7 ms·

A Message from the Amazon Books Team

146 points by ashdav 12y ago

ashdav 12y ago
This was also sent as an email to people with a KDP account
- blumkvist 12y ago
  lol, and they dare to mention Orwell? Are you kidding me?
jcanyc 12y ago
The movie ticket vs. book price example in the article above seems like it comes from the article below. This is a great read regarding the history of the paperback. I know this is a complex issue, but I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non-transferable ebook is ludicrous. http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks-transformed-way-americans-read http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks-transfor...
- helen842000 12y ago
  $15+ isn't that ludicrous. For a fiction book sure, but what about a technical ebook? Something that saves a team of $150 per/hour developers multiple hours of work each - shouldn't that have value based pricing. Amazon isn't just encouraging lower ebook pricing, they are actively penalising authors that try to sell books above this level. Try to sell something over that price and the revenue split flips to 70/30 in their favour! They are removing the choice. To have such a huge retailer force authors into such a cheap price bracket really devalues the content and sets consumer expectations.
- rwl 12y ago
  > I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non-transferable ebook is ludicrous. Hmm. I agree that that price is in many cases too high. But as you say, that's because ebooks are non-transferable. Is creating and selling the devices and marketplace that make those ebooks non-transferable also on the consumer's side? Amazon could have adopted EPUB for the Kindle instead of making their own ebook formats, and they could have pushed for higher-priced-but-transferable ebooks without DRM. They haven't done either at any point. It looks to me like Amazon is only on the consumer's side when they can strongarm the consumer into spending more money at Amazon.
jamesbritt 12y ago
There are more comments on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303
spbaar 12y ago
"We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we "just talk." We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. " And the solutions they then present are very admirable. However, it was still amazon that took the unilateral action to punish authors, and it was likely the backlash from that that motivated those three noble solutions. It's a shame amazon had to poison the well with that move, because everything else points to Hachette being dumb and making bad decsions that hurt authors. "Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store." Hachette stonewalled. Amazon took action. Sales of Hachettes' titles. Out store. Clearly, the authors did not factor into these moves. "the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger." That's great, but it's not a justification to hurt authors. It may be more revenue and customers for amazon in the long run, but these are authors who have put their souls into their art and worked for years. Jeopardizing their release window and sales for a percentage is evil and out of touch.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- kjksf 12y ago
  You keep propagating the myth that it's all Amazon's doing. "Amazon took unilateral action to punish authors" ? The contract between Amazon and Hachette expired. They started negotiating a new contract. They can't agree to terms hence Amazon limiting Hachette's stok because, well, they no longer have a contract to sell Hachette's books on Amazon. There was nothing "unilateral" about it. Amazon doesn't agree to Hachette's term. Hachette doesn't agree to Amazon's terms. Amazon didn't "punish" authors. It didn't even "punish" Hachette. 2 giant companies failed to agree on distribution terms. It's regrettable that authors are collateral damage here but how do you put the blame fully on Amazon and none of it on Hachette? Especially given that Amazon is the party that proposed a way to compensate the authors during negotiations. 3 proposals, actually, all of which Hachette rejected. Because Hachette cares about their authors so much.
clickok 12y ago
It's regrettable that some of the authors are losing sales, but I think that Amazon is basically in the right, for the following reasons: 1. Their arguments with regards to price elasticity are supported by (admittedly, Amazon's) data, and are intuitively plausible. Cheaper books sell more, yielding more revenue. The cost of production is substantially lower for ebooks, so passing on some of the savings to consumers seems fair, and further, so long as a literate public is seen as a good thing, there's intangible benefits to consider as well. 2. It's a dispute between two businesses, and Amazon has a legal right to not list/stock books. Honestly, it's like a caricature out of Atlas Shrugged-- you have to sell our books at these prices (of which authors get < 10%) or you're somehow the villain... as opposed to a business that just does not want to sell on those terms. Further, their contribution to the livelihoods of the authors is probably greater than the "value-add" of a publishing house. If sales and distribution from a website is such an easy thing to do, then how is it possible that a single company feels reasonably secure with delisting so many supposedly desirable books? The amount of effort necessary to make 2-day delivery so much cheaper than going to Borders is immense. They also built the Kindle (as well as its ecosystem) and sold the device at a loss, which has helped make the ebook market so big. 3. The "authors" are the only really sympathetic characters in this drama, but they appear to have no agency of their own. Why not move to a different publisher, or publish on Amazon? Because Hachette won't let them out of their contract? I can see why they would want to group