Amazon pulls MacMillan?

[SpiderMatt]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Absolutely. Eg, recommended retail price for the XBox 360 "Arcade" edition is £159.99; Amazon (UK) sell it for £114.99.

Amazon works the same way in the states. They can lower the cost because they don't have to worry about stock in retail stores all over the country. Other stores have inventories in a large number of outlets and that raises costs. Amazon could give away the Xbox if they wanted to... but that wouldn't be economical.

[TallMomof2]

Retailers want to maximize profits but suffer from price competition. Consumers are notoriously fickle and will buy from the lowest priced retailer most of the time. If the retailer sets the prices too low, they don't make a profit and go out of business. Amazon is willing to take a loss on bestsellers in order to establish a market presence. Meanwhile, other retailers scramble to try meet those prices or at least give the illusion of doing so.

From my personal experience in dealing with wholesalers for my home business retail prices are a suggestion but few allow you to advertise at lower than suggested retail prices. In most cases the wholesaler is trying to protect all their retailers especially the smaller bricks and mortar operations who have far different expenses than an online retailer has.

[Robotech_Master]

Apparently nobody's mentioned this here yet, but the Bits blog post has been updated. According to the blogger's colleague who spoke to someone at Macmillan, Macmillan wanted Amazon to go to an iBooks-style agency-style deal, where they got to set the price and got 70% of the take—or else Macmillan wouldn't give them the e-book for 7 months after it came out in hardcover.

Covered it here: http://www.teleread.org/2010/01/30/n...ks-style-deal/

Bear in mind that, as Cory Doctorow said, just because Amazon wants to charge only $9.99 doesn't mean they're your friend.

[DawnFalcon]

I think it's clear iBooks pricing will need to be watched VERY closely for price cartels.

Also, direct link.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Robotech_Master

Bear in mind that, as Cory Doctorow said, just because Amazon wants to charge only $9.99 doesn't mean they're your friend.

Amazon certainly isn't being my friend. They didn't just pull ebooks, they pulled all books. Including my new paperback. And the books of many of my colleagues. Collateral damage in a stupid war.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Robotech_Master

Bear in mind that, as Cory Doctorow said, just because Amazon wants to charge only $9.99 doesn't mean they're your friend.

And his points, as far as they go, are quite valid. The thing he underplays is that it's trivial for me to strip the DRM from the books I buy from Amazon and read them on any device I want, format-shifting if necessary. When somebody comes up with a python script that will lower the price of every e-book I buy by 5 dollars the positions will be comparable.

Moot point for me anyway, as I'd already stopped buying books published by Macmillan, since much of their output isn't available in electronic form, in any format, at any price, and the quality of the little that is available tends to be atrocious. Along about the second or third time I ended up downloading a scanned copy from the darknet to fix the errors and fill in the missing parts of the book I'd just bought I wised up.

[stustaff]

Do I have this right or am i missing something?

Amazon have been choosing to price best seller ebooks at $9.99

Publishers are concerned that this devalues new releases.

They have told amazon this but due to amazons size have been unable to do anyhing.

Apple have entered teh market and offered publishers a better(for publisher) deal.

Publisher is trying to now push back at amazon and using the argument of fine if you wont oiffer a better contract we will just use ibooks/other stores.

Amazon says, fine if yiu want to play hardball and dont like the contract we offer then we wont sell your books. your choice!

Amazon removes this publishers books to try and force them to back down.

This then goes one of two ways I guess.

1, Macmillan back down amazon win.
2, Amazon back down book prices go up and publishers are happy.
3, no one backs down, amazon stop selling books

Now apart from being used by macmillan as leverage in negotioations what role do Apple have in this?

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Amazon certainly isn't being my friend. They didn't just pull ebooks, they pulled all books. Including my new paperback. And the books of many of my colleagues. Collateral damage in a stupid war.

A war which Macmilian started by demanding control of the prices they set, or Amazon's ebook business could go swing. No, no sympathy for Macmilian in this now from me. Got a clause about recovering rights if they do this sort of thing? (I certainly have for the pnp RPG work I've done). If not, no direct sympathy for you either - just the advice to look to including it in future.

