43 Responses so far

1. 1. Catherine Shaffer on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:26 pm

   Three’s a lot of information flying around. I think I must have missed where it said that Amazon was going to sell every book for $9.99. My impression was that this battle is over the new releases/bestsellers as loss leaders, and that backlists, “paperbacks,” and other such would have various other prices, as they did immediately before this fracas began. Do you have any links or sources that clarify this?

   I think it is foolish for anyone–publisher, bookseller, author, book buyer to get attached to any particular price point for ebooks until the market has had more of a chance to adjust to the product. However, given the consumer backlash, I think it’s unlikely that prices for new release “hardcover” ebooks will settled out at $15. I think it’s pretty clear that not many people are happy about paying that much.

   One interesting thing about Amazon is that although they are touted to be so friendly to indie authors, there is no way to really search for indie authors or self-published books on Amazon. I would be interested in finding highly rated indie books, or indie books that meet my interests to see what the pricing and quality is like. Amazon will *let* you self-publish your ebooks, but you have to find your audience and market outside of Amazon and then send them there to buy the books. So at this point it does not seem like the direct-to-consumer publishing model is really all that effective. I can’t imagine very many people wading through 29,000 ebooks on Amazon to buy something from someone they’ve never heard of.

   I’ve been investigating other ebook sites and am seeing a wide range of prices, but almost all are well under $15. The romance genre seems to be leading the curve on this. I know at least one writer that is doing extremely well by writing short stories and novels for Ellora’s Cave. Novels are priced around $4-$5 over there, and they have “quickies” for around $2. Since they are almost exclusively an ebook publisher and seem to be a profitable, going-concern type publisher, that is probably a good reflection of what a market-based price for a professionally published ebook would be. (Ellora’s Cave is not a self-publishing site.)

2. 2. Tobias Buckell on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:32 pm

   “Three’s a lot of information flying around. I think I must have missed where it said that Amazon was going to sell every book for $9.99. My impression was that this battle is over the new releases/bestsellers as loss leaders, and that backlists, “paperbacks,” and other such would have various other prices, as they did immediately before this fracas began. Do you have any links or sources that clarify this?”

   Amazon won’t raise the price, publishers will, because they’ll have agency model (we’re going over to agency model no matter what). If new releases are forced lower, low end prices rise. Amazon’s doing that right now to balance the subsidies on 9.99 (they’re making $4 off every backlist sale, but losing money on new sales).

   As for what the price of an eBook will since too naturally, I’m betting it’s going to be $4.99 for backlist, $9.99 for new.

   But not if some form of artificiality is introduced.

   Notice, no one forced Ellora’s Cave to set those prices, they figured them out by testing what price caused what jump in sales.

   Unsurprisingly, other publishers do this as well.

3. 3. Murphy Jacobs on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:34 pm

   I’ve had several people toss the “But I pay .99 a song for music!” at me in all this. My standard reply is “Well, .99 a chapter for a book isn’t too bad. Would you pay that?”

   I don’t hear much after that.

   Thanks for tossing a little more rationality into the maelstrom.

4. 4. Tobias Buckell on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:37 pm

   Amazon has a 49 short story market publishing system they tried to launch with the Kindle, but its not taken off. Readers don’t seem to go after short stories like they like novels on estores. But it’s a better comparison, yeah!

   When the volume of people who read books digitally goes up, I’m willing to be authors who do serials, ie: write a long chapter on a cliffhanger, for 99 cents per chapter, will come into being. You can work, put out a chapter, people can follow along. If things don’t work out, you can suspend the project without going broke.

5. 5. tbrookside on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:39 pm

   What this analysis leaves out of consideration is that many authors are in control of the ebook rights for older and out of print backlist titles.

   Those authors can bring those titles to the Kindle themselves, without their former publisher.

   They then can make more per copy pricing those titles at $4.99 and below than they ever made per copy on royalties from their publisher.

   So although the Tobias Buckell backlist may be expensive [currently], the mere existence of the Kindle should help consumers gain access to inexpensive ebook copies of backlist titles more generally.

   The author opportunity here gets larger as ereader adoption by the public expands. Therefore, by subsidizing bestsellers to encourage consumers to buy Kindles, Amazon is building a market for author backlists.

   The critical thing is for the ereader market to mature, and for ereaders to become a more standard consumer appliance. The ereader market could still potentially “die”, and the actions of the publishers seem designed to kill it, if they can.

6. 6. Catherine Shaffer on Feb 5th, 2010 at 3:49 pm

   I don’t think either pricing model is inherently anti-market. Amazon’s $9.99 strategy could certainly be adjusted, and they are just one retailer in a field of many competitors. I think Macmillan is more interested in protecting their hardcover business than in being competitive on ebook pricing right now.

7. 7. Michelle Sagara on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:00 pm

   One thing to keep in mind: Steve Jobs has said that the app store is revenue-neutral for the company. The 30% profit on sales covers the cost of the app store.

8. 8. CharlesP on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:08 pm

   One of the issues I have with the way this Agency Model is going down is that it seems even LESS likely to let the market decide the price than letting Amazon continue to do what it was doing. Instead of Amazon arbitrarily setting a common (if not universal) loss leader price at $9.99 and there not being any real competition to pressure them up or down, now the publisher will be setting the new ebook price at $14.99 and because Amazon, Apple, and I assume Barnes & Noble, will have agreed to let the publisher set the prices, there will be no market force EXCEPT people just not buying eBooks… which the publisher’s don’t seem to mind at this time.