together to avoid getting trampled between the two companies, but why side with Hachette? Unless their objective is "fewer books sold, higher prices, and smaller royalty payments", their collective bargaining power would seem to be better put towards forcing Hachette to either agree to terms or release them to find other representation. Agitating on Hachette's behalf is probably the easiest way to get money flowing again, but it's hardly the right thing to do. Given that Amazon's suggested model could be more profitable for all parties, why are the publishers resisting? I suspect that it comes down to the fact that if ebooks become the main method of book distribution, the value of being a publisher would decrease substantially. Amazon (or similar businesses) could handle the printing and distribution, marketing, editing, type-setting, and similar tasks could be passed to firms whose sole purpose is that task. Regardless of how this shakes out between Hachette and Amazon, I can't really see a future for monolithic publishers.
- 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jawns 12y ago
Author here. My publisher is one of the "big five" (not Hachette), and although my books are not affected by this dispute directly, it could be only a matter of time before they are. The problem, as I see it, is that Amazon has so much of the market share not only for e-books but for regular books that they can dictate terms that are highly favorable to them. While you could argue that those terms also benefit the reader -- for now -- the fact is that ultimately, consumers aren't served when one monolithic company gets to effectively call the shots. It may not be a monopoly in the legal sense, but in practice, it has many of the same negative effects.
- allworknoplay 12y ago
  You're entirely correct. The difference between their historical analogy and the present case is that the present dispute has nothing to do with the technology (e-books have already been pretty universally embraced), it has to do with who benefits from its use. They're using the domain "readersunited" to imply that it's readers who benefit, which is only true in a very zero-sum way because Amazon is keeping all the power to cut author/published margins so hard in the future, and not at all true in the typical sense that a new technology can cut costs and introduce benefits for everyone.
- fallinghawks 12y ago
  I have not followed this at all, so pardon my ignorance, but I'm wondering how this affects what the authors get paid. I assume a lower book price means less goes to the author; I understand that lower book prices generally lead to more sales and higher net. Do authors actually end up pocketing more in the latter scenario?
bryanlarsen 12y ago
The best source of 'cheap' books is the library. The only cost is a little bit of inconvenience. Yet library usage is dramatically down over the last few decades. This suggests to me that there is little demand for cheaper books. The biggest 'cost' to reading a book for many is not the money spent to acquire the book, it's the several hours of leisure time required to read the book, time that could be spent doing something else. This suggests to me that the overall book demand curve is fairly inelastic. That Amazon sees more elasticity is not surprising: they're conducting experiments on part of the market. Price has a big influence on what book people buy and where they buy it; but I hypothesize that it has little effect on whether or not they actually buy a book.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  GoG and Steam have more than tripled my purchasing (and many other people's purchasing) of games by reducing prices. Look at the billions of dollars that Apple has made by radically reducing the app price. It's very rare that I ever spend more than $9.99 for an App these days, even though it might be something that I spend hundreds of hours a year with. Amazon is competing for my leisure time with Apps, Netflix, etc.. It's no wonder that higher priced books are losing out.
- dbecker 12y ago
  If you include the value of your time, the library is a more costly option to acquire a book than Amazon for many affluent readers. And most libraries have a small fraction of the books one might want. The fact that people are choosing an efficient way to get the books they want is hardly evidence of inelastic demand.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    You're saying that time is valuable. The cost of the book is the dollar price + the time to acquire + the time to read it. You're saying that the middle cost is significant. That suggests that the latter cost is also significant. Therefore lowering the dollar price of the book has little effect on the total in the above equation.
gprasanth 12y ago
Pfft! Amazon using godaddy to register a domain! Seriously? What happened to route53? Too expensive?
ratsbane 12y ago
http://screwpulp.com http://screwpulp.com has a solution to the ebook pricing problem based on market economics. New books start out as free, then as more copies are downloaded the price goes up.
- dublinben 12y ago
  https://unglue.it/ https://unglue.it/ works in the opposite direction, by releasing books as free Creative Commons works after a bounty has been raised. You can buy your own DRM-free copy for a few bucks, while helping the book reach a free release.
BryantD 12y ago
John Scalzi comments further: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon-gets-increasingly-nervous/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon-gets-increasing... I particularly like the point that self-pub authors ought to be happy that Hatchette is at higher price points, since it leaves the more lucrative markets for them. This is a tribal dispute for most authors on both sides.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
