4 ms·
With a physical book, since it (1) costs money to make the book, and (2) rapid iteration of content is difficult, there's a huge infrastructure (editors, agents
by psranga 17y ago
With a physical book, since it (1) costs money to make the book, and (2) rapid iteration of content is difficult, there's a huge infrastructure (editors, agents, proofreaders) to select the "good" from the "bad".
With electronic publishing, you just let the crowd do the selection. And it costs virtually nothing to store each additional book.
I hope we move to a web-like world for e-books where an author can publish and charge for a book after eliminating the middleman.
Think about it: without the "Amazon tax", e-books would cost only 33% of what they do now (eliminating Amazon's cut).
Also the percentage-based commission makes no sense. It costs Amazon the same to store/tranfer a book that costs $100 and a book that costs $10. A $1/book "shipping fee" would be more reasonable.
The situation is ripe for an execution-oriented company like Google to move in and kick Amazon.
- DenisM 17y agoThe kindles might cost more and come with recurring subscription though.
- ippisl 17y agoI think it's the perfect time for authors to organize and to do something to push the future book platform to their direction. If they organize they would have a huge marketing clout , and combine that with some company that works with some business model that they like , and offers distribution etc... could make a very powerfull offer.
- MaysonL 17y agoLulu charges a flat fee of $1.99 per copy (or 2.98 for DRM'ed edition).
- tewks 17y agoWhat concerns me is whether a pattern similar to the distributor's downward price pressure that you rightly illustrate will be mirrored for content creators, be they authors, musicians, software developers, etc.