9 ms·
Book publishers call on Apple to match 15% commission granted to developers
- fock 6y agowell, maybe they could just setup a website, let me drop a coin and download a freely convertible, virus-free copy of the book. Setup cost around ~10k, all profits go to them. (and I would actually buy books there)
- momokoko 6y agoThis is a joke I’m hoping so my apologies if I missed it. Apple intentionally cripples the web experience and if you put it in an app, you still have to pay the Apple commission. I sincerely hope this is a joke or that you work for Apple and you livelihood depends on you not understanding this.
- xvector 6y agoThat’s not what OP’s saying, they’re talking about a website that lets you download books (ie .ePub files) that you would open in the Books app. The reading experience is no different.
- beering 6y agoParent comment is not a joke - I would also like to purchase ebooks without DRM - just a file that I can convert/load onto my Kindle, iPhone, etc. They can sell the ebooks on the web and have you download it onto your iPhone. It doesn’t have to be all in one app.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoYou can download files in safari...
- BostonEnginerd 6y agoNow that’s just crazy talk!
- Xelbair 6y agomaybe in the first place they would allow me to buy an ebook i want. Often i want to buy some ebooks in English, but i legally cannot. UK based publisher has rights to the series, but doesn't sell ebooks, while US based one has an ebook but cannot legally sell it to me. The whole ebook industry is absolutely atrocious from consumer PoV. DRM, locked down systems, the problems outlined above.. and for some reason ebooks usually cost more than physical books over here! I mean one has draconian DRM and license attached, can be purged from your device and account for no reason.. while other is a physical good without such restrictions, that i can legally lend to my friends.
- hairofadog 6y agoSuper agree with the sentiment of this comment. Just this morning I read a recent Kottke post and noticed he's got a shop set up on bookshop.org, and so decided to check it out – it's a site that says they help small local bookstores. Great! But I prefer e-books, and the only way I can consume ebooks through this service (or through kobo’s similar “support local bookstores” marketplace) is to use their terrible apps (I know, I know, you who are reading this find Kobo’s app to be just fine, but I’m picky and don't like it) so Apple Books or Kindle it is, all because of DRM. I know from their perspective it's a calculus – they'll lose some money to piracy, and maybe that adds up to a lot more from what they'd gain from selling to persnickety people like me, so maybe they're making the right call. But what I want as a consumer is to sometimes buy hardbacks, mostly buy ebooks, read them in the reader of my choice, and to support my local bookshop and the authors and editors, which I guess is an impossible dream.
- b34r 6y ago10k? Like $100 lol
- seqastian 6y agobook market things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price They prevented what happened to music so nothing will change ever.
- beefield 6y agoI just can't get my head around that the publishers have been looking at music industry going from napster to torrent to spotify. Now they are looking at libgen and seem to be completely unable to connect the dots and come up with a coop that sells all their books with a monthly fee so that they could keep the profits instead of amazon or whatever startup that manages to circumvent all the legal hassles and make a spotify for books. How hard can it be for a couple of larger publishers to start a common book streaming service with a note that all other publisherss welcome, you become a member in the coop and get to say how the coop works, coop takes a fee from sales just to cover operating costs and rest goes to publisher/author?
- GiorgioG 6y agoHaving worked for a very large publisher - they don’t get tech at all.
- dlgeek 6y agoAmazon did this - it's called Kindle Unlimited.
- fock 6y agoboth of you miss the point. I want to have a diskful of books, I can pass on to my kin and also share with friends (which is like normal books worked for years...). I don't want to have a streamingservice which can censor and restrict my rights to read a book at will.
- peternicky 6y ago100%...
- hk__2 6y ago> both of you miss the point. They don’t "miss the point", they just disagree with you.
- Nbox9 6y agoYou’re missing the point. Some people still buy CDs and Records. Some people fill up disks with .flac or .acc files. The industry still serves those customers, but the real business is happening on the streaming services. What _you_ want and what the market demands are two different things.
- 6510 6y agoLets mature web standards so that one can write and publish a book - with just html. Then also do distributed search so that one can find things. Something with supper nodes for those of us who want faster and more complex queries. html, with some minor upgrades, again seems good enough. DRM is a silly idea, we should forget about it. Just write free works until the audience is impressed enough to donate to current effort. And finally some simple to use aggregation formula so that authors can learn what we want to read about. No more middle men.
- hk__2 6y ago> Just write free works until the audience is impressed enough to donate to current effort. I get the rest of the comment, but I don’t understand that part: unless you already have too much money, there’s absolutely no reason you should work for free.
