More wood on the fire...

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by tompe

Baen is a very small company (5-10 people or do I misremember?) and this often happens in small companies were everybody do everything.

Correct. That is their strength. If the company make more of a profit, they know that each one of them helped. treating customers right is always the golden standard of business. Even non-profit businesses.

Look at Gutenberg. They do their best to make the downloader/reader happy.

(That's one of the reasons I spend so much time here. The same ethic seems to pervade here, as well.)

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by kjk

Why won't they? Other people here have stated they will go back to used paperbacks, for one. I just don't think everyone goes to the darknets as their next and obvious option.

The darknet has its own costs. Downloading takes time via torrents, especially if you utilize public torrents. It's not a simple click and there's your file.

There's also the quality issue. You have to carefully filter who you download from, and double check the quality, often fixing stupididity in the process.

If the major players want to curtail piracy, they need to make the money cost of their product more attractive than the time cost and quality cost of pirating it. Until their product is more attractive than "free" products of unknown quality, they'll lose customers.

iTunes went a long way towards solving this issue, however I have never bought anything from iTunes because of the pure crap that is 128kbs encoding. If an online store offered reasonably priced FLAC files (please let there be a GOD and make it 192kHz while you're at it), they'd have all my business.

Right now the modus operandi for me, is to buy an ePub from Books on Board, remove the DRM, and read. If my choice is not available at a reasonable price in ePub, it goes on my wishlist until such a time as it is available. With 300+ books on there at the moment, there's a good chance I'll just never get around to purchasing most of those books; since I'll be distracted by newer offerings.

[DawnFalcon]

kjk - Sure, but to pretend that even a significant minority will, in this day and age and given the people here *care* a lot more about books than the average person...

THEN the industry will complain about it. And you know what? Darknet ebook traffic *will* be up.

[guyanonymous]

And if you're in the US, by removing the DRM, aren't you violating the DMCA and breaking a law with significant penalties?

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

The darknet has its own costs. Downloading takes time via torrents, especially if you utilize public torrents. It's not a simple click and there's your file...

Precisely! So, if the price of a title is lower, more potential purchasers would rather purchase a legal, easy to obtain copy. But, as the price increases, a larger portion of potential purchasers will make the effort to go to darknet/ Doh....

Originally Posted by MovieBird

iTunes went a long way towards solving this issue, however I have never bought anything from iTunes because of the pure crap that is 128kbs encoding. If an online store offered reasonably priced FLAC files (please let there be a GOD and make it 192kHz while you're at it), they'd have all my business....

iTunes does 256k....

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

And if you're in the US, by removing the DRM, aren't you violating the DMCA and breaking a law with significant penalties?

Remember what happened with Prohibition?

Originally Posted by Sonist

iTunes does 256k....

Honestly, the last time I looked was several years ago, like before they did tried the different pricing levels. If they do 256kbs standard now, kudos!

[guyanonymous]

I firmly believe that prohibition and censorship don't work in the long run.

With respect to the removal of DRM, I'm more suggesting that for those who talk about breaking of laws, removal of DRM in some places is still against the law.

As well, some have suggested how easy it is to remove DRM. I believe it's far easier to find the books on the darknet than it is for non-techs to run python scripts etc. (that seems to be what I've found when researching DRM stuff) - though I'd be happy to be told otherwise

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

... As well, some have suggested how easy it is to remove DRM. I believe it's far easier to find the books on the darknet than it is for non-techs to run python scripts etc....

Excellent point.

Originally Posted by tompe

Baen is a very small company (5-10 people or do I misremember?) and this often happens in small companies were everybody do everything.

Yes, they're not the largest company but let's compare them with another publisher in the same general format. Sayyy, Tor, the scifi/fant arm of the newly consumer friendly Macmillian. Quick check shows that since Jan 2009, Tor has released 313 different sets of books, Baen 107. Note, this is not different titles but different releases (such as hardback, paperback, giftsets, special editions). Of ebooks, Tor released roughly 70, Baen roughly 56 (just counting the new ones from the webscriptions).

