MobiPocket Shut Down!?

[HarryT]

Oh dear - I see that the message on the Fictionwise web site has now changed to say:

Engineers at Mobipocket.com have informed us that they continue to work on the issue but do not yet have an estimated date when the server will be back online.

I really am starting to wonder if they will be back!

[Bombast]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You are conflating two different business models, and it doesn't work that way.

You have several costs: the cost of acquisition (IE, the advance payed to the author), the cost of preparation (line editing, copy editing, proofreading, and typesetting), the cost of manufacture, the cost of warehousing, and the cost of distribution.

Acquisition and preparation will be there regardless, and creation of an ebook edition in addition to the electronic format sent to a printer will be negligeable.

Cost of manufacture and cost of warehousing essentially don't exist for ebooks. You have a master copy of the electronic book, sitting on a server. the server will have a cost, but the share of that cost born by any individual ebook will be miniscule.

Cost of distribution will be the cost of the server, electronic payment setup, and bandwidth. Tiny for any individual book.
Dennis

I agree, but would like to note a few additional facts -

1) The acquisition and preparation costs are fixed - they're the same if a book sells 1 copy or 10 million copies. As you note, the variable costs (bandwidth to transmit the book, processing the payment) should be functionally zero.

2) Acquisition costs are sunk costs. Once a book is ready to sell to the public, that money is simply GONE. Then the question is just what to do with it?

3) That mean this is a very simple, classic microeconomics question. What price will result in the highest total income?

Price it there and make the pie as big as possible. Then the author and the publisher can negotiate over how big a piece each party gets.

This model is very, very different from the dead tree world. Printing, binding, shipping, warehousing and retail space are all variable costs.

Until this week, the only E-book I'd ever bought was "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi. He was an established, lower-than-mid-list SF writer, and it was an all-right book. He knew it wouldn't be a best seller, if he shopped it to regular publishers the most he could hope for was about $10k. So he offered it for sale on his website as a word document - IIRC, it was $2. To me, it was WELL worth $2, it wouldn't have been worth $22 for hardback, or $7 for paperback.

He's got a very interesting post on his website about the stupidity of DRM -
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004052.html#comments

[Kilarney]

An Amazon spokesperson is now saying that it is "unknown" when the Mobipocket site will be operating again.
Article here.

I've been struggling between purchasing the Sony Reader and the upcoming Bookeen Cybook Gen3. This may make that decision rather easy.

[NETLOLA]

I just checked a minute ago and Mobipocket website is back online!!!!!

[jasonkchapman]

Curiouser and curiouser. The last large-scale failure I saw like this involved a backhoe. And that was fixed within a week.

I agree with others. This looks less like a hardware failure and more like data corruption every day.

[Neubarth]

Originally Posted by NETLOLA

I just checked a minute ago and Mobipocket website is back online!!!!!

As an author, I had to initiate a new password on a new server HTTPS as opposed to http. New Microsoft security. I was able to get in, but the records of past transactions were not available which tells me they are still trying to reconstruct that. It had to have been a security breech and loss of the history files, otherwise, they would have the records of sales available.

All past history of transactions/sales is not available. Hopefully they can reconstruct that.

[imaredr]

IT's Back!

Ellen

[Kilarney]

Glad to hear it's back up!

[MatthewStorm]

Hey, I did pretty well for my first post. Glad it's back!

[lcalvin]

Sort of up - DNS server propagation may be lagging in some areas (like mine) Clear your cache, and you may want to try
http://84.14.135.242/

[Axelos]

They are back ! Didn't found any explantion on their pages. Strange behavoir !!! Typically french ???

[andym]

Looks like mobipocket is working again by the way.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Bombast

I agree, but would like to note a few additional facts

1) The acquisition and preparation costs are fixed - they're the same if a book sells 1 copy or 10 million copies. As you note, the variable costs (bandwidth to transmit the book, processing the payment) should be functionally zero.

Yes. They pays their money, and they takes their chances. They hope the book sells enough to cover the costs and make a profit.

2) Acquisition costs are sunk costs. Once a book is ready to sell to the public, that money is simply GONE. Then the question is just what to do with it?

3) That mean this is a very simple, classic microeconomics question. What price will result in the highest total income?

Price it there and make the pie as big as possible. Then the author and the publisher can negotiate over how big a piece each party gets.

On that note, ebooks have caused some changes in publishing. It used to be that once a book was out of print for a specified period, the author could ask for the rights to be returned, and attempt to resell the title elsewhere. Print on demand and ebooks raise the question "What is meant by 'out of print'?", and current contracts tend to specify paper editions and number of ebook/POD sales to specify when a book is out of print and the publisher's rights lapse.

This model is very, very different from the dead tree world. Printing, binding, shipping, warehousing and retail space are all variable costs.

Correct again. And retail space isn't a cost to the publisher. The retailer must estimate the proper mix of titles to yield the required revenue per square foot to cover costs and make money, Not all that long back, we saw publishers who knew too many books were chasing too few readers, but nobody wanted to be the first to trim their lines. They were all afraid that if they published, say, three SF titles that month instead of four, they would lose the shelf space occupied by the fourth title and not get it back. So we had editors saying "I have four slots this month, but only three filled. What is the least bad offering in the slush pile to fill out the list?"

Until this week, the only E-book I'd ever bought was "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi. He was an established, lower-than-mid-list SF writer, and it was an all-right book. He knew it wouldn't be a best seller, if he shopped it to regular publishers the most he could hope for was about $10k. So he offered it for sale on his website as a word document - IIRC, it was $2. To me, it was WELL worth $2, it wouldn't have been worth $22 for hardback, or $7 for paperback.

I have _Old Man's War_ and the follow up _The Ghost Brigades_in hardcover, and a third is out and on my list. Scalzi's career is coming along nicely.

He's got a very interesting post on his website about the stupidity of DRM -
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004052.html#comments

There is also an interesting discussion between Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow on Charlie's blog on the topic. Charlie has released a few titles (_Accelerando_ and _Scratch Monkey_, among others) in electronic form under a Creative Commons license, and folks would like him to do it with all of his books. Cory Doctorow already does that. But as Charlie points out, he isn't Cory, isn't blessed with publishers who will let him do that, and doesn't have the clout at this stage in his career to force the issue.

Personally, I haven't bought any ebooks. I have thousands, mostly in Plucker format, on my PDA, but all are freely available from Project Gutenberg or places like the Baen Free Library, or offered under Creative Commons license like Doctorow and Stross's work.

I don't like DRM, and I don't like proprietary formats. I want to download electronic content once, and read it on whatever device I happen to have. Grabbing HTML and concerting to Plucker for my PDA meets that requirement here. If the epublishing industry ever gets its act together and agrees on a standard format everyone will support, so I don't have to remember what title is in what format read by what reader, and if the insanity of DRM is abolished, I'll revisit the decision. Meanwhile, I have for more in electronic format that I want to read than I have time for now. I'm not missing anything by not buying DRMed electronic editions, since I still buy paper editions, too.
______
Dennis

[LaughingVulcan]

So now there's the new "Mobipocket eBook Reader Desktop 6.0". I wonder if that had something to do with it?

It might be interesting to compare it to Connect. (And hopefully it's a gauntlet down to Sony to keep developing Connect so it's even better.... )

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by LaughingVulcan

So now there's the new "Mobipocket eBook Reader Desktop 6.0". I wonder if that had something to do with it?

It might be interesting to compare it to Connect. (And hopefully it's a gauntlet down to Sony to keep developing Connect so it's even better.... )

Reader Desktop 6.0 was out before the downtime.