eBook prices?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I get that you consider agency to be some great evil, but consider that Amazon was already raising their prices quite a bit before agreeing to agency. Once they had their market share, they had no reason to keep prices down.

Have you provided any dates or other evidence for this "Amazon was already raising their prices quite a bit before agreeing to agency" claim?

I'm not saying they weren't raising ebook prices. I'm saying I don't remember it all. It certainly didn't affect my buying habits if it was going on. My new-release best-sellers were consistently priced at $9.99 right up until the agency fight commenced. Backlist (where available) was always priced much lower than it is now, too. The increase in the price I was paying for ebooks from Amazon coincided exactly with the agency fight.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Example ... I've just finished reading The Silmarillion (after years of not reading it while being a big fan of Tolkien's books). I thought I might want to add it to my book collection (the copy I read was borrowed from the library via Overdrive). Here are the prices in the "competitive" eBook market.

Amazon – $9.99
Barnes & Noble – $9.99
Google Play Store – $9.99
Kobo – $9.99
Apple iTunes – $9.99

Not that I think this is an unreasonable price, but it would be nice to see SOME separation (if only by 50¢).

There is nothing to stop retailers competing on the price of these books by offering rebates, reward points, etc.

Kobo currently has its super points reward scheme, which gives a small proportion of the price paid back in the form of points that can be accumulated and redeemed on a future purchase. There is nothing to stop other retailers offering a more generous rebate scheme if they wanted to compete.

If you want to see real anti-competitive practices in action, look at Amazon's Kindle Unlimited scheme, where self-publishers have to agree not to make their books available at competing retailers if they want to participate.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Amazing how many people still cling to this story line as an excuse. Amazon was selling ebooks at a price point ($10) to get market share. Once the competition was out of the way and they had 80% market share, they stopped caring about that price point. When a new book comes out in hardbook, most of the time, the ebook is priced less than the printed book. For example, a hardcover copy of Monster Humter Memoir: Saints is $19 (list price $24). The kindle version is $9.99.

People pay what they are willing to pay. . . .

But Baen don't sell on agency terms so Amazon may and sometime does discount below $9.99

[Fluribus]

I suspect that the big publishers are afraid that if printed books go away, more people may wonder why the big publishers are needed. Thus they are anxious to prop up that side of the business.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I get that you consider agency to be some great evil, but consider that Amazon was already raising their prices quite a bit before agreeing to agency. Once they had their market share, they had no reason to keep prices down.

If Amazon was already raising their prices "quite a bit" before the Apple/Big Six collusion, what was the point of the collusion? Jobs specifically said he would raise the prices of eBooks when he first announced the iPad. And this is why the Big Six and Apple were required to pay out settlements for price fixing.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by rcentros

If Amazon was already raising their prices "quite a bit" before the Apple/Big Six collusion, what was the point of the collusion? Jobs specifically said he would raise the prices of eBooks when he first announced the iPad. And this is why the Big Six and Apple were required to pay out settlements for price fixing.

You do understand that we are talking well after that point. When Cotes issues her ruling, agency went away for several years until her order expired. Amazon was setting the prices. Agency went back into play in November of 2014, after a year long public battle between Amazon and Hatchette when Amazon tried to play extreme hard ball and got lots of bad press because of it.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

There is nothing to stop retailers competing on the price of these books by offering rebates, reward points, etc.

Kobo currently has its super points reward scheme, which gives a small proportion of the price paid back in the form of points that can be accumulated and redeemed on a future purchase. There is nothing to stop other retailers offering a more generous rebate scheme if they wanted to compete.

If you want to see real anti-competitive practices in action, look at Amazon's Kindle Unlimited scheme, where self-publishers have to agree not to make their books available at competing retailers if they want to participate.

I'm curious as to which books by the big publishers I can buy with points? When I do a quick search, I can't find any books that aren't by small independents...kind of like it is in Kindle Unlimited, but with a smaller selection.

Shari

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by shalym

I'm curious as to which books by the big publishers I can buy with points? When I do a quick search, I can't find any books that aren't by small independents...kind of like it is in Kindle Unlimited, but with a smaller selection.

Shari

While I wasn't looking at publisher's, I did find authors such as Stephen King, Nora Roberts, David Weber (Baen but not Tor), Alan Dean Foster, James Beard, Julia Child, Kelley Armstrong, Ilona Andrews, Dean Koontz, (1) etc. are available by redeeming points. Yes, there are quite a few books that do not qualify but of our (wife and I) last 24 purchases from Kobo(2), 19 were available for point redemption. For the most part, I did this by copy/paste on the book title and selecting the points button. BTW, I could find none of these authors in KU.

