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Originally Posted by Barcey
Personally I'm not concerned about an Amazon monopoly. They can't have one selling a virtual product. The retail price needs to be reasonable and something the consumer is willing to pay or it will be nothing. I can go to the library, buy from an indie author or read classics for the rest of my life. Other consumers will choose alternate forms of entertainment. Other potential consumers will file share.
Consumers will compare the price of the virtual book to the price of an equivalent physical book and expect the virtual book to be much cheaper.
Amazon has demonstrated an understanding of this. The publishers haven't.
I'm far on the side of Amazon on this one.
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Oh yes, they can. As mentioned in my previous post, some of the titles that are now missing from my wishlist are from authors that are not available in ebook ANYWHERE else. Not on the darknet, either. What is this if not a monopoly?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pardoz
That's the killer irony here. Of the major publishers, Macmillan (at least the Tor imprint, and I don't have any reason to believe their other imprints fare any differently) has by leagues the worst track record around in terms of actually publishing e-books. Price point is pretty much irrelevant if you're not actually offering to sell any products.
I can't help but laugh when I see Charles Stross hailing Macmillan as the author's economic saviour in e-publishing when none of his work from Tor/Macmillan is for sale in electronic format. I have no real way of knowing just how much he makes from electronic sales of his e-books published by Ace/Penguin under the onerous shackles of the current regime and price structure, but I have to assume it's a sum greater than the $0.00 he's getting from Tor/Macmillan.
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Very true. I had Hank Phillippi Ryan ask Donna Andrews (MacMillan Minotaur) why only a few of her books were in Kindle format, and not anywhere else at a writer's conference they both attended. Her answer was that it was a problem on Amazon's end, but with this development, I tend to think that she has been misinformed by her publisher. Authors really have no idea what's in their contracts, most of the time, as ludicrous as that sounds.
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Originally Posted by Nate the great
It's been a while since I checked, but all the Macmillan-US publishers were pretty bad at releasing ebooks.
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See above. From my limited research on this - they're one of the very worst offenders about this. That's what scares me. They really do not care about ebooks and people who choose to read ebooks. So they aren't going to be in any hurry to get those books back on Amazon or anywhere else.