[BearMountainBooks]

There are threads reporting that Amazon pulled all books because the contract they had with MacM is up and they haven't been able to reach an agreement. Amazon doesn't like the "new suggestions" for price control or delayed releases.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Um...yes. I just found out from this thread that my newly-published Tor paperback of Sunborn is no longer available directly from Amazon. (I just checked.) Just what I need, when I'm trying to get the word out to potential readers.

I had been annoying my editor with periodic questions about when a Kindle version would appear, but I guess that's a moot point for now.

The problem now is that since Tor was mostly sold via Amazon, we cannot get Tor eBooks (overall).

[BWhite]

Originally Posted by stustaff

This then goes one of two ways I guess.

1, Macmillan back down amazon win.
2, Amazon back down book prices go up and publishers are happy.
3, no one backs down, amazon stop selling books

Now apart from being used by macmillan as leverage in negotioations what role do Apple have in this?

Known role for Apple? From the links provided, which I read, at this point in time Apple's role in this affair is not known.

There is conjecture that executives at Apple are talking to executives at MacMillian, exchanging information much like we are on this thread, which is to say the conjecture is Apple is telling MacMillan, "we are not going to have a very successful rollout of MacMillan on iBooks, dude, with those prices at Amazon."

[rpresser]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Personally, I could handle it if they set the default e-price for new-release hardcovers to $15, that's what Baen does with their E-Arcs. However, if they're setting e-books of hardcovers to $15 then they should set e-books of paperbacks closer to $5.

What exactly is the difference between an "e-book of a hardcover" and an "e-book of a paperback", when both are the SAME content, probably generated from the same digital file being sent to the printer?

Perhaps what you meant is that when a mass market paperback is released for a title, the price of the e-book version of same should drop. I can understand that position, but I disagree with it.

[catsittingstill]

Originally Posted by rpresser

What exactly is the difference between an "e-book of a hardcover" and an "e-book of a paperback", when both are the SAME content, probably generated from the same digital file being sent to the printer?

It's fresher.

Just like day-old bread is cheaper, it seems appropriate to me that year-old books should be cheaper--the people who really, really wanted it have already bought, and now you're trying to tempt passers-by with lower prices. Using the date the paperback comes out is a convenient way to decide when the book is old enough to count as "not fresh anymore, but still edible."

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem now is that since Tor was mostly sold via Amazon, we cannot get Tor eBooks (overall).

<snark>They could always sell through Webscriptions again</snark>

No, I am SO not good enough to have resisted that one.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by catsittingstill

Just like day-old bread is cheaper, it seems appropriate to me that year-old books should be cheaper--the people who really, really wanted it have already bought, and now you're trying to tempt passers-by with lower prices. Using the date the paperback comes out is a convenient way to decide when the book is old enough to count as "not fresh anymore, but still edible."

Yep. And I could tolerate a model that worked on that principle, I think - hell, lots of releases on Fictionwise work that way, and after *umpty*-*cough* years of buying books I'm used to waiting for the paperback if it's not a book I must have right now.

But let's face the facts - the whole 'new release bestseller hardcover' thing is a feint, a Trojan Horse, the tip of the camel's nose. If Macmillan is successful in driving up the price to $15*, it's going to stay there, and that's going to be the new default price, +/- 2 dollars**. Take a look at Amazon - lots of stuff priced in the $8-12 range, not so much outside it. Certainly don't see a lot of Kindle versions mass-market originals listing for $3.50 compared to the $7 of the paperback.

* Interestingly, $15 comes out pretty close to the 'real' hardcover price when you take into account that 30-40% of the print run of the average hardcover gets pulped or dumped after it gets returned to the publisher because it didn't sell.

** At least if enough people buy them. The other option will be that when they realize they moved all of 3 e-copies of Steven King's latest brick they'll abandon the market and e-books will go the way of vinyl LPs. They'll still exist, but in very limited numbers and for a truly hardcore market.