As an author I support Amazon's position because as they say, books compete with the video game, TV, movie, etc. markets, and keeping consumer book prices lower helps grow the book market relative to other forms of entertainment, and I would argue that books benefit society more than video games and TV (but not necessarily movies).
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Please look a little but further than your own self interest. Do you really want one entity having a monopoly on book distribution?
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    I agree that long term, there is a danger in Amazon becoming even more of a monopoly. That said, I find it ridiculous that a non-transferable eBook can sometimes cost very close to the cost of a hard cover print book. I was not making my previous comment out of self interest, BTW. In 25 years of being a published author I have only made chump change (less than $150K) on my writing. I earn my living as a software developer. I write because I enjoy it and through writing I have met some very interesting people who I would not have had a chance to meet otherwise.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Amazon is solving a problem that the individual author or reader does not share: they are making the delivery of books more efficient to the marketplace. Books are in a strange place because the time invested consuming them far outweighs the equivalent cost of purchasing the book. I am not limited by price to the number of books I can consume each month; I am limited by time. Already many readers end up buying more books than they can read. In addition, free books are available at this place called the library. Music, movies, and the rest of digital content is not like this. You can pick up a video game and play it for an hour, then put it down. (In fact, the stats show most apps are only used a few times, then never used again) In an author-reader relationship, the author is trying to provide enough value for the reader to spend dozens of hours and many days consuming the material -- and more to the point, the express purpose is to somehow change the mindscape of the consumer. Good books require lots of time and change the reader forever. So what Amazon is effectively doing is destroying the concept of reading by making it nothing more than an extended version of an mp3 song. But since you can't just consume a book in 3 minutes, more books will be sold and more books will remain unread. Books -- long form content -- will become superfluous. It's all low attention span, immediate pleasure consumption now. I imagine we'll see more and more readers buy an ebook and read a few pages and stop. The nature of reading will change. And while this might result in more overall book sales, it doesn't do much for the individual relationship an author has with a particular reader. There's nothing wrong with making books like every other form of digital content. Everything is bits, and bits gotta be free. But as a consumer of good books, Amazon does not have my best interests at heart. It's just playing a numbers game. My best interests actually might be books that cost 100x what they currently do: make me feel some pain and spend some careful thought about what I'm going to spend my time on. I am not interested in delivering the maximum number of unread ebooks to the most number of non-readers. I am interested in choosing those 5 or 6 books each year that are worth my investment in time to experience. And as an author, I am not interested in maximizing sales. I am interested in maximizing impact. Amazon is friend to neither of us.
blazespin 12y ago
Authors should be allowed to price their IP as they see fit. End of story.
rgbrenner 12y ago
For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger. This doesn't prove what Amazon wants to claim it does. 1) Authors don't just earn royalties from ebook sales. They also earn royalties from hardcover/paperback sales.. and if dropping the ebook price causes lowered paperback sales, then the authors could earn less. So merely showing that lower ebook prices increase ebook sales does not prove Amazon's claim that lower prices increase authors' royalties. 2) Amazon's test may not even prove that it would increase ebook sales. Hachette earns money from the sale if the book is sold at BN, Amazon, or any retailer. If only Amazon lowers it's price to $10, then Amazon may just be getting additional sales that would have gone to other retailers. So the only thing Amazon's test proves is that Amazon would be better off in a fictional world where Amazon has the lowest price in the market -- 33% lower than any other retailer.
- finder83 12y ago
  The assumption here I think is that a book at $9.99 might attract people who wouldn't buy it at $14.99. I'm probably one of those people, particularly with fiction books (computer science books/math books/etc are another issue). There are so many choices that are far below the $14.99 price, that unless it's from a favorite author I'd happily pass up the higher price for another book, or another form of media (like a game). It doesn't matter what other retailers offer the price at, $14.99 is simply too high for an e-book, and I only read fiction books as e-books. I might be the minority, but given the expertise of Amazon at selling books, I think that Amazon probably has a valid point. You're right though, that it doesn't completely prove the point, but I think it definitely makes a point. People who wouldn't buy the e-book at 14.99 are probably unlikely to go out and buy the same book from another retailer for 14.99. The question is if it really increases the market share of the book, or if instead lowering the price on amazon makes everyone who would buy the book would just go to amazon for the cheaper price. (Given that e-books cost nearly nothing to distribute, I would think that the price drop would pretty easily pay for itself though)

