Ben Bova's THE EXILES TRILOGY - on 99cent special for a very short time

[djulian]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Please don't anyone else buy this. We need to send a message to the publisher that they cannot screw with customers. Sure it's a good deal if you read Kindle eBooks, but we have to unite and tell the publisher that this sort of discrimination is not going to be tolerated. Also, if you've already bought it from Amazon, please try your best to return it. We need to get less sales for the publisher, not more.

You do understand that according to the OP, if it sells well at Amazon (while allowing the author to make some money) that the price will propagate to the other stores. If it sells really poorly, or if it fails to retain some level of profitability, that lower price will not make it to the other stores. So in essence, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. Do what you feel is right, but I agree with the previous poster that your comment comes across as "sour grapes."

[djulian]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Long story short: the Mobipocket format is not only proprietary and poorly documented, it's also very limited in its display features and functionality (no right-hand margins! text can't wrap around pictures and must start on a new line below! images size limited to 128kb which often results in nasty pixelated downconversion for maps in the front of fantasy novels!) in a way that reduces a lot of books to a very low typographical level of simple text display.

Much basic fiction probably isn't impacted very much by that, but it does make for a very bare-bones reading experience when it could be something much nicer, cf. MR member zelda_pinwheel's nifty illustrated version of Three Men in a Boat, which has some nice screenshots in the thread showing how simple basic ePub features (actually just plain HTML features, really) can make a tremendous visual impact in aesthetic terms.

And certain kinds of non-fiction are affected detrimentally, such as poetry and reference because Mobi doesn't handle indents or any but the most basic types of lists and tables very well.

The one thing it does have going for it is a standardized dictionary format that anyone can create their own lookup dictionaries for any language in, and that's really the best thing about Mobi, IMHO, which I wish the ePub people would get around to addressing.

Also, personally I find it's rather annoying to take apart and reconstruct to fix the inevitable typos and formatting errors that riddle just about every e-book and ePub is simply so much easier to deal with that simply I no longer consider Mobi format books worth buying when there's an ePub version available.

Those pictures (from Three Men in a Boat) are remarkable! I have never seen anything like that in an Amazon book. I love the Kindle as a device, but I'd like to see some formatting like what zelda_pinwheel put together.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I just busted this test: I bought the book directly from the Reanimus site, thereby demonstrating my willingness to pay a reasonable amount for quality material that piques my interest, give more money to the author, have it in ePub, and my disinterest in getting a book, even at that discount, from the Kindle Store. (Though I suppose I could've bought, jailbroken and converted it into ePub... just like you could've, Jon... but sometimes, life's too short.)

I've also wiped out the "lost sales" mentioned above.

Buh... zingue.

[piperclassique]

Jswolf, there is no way I am returning a book I wish to read because someone else can buy it a little cheaper. Please rearrange these words to make a sensible phrase - face off nose cut spite to
It's their book, they can decide the price and I can decide if I want to buy it.

[pdurrant]

£1.02 is still an excellent price for a three novel omnibus from Ben Bova. I couldn't resist.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by piperclassique

Also I find the format perfectly acceptable for text. I can read without pictures, have been able to since I was five years old.

Pictures are not the only issue with the Mobi format. It can and does mess up certain basic features of plain text.

You know how some stories distinguish letters and faux-newspaper column stories from the regular narrative by off-setting that quoted text by indenting in a block on both sides? Thanks to the total lack of right-hand margin/indents, that doesn't happen in Mobi books.

But mainly, my pathological dislike for it stems from the badly-arranged mess it is when deconstructed and edited to fix errors (and KindleGen's charming little conversion quirks), which I freely admit I am anomalous in doing and really not representative of the general reading audience who like you, doesn't care at all.

Though I will likely finally be able to directly use my gotten-for-convenience-and-future-proofing ePub collection, as I'm anticipating getting a Sony as part of a credit card application promo. Just three more qualifying purchases and a 6-8 week wait, if they haven't run out of PRS-T1s in the meantime!