(1) I got tired of listing the authors

(2)Assumes I've been properly maintaining the vendor column in calibre.

[Derf]

Hey, everyone, I'm the OP who started this thread, and I want to thank you for all participating in this discussion.

I'm actually quite new to eBooks/eReaders, and confess to being 'green' to much of all this. Although I considered getting a Boyue T68+ a couple years ago (and didn't), I've been eReading on my computer and iPhone intermittently, a lackluster experience, and finally bought a Kobo Clara and LOVE it! Reading on it is just better, the glow light rocks, the orange shift is great, superb battery and lightweight and the software is pretty mature and with the patches from here make an AMAZING reading experience, IMO. [/gush]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

Although I have seen plenty of threads that were started on other topics devolve into a discussion of ebook prices, I don't recall seeing a thread actually started specifically on this topic (maybe I missed it).

I did do a search on the topic but I didn't find anything specific to my question.
I was afraid that the 'discussion' might devolve into heated arguments, but I'm glad that we're staying on track and I am learning a lot actually.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

IMPO, the ... big issues that ebooks have is that many people have trouble wrapping their head around the idea that something that doesn't physically exist except as a computer file has value and there really isn't a one to one match as far as price points go.

Absolutely not what I have difficulty with. I totally get that authors write stories because they enjoy the process and result AND they want to be paid. The end product for the consumer is the same; entertainment for a few hundred pages, be it a paperback novel, a hardcover first edition, or a eBook file. What I'm saying is that so many of the middle-men players are no longer relevant with eBooks, but the price is still artificially high on them simply because someone said that is what the market will bear.

Originally Posted by rem736

i agree that the price of a book (e-book or paper) may not necessarily be determined by costs alone. however, if the actual costs associated with e-books are lower than the paper version (which is generally the case), then e-book version should never be priced higher than the paper version. it should be priced the same or lower (even a penny lower) than the paper version. pricing the e-book version higher when it costs less simply tells the customer that whoever is selling is trying to take advantage of the consumer for format preference. pricing it the same or lower, and you'll get less confusion and less complaints. and i am emphasizing that you don't have to price it lower. just make both formats the same price. even better yet, sell both versions to the same customer at the price of one version + $1 (or something much lower than the price of one alone). this will make the combo a bargain for the consumer at very minimal additional cost to the seller.

Amen!

Originally Posted by rcentros

The Big Five publishers are not basing their prices on the "market" – they're basing them on what they want to charge....Here are the prices in the "competitive" eBook market.

Amazon – $9.99
Barnes & Noble – $9.99
Google Play Store – $9.99
Kobo – $9.99
Apple iTunes – $9.99

Not that I think this is an unreasonable price, but it would be nice to see SOME separation (if only by 50¢).

So, I think that it does look very ODD that all the major retailers are at the exact same price point, without even a penny difference. Seems like there is some kind of 'agreement' if not 'collusion'. But I'm still hung up on $10 for an eBook.

Let me give my examples... When Hollywood film studios make movies, they largely dictate the price at the cinema - $18 Regal premium, $20 Regal D3D, $22 Regal Imax, $25 Regal Imax 3D. And there are only so many studios making so many movies. Back in the 80's, along comes Cable TV, HBO, and for $30 (or whatever) a month, you could watch all kinds of ORIGINAL content. The a-la-carte price-per-entertainment dropped with a subscription model. Fast forward to Netflix days, and for $12 a month I can now see all kinds of ORIGINAL content. The content is still entertaining, maybe it doesn't cost $120 Million Dollars to produce an hour and twenty minutes of entertainment, but it still entertains me. And I'm happy with that.

When the major record labels produced all the music hits you'd hear on the radio, they dictated what the cost of a record would cost. Sure you could buy used records and old stuff, not fresh off the hit list, for cheaper price points, but that's still a small picture window. In 2001 Apple introduced iTunes, where you could pick and choose your songs for $0.99 each, and the a-la-carte price dropped. Then Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, and so many others popped up, offering $10 a month for unlimited music, and the subscription model meant your entertainment price-per-song fell off the proverbial cliff. But the artists are still making money, and the record studios are still making money. And now there's SoundCloud and Youtube, AudioMack and Vimeo where people can produce their own content without a major studio, get exposure, a following, and sell their music to their followers.

