5 ms·

Memo To Ian Fleming’s Heirs

14 points by mikecane 16y ago

kevinelliott 16y ago
"There is no way in hell I am paying frontlist pricing for the work of a dead author whose works can be had for about a buck in used paperback." Well said and good point. I know that many publishers are justifying that they are charging near dead-tree version pricing because of "costs associated with conversion to eBook formats." That's a sham, because 99% of the eBooks out there do not even have formatting as nice as the printed books, nor do they have the photos or imagery associated with chapters. At least, the Amazon and Apple eBooks. I have seen some PDF eBooks from notable publishers (O'Reilly and Pragmatic) who format their eBooks quite nicely. If publishers can make their eBooks look nearly as fantastic as their dead-tree versions (if not better), then I think it's fair to charge near dead-tree pricing. Otherwise, who are they fooling? Most of them are doing a "print to PDF" not actually formatting it.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  The eBooks I've read on the Kindle seem very very low rent conversions - tables of contents aren't usually linked, links to additional notes at the back of the book are missing (as in the superscript isn't there, let alone linked).
  - barrkel 16y ago
    I've seen obvious OCR errors too.
    - adolph 16y ago
      Some errors could be deliberate to detect copyright infringement: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Ones I've read recently all seem to have wei-rd hyphenation pro-blems.
Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
This sort of misses the point. Pricing is generally driven by one thing - profit maximisation. That's very different to maximising volume sales. Even if you can go and buy a paperback for $1, there are evidently enough people buying the $10 version (or they wouldn't sell it at that point). If they price the eBook based on the competition from used paperbacks, they're going to risk people who would have paid $10 buying the cheap eBook instead. That may increase volume sales but given their age and the likely number you could shift even selling them for a $1 (after all there are plenty sat unsold in the second handbook shops, it's not like they're flying off the shelves even at that price) the total profit would be lower. So you may not think it's not worth $10 but they know that most people think that and they don't really care. They'd rather sell to 100 people at $10 than 500 at $1 and if you're one of the 400 not buying at the higher price they're not fussed. The other point is that I think people massively over estimate the cost of the physical medium for books. In the UK you can buy a printed copy of War and Peace (nearly 1000 pages) for £1 and at that price it's profitable. The paper is pretty low quality but it's 1000 pages, printed and shipped and profitable for both the publisher and the retailer. Given that I don't think we should expect massive differences between the cost of physical and eBooks.
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  "Pricing is generally driven by one thing - short-term profit maximisation." There, fixed that for you. His argument is that they're trading short term gain for long term pain by turning customers into pirates or shudder library patrons. Of course, it may be argued that they're maximizing long term gain at the expense of short term gain by "convincing" users that $10 is an appropriate price for off-list books. I agree with the author, but there is merit to the other argument.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    Sorry, how does that work? People aren't pirates or not pirates - there's nothing that says that once you become a pirate that's you for life. I'm sure there are people who've pirated stuff on here who also buy stuff. One incident doesn't determine your future behaviour. The decision point is different for each person for each medium and each specific product. You may be willing to pay $5 for the new William Gibson but I may think it's worth $20. If they price it at $10 I think it's a bargain, you go looking for a torrent. We both read it, you love it, I hate it. Next time our valuations on it may be completely different and our actions completely different. And with each transaction being an individual thing it all comes back to what you see as short term profit.
mattmaroon 16y ago
This is akin to saying "I can download music for free so record labels should give theirs away on iTunes."
- brownleej 16y ago
  The author isn't recommending that they give anything away for free. He is talking about how to determine a fair price. Your analogy does not apply.
  - zavulon 16y ago
    I don't think it's really the "fair" price.. it's the price that he, the author, would consider buying the books instead of pirating them. Whether that price is really "fair" is debatable. Now, I love freedom of information, torrents, open source, and all of that, but putting myself in any author's shoes, I think it would be infuriating to hear this kind of argument. "I can pirate your book for free, so a fair price would be $1 dollar. I don't care how much work you put in it." (Yes, I know Ian Fleming is dead, but this applies to any other author as well)
    - jerf 16y ago
      There's no such thing as a universal fair price. There's the situation when the price is lower than your personal valuation of the good, then you buy it, and there's case where it isn't, in which case you don't. (And don't forget opportunity costs when factoring in your "personal price", there's a lot of things I might be willing to spend $10 on in isolation but I can't actually buy all of them, and you have to factor that in to your personal price.) It's not wrong to sell it for $10, it's not wrong for your price to be $1, the latter fact doesn't give you a license to pirate it simply because your personal price is lower. You can sort of composite up a semi-universal concept of a "fair price" by looking at a suitably chosen large group of people but it's still just an approximation.
cowboyhero 16y ago
That's an odd rant. The same argument could be made for any popular author (King, Rowling, Peterson, etc). The eBooks are priced that way because the estate is afraid of devaluing the Bond brand. (Publishers know that eBook pricing is a race to the bottom and they don't want to get there too soon.) Bond is like Batman or Holmes. Three generations going and his adventures are still published and republished in hardback, special editions, omnibuses, and variant cover paperbacks. There's also a lucrative secondary market of neverending sequels and spinoffs. The estate doesn't want to screw Penguin on pricing by offering an electronic version at $2 when the dead tree version is $15. That undercuts the publisher across the entire line of Bond products.
cosgroveb 16y ago
Call me crazy but I think that publishers should try to sell their e-books at whichever price they want to... Pirates are going to pirate, people looking for the best bargain they can by hunting around ad used book stores will do just that.
mikecane 16y ago
I just want to make it clear that nowhere did I ever state people should pirate the books. If I thought they should, I would have provided a very convenient link to the pirate site. I wanted the Fleming company to be aware they weren't sitting on some sort of OPEC-like monopoly -- which is the thinking that apparently drives the current Agency pricing model in publishing. Pricing is the hot topic in publishing right now. Notice how someone such as Konrath is raking in the dough with his $2.99 eBooks. It doesn't matter what the publisher thinks the "value" is -- it's the price people are willing to pay that matters. Does Konrath think his stuff is devalued because it's no longer in paper form at a higher price? Or does he see the greater value in having a larger income? Tell me, does being free devalue the software a lot of you use? I don't think so. But if they tried to price it, what would you be willing to pay? You're all very smart people here (and I state that without any sarcasm), so I wonder if anyone here has devised any sort of pricing algorithm that could be applied to publishing? I always hold up the Henry Ford model: he priced his cars cheap because he wanted them above all to be affordable and to sell. I think publishing needs to have the same attitude. When people disagree with that, I'm just puzzled and stumped.
loewenskind 16y ago
You generally pay what something is worth to you, not some small percentage more than the creator invested to make that something. eBooks are very convenient compared to books. I can get them easier and they don't have the issues of a physical book. I can have literally rooms worth of books on my iPad and if I move I don't have to dread carrying my library around. If technical books weren't already so expensive I would be willing to pay more for an equivalent eBook than a physical one.

