07-03-2008, 10:34 AM | #1 | |
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PW's Sara Nelson on Sony, Kindle, & ebooks
In this week's edition of Publishers Weekly, Sara Nelson, in her Foreword column title "E-Dreaming," comments on e-books, the Sony, and the Kindle. The complete article can be found here: E-Dreaming.
Nelson wrote, among other things: Quote:
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07-03-2008, 01:01 PM | #2 |
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I love the Kindle's ability to download my newspaper VIA the wireless. It may seem silly, I know I could dl via usb using Calibre or some other tool for free, but the wireless is just so easy and convinient being an all in one portable solution. Now since she wrote "'...download AND the ability..." maybe she's not aware of the alternatives?
Also I don't understand the fear of publishers that people will buy ebooks instead of hard copies. As long as they sell a unit for $x do they care what packaging the unit comes in? Do they actually sell ebooks for less per unit profit than hardbacks or paperbacks? So far I've been lead to believe they don't but I'm not sure I've seen any hard numbers. |
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07-03-2008, 02:07 PM | #3 | |
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Part of publishing is fear of piracy: if you have the book in electronic format, you can then copy and share it with all your friends, costing them sales. Hence, DRM provisions. The bigger problem is that publishers don't normally sell direct to consumers. They sell to distributors who sell to retailers who sell to you. Most publishers aren't set up to handle retail sales and sell ebooks directly to the customer. this is one reason why a lot jumped on the Amazon bandwagon. Amazon is set up to do that. ______ [pb]Dennis[/b] |
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07-03-2008, 05:01 PM | #4 | ||
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Last edited by TheJohnNewton; 07-03-2008 at 05:06 PM. |
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07-03-2008, 06:06 PM | #5 | |||
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BTW, I've seen lots of stuff on the darknet. No thanks. My standards for ebooks are set by the sort of work uploaded here. I'm not interested in someone's plain text conversion from a scanned paper book, and haven't time or desire to put it into a decent format. If I'm going to do that, it will be something I can legally share with others. Quote:
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Book selling is a retail business. Retailers need to sell X units of whatever per day to cover their costs. Retailers buy from wholesalers. If a retailer lowers the price on an item, that comes out of their margin. They still pay the wholesaler the same for it. If there is pressure on the retail price, the retailer gets squeezed, and may be squeezed out of business. This is already happening in the book selling trade. Smaller independent bookstores are going out of business because they can't match the pricing offered by places like Barnes and Noble and Borders, and those outfits are in turn being squeezed by discount "warehouse" retailers like Costco and Sam's Club. Economies of scale: the more copies of books you can order from a publisher, the greater the volume discount you can get, and the lower you can price the books. Ebooks add another wrinkle to the problem. In the computer business, one of the perennial problems is "Channel conflict". A computer manufacturer may sell through retailers, or Value Added Resellers, or direct. Dell is going through that as they attempt to sustain growth, because they want to sell through retailers, but the retailers are afraid Dell may undercut them selling direct. Consider retailers selling paper books faced with competition from ebooks? They sell paper books. The publisher sells the ebooks directly. Depending on ebook pricing, the customer might get the ebook simply because it's cheaper, and bypass the retailer. The retailer sees possibility of going belly up, and isn't happy. Channel conflict. the publisher needs the retailer to sell paper editions, and will be concerned about adversely affecting them. Until there is an easy method for bookstores to sell electronic editions as well as paper copies, and make money on it, this issue won't go away. ______ Dennis |
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07-07-2008, 07:41 PM | #6 | |
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07-08-2008, 01:25 AM | #7 |
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if publishers don't have to manufacture and ship paper books, they can afford to charge less for ebooks and make the same money - or maybe even more, while charging less. they'll also be contributing in a positive way to stuff - less traffic from less shipping, less pollution from less manufacturing.
i personally am happily reading about 1 book a day these days, but i do still read and buy some paper books - in fact, i got 3 new paper books from amazon today and 2 ebooks from bOb a couple days ago. and paper books aren't dead - paper books still make great gifts and are better for children, plus huge coffee table books aren't worth getting on either a 6 or 9 inch screen. i'd love it if i could buy a paper book that also came with a download link so i could take that book with me in eformat. in fact, i'd make a point of supporting any retailer or publisher that made that happen. |
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