- 6510 6y agoYou don't need to much money to do what you like. I want to see a basic income which makes DRM one of the many "old world" formulas that cant work perfectly even if you throw infinite money at it. To pay people to write is as simple as it sounds. While some components might be legitimate there is really no end to greed in rent seeking formulas. We can look at the TV license in the UK to see what the future might look like. They didn't even have the modern tools to monitor everyone. The system involves a database of houses where the license was not purchased. Agents will make unannounced visits to search your house. In stead of impossible some would argue it was simply a hard problem to write into law. From that perspective we failed to create a carefully balanced set of rules. As long as the demands are small steps the copyright industry gets what they want every time while the consumer, the party argued to so greatly benefit from these laws (what a joke),..... well.... the consumer gets to play and sing songs from before 1923! When Swartz downloaded a pile of ancient garbage articles he was going to get 35 years in prison for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. This is complete nonsense and everyone knows it. If the industry wants to go full retard it should be treated as such. Therefore we should burn it to the ground and keep the authors and keep the artists. Pay them for what they do. The only thing that matters is that the unwashed masses who already cant find work get access to educational materials. Everything else is either not important or simply entertainment. You cant use tax money for entertainment as long as you are taking it from people who can barely pay their bills. You can use it to sponsor crowd funding so that they can learn useful things and ponder the many intelligent thoughts others wrote down. To me this sounds a lot better than [say] sponsoring scientific journals with public funds so that they can paywall the stuff we've paid for. There are tons of old books. People can go read those first before demanding more free work from authors for the benefit of publishers. It is also easy to remove % fees from app stores by writing some laws. Or are we to think it will bankrupt google and apple? I cant recall paying Microsoft any fees. It is my country. The legal system is there to serve me.
- pmalynin 6y agoIsn’t this what No Starch Press is doing?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoFuck these greedy cunts asking for more, and fuck Apple for being weak bitches and rolling over for any of this in the first place. Record labels take 70-80% from artists, Apple could have simply cited that and increased their cut. But a literal bottom twink faggot runs the company so I suppose strong positions can’t be expected.
- supernova87a 6y agoSure, milk whatever they have the political or economic clout to achieve. But I would say that the argument is even less favorable for them that Apple exerts an unfair monopoly over the outlets for them to publish their works. They have a world of ways to publish their content and simply want a bigger cut of this one. No principles about it.
- larrik 6y agoThis is true. I mean, no one I know has ever admitted to purchasing a book through iBooks.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoI exchange please remove DRM from ebooks.
- arendtio 6y agoShort Story: A few weeks ago, I had trouble to connect my Sennheiser Headphones to a bluetooth splitter. So I downloaded the manual and after some time I found what I was doing wrong. To let me find the critical part faster next time, I wanted to highlight the relevant part of the manual. Sadly the manual was DRM protected and didn't want to let me annotate the manual... So I had to find a way to work around it, but I felt like a criminal, just because I wanted to use a highlighter on the digital manual of a physical product I bought.
- colejohnson66 6y agoWhat is even the point of DRM protected manuals? I can understand it on book, but manuals? Piracy of a manual isn’t going to affect sales of the product; I (almost all the time) have no need for the manual if I don’t own the product.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoMaybe they want to avoid anybody who copies their hardware from copying the manual. About the only thing I can see but at that point you lost the war.
- OnlyLys 6y agoEbook DRMs are truly some of the most annoying things ever. I just want to click "Pay", and then click "download PDF" so I can annotate the books in my favorite app. Why do they have to make it more complicated than that. This reminds me of a few months ago when I accidentally bought a 90 USD Ebook that came with DRM. I didn't realize it until I clicked the download button and got some Adobe digital editions file. I immediately Googled for a PDF copy of the book and saw that there were plenty on the first page of Google, so I don't know what the point of the DRM was other than to make me have to download some crappy reader just to read it. Thank goodness the company that sold the Ebook was willing to refund me.
- wdb 6y agoWhat about we first start with the book publishers paying a fair share of royalties? 1.5% is nothing
- toby 6y agoMy first thought... when you realize they've been taking 96% as the gatekeepers for so long, Apple's fees don't sound as absurd. With traditional print publishing there is a lot of value add, but with ebooks they're really just choosing winners. Aside: I have met several people who admitted to downloading my books on torrents, and they gave me the $2 I would have made if they'd bought it :)
- 6510 6y agoThat's hilarious. I would give you $2 to just keep writing. Sadly the technology is just not there. Everyone is busy welding the next digital prison for popular walled gardens. Building a forest of plastic plants.
- ownagefool 6y agoIt's sad that books don't have the equivalent of steam sales. I have so many games I'll never play, because at $2 it seems rude not to but at £30, I gotta think about it.
- pkaye 6y agoA few of the tech oriented publishers have ebook sales on their websites from time to time. Like Apress has $6 per ebook during black friday. Informit was 55% off per ebook book.