146 points by ashdav 12y ago

ashdav 12y ago

This was also sent as an email to people with a KDP account

blumkvist 12y ago
lol, and they dare to mention Orwell? Are you kidding me?

jcanyc 12y ago

The movie ticket vs. book price example in the article above seems like it comes from the article below. This is a great read regarding the history of the paperback. I know this is a complex issue, but I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non-transferable ebook is ludicrous. http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks-transformed-way-americans-read http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks-transfor...

helen842000 12y ago
$15+ isn't that ludicrous. For a fiction book sure, but what about a technical ebook? Something that saves a team of $150 per/hour developers multiple hours of work each - shouldn't that have value based pricing. Amazon isn't just encouraging lower ebook pricing, they are actively penalising authors that try to sell books above this level. Try to sell something over that price and the revenue split flips to 70/30 in their favour! They are removing the choice. To have such a huge retailer force authors into such a cheap price bracket really devalues the content and sets consumer expectations.
rwl 12y ago
> I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non-transferable ebook is ludicrous. Hmm. I agree that that price is in many cases too high. But as you say, that's because ebooks are non-transferable. Is creating and selling the devices and marketplace that make those ebooks non-transferable also on the consumer's side? Amazon could have adopted EPUB for the Kindle instead of making their own ebook formats, and they could have pushed for higher-priced-but-transferable ebooks without DRM. They haven't done either at any point. It looks to me like Amazon is only on the consumer's side when they can strongarm the consumer into spending more money at Amazon.

jamesbritt 12y ago

There are more comments on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303

spbaar 12y ago

"We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we "just talk." We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. " And the solutions they then present are very admirable. However, it was still amazon that took the unilateral action to punish authors, and it was likely the backlash from that that motivated those three noble solutions. It's a shame amazon had to poison the well with that move, because everything else points to Hachette being dumb and making bad decsions that hurt authors. "Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store." Hachette stonewalled. Amazon took action. Sales of Hachettes' titles. Out store. Clearly, the authors did not factor into these moves. "the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger." That's great, but it's not a justification to hurt authors. It may be more revenue and customers for amazon in the long run, but these are authors who have put their souls into their art and worked for years. Jeopardizing their release window and sales for a percentage is evil and out of touch.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kjksf 12y ago
You keep propagating the myth that it's all Amazon's doing. "Amazon took unilateral action to punish authors" ? The contract between Amazon and Hachette expired. They started negotiating a new contract. They can't agree to terms hence Amazon limiting Hachette's stok because, well, they no longer have a contract to sell Hachette's books on Amazon. There was nothing "unilateral" about it. Amazon doesn't agree to Hachette's term. Hachette doesn't agree to Amazon's terms. Amazon didn't "punish" authors. It didn't even "punish" Hachette. 2 giant companies failed to agree on distribution terms. It's regrettable that authors are collateral damage here but how do you put the blame fully on Amazon and none of it on Hachette? Especially given that Amazon is the party that proposed a way to compensate the authors during negotiations. 3 proposals, actually, all of which Hachette rejected. Because Hachette cares about their authors so much.

clickok 12y ago

It's regrettable that some of the authors are losing sales, but I think that Amazon is basically in the right, for the following reasons: 1. Their arguments with regards to price elasticity are supported by (admittedly, Amazon's) data, and are intuitively plausible. Cheaper books sell more, yielding more revenue. The cost of production is substantially lower for ebooks, so passing on some of the savings to consumers seems fair, and further, so long as a literate public is seen as a good thing, there's intangible benefits to consider as well. 2. It's a dispute between two businesses, and Amazon has a legal right to not list/stock books. Honestly, it's like a caricature out of Atlas Shrugged-- you have to sell our books at these prices (of which authors get < 10%) or you're somehow the villain... as opposed to a business that just does not want to sell on those terms. Further, their contribution to the livelihoods of the authors is probably greater than the "value-add" of a publishing house. If sales and distribution from a website is such an easy thing to do, then how is it possible that a single company feels reasonably secure with delisting so many supposedly desirable books? The amount of effort necessary to make 2-day delivery so much cheaper than going to Borders is immense. They also built the Kindle (as well as its ecosystem) and sold the device at a loss, which has helped make the ebook market so big. 3. The "authors" are the only really sympathetic characters in this drama, but they appear to have no agency of their own. Why not move to a different publisher, or publish on Amazon? Because Hachette won't let them out of their contract? I can see why they would want to group together to avoid getting trampled between the two companies, but why side with Hachette? Unless their objective is "fewer books sold, higher prices, and smaller royalty payments", their collective bargaining power would seem to be better put towards forcing Hachette to either agree to terms or release them to find other representation. Agitating on Hachette's behalf is probably the easiest way to get money flowing again, but it's hardly the right thing to do. Given that Amazon's suggested model could be more profitable for all parties, why are the publishers resisting? I suspect that it comes down to the fact that if ebooks become the main method of book distribution, the value of being a publisher would decrease substantially. Amazon (or similar businesses) could handle the printing and distribution, marketing, editing, type-setting, and similar tasks could be passed to firms whose sole purpose is that task. Regardless of how this shakes out between Hachette and Amazon, I can't really see a future for monolithic publishers.