Originally Posted by piperclassique

Give the publishers a break here guys, they are supposed to be running a business and hopefully making money for themselves, their employees, an their authors ( change the order as required)

The publisher would make more money from a direct sale from their own store at 99 cents less transaction fees, than 30 cents less transfer and other fees from Amazon on the general royalty scheme which would apply at that price. They could then pass on that extra 69 or so cents to the author and/or pay a tiny pittance of their employee salaries out of it.

I understand the motive for not wanting to deal with the other stores' price-adjusting quirks, but refusing to sell directly from their own store at the same promotional price when they control the store and its pricing and get to keep more of a share of the money from a sale just strikes me as one of those short-sighted silly things.

However, if they really only want to promote through Amazon, I don't really care. It would be nice if they were willing to offer the promo price at their own store in the format I prefer, but if they don't, it's disappointing but frees up my potential purchasing money to spend elsewhere on something that costs more, such as yet another Baen bundle.

I don't feel the publisher owes me anything in making the sale price available to me, but by the same token I don't owe them anything and I'm certainly not going to rush off to Amazon to buy the book if it it's not available elsewhere (I certainly didn't for the last one offered as Amazon-only).

And I freely admit I don't particularly care for the "if all of you who are interested go buy the book on sale at Amazon regardless to prove this price-point a "success", then maybe, just maybe, we'll later make it available to the other store you might use in the format you can actually use" rely-on-the-kindness-of-strangers-and-wait-for-dropped-breadcrumbs-if-we-feel-like-doling-them-out approach to differential promotional pricing.

Especially with the added "if you really need to get an ePub and show your support for the author/small publishing, you should pay 9 times as much as the asking price people who've never even heard of either of us are getting waved in their face".

I reiterate: 99 cents less transaction fees from a direct sale > 30 cents less transfer/other fees from an Amazon buy and would support said author/small publisher better. Some people may be willing to pay an $8 premium to show support, but I'm not one of them, especially not for an author I've never read whose works appear to have been mainly written before I was born and thus may end up being too dated for me to really like the style of, but am otherwise willing to try. A dollar or two extra when I'm buying at Baen or Samhain or Smashwords vs. using the Kobo discount coupons, maybe, but not 8.

I vote with my wallet, and my wallet's telling me "you just saved 99 cents (and the bother of fixing inevitable typos in the hot mess that is Mobi) (and the chunk of time which you can now use to read your 3-dozen-odd $3-5 Robert Silverberg and George Alec Effinger and Pamela Sargent and Charles Sheffield and Frederik C. Pohl backlist e-book buys if you're in the mood for old-school sci-fi)!"

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Please don't anyone else buy this. We need to send a message to the publisher that they cannot screw with customers. Sure it's a good deal if you read Kindle eBooks, but we have to unite and tell the publisher that this sort of discrimination is not going to be tolerated. Also, if you've already bought it from Amazon, please try your best to return it. We need to get less sales for the publisher, not more.

No.
Why should I join your little crusade?

[piperclassique]

The publisher would make more money from a direct sale from their own store at 99 cents less transaction fees, than 30 cents less transfer and other fees from Amazon on the general royalty scheme which would apply at that price. They could then pass on that extra 69 or so cents to the author and/or pay a tiny pittance of their employee salaries out of it.

point taken. But, selfish person that I am, I want to read the book and am happy with what I paid.

As for the formatting, if the book grips me I tend not to notice that. The author's words are what matters to me, and as long as there are no blatant errors my eye will slide over minor imperfections. A decent readable font, sensible line spacing and left aligned and I'm a happy bunny. Sorry for not being a perfectionist

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by piperclassique

The author's words are what matters to me, and as long as there are no blatant errors my eye will slide over minor imperfections. A decent readable font, sensible line spacing and left aligned and I'm a happy bunny. Sorry for not being a perfectionist

I'm not a perfectionist either. I read ~200 fiction titles a year, according to last year's reading challenge stats and I simply don't have the time or inclination to fix everything which goes wrong in an e-book. Although I do highlight the errors as I run across them, jut in case.

