Amazon's $9.99 eBook Attacked as "Predatory Pricing" - Page 5

basschick · 12-17-2009, 06:53 PM

of the few hardback new books i've bought over the years, all but 2 were on mega sale, and significantly under $20 - say $12.99. that is what i paid in a brick and mortar store, not just amazon. usually i just waited for the paperback versions to come out. yet at $9.99, there is a chance if it's an author i really like, that i'll be tempted not to wait, and i'll buy the ebook version at that somewhat higher price. that's a couple bucks more than i pay for the paperback version, and i'll bet there are a lot of others like me out there.

as far as i can tell, publishers lie continuously out of a sense of entitlement. they'd rather lie and grouse than adapt. a large number of the higher priced ebooks i get are edited worse than the pbook versions, which makes no sense - i mean, why pay someone to unedit a book? some, including best sellers, not only don't appear to have any kind of formatting, but don't even include the cover art.

and this makes me wonder if they're trying to force us to buy the pbooks by making the ebooks inferior to the pbooks.

if true, once again that shows how little they know their customers - the people who buy ebook readers. a lot of us have no space. i bought over 170 ebooks in the last year, and there's no way i could have wedged 170 more books in my house, or even 50. each shelf in our bookcase is filled with double rows of books. we have boxes of books, a footlocker of books, and we're in a one bedroom apartment. i tended to buy used books so i could just give the ones i didn't love away.

they aren't losing money from me or those like me who buy ebooks- the total number of sales of new books via ebooks they've made are probably 4 times greater than they'd have made from me on new pbooks, and i did spent more on some of them, as well.

maybe they should know this sort of thing. it is their business to know - but they'd rather just complain.

delphidb96 · 12-17-2009, 06:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moejoe

To their customers? Seriously, that's what literature is reduced to is it? And what are writers now? Word vendors? Entertainment facilitators? Distraction enablers?

To write only for money is not to write at all.

Tell that to Dickens and Heinlein.

Derek

fugazied · 12-17-2009, 06:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by =X=

I see so making books affordable is an attack on literature. FAIL

It is when authors/publishers/retailers are more concerned about $ than writing that is the true attack on literature.

I agree 100% Publishers wouldn't care if only 1 person could afford to read if the books sold for 10 million dollars each.

They don't care about making books cheaply available. In countries like Australia they charge $30 for a paperback and publishers viciously thought against proposals which allowed for cheaper imported books. Again with the same tired arguments, 'it hurts literature, it hurts authors'. They want super expensive books, they don't believe cheaper books means more readers and more profits.

They have failed to fully appreciate the fact that in 5 years the vast majority of people will have an e-reader device in their pocket in the form of a phone or a tablet. People won't need to carry those weighty hardbacks and can read on the run, it's a LOT more potential consumers - people who don't want to lug around paper books .

delphidb96 · 12-17-2009, 07:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kris777

100% agree

Oh! My! GLORG! Since when is a desire to be financially secure a 'crime'??? (And while *publishers* may rake in unhealthy profits, the same cannot be said for the majority of authors. Heck, even most retailers don't make much of a margin after figuring in overhead of running a storefront - including property taxes, mortgage, utilities, wages, insurance, etc...)

Derek

jaxx6166 · 12-17-2009, 07:05 PM

Delphi - I'm the first to agree with you here. Some writers barely make a pittance to survive on. Others are paid entirely too much.

CCDMan · 12-17-2009, 08:05 PM

Here we go again. The dinosaurs see the asteroid approaching and are whining. OK, fine, but whining won't stop the asteroid.

It is what it is. It's called capitalism. Deal with it or perish. It does not matter a whit if you are right or wrong.

Yawn

BuddyBoy · 12-18-2009, 02:14 AM

Well, I try to only wade into the price discussion about once a year, and my day-to-day experience in a publishing company get more and more out of date, but I do actually understand the publishers' perspective on this too.

The problem is with the mega authors, for whom they have to bid unreasonably advances in order to land their titles and retail shelf space. The publishers are happy enough to take the $12 from Amazon for the wholesale cost of the ebook, but creating an implied value of $9.99 for the content of a new bestseller is scaring them out of their two-piece suits. If that were to become the accepted retail pricing, and cascade the wholesale price down to $7 or even $5, the big titles might never pay off their advances.

It's a nasty catch-22 - keep your prices high and push your customers away - or lower your advances and prices and push your authors away.

And although there are a number of authors whose advances are so high that they never fully earn them (the advance it theirs to keep regardless), the other big authors who are profitable are the ones whose profits do help underwrite the direct to paperback smaller authors, most of whom bomb and sell fewer than 1000 copies.

I don't know if there is a solution that works for everyone - the possibility of delaying ebook by four to six months to grab the maximum hard cover sales without ebook cannibalization may be the most workable approach. Not that I like waiting for my books, but I can survive. I'd rather do that then pay $15 for an ebook, unless it's a very very special book.

HarryT · 12-18-2009, 04:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Tell that to Dickens and Heinlein.

Derek

Or to Shakespeare for that matter. He wrote to make money, period. A cynical profiteering hack writer who didn't even make up his own plots - he just took other peoples' stories and rewrote them.