Back in the 90's, software used to be produced by big companies. If you had an idea for a game or a something, it just wasn't possible to get it onto retail shelves, since it was largely considered impossible for independent creators to code an entire product by themselves. You needed a huge team, and a marketing department, etc, etc. In 2007 Apple came along and said you could make an app and sell it for $1 in their store, and net $0.70 on the dollar. Google soon followed suit. No marketing, just word of mouth, and people compete on a fair playing field for your dollars one at a time, (not asking $10 for most apps).

In all of these examples, the price of the digital delivered product, often coupled with a subscription model, but through new distribution channels, and new players cutting out the dinosaur companies that used to produce the entertainment, are changing the game. There's more choice, and its cheaper to try.

So that's why I'm hung up on the fact that eBooks are still largely a-la-carte purchases, not unlike Apps on your phone, but the price remains as high as in brick-and-mortar stores. eBooks are still $10, because ... ? Well, I haven't quite figured that out yet.

It is equally confusing why target sells the same book as Amazon for the same price, when Target has to store the book in physical space, and Amazon is just a warehouse with a virtual storefront.

Originally Posted by GeoffR

If you want to see real anti-competitive practices in action, look at Amazon's Kindle Unlimited scheme, where self-publishers have to agree not to make their books available at competing retailers if they want to participate.

I like hearing that there is a subscription model for eBooks, but I don't really like that business practice - it just sounds terrible.




Lastly, can anyone explain this quirk:
Radio : If I listen to a song on the radio, everyone else can listen to the same song, at the same time, and there's no problem with all of us 'consuming' that song at the same time.

Digital Radio : Similarly, if my whole town subscribes to Pandora, we can all listen to songs by Billy Joel at the same time, and there is no problem, we never get notified that someone else is listening to the song I want to hear, and have to wait.

HBO On Demand : If everyone wants to queue up a new release on HBO on demand at the same time, there isn't any warning that we need to wait.

Hulu : If everyone on Hulu wants to watch the same tv episode at the same time, it starts right away, no wait list.

Libraries : Libraries have a finite number of books, like the way Blockbuster had a finite number of VHS copies. If its checked out, you have to wait for someone to return their copy so you can read it.

Digital Libraries / Overdrive : It makes absolutely ZERO sense to me that a digital copy is 'checked out' and I have to wait to read it. How is that possible. I understand that a library may impose a 'two week period' where I can read the book, before it disappears from my 'collection', thus making me feel like I don't own it, but only borrowing it... But I can't wrap my head around the library or Overdrive saying that all copies are being used at the moment, and I need to wait a couple weeks to read it.
The only thing I can think of is that Libraries are somehow locked into some old pricing/distribution structure, where they are purchasing X number of physical copies of books and Y number of copies of digital books from a publisher. So at any given point they can only loan out X number of physical books, and Y number of digital books. But THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. It doesn't jive with any other digital content distribution platform currently being used for other entertainment.

Hence, why eBooks are probably priced the way they are; because unlike in all these other models and mediums, digital ebooks are still being controlled like it is a physical object by publishing houses holding onto their old ways, trying to hold onto their power, and everyone who has been a middle-man to their creation, distribution, and marketing, still has their hand out to get a slice of the pie.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by shalym

I'm curious as to which books by the big publishers I can buy with points? When I do a quick search, I can't find any books that aren't by small independents...kind of like it is in Kindle Unlimited, but with a smaller selection.
i

It varies by country. To see all the books you can spend points on from the Kobo website, do a search with an empty search box to list all books, select filters by language, category, etc., tick the points box under pricing options, and click the apply button.

Where I am (New Zealand), 92% of the paid English-language ebooks on Kobo can be bought with points, including books by the big publishers Hachette, Penguin/Random House, Macmillan US (but not HarperCollins or Macmillan UK).

But points are received from all ebook purchases, not just the ones the ones that can be bought with points, and the points don't have to be spent only on other books by the same publishers. If Amazon wanted to offer a competing rebate scheme they could negotiate with suppliers to allow the rebates from ebooks to be spent on lawn-mowers or vacuum-cleaners or whatever.

(Edit: Just to point out that Hachette uses agency-style pricing in New Zealand, and also allows its ebooks to be bought with points, so one doesn't automatically preclude the other.)