But I do like to see a certain minimum standard of indented paragraphs and chapters start on new pages and hopefully there's a working table of contents/flickable chapter marks which I know from personal experience that I'll often have to apply myself if they're not already pre-existing.

And my preference for ePub is based in the fact that from time to time I do end up buying e-books which turn out to have rather spectacular, reading-impeding Stuff That Has Gone Wrong, such as Barbara Hambly's The Silicon Mage which like all the other books in that series not only has frequent OCR "th" -> "m" errors, but also chops off the last paragraph of each scene and appends it to the first paragraph of the next scene. Or David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, which is afflicted by random wordssmushedtogether on every single page of the Kindle version of the book, which I bought on sale last year. Or Nancy Goldstone's non-fiction biography The Lady Queen which has the exact opposite problem of hav ing words rand omly spl it like this ag ain on every sin gle page.

And these are all things I'll very likely have to fix myself, because when I contacted Amazon CS to inform them of a similar error in Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night which I'd also bought on sale and supplied a lengthy list of exactly what and where had gone wrong for them to pass onto the publisher, all that really happened is that the book was yanked from the store for some time* and when it reappeared later, it still doesn't seem to have been fixed.

I haven't received any of the usual notifications from Amazon CS that a corrected copy might be available and my Manage Your Kindle page doesn't have an "update your version" option for this book (while some of the other titles I don't care about do).

And it's not just my Amazon-purchased books. Several of the Paul Cook sf backlist I bought direct from Phoenix Pick have for some bizarre reason the base font set to a tiny squinty size. A Smashwords mystery I have from Lillian Stewart Carl has random alternating normal and fixed-width typewriter-looking text throughout the entire book.

So yeah, my preference for ePub is also predicated in part directly upon the certain knowledge that any serious messes that are inside a book, I'll have to spend my own time cleaning up if I want a reasonably readable copy that doesn't make either my eyes or my brain hurt.

And I've found that I spend somewhat less time and effort fixing ePubs (that squinty font size can be taken care of with a minor adjustment to an ePub's css file, while for Mobi I'd have to run a search and replace regexp on practically every paragraph) compared to doing it starting from a Mobi base.

* And right in the middle of my talking up the 99 cent promo price to encourage people to go check Hambly's works out.

[AnemicOak]

The very limited time appears to be over. I just went to buy this on Amazon and it's now $8.99

[crich70]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Jon, sometimes I wonder about your comments. Andrew doesn't owe us an explanation. You made your point and this just comes across as sour grapes because someone isn't immediately responding to you.

Maybe he doesn't want to get into an argument with you over a business decision he has made. After all, it is his business and he can do as he wishes without getting your or my approval.

And it may not even be his decision. Most publishing houses are run by more than one person first of all. And most are companies run by a bigger company on top of that. So Andrew might just be the middleman rather than 'Mr.Big' at the publishers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by djulian

Those pictures (from Three Men in a Boat) are remarkable! I have never seen anything like that in an Amazon book. I love the Kindle as a device, but I'd like to see some formatting like what zelda_pinwheel put together.

Not possible. Mobipocket does not support such advanced formatting.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Not possible. Mobipocket does not support such advanced formatting.

No possible yet.

While the Mobipocket format doesn't support such formatting, the Kindle for PC/Mac/iOS and Android apps do now support Amazon's KF8 format which does, and support for KF8 is promised for current hardware Kindles as a firmware update.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

No possible yet.

While the Mobipocket format doesn't support such formatting, the Kindle for PC/Mac/iOS and Android apps do now support Amazon's KF8 format which does, and support for KF8 is promised for current hardware Kindles as a firmware update.