14 points by mikecane 16y ago

"There is no way in hell I am paying frontlist pricing for the work of a dead author whose works can be had for about a buck in used paperback." Well said and good point. I know that many publishers are justifying that they are charging near dead-tree version pricing because of "costs associated with conversion to eBook formats." That's a sham, because 99% of the eBooks out there do not even have formatting as nice as the printed books, nor do they have the photos or imagery associated with chapters. At least, the Amazon and Apple eBooks. I have seen some PDF eBooks from notable publishers (O'Reilly and Pragmatic) who format their eBooks quite nicely. If publishers can make their eBooks look nearly as fantastic as their dead-tree versions (if not better), then I think it's fair to charge near dead-tree pricing. Otherwise, who are they fooling? Most of them are doing a "print to PDF" not actually formatting it.

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
The eBooks I've read on the Kindle seem very very low rent conversions - tables of contents aren't usually linked, links to additional notes at the back of the book are missing (as in the superscript isn't there, let alone linked).
- barrkel 16y ago
  I've seen obvious OCR errors too.
  - adolph 16y ago
    Some errors could be deliberate to detect copyright infringement: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html
- arethuza 16y ago
  Ones I've read recently all seem to have wei-rd hyphenation pro-blems.

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago

This sort of misses the point. Pricing is generally driven by one thing - profit maximisation. That's very different to maximising volume sales. Even if you can go and buy a paperback for $1, there are evidently enough people buying the $10 version (or they wouldn't sell it at that point). If they price the eBook based on the competition from used paperbacks, they're going to risk people who would have paid $10 buying the cheap eBook instead. That may increase volume sales but given their age and the likely number you could shift even selling them for a $1 (after all there are plenty sat unsold in the second handbook shops, it's not like they're flying off the shelves even at that price) the total profit would be lower. So you may not think it's not worth $10 but they know that most people think that and they don't really care. They'd rather sell to 100 people at $10 than 500 at $1 and if you're one of the 400 not buying at the higher price they're not fussed. The other point is that I think people massively over estimate the cost of the physical medium for books. In the UK you can buy a printed copy of War and Peace (nearly 1000 pages) for £1 and at that price it's profitable. The paper is pretty low quality but it's 1000 pages, printed and shipped and profitable for both the publisher and the retailer. Given that I don't think we should expect massive differences between the cost of physical and eBooks.