- wdb 6y agoYeah, and the sad part is that the paper copies royalty is different from the ebook copies. And when someone buys your book in bulk or the publisher gives away promotion copies it get counted differently. Still waiting for hunderds of US dollars worth of royalties :(
- 6y ago
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoNo good deed goes unpunished. But really, apps and books are apples and oranges. Similar in one regard, both are digital goods, but not in important ones that matter strategically. Apple doesn’t have the stranglehold on ebook reading that they have on apps. For those who don’t know, you can’t buy ebooks on iOS without paying an Apple tax, but as many kindle users know, you can of course buy kindle books via a browser and then read them in the kindle app. Not to mention the work that goes into custom developing an iOS app compared to simply compiling text an editing to whatever format Apple requires.
- intricatedetail 6y agoIs it really that different? You can think of it as an app that shows information you can navigate. It just needs a runtime e.g. pdf viewer just like apps need e.g. java runtime.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoThat’s an interesting point, because I guess nothing stopping an author from publishing their book wrapped in an ereader app and getting the commission discount, although they lose some of the market discovery benefit. Different contexts and ecosystems. The tech behind it has very little to do with the business/production and user end use.
- intricatedetail 6y agoI think some religious books are actually delivered this way and are quite successful.
- politelemon 6y agoYes it's quite different. It's a deliberate platform lock in. Its pervasiveness does not make it the same as alternatives, it's far worse.
- shuckles 6y agoDidn’t Apple lose an anti-trust lawsuit for plotting to do exactly this before the launch of the Books store?
- theshrike79 6y agoYea, they lost for doing something Amazon was doing and is still doing :D
- canuckintime 6y agoNo. Apple plotted with the biggest 5 book publishers to enforce a 30% commission not just on the Apple Book store but all other ebook stores as well. This new request is by a consortium of independent book sellers, authors that the App Store and Apple Book store commission rates should match
- shuckles 6y agoI thought the key proposal was changing to an agency business model where Apple would charge a commission and publishers would set prices, as opposed to Amazon’s status quo at the time where Amazon would both set prices and their own fees.
- canuckintime 6y agoThe key problematic proposal was not the business model per se (the agency model was left largely in place even after the anti-trust was lost and punitive measures applied), it was Apple coordinating the publisher oligopoly to force Amazon and other ebook stores to switch their business models in concert.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- josephcsible 6y agoI don't see a need for this. The reason Apple's commission for apps is a problem is that they have a monopoly on iOS app sales. But publishers can sell books that can be read on iOS without going through Apple. If they don't like the cut, they should just sell their product elsewhere. (Now if Apple were to do something like ban ePub reader apps that worked on outside purchased books, I'd change my tune.)
- zamadatix 6y agoThat's one commonly presented half of the app problem, the other commonly presented half is the blocking of alternative means of payment from the device. The latter half isn't talked about as much on the app side because once you can load an app outside of the official app store the presumption is there won't be any problems with the app using non-apple payment. It's still a problem whether or not you can buy something externally and then import it as Apple has restrictions as to what the app can tell you about this (e.g. you're not allowed to say "go to website.com and buy it for 30% less than on your iPhone" in the app) and it's artificially increasing the barrier to this option. Whether or not you think those points on their own is enough to warrant specific action is up to you. The problem is people talk in these threads as if arguments they don't agree with don't exist which leads to a lot of the same discussions every time a thread about this comes up. My personal take is the official store should be able to set whatever percentages as long as the option to use 3rd party distribution and 3rd party payment is there. I.e. let people decide if alternatives are better not try to force Apple to set certain cuts. I can see a lot of why others don't think that though but for me it really comes down to full vertical lock in being as damaging to competition as full horizontal lock in IMO.
- m3kw9 6y agoThis is like an industry getting tax breaks, then another asking for the same assuming all else is the same.
- kerng 6y agoEven 15% is still outrageous. 2-3% would be reasonsble or a small fixed amount Imagine credit card company taking 15 or 30%...
- fnordsensei 6y agoA reasonable argument, if the credit card company also provides the infrastructure for distribution of the goods.
- zamadatix 6y agoA reasonable argument, if we had any proof that infrastructure is actually what is driving the 30% cut. Unfortunately there are no alternative integrated payment and distribution methods allowed so we can't really say. My gut feeling is nowhere near 28% of the cost of a digital book is in delivering the file to the user though.
- toyg 6y agoHave a look at Apple’s revenues from digital services, then tell us again with a straight face that their prices are driven by infrastructure costs - I dare you.
- fnordsensei 6y agoSo we should work with the hypothesis that distribution and infrastructure is free? I'm not saying that Apple doesn't have a healthy profit margin, only that comparing them to a card processor is simplistic. This whole tone of "straight face" and "I dare you" comes across as affective and childish.
- kerng 6y agoAppstore distribution seems a simple problem compared to becoming a payment provider. Payment infrastructure is a lot more complex and difficult to implement, and it also needs integrations.
- 6y ago
- mr_toad 6y agoAnd what percentage do the publishers extract? I’m betting the Author doesn’t see 30%.