[shalym]

Originally Posted by DNSB

While I wasn't looking at publisher's, I did find authors such as Stephen King, Nora Roberts, David Weber (Baen but not Tor), Alan Dean Foster, James Beard, Julia Child, Kelley Armstrong, Ilona Andrews, Dean Koontz, (1) etc. are available by redeeming points. Yes, there are quite a few books that do not qualify but of our (wife and I) last 24 purchases from Kobo(2), 19 were available for point redemption. For the most part, I did this by copy/paste on the book title and selecting the points button. BTW, I could find none of these authors in KU.

(1) I got tired of listing the authors

(2)Assumes I've been properly maintaining the vendor column in calibre.

Yeah...I looked for Stephen King as well, and the only ones I found were audiobooks. I guess if you're interested in those it would be a good thing.

Shari

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Derf

I like hearing that there is a subscription model for eBooks, but I don't really like that business practice - it just sounds terrible.

.

It isn't.
It is actually a fair (and delicate) balance between the interests of readers, willingly participating authors, and Amazon.

You clearly have a firm grasp of the digital economy for most forms of media but when it comes to books you need to factor in that there are *two*distinct and separate economies.

The traditional, legacy economy from past centuries revolves around "curation" and the power to say no. ( "No, we won't sell your book.")

The traditional consumer book supply chain runs from aspirant author through agents, acquisition editors, big chain (or Amazon) purchasing managers to store managers to (publisher paid-for) shelving. And at every step there is a gatekeeper judging the content by their own criteria. Typically: the odds that *they* can move the product. (There is a lot of blather about literary merit but it is just hot air. Everybody down the chain is focused on sale-ability. It's a for-profit business.)

Now, over the past few decades what used to be a diverse economy of hundreds of publishing houses has consolidated down to a handful of giant multinationals publishing thousands and tens of thousands of books a year, a few dozen mid-size publishers releasing hundreds of titles, and hundreds of "small press" publishers releasing a dozen or so titles a year. Now, obviously, the tens of thousands of books from the big publishers can and do crowd out the releases from smaller publishers. Mostly through paid placement. Pay to play.

If you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore (other than AmazonBooks) you'll quickly notice a pecking order: some books are sitting cover up on promo tables or face out on endcaps, some are shelved face out, but most are shelved edgewise and practically hidden deep in the store. The front table and endcap books are all supported by publisher payments, pre-designated as big sellers before consumers even hear of them. The face out books on shelves are prominent new releases the store thinks will move fast. And the rest...well, the rest might as well be decoration, honestly. They fill out the shelves, move slowly and for some stores cost more in floor space rent than they earn.

That is why you see the exact same new books in all stores. Those are termed front list and you find them everywhere,bookstores, newstands, dept stores, drug stores... The other books are called midlist and (if older) backlist. Those you only find in bookstores and online.

As you can see these practices lead to limited price competition. Same books from the same sources at the same prices. With one enormous caveat: volume discounts. In the 80's and nineties, as the hundreds of publishers were consolidating down to the "Big 5", the big publishers found that instead of dealing with thousands of individual stores and dozens of regional distributors (they were called jobbers) their life was sooo much simpler (and cheaper) if they only dealt with a few national distributors and a dozen or so bookstore/newstand chains. Everybody else, mostly smaller independent bookstores, could go through the distributors. And then they added in volume-based discounts for the biggest accounts. Naturally, small stores couldn't order as many copies of a given book so they had to sell at or near list price. A few miles away, Borders, Walden, B&N, and other chains offered 10%, 20%, even 30% discounts off list.

Smaller stores closed by the thousand. A lawsuit ensued in the mid 90's. Money was paid, promises made and ignored.

More consolidation. Less players, less competition, resulting in uniform prices.
Then Amazon came. Initially they were small and had to go through distributors to get books but they were also efficient, low-overhead, and willing to live off low single-digit margins. They grew big enough the publishers were willing to deal with them direct. Lower costs passed to consumers; Amazon *thrived* on low single-digit margins. The more books they sold, the bigger the discounts they got and the lower their prices. Even bigger volumes. Soon, not even the biggest chains could compete and still the big publishers stuck with volume discounts. These days Amazon easily gets 45-50% off list. They sell half the books in the land.

Now, lets turn to ebooks and the second economy.
Very different story.

