.
Didn’t you “get” any of that, asshat? Or are you one of those douches who doesn’t bother to READ a thread but instead just jumps to the posting box to spew his own inaccurate venom to satisfy his own idiot ego?
Flip-Flop is dumb as a door stop:
You got that damn right!
Hello Rike
I love my country like you do, but I don’t take the line, ‘my country right or wrong’
YOU THINK IT’S AN HONORABLE WAY TO WIN A WAR, BY DESTROYING A COUNTRY’S CULTURE? I don’t
There’s no “hell” for me to go to. And I was born 11 months after my parents married
MDN Magic Word: alone
Hello breeze
I do it all out out of love. I respect your assessment. But I am entitled to my views, and I pay no regard to the herd mentality.
My assessment? I think I went over the top. Plus, it was wrong to bring in my anger and hurt at what happened to the National Library of Iraq. (But what they did wasn’t necessary. That and the ransacked Antiquities had belonged to all Mankind.)
As to the iPad ~ there’s every chance the platform could FAIL. In which case it would be a shame if “the greatest thing” Steve ever did (by his own assessment) was a kind of Newton 2
{Jobs still looks very ill to me}
MDN Magic word: press
So I’ll press the submit button
Hello ron
No, bud, I was born in a slum. Libraries in general ~ I hadn’t thought of that! I can’t imagine though that neither printed paper books nor libraries will disappear. Funding for the latter is always limited. Certainly the libraries I used to use were very poor in a subject I knew something about ~ I found it necessary to buy what I wanted.
Even with the success of the iPad (which is in great doubt) books on spirituality which I buy likely won’t be made in an electronic form.
I got over-excited (I’m bipolar) at what books on the iPad might be like, seeing the free apps that were made available for the iPhone. It was my own fault: I hadn’t slept, reading everything I could about the iPad. I think after so many jibes about “fanboy”(not here though) I had gone into Super-Fanboy mode.
Thanks for pulling up me up, though. (I clearly do care about libraries)