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Keeping Amazon from becoming dominant is the only reason for jacking ebook prices that makes sense. > [Amazon] accounted for 64% of the U.S. e-book market, by

• cstross 11y ago
  Back at the point in time when Apple and the big six were talking about agency model pricing -- which the DoJ brought the price-fixing case over -- Amazon's penetration was around 90%. (I'm of the opinion that the DoJ case is therefore evidence that US anti-trust law is broken; Amazon were clearly operating a predatory monopoly, but the DoJ went after the much easier target because price fixing is easier to prove.) Speaking as an author published by the major houses (Penguin Random House and Macmillan in the USA; Macmillan and Hachette in the UK) I'm not seeing my books hitting the ebook bestseller charts much -- but I'm not seeing my sales decline relative to where they were a few years ago, either. What seems to be happening is that the bestseller charts are being dogpiled by self-published titles on deep discount -- 99 cents to $2.99 seems to be typical. And the old joke "sell it at a loss, we'll make it up on volume" seems apposite at this point.
  • Turing_Machine 11y ago
    "Amazon were clearly operating a predatory monopoly" Nonsense. You could maybe argue that they were a monopsony, but even that is a stretch. "What seems to be happening is that the bestseller charts are being dogpiled by self-published titles on deep discount -- 99 cents to $2.99 seems to be typical." Someone selling a product for less than your antiquated publisher sells it for is not "predatory". Those authors are almost certainly making more per copy than you are. The consumers are paying less. The authors are making more. What is the problem with this?
    • cstross 11y ago
      * Looks at royalty statements * Nope, not seeing it. (Seriously. You're telling my the sky in my work is green with pink polka-dots. Hint: I do this for a living. Yes, some self-pub authors make out like bandits. But you might want to look up what the average revenue is, and how big the gap between mean and median looks.)
      • Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
        What do you think the future is for professionals? I've noticed that there is an awful lot of very-high-quality content being produced for free, Worm and Shadows of Limelight are better than most published fiction, but are free and the authors seem uninterested in anything more than Patreon donations. As making art is something people enjoy and there are no bottlenecks to distribution, maybe we should expect there to be fewer professional artists and vast entertainment niches filled by popular amateur or part-time artists. I sort of imagine a world where one can have millions of readers and still can't be a pro - but probably Patreon would pay a living wage after that point.
        • jsnell 11y ago
          Worm is an instructive example. It has some of the best speculative fiction worldbuilding, characters and plotting this decade, and it's amazing that somebody doing this in their spare time while having to work for a living could keep up that pace of writing for a couple of years. But it also suffers badly from the lack of professional editing and could do with major tightening up. It's also not someone just doing it as a hobby, but someone really trying to make a living as an author. And it's not at all clear that it's been very successful. The $2200/month from Patreon is still a fairly pitiful wage for such highly creative work. And I think it's pretty sad if we end up with a world where that's how things work. (I wrote a bit more on both the merits of Worm as a piece of fiction and on the business model last year here https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-05-24-book-review-worm.html https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-05-24-book-review... . It's interesting to note that the Patreon campaign has not really made that much progress in 15 months, it was $1200/month then).
      • serge2k 11y ago
  • jbeales 11y ago
    Do you know what happens to the money that would be spent on printing when an ebook is sold? For example, if someone buys your $15 ebook, do you get more money than if someone buys your $15 dead-tree book, or does that money go to your publisher or someone else? If authors get more money for ebooks that would be an argument for buying ebooks despite their drawbacks.
    • cstross 11y ago
      Do you know what happens to the money that would be spent on printing when an ebook is sold? The cost of printing is a very small component of the cover price of a book; for paperbacks you're talking around $0.5, and for hardbacks around $2-3. The author and publisher get roughly equal shares of the profit from a traditional trade book sale; the lion's share of the profit goes to the retail distribution chain, i.e. Amazon. (And when I say "lion's share" I mean 30-70%, depending.) The author's cut is a royalty percentage of net receipts. And yes, I get a much larger percentage cut of ebook sales than paper sales -- it comes from what would otherwise be the physical dead-tree printing costs.
      • jbeales 11y ago
        Good to know, thanks. It's not a huge amount, but it looks like if you do fairly well on ebook vs. hardcover, and sell a decent number of books, it'll be a nice little bonus.
  • Oletros 11y ago
    > Back at the point in time when Apple and the big six were talking about agency model pricing -- which the DoJ brought the price-fixing case over -- Amazon's penetration was around 90%. Wrong, market share was less than 80%, Nook eat a lot of market before iPad > Amazon were clearly operating a predatory monopoly Citation needed