bryanlarsen 16y ago
"Pricing is generally driven by one thing - short-term profit maximisation." There, fixed that for you. His argument is that they're trading short term gain for long term pain by turning customers into pirates or shudder library patrons. Of course, it may be argued that they're maximizing long term gain at the expense of short term gain by "convincing" users that $10 is an appropriate price for off-list books. I agree with the author, but there is merit to the other argument.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  Sorry, how does that work? People aren't pirates or not pirates - there's nothing that says that once you become a pirate that's you for life. I'm sure there are people who've pirated stuff on here who also buy stuff. One incident doesn't determine your future behaviour. The decision point is different for each person for each medium and each specific product. You may be willing to pay $5 for the new William Gibson but I may think it's worth $20. If they price it at $10 I think it's a bargain, you go looking for a torrent. We both read it, you love it, I hate it. Next time our valuations on it may be completely different and our actions completely different. And with each transaction being an individual thing it all comes back to what you see as short term profit.

mattmaroon 16y ago

This is akin to saying "I can download music for free so record labels should give theirs away on iTunes."

brownleej 16y ago
The author isn't recommending that they give anything away for free. He is talking about how to determine a fair price. Your analogy does not apply.
- zavulon 16y ago
  I don't think it's really the "fair" price.. it's the price that he, the author, would consider buying the books instead of pirating them. Whether that price is really "fair" is debatable. Now, I love freedom of information, torrents, open source, and all of that, but putting myself in any author's shoes, I think it would be infuriating to hear this kind of argument. "I can pirate your book for free, so a fair price would be $1 dollar. I don't care how much work you put in it." (Yes, I know Ian Fleming is dead, but this applies to any other author as well)
  - jerf 16y ago
    There's no such thing as a universal fair price. There's the situation when the price is lower than your personal valuation of the good, then you buy it, and there's case where it isn't, in which case you don't. (And don't forget opportunity costs when factoring in your "personal price", there's a lot of things I might be willing to spend $10 on in isolation but I can't actually buy all of them, and you have to factor that in to your personal price.) It's not wrong to sell it for $10, it's not wrong for your price to be $1, the latter fact doesn't give you a license to pirate it simply because your personal price is lower. You can sort of composite up a semi-universal concept of a "fair price" by looking at a suitably chosen large group of people but it's still just an approximation.

cowboyhero 16y ago

That's an odd rant. The same argument could be made for any popular author (King, Rowling, Peterson, etc). The eBooks are priced that way because the estate is afraid of devaluing the Bond brand. (Publishers know that eBook pricing is a race to the bottom and they don't want to get there too soon.) Bond is like Batman or Holmes. Three generations going and his adventures are still published and republished in hardback, special editions, omnibuses, and variant cover paperbacks. There's also a lucrative secondary market of neverending sequels and spinoffs. The estate doesn't want to screw Penguin on pricing by offering an electronic version at $2 when the dead tree version is $15. That undercuts the publisher across the entire line of Bond products.

cosgroveb 16y ago

Call me crazy but I think that publishers should try to sell their e-books at whichever price they want to... Pirates are going to pirate, people looking for the best bargain they can by hunting around ad used book stores will do just that.

mikecane 16y ago

I just want to make it clear that nowhere did I ever state people should pirate the books. If I thought they should, I would have provided a very convenient link to the pirate site. I wanted the Fleming company to be aware they weren't sitting on some sort of OPEC-like monopoly -- which is the thinking that apparently drives the current Agency pricing model in publishing. Pricing is the hot topic in publishing right now. Notice how someone such as Konrath is raking in the dough with his $2.99 eBooks. It doesn't matter what the publisher thinks the "value" is -- it's the price people are willing to pay that matters. Does Konrath think his stuff is devalued because it's no longer in paper form at a higher price? Or does he see the greater value in having a larger income? Tell me, does being free devalue the software a lot of you use? I don't think so. But if they tried to price it, what would you be willing to pay? You're all very smart people here (and I state that without any sarcasm), so I wonder if anyone here has devised any sort of pricing algorithm that could be applied to publishing? I always hold up the Henry Ford model: he priced his cars cheap because he wanted them above all to be affordable and to sell. I think publishing needs to have the same attitude. When people disagree with that, I'm just puzzled and stumped.

loewenskind 16y ago

You generally pay what something is worth to you, not some small percentage more than the creator invested to make that something. eBooks are very convenient compared to books. I can get them easier and they don't have the issues of a physical book. I can have literally rooms worth of books on my iPad and if I move I don't have to dread carrying my library around. If technical books weren't already so expensive I would be willing to pay more for an equivalent eBook than a physical one.