Comments on: Macmillan Books Gone Missing From Amazon

By: Ken Haase

Ken Haase — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:18:00 +0000

My real concern isn’t in the long term but for the shorter-term adoption of e-reading. The publishers have little direct interest in encouraging e-readers and, unlike with music, there isn’t an easy way to rip books into e-books. That means that the broad adoption of e-reading (which is mostly about new titles) will depend on either publishers dying out (and being replaced by something better) or going open while preserving their core functions.

By: Geoffrey Kidd

Geoffrey Kidd — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:22:05 +0000

I’m not all that worried about Apple iBook DRM.

Committing DRM is like committing any other crime. Criminal gets ONE move, committing the DRM. The Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolf, Inspector Poirot, Lord Darcy … et al. get *all the moves they want* to solve the problem.

Besides, most digital crowbars get built not in order to “pirate” the book, but to be able to put it into a more comfortable-to-the-reader form. Once the publishers wake up to the fact that DRM hits them in their own rice bowls, they’ll quit doing it the same way the music industry finally woke up to the fact that their use of DRM was only hitting them in their own kneecaps.

By: Ken Haase

Ken Haase — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:40:45 +0000

Pricing isn’t just a matter of direct costs (which John’s link to Gordon Haff’s piece did a great job of enumerating) but of “ecosystem costs” that are both harder to reduce and largely recovered by publisher pricing strategy (disrupted by Amazon) across products and time. I’ve got a description of some of the issues at http://blog.sbooks.net/2010/01/14/ebookcost/ (shameless plug). The ugly part for readers will be when these issues collide with vendor lock-in. It’s not clear what kind of DRM will be on Apple’s iBooks; they’ve said they’ll use ePub, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they rolled their own DRM rather than use Adobe’s (which B&N and others use).

By: Steve Green

Steve Green — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:44:55 +0000

Your books still appear on Amazon’s UK site.

By: Geoffrey Kidd

Geoffrey Kidd — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:02:26 +0000

Elise Mathisen@98:

OK, Macmillan, at least, has broken the silence.

By: Rebecca Herman

Rebecca Herman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:23:28 +0000

I hate ebooks. I want to hold and read a physical books. And I hate that now arguments over ebook prices are making print books less available. Guess I’ll be ordering my books from other places such as B&N and Book Depository.

By: John Scalzi

John Scalzi — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:53:32 +0000

AutumnRLS:

Yes, I’ve noticed that myself, since my audiobook stuff is still available. Audible is a fairly autonomous division of Amazon, however. Also, not every audiobook of a Tor book is Macmillan audio.

By: AutumnRLS

AutumnRLS — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:49:06 +0000

It appears as though it does not affect their audiobook website, however. Robert Jordan and other Tor titles are still available to members… Interesting.

By: Gary

Gary — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:18:54 +0000

The whole argument regarding whether $9.99 is enough seems specious to me. Baen Books, via Arnold Bailey’s Webscriptions website, makes a profit selling most eBooks – including eBooks of their newly released Hardbacks *the month before the hardcover is released* – for $6.00. They even bundle that month’s new releases together for $15.00, anywhere from four to seven books if eBooks of paperbacks are included.

I’ll admit that crippling the eBook with DRM drives prices up. Maybe that’s why Baen doesn’t do that.

The article that Mr. Scalzi linked to regarding costs of creating books was interesting, and if a company were solely making quality eBooks, they would incur most of those costs. But Macmillan and Simon & Schuster et al aren’t solely making eBooks. Those costs were incurred making treeBooks. The eBook is practically a free biproduct of that process, siphoned off on the way to the presses. AT SOME POINT in that process, an eBook *exists*, whether it is the corrected word processing file or the PDF file that gets sent to the presses. Producing LIT, LRF, PDF, RTF, PRC, PDB ePUB or HTML from those sources is almost trivial.

By: Jeff Cecil

Jeff Cecil — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:42:09 +0000

Pricing is always difficult across technology. It’s no different than trying to price enterprise software by CPU or computer or offer volume discounts. And also sell packaged sets of the same software individually to small businesses or individuals. No matter how you do it, it doesn’t make sense for a particular market segment.

Here we have a problem where a normal book costs ‘$x’ based on years of publishing involvement.

Enter a device that doesn’t require said publishing involvement and allows a book to be distributed for ‘$x-y’.

However, some of the services a publisher provides are still viable and even necessary. But, the publishers wish to keep the viable parts embedded within the superfluous parts that have no value in the new technology.

Eventually, the publisher capabilities will be broken down into purchasable services and hopefully the authors will be in charge of their materials.

In the mean time I don’t get the big thing about the iPad. It’s not an eBook. It is a big ITouch. Not really something you want to keep on the nightstand to read for hours. There will be better eReaders, but this isn’t it. Publishers are fooling themselves if they think this will put pressure on Amazon. What they will really do is hurt their own sales. At least that’s my opinion.