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View Poll Results: Boycott?
I won't buy from them at all. Total boycott! 71 16.75%
I won't buy from them at all and I will get their stuff from the darknets. 90 21.23%
I won't buy from them at all and I will get their stuff through other legal means. 22 5.19%
I won't buy at the higher price but I will wait some months for the price drop. 131 30.90%
I'll buy books I'm eagerly anticipating at the higher price but wait for other stuff. 56 13.21%
I'll buy whatever I feel like. The higher price doesn't matter to me. 38 8.96%
Other. (Please explain.) 16 3.77%
Voters: 424. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 02-04-2010, 08:55 AM   #31
Barcey
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Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski View Post
...
So presumably you reject the idea that publishers should decide when to release a mass-market paperback as well? How dare they!

Consistency doesn't seem to be the strong suit here...

Agency-pricing is not a good thing, but it's Amazon's fault for trying to act the bully. And with the market in the state that it is, agency-pricing just happens to benefit them immensely, strange isn't it?

In the old days:
Book comes out in hardback, but you don't think it's worth the cost, so you wait a year and get the paperback.
Now:
Book comes out at full-price, but you don't think it's worth the cost, so you wait a year and get the discount version.
What's changed? Nothing
I don't have a problem with publishers setting the list price for the book and telling the retailer they pay 30% of that to the publisher. The retailers can then fight it out for what they actually sell it for.

I reject the publishers setting a fixed retail price and telling the retailers they can't sell below it. This gives all the disadvantages of competition (multiple format incompatibilities, exclusive deals etc...) and none of the benefits.

I personally think that the windowed pricing is an artifact of physical books sales and is not necessary when selling electronic copies. It made sense to drop the price to get rid of your physical inventory and then introduce cheaper physical copies after you'd recovered costs (in the gravy zone). I don't have a problem with the windowed pricing but I do think it's stupid and will only drive more people to alternatives.
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Old 02-04-2010, 09:57 AM   #32
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My vote was for "I won't buy at the higher price but I will wait some months for the price drop."

I wholly support a publisher/author's right to charge what they see fit for their book. But I will never pay more for an electronic version than I would have to pay for a paperback. If that means I have to wait longer before the electronic version is priced reasonably (to me) then so be it.

There are plenty of great (and even just "good") books out there at reasonable prices that I haven't read yet. I don't have to have the latest and most heavily hyped book. I can -- and do -- wait.
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Old 02-04-2010, 10:06 AM   #33
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I probably won't buy many MacMillan books anyway because the ones I want never get released as ebooks. I've never understood why most of the MacMillan/Tor SF & Fantasy is still not available as ebooks, since the readers of those genres tend to be early adopters of tech gadgets.

I normally will not buy ebooks with list price over $10, unless Fictionwise has some sale going on that brings the price down to the $4-6 range I consider acceptable. In general, if it costs more than the MMPB, I won't buy it. Even though I think it sends the wrong message to the publishers, I will buy an ebook I want that's over $20 if I can get it with a 100% micropay rebate at Fictionwise. In some ways, that's my biggest gripe about the Fictionwise sales, is that I suspect it doesn't send the publishers the message that they are overpricing some ebooks.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:11 PM   #34
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Originally Posted by charleski View Post
So these people who used to buy paperbacks a year after the original release still bought those paperbacks even though they weren't accompanied by a big marketing campaign? How have things changed?
What's changed is that out off all the books we tell ourselves we'll get when they come out in paperback, we forget a good deal of them. Or we get them from a friend or the library. More and more libraries have ebooks. The new releases have a waiting list but I'll just put myself on the list at this point. I'll likely get the book before the price drops. We find them used. They could pick up a lot of sales at $10 that they likely would have lost with people waiting for $7. They'd get more money sooner. It maximizes their marketing, too.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:15 PM   #35
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I went with 'other'. You can't boycott a product that isn't available for sale, and of the books I'm interested in buying that Macmillan has the publication rights to, none are available as commercial e-books. Price only matters for products that you actually sell, after all.

