Students who Whine Like This are not Long for Class
The Battle of Late January has ended, as Amazon yields, gracelessly:
We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative. [emphases mine]
Whenever a company talks about how it is looking out for your interested, Jim Henley’s consumer-surplus version of reality notwithstanding, check for your wallet; it’s probably missing.
The first italic is obvious: any firm that calls complete stopping of sales “expressed our strong disagreement” is either really stupid or exercising monopoly power—and no one thinks Jeff Bezos is stupid.
The second is even sillier: Amazon accuses Macmillan of exercising “monopoly power” and declares that they “will have to capitulate.” Someone ask the people at Hachette about how Amazon has to yield in a clash between it and publishers.
We’ve all seen the claim that starts this article: “On Christmas Day, for the first time in its history, Amazon.com (AMZN) sold more digital books than the old fashioned kind.” Not for the Xmas season; just on the day. And even there, it’s an Amazon declaration—not verifiable from the publishers, since e-book sales are confidential information. But Tobias Bucknell lays out the details from his royalty statements:
Well, I have my eBook sales figures of Crystal Rain, a book that has sold in the five figures in print, meaning people who have purchased in print, print online and in bookstores. That’s a nice run, it’s my bestselling book of the 3 Xenowealth books (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose), but leaves me still a midlist writer….
In 2008, for a brief while, Crystal Rain was available for free via download. Number of Kindle users who downloaded it: low thousands. Number who’ve purchased it for sale after that: low hundreds.
So five figures in volume compared to three figures. That’s an order of magnitude difference.
This magnitude difference holds steady. I sell hundreds of copies of eBooks, and thousands of paper copies.
The difference between Hachette and Macmillan isn’t one of size. It’s that the Amazon monopoly—the proprietary e-reader format of the Kindle—now has another viable rival: the poorly-named iPad, which uses the ePub format that is the standard among non-Kindle readers.
Apple is confident: the iPad will do more things than read books, so it can sell books that can also be read on other devices. Amazon, for all that it offers other products, lacks that ability, and is trying to protect itself through proprietary formatting.
It appears—given the speed with which they ended their ostracizing of Macmillan—that they may need a new business strategy soon.
Are you sure that Apple will be selling books that can be read on other devices? From what I’ve read, that seems extremely unlikely. While Apple announced that its books would be in the epub format, they didn’t announce that they would be DRM-free, and if they’re not DRM-free, then they will have Apple’s DRM, not Adobe’s DRM. The epub format used by Sony, Nook, et al, uses Adobe’s DRM.
BTW, Amazon has free readers for its ebooks available for the iPod, PC, Mac, and Blackberry, so it isn’t true that their ebooks can only be read on a Kindle. I’m not interested in defending either Macmillan or Amazon in this mess, but there’s been a lot of misinformation floating around.
Ken what is with the “poorly named?”
Do you remember the snickering that came with IBMs release and subsequent sale to Lenovo of its ThinkPad line of lap tops. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/x-series
Was that considered some really shitty marketing decision? Well no. In the wake of the product announcement for the iPad some Apple haters cast around for some excuse to bash the product and some wage came up with the iTampax and everyone ran with it as if it was some huge stupid misogynistic gaffe. I don’t know about anyone else but when I hear the word ‘pad’ I don’t break out in giggles like a fifth grader getting someone to ask “Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?”
Ken is your refrigerator running? Do you have Prince Albert in the can? I think the iPad jokes have run their course.
I bought the Kindle for my dyslexic son as the text to speech feature is a huge help to him. I’m readying my first book on his Kindle – the Scarlet Pimpernel – and am annoyed at how many errors are in the text.
Certainly the price of the book is great at $2.49 but it seems to have at least one error on every (short) page.
Apart from the errors, reading on the Kindle is fine, although I keep finding myself reaching up to the right-hand corner as I near the end of every page. Old habits.
The better term is Monopsony where a single buyer faces multiple sellers. This seem to be what Amazon.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
I hope we get a single standard for all the e-readers. Multiple standards are not good for the consumer.
Sherry, it’s even worse than that. While Apple is using ePub and likely Adobe’s DRM algorithms, they’re likely to do what B&N is doing with the Nook and create a new key scheme that is incompatible with everybody else. We are after all talking about Apple, which has never — ever — allowed anybody else access to their DRM’ed content. You’ve always had to use Apple’s software and/or hardware to access DRM’ed iTunes content — my Sony stereo in my car, for example, will only play non-DRM’ed AAC (Apple iTunes format) music.
As for Amazon.com, they are not in a monopsony position. The fact that they had to back down shows that much. They thought they were — but obviously they thought wrong, and now have gone off whining to their room.
“You’ve always had to use Apple’s software and/or hardware to access DRM’ed iTunes content” (or use Fairplay, or burn to a CD and reimport if you wanted to be legal).
Yes, but you’ll notice that it was Apple’s market power that ended music DRM. Neither Amazon nor Apple is that powerful yet in the book world. The e-book market is a bit different from the e-music market. People want to buy books, not chapters. The market is much thinner. People listen to songs more times than they read books. There are alternate channels like libraries and used book stores. If e-books ever get as much market share as e-music, we might see real anti-DRM pressure. If nothing else, the weakest DRM will win the market. Some book publishers are already making a living on that.