Moejoe · 12-18-2009, 04:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Tell that to Dickens and Heinlein.

Derek

I would if they were both alive. Dickens was a hack and the only work I've ever enjoyed of his was A Christmas Carol, and then only because of its cultural resonance (I thank him alone for allowing Scrooged with Bill Murray to happen). Everything else by Dickens bores me to absolute tears.

Heinlein I despise even more. A libertarian bordering on fascist, mysogonist with little to no skill who somehow hit a chord with the post 60's pseudo-intellectuals who raised him up as a master. Dull, dull, dull.

If you're going to give examples use someone like Max Brand who was actually talented, wrote for money and only money and despised the audience who bought his work. He would make your argument more compelling to me, but not much more.

Moejoe · 12-18-2009, 05:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HarryT

Or to Shakespeare for that matter. He wrote to make money, period. A cynical profiteering hack writer who didn't even make up his own plots - he just took other peoples' stories and rewrote them.

Exactly, and as such he's no great shakes to me (pun most definitely intended).

HarryT · 12-18-2009, 05:09 AM

Oh well, obviously you're a better judge of English literature than all those so-called "experts".

Moejoe · 12-18-2009, 05:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HarryT

Oh well, obviously you're a better judge of English literature than all those so-called "experts".

Yes I am when it comes to my consumption of literature. I don't give a tinker's cuss what 'experts' think about anything. I'm not here on this earth to let other people tell me what is good or not, I'll make up my own mind. I love Kafka, Steinbeck, Plath, Chandler, Parker (Dorothy and Robert B) Dostoyevsky, Bradbury (Ray), Murakami, Yoshimoto, Abe, Brackett, Cheever, Ballard, McDonald (several of them)... and so on...

I find very little worth in Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and the other stalwarts of bored and bearded (both men and women) secondary-school literary teachers and so-called 'experts'.

omk3 · 12-18-2009, 05:18 AM

Jim Thompson also wrote for money, Dostoyevsky too. Well, to survive, not to get rich.
I'm with Moejoe though, if you start treating your readers as customers, you're not writing at all. Some rich man can hire you to write on demand stories he'll find amusing.

Thompson -and a lot of others I'm sure- never thought about his readers as anything. It was the publisher that was the customer, who paid by the word. It is amazing that good books can be written this way, but maybe the desperate situation the writer was in helped. I don't think best-selling authors of today are in any kind of desperate situation to urge them to explore the depths of human psyche...

Each to his own however. There are enough (good or bad or whatever) books in the world for everyone. And always will be, I'm sure, regardless of amazon pricing policies :P

Mycropht · 12-18-2009, 05:45 AM

I don't think authors are the problem and I don't think the readers are the problem. For $9.99 both authors and readers could get what they want but with an extremely simplified distibution chain a lot of inbetweens are not needed anymore and they are the ones who are crying out loud. Well, my heart bleeds for them and for the music agents and for every worker replaced by a robot and for all those expert makers of horse chariots and... Maybe it is not a good thing but it cannot be stopped.

I know one thing: if I could somehow pay $9.99 for an e-book where $5 would go to the author and the rest to Amazon to cover less creative work (editing, formatting, marketing, distribution,...), the author would get more then (s)he gets now. Same goes about music.

captcrouton · 12-18-2009, 06:22 AM

The thing will sort itself out, either way. For me, I can wait for a best seller to be reasonably priced before I buy it. So if it takes a year after a book is released, I very well could lose interest. I'm not running out of things to read.

If a book never becomes affordable in my eyes, I might check it out in the library, borrow it from a friend, or never ever get it. All three have happened at some point. Again, I'll buy the books (e or p) that I feel like are worth the price. And as there are plenty of great classics I can read for free that I haven't touched yet, and plenty of great new authors who do want their books in my hand, I'll have enough reading material to put on my Kindle.

12-17-2009, 08:05 PM	#66
CCDMan *** Posts: 335 Karma: 5759 Join Date: Mar 2006 Device: ***	Here we go again. The dinosaurs see the asteroid approaching and are whining. OK, fine, but whining won't stop the asteroid. It is what it is. It's called capitalism. Deal with it or perish. It does not matter a whit if you are right or wrong. Yawn Last edited by CCDMan; 12-17-2009 at 08:07 PM.

12-18-2009, 05:45 AM	#74
Mycropht Optimist Posts: 77 Karma: 378 Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Zagreb, Croatia Device: Kindle Paperwhite	The $9.99 problem I don't think authors are the problem and I don't think the readers are the problem. For $9.99 both authors and readers could get what they want but with an extremely simplified distibution chain a lot of inbetweens are not needed anymore and they are the ones who are crying out loud. Well, my heart bleeds for them and for the music agents and for every worker replaced by a robot and for all those expert makers of horse chariots and... Maybe it is not a good thing but it cannot be stopped. I know one thing: if I could somehow pay $9.99 for an e-book where $5 would go to the author and the rest to Amazon to cover less creative work (editing, formatting, marketing, distribution,...), the author would get more then (s)he gets now. Same goes about music.