If Macmillan ever decide they're interested in actually publishing books I shall have to examine the situation as it stands then. I suspect I'll end up downloading a copy from the darknet and buying a copy of a different book by the same author from another publisher, ideally one that sells to the reader at more reasonable prices and pays better royalties to the author.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:15 PM   #36
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Maybe it is time to try the "1-star" review tactics?
Unfortunately, that also hurts the authors. Of course a lot of what we're talking about here ultimately hurts them.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:16 PM   #37
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More and more libraries have ebooks.
Not, it should be noted, from Macmillan. Because John Sargent knows how evil libraries are.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:22 PM   #38
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Originally Posted by Pardoz View Post
Not, it should be noted, from Macmillan. Because John Sargent knows how evil libraries are.
You laugh, but sadly a lot of publishers actually /do/ think libraries are evil incarnate, because they cannibalize book sales.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:26 PM   #39
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Originally Posted by TallMomof2 View Post
I'm completely boycotting MacMillan both for not allowing retailers to set prices but also because they do not allow their ebooks in libraries. I have too many excellent ebooks to read so maybe when I finish my backlog MacMillan will have changed (Ha!).
I hadn't noticed that but I just popped over to my library website and, sure enough, no MacMillan. Another reason to dislike them. I have gotten a lot of HarperCollins titles there, though. Sadly a couple of our favorite authors are on Tor. I wish we could convince them to jump ship and go to Baen. My husband is in the middle of a series. He gladly paid $9.99 for the first two. He says he doesn't even know if he'll bother with third. He figures if he's waiting for it to come out and then has to wait another 6 months or so for the price drop, he'll likely have lost interest. He's a lot more thrifty with books than I am, probably because he goes through them more quickly. I only read a book a week on average. He reads at least two.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:27 PM   #40
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Authors. You lose. I will not even consider buying and reading your fiction work if it is:

Sold as dead tree HC or Trade PB only.
Any e-book with proprietary DRM or tied to a device brand.
RETAIL Priced above a Mass market PB (no rebates, no point credits) if no DRM (when I am done, I can give my copy away, just like my dead tree book).
With price over half the Retail of a MM PB version if infested with DRM.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:29 PM   #41
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You laugh, but sadly a lot of publishers actually /do/ think libraries are evil incarnate, because they cannibalize book sales.
Oh, I wasn't laughing, believe me. That wasn't *quite* a direct quote, but it was pretty close. From a discussion on publishing, in which somebody asked Sargent why no Macmillan e-books are (or ever will be) available from libraries.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:41 PM   #42
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I don't buy ebooks of paperbacks for $15, if the book's in paperback for $8 and I can't get an ebook for about that price I won't buy the ebook. I have bought ebooks of hardcovers for $15, and the current mess isn't going to make me change my buying habits.

Macmillan generally charges too much for their ebooks, and so I normally avoid buying ebooks of Macmillan titles. If they do bring ebooks down to paperback level prices for books currently in paperback I may end up buying more ebooks from them.

If not, I won't.

I am still likely to buy books I really want for $15 because I'll already do it for E-arcs so it's no different.

Luckily I don't own a Kindle, so I don't have to give Amazon money if I am going to buy DRM'd bestsellers.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:44 PM   #43
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Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks View Post
Authors. You lose. I will not even consider buying and reading your fiction work if it is:

Sold as dead tree HC or Trade PB only.
Any e-book with proprietary DRM or tied to a device brand.
RETAIL Priced above a Mass market PB (no rebates, no point credits) if no DRM (when I am done, I can give my copy away, just like my dead tree book).
With price over half the Retail of a MM PB version if infested with DRM.
So you won't buy anything if the creators get a fair shake.

Gotcha.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:50 PM   #44
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I can wait until prices drop to a level I'm comfortable with. If I lose interest before an acceptable price, well, it's a lost sale then, isn't it? Too bad!

If we don't buy at an "acceptable" level, the publishers will never figure out at what price the consumer is willing to pay.
My feelings exactly (in the first post!). I will wait, and I often forget about things in the mean time (there are a ton of movies I was waiting for on DVD (largely because they dub them here) and I just never watched).

They may not care about me, it depends on how many people will buy when the items are "hot", and how high they can rev the hype machine. But the hype machine eats money, so publishers are going to have to think things through carefully.
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Old 02-04-2010, 02:01 PM   #45
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But I also think that mandated selling prices and 'no sales price allowed situations' are annoying - it annoys me for physical hardware when Sony does it, it annoys me when Apple does it and it annoys me even more that Macmillan is planning on doing it for non-physical mediums.
Me too. (Although I'm a bystander in this debate; I don't buy DRM'd ebooks.)

I would expect Amazon to retaliate by holding occasional "site wide ebook sale!!--except for Macmillan books" promotions. 10% off all kindlebooks (with Amazon eating the loss from their cut) for a holiday weekend--and a text-tag on every Macmillan kindlebook, in the spot where the sale price would be, saying that Macm's contract does not allow Amazon to offer sales of Macm's ebooks.
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