Yostivanich

Amazon.com has recently decided to pull Macmil­lan books from their online store due to a spat over ebooks pric­ing. Essen­tially Macmil­lan wants ebooks prices to be more flex­i­ble, rang­ing from $15 to $5 depend­ing on the title and age of the book.

This makes a lot of sense for a pub­lisher, they want prices to float in line with most other real world goods.

So pub­lish­ers, look­ing at sup­ply and demand, think that there’s low enough demand that they can up the prices a bit and over­all, in that first while, make a lit­tle more. There are enough peo­ple who are excited about an author no mat­ter what the cost, that they’ll make more. This way they’re cov­er­ing the cost of the guy who makes sure the books get con­verted into nice eBook ver­sions. And over time, they’ll drop the price.

Via: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/

Ama­zon cer­tainly has the right as a busi­ness to choose to not sell books from a pub­lisher, and the pub­lisher also has the right to not offer their books to Ama­zon to be sold. Unfor­tu­nately this is a part of the bat­tle where pub­lish­ers don’t have a lot of sway with con­sumers. My loy­alty is with Ama­zon, I buy most every­thing online through Ama­zon, which is most of my shop­ping out­side of food. I don’t know who or what pub­lishes my books, all that I know for sure is that I like Ama­zon and they make me happy. When­ever I read up of a new gizmo, book, movie, basi­cally any­thing that I want it goes on my Ama­zon Wish­list, I have over 1,300 items on there most to set to be pur­chased directly through Amazon.

Recently, it has come to my atten­tion that some of you are hav­ing a bit of a spat with Ama­zon, cen­ter­ing over release sched­ules, pric­ing issues, and, above all, con­trol. This sent me walk­ing over to my book shelf to check whether those of you who are hav­ing the spat with Ama­zon actu­ally pub­lish authors I read. The fact that I didn’t know this off the top of my head, and that this is the first time I’ve thought about indi­vid­ual pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies in my entire life, should be a pre­view of com­ing attrac­tions for you as regards to which com­pany I am back­ing in this fight.

Via: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/31/four-open-letters-to-the-book-industry/

That all being said there are things that Ama­zon does with their ebooks I’m not happy with, DRM being the largest of these. How­ever you know what I have done, I’ve spent sev­eral hours going through and chang­ing all my books in my Ama­zon Wish­list to Kin­dle ebooks. I love the idea of an ebook, the abil­ity to own a book for­ever, never to worry about it being destroyed due to a flood or over read­ing. I’ve lit­er­ally destroyed books that keep get­ting read over and over. While I may not today pur­chase as many books as I used to due to being in col­lege, I love read­ing and I love books.

The pub­lish­ers are going to try a new tac­tic, join forces with Apple and the iPad and hope that Apple cre­ates an sec­ond wind for pub­lish­ers much like the record indus­try. In a sense Ama­zon is viewed as the peer-to-peer net­works and Bit­torent of this bat­tle with pub­lish­ers, I guess? This idea doesn’t even make a lot of sense, because Ama­zon unlike the peer-to-peer net­works is a legal busi­ness, they sim­ply aren’t in the eyes of the pub­lish­ing indus­try charg­ing enough for their products.

Apple does have a few things going for itself, it prob­a­bly has just as much cus­tomer loy­alty as Ama­zon does, it has a huge cus­tomer base already using the iPhone and iPod, it does have a lot of music sold but it isn’t the Wal­Mart of the online world, Ama­zon is. When you need to buy any­thing other than music, you are prob­a­bly look­ing at Ama­zon or a store sell­ing items through Ama­zon. Per­son­ally, I also buy my music through Ama­zon as I get in MP3 for­mat as opposed to AAC, how­ever I’m not most consumers.

Okay, so let’s try to sum this up, Ama­zon is an awe­some com­pany, Apple also an awe­some com­pany, both have loy­alty, pub­lish­ers don’t. The iPad and the abil­ity to buy books via Apple is not out today and won’t be for 2 months. Ama­zon is eas­ily out­classed in terms of hard­ware design, but can you read your Apple pur­chased books on your iPhone, lap­top, etc? Thus far I haven’t heard any­thing about that and that is an impor­tant point. One of the ben­e­fits to the Kin­dle App on the iPhone is that I don’t have to own a Kin­dle to read the book and it makes it really easy when walk­ing or trav­el­ing to pull it out and read a few pages. I would assume you would be able to, but who knows Apple might be crazy and not let you read your books on your lap­top or iPhone. That all being said, I would think Ama­zon would love the iPad, it’s far supe­rior hard­ware design will make it an awe­some ebook reader. Ama­zon shouldn’t really be in the busi­ness of sell­ing hardware.

As for Ama­zon, they might wind up delighted with this thing. Apple’s in the busi­ness of sell­ing devices first, con­tent sec­ond. I think Ama­zon is in the con­tent busi­ness first, the device busi­ness sec­ond. A world where Kin­dle hard­ware sales pale in com­par­i­son to the iPad but where there’s a very pop­u­lar Kin­dle app for iPad that com­petes against iBooks is not a bad sit­u­a­tion for Ama­zon. Apple is only sell­ing e-books for use on their own devices; Ama­zon is will­ing to sell e-books any­where they can.

Via: http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/various_ipad_thoughts

Ama­zon give into pub­lish­ers and float your prices, con­sumers will pay for it as long as the value is still per­ceived to be there, you don’t want even a chance that you lose out to Apple. While you are at it, try mov­ing to ePub as opposed to your own goofy for­mat, open stan­dards mat­ter to con­sumers like me and the real goal of ebooks is the ease of hold­ing onto a book and mov­ing it from device to device, much like MP3 does for music. Also stop screw­ing over con­sumers by deny­ing them to pur­chase con­tent from you, that just pisses peo­ple off includ­ing me.

But Ama­zon, in declar­ing war on Macmil­lan in this under­hand way, have screwed me, and I tend to take that per­son­ally, because they didn’t need to do that.

Via: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html

Apple keep doing what you are doing, and don’t you dare try to deny Ama­zon from pub­lish­ing an awe­some iPad Kin­dle App.

Pub­lish­ers we don’t know who you are and we don’t care, we just want to buy books, give it up the ship of being loyal to a con­tent pro­ducer died a long time ago. Also ebook prices should always stay under the phys­i­cal copy prices. Essen­tially learn from what hap­pened with the record industry.

Right after I posted this Ama­zon came out and said they are giv­ing in and will sell the books again and float ebook prices.