Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Many things, though I suspect you will not agree. I will discuss just some of what I see as the major ones here. Certainly ebook pricing. I believe that they are deliberately seeking to slow ebook adoption in order to preserve their print book market for as long as possible. This may not be an irrational tactic from their point of view, and it does seem to be working to some extent. But it is a short term tactic and a dangerous one for them. It is detrimental to their authors, who bear the brunt of this tactic. They are losing market share and have stood idly by and watched the development of a huge and growing market in which they play no role. At the same time, they delude themselves that their product is so superior that it is in essence a market of its own, and not in competition with the cheaper Indie market. On the supply side, their response to much better deals for authors in the Indie market has not, as one would expect, been to themselves offer better deals for authors. It has been to offer even worse terms, slash advances, cut many authors and engage in a rights grab. Their source of best selling authors in the future must surely be from the Indie ranks, and to attract such authors they will have to offer very good terms indeed and accept only limited rights. I will be interested to observe what their strategy is as their mega selling authors cease to write new books. Perhaps they do have an intelligent strategy to transition to the new state of affairs, and this is just a rational strategy to maximise their profits in the meantime. But I can't personally perceive such a strategy. All I can see so far is denial and short-sightedness and lost opportunities.
Finally, to return to your music industry analogy once more, imagine Amazon had not come along when it did. Certainly as better reading devices came along there would likely have been increasing piracy. Perhaps a Napster equivalent would have arisen, or simply a trade through the various file sharing systems. Publishers would possibly have offered ebooks in some form, no doubt at ridiculous prices, much as the record labels did with music files at different times. When Apple came along with IBooks it would have dominated distribution of ebooks, much as it did music. Or imagine the music industry with a timely Amazon. Apple may never have bothered with ITunes because it would have had to compete on price with an established player with deep pockets. But the one thing that could have happened in both Industries but did not is the established players embracing the new format and offering and controlling it themselves. Because they made the choice to take the safe road and not jeopardise their existing business model, which of course others then did anyway.
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Hum, let me pull up two recent best sellers
Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci (published Oct 17th, 2017)
Ron Chernow's Grant (published Oct 10th, 2017)
The paper price for the da Vinci book is $21, the Kindle price, $17
The paper price for the Grant book is $24, the Kindle price, $20
In both cases, the kindle price is basically at the discount price for the hardback. So I don't see a price discrimination against the ebook version, unless you are simply arguing that ebook prices should be much cheaper.
Choosing price points for anything is more of an art than a science, but we do see a nice experiment in pricing going on.
I just bought book 5 of J.A. Sutherland's Alexis Carew series. Kindle price, either $5 or free if you have kindleunlimited. The paperback price is $18. Sutherland is an indie author and the paper version is via Amazon's Publishing Platform. I would predict that he's not going to sell many paper copies.
With iTunes, you have a tiered pricing model. You can buy individual songs at $1.29, or the whole album at a much lower price than all the songs totaled. The album price costs about what the cd cost at Amazon. So, it seems to me that the big Publishers already are following the current music industry's lead in pricing. Digital media cost is fairly close to physical media cost. Movies are priced the same way, it cost the same for a digital copy of the movie as it does for a Blu-Ray copy.
Now perhaps you are arguing that the published missed the boat by not selling the ebook versions directly. Some either do have or once had their own ebook stores. Baen has it's own monthly ebook bundle and has since 1999, which if we actually had sales figures, might give some interesting information. I do suspect that the fact that Baen ebooks are now available on Amazon probably is an indication though. I would suggest that most customers would rather shop somewhere than has all the books available, rather than go from publisher to publisher.