12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jawns 12y ago

Author here. My publisher is one of the "big five" (not Hachette), and although my books are not affected by this dispute directly, it could be only a matter of time before they are. The problem, as I see it, is that Amazon has so much of the market share not only for e-books but for regular books that they can dictate terms that are highly favorable to them. While you could argue that those terms also benefit the reader -- for now -- the fact is that ultimately, consumers aren't served when one monolithic company gets to effectively call the shots. It may not be a monopoly in the legal sense, but in practice, it has many of the same negative effects.

allworknoplay 12y ago
You're entirely correct. The difference between their historical analogy and the present case is that the present dispute has nothing to do with the technology (e-books have already been pretty universally embraced), it has to do with who benefits from its use. They're using the domain "readersunited" to imply that it's readers who benefit, which is only true in a very zero-sum way because Amazon is keeping all the power to cut author/published margins so hard in the future, and not at all true in the typical sense that a new technology can cut costs and introduce benefits for everyone.
fallinghawks 12y ago
I have not followed this at all, so pardon my ignorance, but I'm wondering how this affects what the authors get paid. I assume a lower book price means less goes to the author; I understand that lower book prices generally lead to more sales and higher net. Do authors actually end up pocketing more in the latter scenario?

bryanlarsen 12y ago

The best source of 'cheap' books is the library. The only cost is a little bit of inconvenience. Yet library usage is dramatically down over the last few decades. This suggests to me that there is little demand for cheaper books. The biggest 'cost' to reading a book for many is not the money spent to acquire the book, it's the several hours of leisure time required to read the book, time that could be spent doing something else. This suggests to me that the overall book demand curve is fairly inelastic. That Amazon sees more elasticity is not surprising: they're conducting experiments on part of the market. Price has a big influence on what book people buy and where they buy it; but I hypothesize that it has little effect on whether or not they actually buy a book.

ghshephard 12y ago
GoG and Steam have more than tripled my purchasing (and many other people's purchasing) of games by reducing prices. Look at the billions of dollars that Apple has made by radically reducing the app price. It's very rare that I ever spend more than $9.99 for an App these days, even though it might be something that I spend hundreds of hours a year with. Amazon is competing for my leisure time with Apps, Netflix, etc.. It's no wonder that higher priced books are losing out.
dbecker 12y ago
If you include the value of your time, the library is a more costly option to acquire a book than Amazon for many affluent readers. And most libraries have a small fraction of the books one might want. The fact that people are choosing an efficient way to get the books they want is hardly evidence of inelastic demand.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  You're saying that time is valuable. The cost of the book is the dollar price + the time to acquire + the time to read it. You're saying that the middle cost is significant. That suggests that the latter cost is also significant. Therefore lowering the dollar price of the book has little effect on the total in the above equation.

gprasanth 12y ago

Pfft! Amazon using godaddy to register a domain! Seriously? What happened to route53? Too expensive?

ratsbane 12y ago

http://screwpulp.com http://screwpulp.com has a solution to the ebook pricing problem based on market economics. New books start out as free, then as more copies are downloaded the price goes up.

dublinben 12y ago
https://unglue.it/ https://unglue.it/ works in the opposite direction, by releasing books as free Creative Commons works after a bounty has been raised. You can buy your own DRM-free copy for a few bucks, while helping the book reach a free release.