Any idea how many people get used at Tor? (Honest question. I have no idea how many employees are under the Tor label directly and how many are under Macmillian but get used by Tor.)

I'm wondering because even if Tor has 50 or more people but still is less consumer friendly and forthright, then it might be not because of workload but because it's "just the way they do things around there". I do remember the first time Tor and Baen worked together on ebooks everything was going great until Macmillian got involved and pulled them out. They knew that ebook distribution system would be a huge money loser and refused to fail with Baen. Uh, yeah.

Using the size of the company really makes a bad excuse for a company ignoring people (even though more than a few use their size to try to excuse their actions). Though to be fair, ignoring the end consumer might be a simple survival tactic for them. Once a company gets to big, no one has the power or permission to answer questions or listen to complaints without running it though several other levels of bureaucracy. Once you become to big to serve your end consumers, you have to change your focus to the sector you do sell to.

[Blue Tyson]

stxopher,

Good stats - did you do that from the publisher sites?

Different titles (e.g. counting hardback, paper, gold foil, bound in human skin or whatever editions as just one, combined) would be interesting when talking about ebooks. Baen obviously does 100% of theirs. So be interesting to know Tor, as I think they probably do more than they used to.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

And if you're in the US, by removing the DRM, aren't you violating the DMCA and breaking a law with significant penalties?

Maybe, the question of removal for personal use hasn't really been tested, AFAIK, and unless the question goes before the courts (which honestly isn't terribly likely) we won't have a definitive answer.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by stxopher

Any idea how many people get used at Tor? (Honest question. I have no idea how many employees are under the Tor label directly and how many are under Macmillian but get used by Tor.)

Linkedin has 39 people from "Tor Books" and lists "Company Size" at "11-50 employees".

[emellaich]

Back to the original post, I'm interested in any lawyers thoughts on this entire "Agency Model" approach. It seems to me that it is just another version of price fixing. I think that years ago, the famous case of price fixing was about refineries trying to set prices fro gas stations. How is this different?

Please note, I know tone doesn't come through in a post, I mean that as a legitimate question, and not as a complaint. I really don't understand everything in this arena and I wonder how this is different.

I also wonder if it makes a difference that they are not selling printed books using an 'agency model' but they are selling ebooks this way. It really seems like restraint of competition to me, but that's why I need a lawyer's insight.

[emellaich]

So, I guess I should have just done some searching before I posted. I guess my information shows my age.

It seems the issue in question is called vertical price fixing (between a manufacturer and its retailers) by some and it usually applies to either maximum or minimum retail prices. The US ruling that I remembered was from 1968 and it said vpf was 'per se' or automatically illegal. However, in 1997 the US Supreme court ruled that it was permissible to set maximum prices and that all such actions were not per se illegal. Then even more recently, in 2008, the US Supreme court accepted the use of minimum retail prices.

So, it does appear that my original memory is correct, just outdated. It now seems that McMillian can set a minimum price.

Sources:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/08/18/...w/tab/article/

http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/092/rpm.html

http://edition.cnn.com/US/9711/04/sc...ust/index.html

and of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing where a reference to the 2008 Supreme court decision got me to look for the other stuff.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by emellaich

Back to the original post, I'm interested in any lawyers thoughts on this entire "Agency Model" approach. It seems to me that it is just another version of price fixing. I think that years ago, the famous case of price fixing was about refineries trying to set prices fro gas stations. How is this different?

It's different from the gas stations because the refiners were trying to set prices at both their owned and the independent stations. They could set them at the company owned but not the independents.

Agency is not price fixing. Price fixing would be if Macmillan and Hachette and Random House sat together and devised a firm set or prices for all ebooks. With the U.S. Supreme Court configured as it is (thank you, Junior -- said with dripping sarcasm) I suspect that each ebook would be considered a separate product, which would make price fixing impossible to prove. More importantly, the Bush Court has already ruled that manufacturer's are entitled to set minimum resale prices. You see this everyday with the lack of discounting that occurs, for example, with Sony Readers and TVs. Sony has always been a big fan of minimum resale pricing. It would be very easy to fit the ebook pricing into that rationale.