Quote:
Originally Posted by Kris777
Stars fall in Amazon protest about ebook prices
Authors found themselves in the firing line this week as fans furious at sudden rises in Amazon's Kindle prices protested by giving their books one-star reviews on the retailer's website.
Iain Banks, Stephen King, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Buchan and Michael McIntyre were among those authors whose books were given new, low-ranking reviews on the basis of their Kindle ebook price, as part of a concerted attempt by readers to voice their displeasure.
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Here's the basic problem. When I pay for a digital edition, I neither own it nor control it in the way I do a copy of the print edition. A print book I can keep for the rest of my life, lend it to a slow-reading friend for six months (and then another friend, and another, until I run out of literate friends), sell it used at a yard sale, or sell it for a profit to a collector if it happens to be a first edition of a well-known book.
The digital edition (if I follow all the rules and laws that apply in my country) may be good for the life of the company I bought it from, the company that runs the rights server, or the device I must read it on - whichever comes first. I can lend it, once, for two weeks, to someone who has the same reading device I do, and I can't legally resell it to anyone for love or money. And the formatting of said ebook may be way south of that of the print book, due to garbled scans, lack of editing, etc., or so my experience so far tells me. So if the publisher selling it wants to price it the same as, or for more than, the print edition, I'm paying the same price and getting much, much - MUCH - less. And the publisher is getting much, much more, while probably at the same time (as we've seen in the U.S.) trying by hook or crook to trick most authors (except for the "cream" who have tough agents, large sales, and a fleet of lawyers) into accepting the same royalty for a digital book that they would be getting for the print edition, even though the publisher's costs on an ebook do not include typesetting, printing, binding, warehousing, spoilage, shipping, etc. The record of certain agency-model publishers in that last respect is pretty shoddy, as we can see from a series of recent confrontations with the Authors Guild.
So while Amazon and other ebook sellers don't necessarily have pure motives for wanting to put ebook prices at a level that will maximize their cash flow, and perhaps allow them to monopolize the digital market, the publishers are the ones with the truly unclean hands in situations like this. They shouldn't let Amazon fix the prices (as Apple did with iTunes), but they should understand that trying to fix prices at print levels under the pretext of protecting their print business and acting as white knights for the very people - their authors - they are screwing will just squeeze both themselves and their authors out of the e-market for sure, and possibly out of a segment of the print market as well.
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A final thought:
"A churlish envious Cur was gotten into a manger, and there lay growling and snarling to keep the Provender. The Dog eat none himself, and yet rather ventur’d the starving his own Carcase than he would suffer any Thing to be the better for’t.
THE MORAL. Envy pretends to no other Happiness than what it derives from the Misery of other People, and will rather eat nothing itself than not to starve those that would." - Roger L'Estrange - 1692