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12-17-2009, 06:53 PM	#61
basschick Wizard Posts: 1,096 Karma: 4695691 Join Date: May 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite	of the few hardback new books i've bought over the years, all but 2 were on mega sale, and significantly under $20 - say $12.99. that is what i paid in a brick and mortar store, not just amazon. usually i just waited for the paperback versions to come out. yet at $9.99, there is a chance if it's an author i really like, that i'll be tempted not to wait, and i'll buy the ebook version at that somewhat higher price. that's a couple bucks more than i pay for the paperback version, and i'll bet there are a lot of others like me out there. as far as i can tell, publishers lie continuously out of a sense of entitlement. they'd rather lie and grouse than adapt. a large number of the higher priced ebooks i get are edited worse than the pbook versions, which makes no sense - i mean, why pay someone to unedit a book? some, including best sellers, not only don't appear to have any kind of formatting, but don't even include the cover art. and this makes me wonder if they're trying to force us to buy the pbooks by making the ebooks inferior to the pbooks. if true, once again that shows how little they know their customers - the people who buy ebook readers. a lot of us have no space. i bought over 170 ebooks in the last year, and there's no way i could have wedged 170 more books in my house, or even 50. each shelf in our bookcase is filled with double rows of books. we have boxes of books, a footlocker of books, and we're in a one bedroom apartment. i tended to buy used books so i could just give the ones i didn't love away. they aren't losing money from me or those like me who buy ebooks- the total number of sales of new books via ebooks they've made are probably 4 times greater than they'd have made from me on new pbooks, and i did spent more on some of them, as well. maybe they should know this sort of thing. it is their business to know - but they'd rather just complain.

12-17-2009, 07:05 PM	#65
jaxx6166 Wizard Posts: 1,222 Karma: 769316 Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Eternal summer Device: 350, iPad, PW	Delphi - I'm the first to agree with you here. Some writers barely make a pittance to survive on. Others are paid entirely too much.

12-18-2009, 02:14 AM	#67
BuddyBoy eBookin' Fool Posts: 310 Karma: 1008360 Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Vancouver, BC Device: Kindle Paperwhite, KK, iPad (Ex Prs 505, 500, Reb1100-2150, Rocket)	Well, I try to only wade into the price discussion about once a year, and my day-to-day experience in a publishing company get more and more out of date, but I do actually understand the publishers' perspective on this too. The problem is with the mega authors, for whom they have to bid unreasonably advances in order to land their titles and retail shelf space. The publishers are happy enough to take the $12 from Amazon for the wholesale cost of the ebook, but creating an implied value of $9.99 for the content of a new bestseller is scaring them out of their two-piece suits. If that were to become the accepted retail pricing, and cascade the wholesale price down to $7 or even $5, the big titles might never pay off their advances. It's a nasty catch-22 - keep your prices high and push your customers away - or lower your advances and prices and push your authors away. And although there are a number of authors whose advances are so high that they never fully earn them (the advance it theirs to keep regardless), the other big authors who are profitable are the ones whose profits do help underwrite the direct to paperback smaller authors, most of whom bomb and sell fewer than 1000 copies. I don't know if there is a solution that works for everyone - the possibility of delaying ebook by four to six months to grab the maximum hard cover sales without ebook cannibalization may be the most workable approach. Not that I like waiting for my books, but I can survive. I'd rather do that then pay $15 for an ebook, unless it's a very very special book.

12-18-2009, 05:09 AM	#71
HarryT eBook Enthusiast Posts: 85,544 Karma: 93383043 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: UK Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6	Oh well, obviously you're a better judge of English literature than all those so-called "experts".

12-18-2009, 05:18 AM	#73
omk3 Wizard Posts: 1,454 Karma: 37243 Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Europe Device: pocketbook 360, kindle 4	Jim Thompson also wrote for money, Dostoyevsky too. Well, to survive, not to get rich. I'm with Moejoe though, if you start treating your readers as customers, you're not writing at all. Some rich man can hire you to write on demand stories he'll find amusing. Thompson -and a lot of others I'm sure- never thought about his readers as anything. It was the publisher that was the customer, who paid by the word. It is amazing that good books can be written this way, but maybe the desperate situation the writer was in helped. I don't think best-selling authors of today are in any kind of desperate situation to urge them to explore the depths of human psyche... Each to his own however. There are enough (good or bad or whatever) books in the world for everyone. And always will be, I'm sure, regardless of amazon pricing policies :P

12-18-2009, 06:22 AM	#75
captcrouton Connoisseur Posts: 63 Karma: 84 Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Kyiv, Ukraine Device: Kindle 2	The thing will sort itself out, either way. For me, I can wait for a best seller to be reasonably priced before I buy it. So if it takes a year after a book is released, I very well could lose interest. I'm not running out of things to read. If a book never becomes affordable in my eyes, I might check it out in the library, borrow it from a friend, or never ever get it. All three have happened at some point. Again, I'll buy the books (e or p) that I feel like are worth the price. And as there are plenty of great classics I can read for free that I haven't touched yet, and plenty of great new authors who do want their books in my hand, I'll have enough reading material to put on my Kindle.

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