Commercial ebooks have been available in hit or miss form from the big publishers since the PDA era in the late 90's. It was a niche market and the books were priced like hardcovers. Being a niche, sales were low, and discounts were low. $35 ebooks were not unheard of. $17-25 prices were common.
Retailers were few, catalogs were small--9000 titles was considered huge. Kindle launched with about that many.
Since the ebooks were priced like hardcovers, they were discounted like hardcovers. And Amazon moved lots and lots of hardcovers. But since ebooks are a lot cheaper to store and distribute, Amazon's other costs were near zero. And they wanted to take ebooks beyond hobbyists and techie enthusiasts to mainstream readers so, instead of pocketing the savings, they discounted ebooks below the pbook sale price. The $9.99 price point was born.

At that same time, few noticed but something else was born along with the Kindle. Today it is called KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING. It was meant to streamline ebook publishing for smaller publishers. And authors. Few noticed but those that did acted on what they saw coming.

Now Kindle made a big noise when it released. Not totally sure why. It was clunky, ugly, pricey. And it sold out in a day or so. Amazon had ordered 25000 built and they just vanished. It took them six months to get more. In that time they grew their catalog to tens of thousands of ebooks. Other ereaders joined Sony (they were the first eink reader) and Kindle. Publishers saw the margins and rushed to digitize their backlist for fun and profit.

All was well until mid 2009. Kobo was in planning. Nook was in planning. Kindle sales were outstripping Sony and other ereader vendors because Kindle was a standalone device. You didn't need a PC to buy ebooks. It was a BIG thing at the time.

Suddenly, the big publishers stopped looking at ebooks as another book format like hardcovers and paperbacks and started talking of them as something alien and different. Not real books. A different product. And a different product where 90% was sold by Amazon. (Yeah, and at one time IBM sold 100% of PCs. First movers in new markets start big and quickly lose their dominance as competitors emerge.)

The big publishers panicked and without waiting for bigger competitors to jump in and the market to mature, cutting Amazon down to size naturally, decided all ebooks everywhere would be sold at prices *they* set, not the retailers, with no discounting allowed. Then they got...stupid is the only word that applies, really. They conspired with Apple to not only do away with discounting, bad enough right there, they openly raised prices on all ebooks the exact same amount, the exact same day, and they DOCUMENTED everything in their email archives! (Easiest antitrust case the DOJ ever prosecuted.)

Now, Amazon was the target of the conspiracy but they were big and entrenched. And they had a secret weapon. The real victims were Amazon's other competitors. Smaller epub ebookstores, hardware-only ebook readers, and of course readers. This was because to do away with discounting, the big publishers had to cancel all existing ebook contracts, leaving retailers with no books to sell from those publishers. And those publishers provided over 60% of all the ebooks sold at the time. And they took their own sweet time negotiating new contracts. Up to six months. For some vendors, they never did.

The conspirators controlled over half the ebooks sold but they didn't control the rest and they did them a big favor in raising prices 30% overnight.

People who had spent $300 on an ereader weren't going to just trash them and go back to print. So they went looking for other, better priced ebooks. And found them. And liked them. Some were older books from familiar authors (especially in the Romance genre) but many were from previously unknown authors. There was life in ebookland beyond the valleys of the big publishers. And these books were cheaper because they were based on an entirety different economic framework. One that isn't based on the power of "no" and instead on the power of "yes", "go ahead. See who likes your book."

There is a fancy word, disintermediation, that means "cutting out the middleman". And in the second ebook economy the middlemen being cut out is everybody except Amazon. (Or Kobo, but Kobo is at a big disadvantage. Apple and Nook even morecso.) All that remains is the author and the reader in the economy of Independent Author/Publishers, better known as Indie publishers (as a parallel to indie movie makers and indie musicians) and collectively increasingly known as Indie, Inc. It is currently several tens of thousands of authors; some are veteran tradpub authors dropped by their publishers, some walked away from tradpub, some never bothered to play the tradpub game at all.

These days, Indie, Inc makes up nearly half all ebooks sold. About two million, at last count. A million and a half are exclusive to Amazon. You will not find them anywhere else.

The Indie economy is built on two pillars: margins and choice.

Choice is easy to understand: without gatekeepers saying "no" authors can write whatever they like and readers can read whatever they like. You can find entire genres that traditional publishers never bothered with because they considered them too niche (say superhero fantasies), sleazy (twenty types of erotica, probably more), or simply non-profitable (poetry, for ine).

The second pillar is margin. Or as some Indie authors put it "What part of 70% royalties don't you get?" .

