07-19-2010, 02:04 PM | #31 |
Kindlephilia
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I'm still waiting for the publishers to drop ebook prices to match MMPB prices. As it stands, if I want a book with DRM I get it from the library (which eliminates a couple of the big publishers, MacMillan is one) or not at all.
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07-19-2010, 03:14 PM | #32 |
Curmudgeon
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The complete works of William Shakespeare are smaller than some pictures I've come across on badly-built websites. In epub, they're a hair over 2 MB.
Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is 140k. That's about the size of a picture of my cat. |
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07-20-2010, 11:35 AM | #33 |
Wizard
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07-25-2010, 08:03 AM | #34 | |
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07-25-2010, 10:32 AM | #35 | |
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Consider your typical genre paperback. The author gets no more than 50 cents in royalties per book sold during the brief time (usually about 90 days) that book is on the bookstore shelves. And most of the time, once that first printing is sold out or remaindered, there is never another. If that same author publishes that same book as an ebook through Smashwords, he can sell it for just $1 and still make more per book sold. And it's never out of print. The same, with different numbers, applies to publishers. They can make more profit on an ebook priced at a fraction the price of a pbook. They're just short-sighted ("We have to protect our (lower-profit) hardcover sales!") and/or simply greedy. |
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08-04-2010, 10:41 PM | #36 |
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It's absolutely absurd to charge MORE for an ebook than for a printed book, or even the same price, given that no paper and printing costs are involved. But if you really want the book, who else can you buy it from? It's greed, no doubt about it, but there's no one to stop them
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08-05-2010, 05:58 AM | #37 | ||
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08-05-2010, 06:58 AM | #38 | |
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And if the French Gov think they can hold back the tide in some idiotic effort to 'save and protect the French culture from Americanisation' then it is even more deluded than usual. Illegal copies are exploding on the internet. The ridiculous amounts of control over pricing that some countries have allowed the publishers cannot survive the changes that are happening and these publishers have no excuses. They have seen the writing on the wall for years now and they deserve absolutely no sympathy. |
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08-05-2010, 07:21 AM | #39 | |
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I used to be very much opposed to this policy, but now I honestly don't know. I wouldn't like the French publishers to become too much like American ones. Except that they probably already are... I don't like the idea of culture as a mass-market product, at the cost of quality. However, I doubt that protecting the publishers' margins has much influence on that. Or on protecting small bookshops... |
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08-05-2010, 08:41 AM | #40 | |
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08-05-2010, 08:44 AM | #41 |
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As an Italian, I'd gladly take the American business attitude for my country's publishers, and leave the culture thing to authors.
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08-05-2010, 10:53 AM | #42 |
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Books and music are a couple of the greatest values in the world. Given the number of times I listen to a song I love, $1.29 is cheap. I'm not a fast reader and it takes me several hours to read a book, usually in small bits of time over days and even weeks. For this much entertainment on demand, $5-10 is a bargain.
There is so much content out there...so many struggling musicians, so many wannabe authors...that it becomes devalued monetarily. That's a problem for the creators (like me), but it's a godsend to consumers. Big publishers have maintained high prices because they controlled the supply. They still control the supply on bestsellers. But the dam is leaking more and more every day and people are finding alternatives to their high-priced offerings. The bestsellers that everyone must have are going to dwindle in number while most reading takes place around the edges of the mainstream market. |
08-05-2010, 11:59 AM | #43 |
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Also consider that after a book has been out for a while it's easy to find used copies for sale, often (from Amazon) you can get a book for $4 (shipping included). As someone who sells books on Amazon I've often bought a book used from one vendor, read it, and then sold it on Amazon for more than I paid for it. But it's not even legal (as far as I know) to resell you e-books. Large publishing houses, like large music companies, have a hard time adjusting to new technology and end up aleinating their customer base as a result.
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08-05-2010, 03:07 PM | #44 |
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Yes, this is what Stephen King claimed he was trying to do when he windowed the ebook for Under the Dome. Then a price war broke out between Walmart, Target and Amazon.
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08-06-2010, 01:36 AM | #45 |
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The publishers aren't exactly happy about the ebook revolution either. They're afraid of anything they can't control.
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