BryantD 12y ago

John Scalzi comments further: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon-gets-increasingly-nervous/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon-gets-increasing... I particularly like the point that self-pub authors ought to be happy that Hatchette is at higher price points, since it leaves the more lucrative markets for them. This is a tribal dispute for most authors on both sides.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

As an author I support Amazon's position because as they say, books compete with the video game, TV, movie, etc. markets, and keeping consumer book prices lower helps grow the book market relative to other forms of entertainment, and I would argue that books benefit society more than video games and TV (but not necessarily movies).

blumkvist 12y ago
Please look a little but further than your own self interest. Do you really want one entity having a monopoly on book distribution?
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  I agree that long term, there is a danger in Amazon becoming even more of a monopoly. That said, I find it ridiculous that a non-transferable eBook can sometimes cost very close to the cost of a hard cover print book. I was not making my previous comment out of self interest, BTW. In 25 years of being a published author I have only made chump change (less than $150K) on my writing. I earn my living as a software developer. I write because I enjoy it and through writing I have met some very interesting people who I would not have had a chance to meet otherwise.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Amazon is solving a problem that the individual author or reader does not share: they are making the delivery of books more efficient to the marketplace. Books are in a strange place because the time invested consuming them far outweighs the equivalent cost of purchasing the book. I am not limited by price to the number of books I can consume each month; I am limited by time. Already many readers end up buying more books than they can read. In addition, free books are available at this place called the library. Music, movies, and the rest of digital content is not like this. You can pick up a video game and play it for an hour, then put it down. (In fact, the stats show most apps are only used a few times, then never used again) In an author-reader relationship, the author is trying to provide enough value for the reader to spend dozens of hours and many days consuming the material -- and more to the point, the express purpose is to somehow change the mindscape of the consumer. Good books require lots of time and change the reader forever. So what Amazon is effectively doing is destroying the concept of reading by making it nothing more than an extended version of an mp3 song. But since you can't just consume a book in 3 minutes, more books will be sold and more books will remain unread. Books -- long form content -- will become superfluous. It's all low attention span, immediate pleasure consumption now. I imagine we'll see more and more readers buy an ebook and read a few pages and stop. The nature of reading will change. And while this might result in more overall book sales, it doesn't do much for the individual relationship an author has with a particular reader. There's nothing wrong with making books like every other form of digital content. Everything is bits, and bits gotta be free. But as a consumer of good books, Amazon does not have my best interests at heart. It's just playing a numbers game. My best interests actually might be books that cost 100x what they currently do: make me feel some pain and spend some careful thought about what I'm going to spend my time on. I am not interested in delivering the maximum number of unread ebooks to the most number of non-readers. I am interested in choosing those 5 or 6 books each year that are worth my investment in time to experience. And as an author, I am not interested in maximizing sales. I am interested in maximizing impact. Amazon is friend to neither of us.

blazespin 12y ago

Authors should be allowed to price their IP as they see fit. End of story.

rgbrenner 12y ago

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger. This doesn't prove what Amazon wants to claim it does. 1) Authors don't just earn royalties from ebook sales. They also earn royalties from hardcover/paperback sales.. and if dropping the ebook price causes lowered paperback sales, then the authors could earn less. So merely showing that lower ebook prices increase ebook sales does not prove Amazon's claim that lower prices increase authors' royalties. 2) Amazon's test may not even prove that it would increase ebook sales. Hachette earns money from the sale if the book is sold at BN, Amazon, or any retailer. If only Amazon lowers it's price to $10, then Amazon may just be getting additional sales that would have gone to other retailers. So the only thing Amazon's test proves is that Amazon would be better off in a fictional world where Amazon has the lowest price in the market -- 33% lower than any other retailer.

finder83 12y ago
The assumption here I think is that a book at $9.99 might attract people who wouldn't buy it at $14.99. I'm probably one of those people, particularly with fiction books (computer science books/math books/etc are another issue). There are so many choices that are far below the $14.99 price, that unless it's from a favorite author I'd happily pass up the higher price for another book, or another form of media (like a game). It doesn't matter what other retailers offer the price at, $14.99 is simply too high for an e-book, and I only read fiction books as e-books. I might be the minority, but given the expertise of Amazon at selling books, I think that Amazon probably has a valid point. You're right though, that it doesn't completely prove the point, but I think it definitely makes a point. People who wouldn't buy the e-book at 14.99 are probably unlikely to go out and buy the same book from another retailer for 14.99. The question is if it really increases the market share of the book, or if instead lowering the price on amazon makes everyone who would buy the book would just go to amazon for the cheaper price. (Given that e-books cost nearly nothing to distribute, I would think that the price drop would pretty easily pay for itself though)