News Corp: New Deal on eBooks from Amazon?

[kjk]

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2010...nue-estimates/

Murdoch hinted that his book publishing unit is in line to get a new deal on e-books from Amazon (AMZN), just as Macmillan has demanded (and other publishers will as well).

Murdoch:

We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books, on the contrary, we like them very much,” because they cost us less to distribute, “but we want some room to maneuver.”

Newscorp of course, owns Harper Collins.

[mcl]

And so it begins.

[thename]

Murdoch seems to have stated the basic calculus here: people pay $x for books so we will charge $x (or some slight modification of $x) for books no matter what form they come in. It was the same in the early days of legitimate music buying: CDs cost about $15 so we'll charge about $15 for a CD's worth of music files.

They're operating under the old adage that gave rise to the econ joke: economist purchases an item and, noting he has a few dollars in his wallet as he leaves, remarks "you priced this wrong; I've still got money left."

Until they decide ebooks are a different product than pbooks, they will attempt to charge the same amount for them. That their costs are lower to produce ebooks? Well that's just gravy for them.

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by mcl

And so it begins.

Shocking, isn't it?

[guyanonymous]

I'd say, "Inconceivable!"

But it is conceivable

[K-Thom]

Simply: Friends don't let friends buy eBooks above 9.99. It's us - them customers - who decide which price is acceptable and accepted. Not the publishers.

Silly them.

[Bremen Cole]

I knew, and predicted (post #2 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=72014 ), this would happen. Once one company did it, and got away with it, the others would be foolish to not follow suit. Though I disagree with it, it had to happen.

But as K-Thom said the consumer has the power. They can only charge what the marketplace is willing to pay. So it is really up to us, we shall see......

[sabredog]

sigh.....

I wonder how long this filters out to Fictionwise, Diesel and others...

DRM, Geo restrictions and high prices. It is enough to make you weep and probably turn to Rapidhare.

[GBerlin]

On his blog Whatever, Scalzi is asking people to buy Macmillan books. I think he's insane- time for authors to buy into a different formula. I will never pay more than 9.99 for an e-book and, dynamically, I will never pay more than an available (new) paperback. What type of idiot do they think I am? I already have 6-7,000 paper books, won't kill me to have a few more while I donate/sell/give away the real residual value of my physical property. Until I can do the same with e-books (and we aren't talking about the artwork, graphics, color, maps that I don't have on e-form) I won't pay near that price. It's time that we all vote with our dollars.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Simply: Friends don't let friends buy eBooks above 9.99. It's us - them customers - who decide which price is acceptable and accepted. Not the publishers.

Silly them.

I'll certainly pay more for an ebook if it's by an author I want to read.

I've paid as high as $17.00 - and will do so again, if it's an author whom I wish to read.

I do agree with you that it is the customer who decides what price is "acceptable and accepted." If there is an ebook I want, then I make my decision on whether it is acceptable or accepted. If not, then I don't buy. If acceptable - and someone [or a title] that want to read - then I buy.


Don

P.S.: I'm also a book collector of 20th-21th Century Fiction - of certain writers and certain types of Fiction, most often Post-Modern Literature and Meta-Fiction - to include David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, Claude Simon, Michael Butor, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLilo, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, William Vollmann, et al. (Cheever's not Post-Modernist, however.)

I also enjoy genre fiction and enjoy stories of Horror Gone Bad - "The Case of the Disappearing Cat," for example. (I keep my microwave pretty busy at night...Heheheh..[and a haw-haw for good measure].)

[Musicman]

Now, if they are DRM Free e-books, then I am willing to pay a higher a price.

If you are charging more then you must give more to the consumer...

[dsvick]

For a DRM free eBook I would even pay a slightly higher price than a pBook for the convenience factor. With DRM it needs to be lower though because I can't do anything with it if I dont like it.

[djloewen]

Originally Posted by Musicman

Now, if they are DRM Free e-books, then I am willing to pay a higher a price.

I only agree in the sense that the price I'm willing to pay for a DRM-protected book is..

$0.

For me, a media file, be it book, music, video, has no DRM. Unless I can remove the DRM, I wouldn't buy it at all. The day Sony announced they would be switching to (DRM-removable) ePub is the day I started buying e-books (I now buy from Kobo and sometimes Sony, ePub only of course).

The only reason I'm willing to buy e-books is that I can remove the DRM myself. Certainly it would be a step in the right direction for them to remove DRM, it save me from having to do it myself, but if they used that as an excuse to jack up the price (as temporarily happened when music made the switch), I'm not interested.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Simply: Friends don't let friends buy eBooks above 9.99. It's us - them customers - who decide which price is acceptable and accepted. Not the publishers.

Silly them.

Although I rarely buy an ebook that costs more than a few dollars, I have no objection to paying more than $9.99 for a well-formatted nonfiction book. And before you jump on my opening phrase, let me say that the reason why I rarely pay more than a few dollars is because I buy in ebook form novels from unknown authors. All novels that I buy written by authors I like, such as David Weber and Robin Hobb, and all nonfiction books I buy (primarily history, science, biography -- not politics or self-help), I buy in hardcover.

I consider ebooks to be throwaway books, not keepers, whereas I consider hardcover books worthy of keeping in a "permanent" collection. I never buy books like Dan Brown's or Stephen King's; I'm not into the "bestseller" list novels.

When publishers start producing nonfiction books with proper quality and a DRM scheme that is device agnostic and guaranteed to keep the ebook available until the copyright expires and the book falls into the public domain, then I'll start buying nonfiction ebooks as well. My view is that if I'm willing to pay $25 for the hardback, I'm willing to pay $15 or so for the ebook if it meets the foregoing criteria. I do not consider $9.99 as an unbreachable divide between buy/not buy; some books are worth more and some less.

What I'm saying is that just as different hardcover books have different values to me (e.g., I paid $100 for Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life), so do ebooks and an artificial border makes no sense to me. Either a particular book has value or it doesn't.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by sabredog

I wonder how long this filters out to Fictionwise, Diesel and others...

It's been the case on Fictionwise (and Mobipocket) for years, actually.