No, not yet.. never. Mobipocket will never support any truly advanced features.

As for KF8, we still don't know if it is for the K4 on up and if the K3/KK is going to be supported.

[andrewburt]

Thanks everyone for your support on our pricing test on Amazon. I hope you enjoy the book! Sorry we couldn't offer an epub at the same exact time, but don't worry, we are planning something special within our own web store for it, where both the epub and mobi formats are available (and without DRM; yuck, hate DRM, nasty DRM). We have to code this special feature up first -- and make sure it doesn't break anything [did y'all notice how adding the special Harry Potter button on Amazon broke the site so nobody could buy any ebooks for several hours? oopsie!] -- then I'll be sure to let you know here.

Let's see, what other questions were there. (I'm not allowed back-to-back posts, so I'll have to answer everything in this one. If I've missed something just poke me on it.) Prices in the UK, interesting, I didn't know they did that, nor do I know exactly how we can anticipate it. Hmm, fascinating. I'll try to figure that out. I have heard they add stuff on top of the price we set; all we get as publisher is a choice between "Let amazon pick the price based on the US price, or pick a specific price" but they apparently still add stuff. (What's interesting about you saying they add tax on top is that in the US Amazon has stoutly refused to collect tax; though governments being what they are, I can't see Amazon holding out forever on that. I know that in the state where I live Amazon cut us off from the affiliate program several years ago because my state passed a law saying online stores had to collect sales tax on sales made to buyers in the state if they had an affiliate program here even if they had no physical store here... so Amazon pulled the affiliate program from us and several other states. Not that I ever got much from it personally, but it was annoying. So it's interesting to see they do collect tax for other countries.)

To those who suggested we would prefer sales within our store -- absolutely, as then Amazon doesn't take their large bite... but the facts of the market are that people overwhelmingly prefer buying from Amazon right now. Our sales on Amazon dwarf our sales on any other channel, including B&N. (Not like this is any secret; this is generally the case for most authors and publishers I talk with.) Amazon has set up a compelling ecosystem with the Kindle, making it really easy for people and with an as-yet unbeatable breadth of selection in one place. I give them kudos for what they've done to make ebooks so popular. I'd love for their to be a viable (comparable-sized-sales) competitor or two, but the world just isn't there yet. As to jswolf's questions about why we didn't include other channels at 99cents, as I explained to him in email, we wanted to keep the experiment simple so we have unambiguous results, thus we chose to conduct it solely on Amazon. Yes, as the CEO of ReAnimus Press that was ultimately my decision to approve, but I did so since my background is as a scientist (I was a computer science professor for a long time); we wanted to be sure the experiment was going to be sound for us, and we carefully designed the parameters so it would be. Now we'll analyze the results to decide if that price makes sense elsewhere. (And we'll do something for epub folks to make up for it in any event.)

I personally prefer epubs for my own reading, and I agree about the limitations of formatting in mobis. Boy do I feel your pain there! We try with our titles to get the mobis formatted nicely, but the spec is so incredibly limited. (In our case we aim to match the basic print layout of indented paragraphs, no blank lines between paragraphs, chapters on a new page, a good TOC, etc.) (I'd also say, if you see any formatting or other glitches in our books, definitely do tell us, and we'll fix them. We try very hard to get ours nicely formatted and error-free. Images, though, ai-yi-yi, what a pain. There are a few of ours that have charts and such, and they seem to be fine in one reader and hard to read in the next, so until that settles out we've taken to posting a PDF of the embedded graphics so folks can download them if they're having trouble.)

Ebooks and their formats are still in their infancy, so it's just part of the growing pains. They are so much cooler than paper books (IMHO) that it's all good. It's been a dream of mine to have all the thousands of books on my shelves available as ebooks, so I'm just glad I've had the opportunity to start ReAnimus Press to help make that a reality in some small way. I love this job!