Indie author/publishers are small businessmen. They own their books, they control their copyrights, they set their own prices (daily, if they feel like it) and the sales revenue goes direct to them. Some price their books at $9.95 or even high. Some price them as low as $0.99. The vast majority price them, according to genre, between $2.99 and $5.99. The average for Romance is around $3 and for SF&F around $4. And they generally get to keep 65-70% of the sale price. For comparison, tradpub hardcover royalties run *at best* 15% or so after everybody upstream has been paid. For ebooks the rate is 25% of the publishers' 70% cut minus the agent's 15%. Works out to just under $15% of the sale price.

It's trickle down economics on the tradpub side. The reader pays $13 and the author sees $1.97.

On the Indie side, the same book might cost the reader $2.99 but it'll deliver $2.10 to the author's pockets. For twelve bucks, a reader can buy one "curated" tradpub book or three Indie books and have change left over. Maybe four if they're into romance. (Which is why almost 90% of romance ebook sales are indie.)

So, back to the top:

On the tradpub side you have virtually no price competition between vendors, occasional sales from publishers mostly on backlist, and higher than print ebook prices. You will find mostly familiar names that have been filtered by perceived marketability.

On the Indie side there are lower prices, less familar names, and a broader range of subjects. You are the filter.

Two parallel economies.

And then there are the subscription services.
Two.
Scribd and Kindle unlimited.

Scribd is small, grossing a few tens of millions, and pays the publisher between 60-80% of sale price if you read at least ten percent of a book. There's people around here who can tell you how they like. It's not a big money maker for Scribd but they haven't folded yet.

And then there is kindle unlimited which is like nothing else.
It's economics are...interesting...
Authors get paid in direct proportion to the amount of the book read.
The per page payout varies month to month, hovering around Whereas at Scribd if somebody reads 9% of a book and decides it's not for them the publisher gets nothing.
At KU if somebody reads 9% of a book and moves on, the author gets 9% of a full read. Eleven people rejecting a book can be as profitable as one person loving it.

A weird economic proposition.
But one that makes sense for readers--risk free discovery of new to them voices--and for authors, who get paid while searching for new readers. They get paid less than for a sale--a 200 page book might only bring in $1.80, though some longer books bring in more from a full read than a sale--but it's not a sale, just a rental. And fans can and do go on to buy other books from the same author at full price.
As for Amazon, they get the competitive advantage of of a million and a half exclusive books.

So no, ebook subscriptions are not a terrible business practice.
Kindle Unlimited by itself delivers more revenue to Authors than any non-Kindle store. $250-300 million a year. That is billions of pages read each month.
More than Kobo, Apple, Google, Microsoft. Oh yeah, and more than Nook but that goes without saying.

The only real question is whether or not you need curation on the books you read and are willing to pay as much as $10 each ebook for that service.

If not, those same $10 will buy you a month of an all you can eat buffet. The buffet may not be gourmet-approved but lots of people seem to enjoy it: it's grown 5x over 4 years.

Regardless, welcome to the world of ebooks.
Hope you find good reads.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by shalym

Yeah...I looked for Stephen King as well, and the only ones I found were audiobooks. I guess if you're interested in those it would be a good thing.

Shari

Use the filter to remove the audiobooks. That's my normal practice since I don't listen to audiobooks. At home, I prefer reading not listening. In the car, the way I get caught up in a book, I'd be an accident looking for a place to happen.

[Apparition B5]

Originally Posted by shalym

I'm curious as to which books by the big publishers I can buy with points? When I do a quick search, I can't find any books that aren't by small independents...kind of like it is in Kindle Unlimited, but with a smaller selection.

Shari

Yeah, that's the main reason why I dropped my Kobo VIP subscription. None of the books by the big five publishers are eligible, and the vast, vast majority of the independent eBooks I'm interested in are solely available for sale on Amazon. It's a shame, but for whatever reason(s), most independent eBook authors (including big ones like Lois McMaster Bujold), do not put their eBooks up for sale on Kobo, Google Play Books, etc.

[Derf]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

It isn't.
You clearly have a firm grasp of the digital economy for most forms of media but when it comes to books you need to factor in that there are *two*distinct and separate economies....

The only real question is whether or not you need curation on the books you read and are willing to pay as much as $10 each ebook for that service.

If not, those same $10 will buy you a month of an all you can eat buffet. The buffet may not be gourmet-approved but lots of people seem to enjoy it: it's grown 5x over 4 years.

Regardless, welcome to the world of ebooks.
Hope you find good reads.

Thank you for that. I'm sure it took a little bit of time to type out, but I really appreciate the lesson.