5 ms·

Do you own trees?

25 points by jmorin007 18y ago

shimon 18y ago
Provocative article. But I don't think the fact that book publishers price ebooks and paper books the same is about protecting printing plants. It's actually about protecting a distribution advantage, which is a core part of the publishing business. The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios. Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller. Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.
- technoguyrob 18y ago
  Not to mention, there are a lot of people who don't care about the medium, but rather the price (e.g., college students). I know if an e-book was priced $8 versus the $10 paper version, I'd go with the $8 for pretty much any book. It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Finally, although I can see reasons for pricing it above the paper version (you have features like search, copy and paste, etc.), I think many people would find this absurd. Hence, the only remaining option is to price them at the same cost as the paper version. Clearly, any of the other options are possible, but the reasons listed here are, I think, valid for not doing so.
  - Herring 18y ago
    > It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Assuming, of course, that lower prices mean less profits. That's not always true. It's more complex than that.
mynameishere 18y ago
http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summary http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summa... 28 gigabytes of ebooks. Why would publishers even want to encourage digital formats? Obviously, ANY tactic that will slow the inevitable is good for them.
GavinB 18y ago
Aren't they just charging the price that they can get away with? The publishing house and authors get the part of the money that would normally go to the printers, loggers, shippers, etc.
- cia_plant 18y ago
  Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X should see the inflated price of ebooks as a revenue opportunity - undercut everyone else by charging less of a markup, and they would probably get a much larger chunk of the market to make up for it. My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of (probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the television industry.

25 points by jmorin007 18y ago

Provocative article. But I don't think the fact that book publishers price ebooks and paper books the same is about protecting printing plants. It's actually about protecting a distribution advantage, which is a core part of the publishing business. The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios. Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller. Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.

technoguyrob 18y ago
Not to mention, there are a lot of people who don't care about the medium, but rather the price (e.g., college students). I know if an e-book was priced $8 versus the $10 paper version, I'd go with the $8 for pretty much any book. It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Finally, although I can see reasons for pricing it above the paper version (you have features like search, copy and paste, etc.), I think many people would find this absurd. Hence, the only remaining option is to price them at the same cost as the paper version. Clearly, any of the other options are possible, but the reasons listed here are, I think, valid for not doing so.
- Herring 18y ago
  > It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Assuming, of course, that lower prices mean less profits. That's not always true. It's more complex than that.

mynameishere 18y ago

http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summary http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summa... 28 gigabytes of ebooks. Why would publishers even want to encourage digital formats? Obviously, ANY tactic that will slow the inevitable is good for them.

GavinB 18y ago

Aren't they just charging the price that they can get away with? The publishing house and authors get the part of the money that would normally go to the printers, loggers, shippers, etc.

cia_plant 18y ago
Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X should see the inflated price of ebooks as a revenue opportunity - undercut everyone else by charging less of a markup, and they would probably get a much larger chunk of the market to make up for it. My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of (probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the television industry.