   Ideally (well maybe not exactly ideally), to let the market drive the market in two months we would have had Amazon setting their prices, and Apple setting their prices (or Apple letting the publishers set their prices), and the publisher getting paid either way and then the market would decide where that sweet spot price point was. That would, perchance, give a better feel of would the users rather spend less per book, and less for a book only device, vs a bit more per book while spending a bit more for a device, but one they can do a plethora of things on.

   I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it in other threads here or over on Jamie Ford’s blog, but while I’m appalled at the Amazon negotiation tactic, I’m more and more perplexed by what the publishers (because it’s Macmillan and Hachette and Harpercollins now) are really trying to accomplish here. They’ve never had control on final pricing before (they’ve always set wholesale pricing and retailers mark down as they feel is necessary to gain an advantage over their competition) so this is them getting into a different game… and I’m not exactly sure how they’re trying to play it. I still think Evil Steve Jobs is behind it somehow… he’s convinced the publishing world this is what they want and in the end Apple will eat their babies.

   Minor quibble: I looked at some other (probably slightly higher) mid-list authors and their Kindle books are, when a paperback is available, generally marked down a little bit from the paperback price. There are a few that sit at the paperback price, but many of the ones I checked were sitting around $6.20 for Kindle edition vs $7.99 for MMPB, or maybe $6.99 for Kindle vs $8.49 for PB. So, while your premise does still stand, I don’t think the model is quite as ‘skewed’ as your tables show. BUT the premise is still good and there is some question as to which way the consumers will really want it… and I’m not sure how to let the market decide.

9. 9. CharlesP on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:11 pm

   Dangit! I was just going to post a little comment and there goes another 500 words. Maybe I should lay off the coffee and Crunch ‘N Munch.

   BTW, I’m enjoying Crystal Rain… hate to judge a book by its cover and all that, but it had a cool airship on it so that’s the one I decided to read first.

10. 10. Dan Dan The Art Man on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:28 pm

    Great post Tobias, thanks for writing this all out, it’s great to hear it from an author’s perspective.

    I liked Murphy Jacobs comments, that is a nice comeback to the 99cents per song b.s.

11. 11. Alexandra Wolfe on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:38 pm

    Is it not a simplistic case of the Publishers causing their own problems in the first place, by discounting their books to Amazon at such a hefty rate, that Amazon can then set their own silly prices, dictating to everyone in the process?

    If Publishers stopped selling to Amazon, what would happen? The ruling factors here, it would seem, are greed and stupidity. The Publishers seem intent on their own downfall. They’re willing to discount a hardback book to Amazon for almost 70%, but not me, the buying public? *shrugs*

    It will be interesting to see where this will all lead.

12. 12. tbrookside on Feb 5th, 2010 at 4:48 pm

    When the volume of people who read books digitally goes up, I’m willing to be authors who do serials, ie: write a long chapter on a cliffhanger, for 99 cents per chapter, will come into being. You can work, put out a chapter, people can follow along. If things don’t work out, you can suspend the project without going broke.

    This.

    Also, since using the “Smashwords Maneuver” or similar publisher tricks, it’s possible to offer an ebook on Amazon for $0.00, I’m convinced that the first half of some books will be offered for $0.00, with the second half for $9.99 or something similar. This would be a particularly effective tactic for genre titles. I’m surprised mystery writers aren’t charging by the chapter already. Didn’t they see that M*A*S*H episode? People will probably pay top dollar for the last chapter of a mystery once they’ve read the first fifteen chapters.

13. 13. Ed Greaves on Feb 5th, 2010 at 5:01 pm

    Toby, there’s something in how you frame all this that isn’t quite sticking right with me, and I can’t put my finger on it. I’m going to have to think about this. One thing I don’t get is where you make this artificial claim that Amazon wants to flatten out the price structure to one price fits all. That’s not what I’ve been seeing as a Kindle owner/ebook consumer, as someone who bought into the product very early. (IE for the first Christmas available.)

    What I’ve seen as my experience for the most part (ignoring the outliers that seem to be not quite so out there as you would normally expect) is pricing behavior that falls mostly within the exact guidelines of what MacMillan has proposed with their agency model. (Noteworthy exception being bestselling hardcovers, a point that does in fact matter a great deal to the publishing houses, and I appreciate that.)

    I’m going to have to think more on this.

14. 14. Tobias Buckell on Feb 5th, 2010 at 5:06 pm

    Ed: Amazon’s taking a $4 profit on the low end books, and up to a -$2.50 loss on new books. This flattens out pricing right now. On the consumer end this ends up being $6 or $7-$12 or $13 dollars (with some higher outliers), instead of $4.99 to $12.99 (with higher outliers).

    They propose a system of $5.99 to $9.99.
    Publishers want a system of $5.99 to $14.99.

    Notice, again on both Amazon’s and the publisher’s low end backlist, those books are a bit pricey.

    We’re going to have agency, both Amazon and the publisher want it.

    Frankly, wholesaler model, with Amazon charging the same amount over what the publisher pays, looks more sane to me. $4.99 is a nature price break point, I’d love to see my backlist for sale at $4.99/eBook and $7.99 paperback. There’s an obvious value statement there.

    But it’s not going to happen…

    Amazon could have done that. It would have been very cool, IMHO, to have $3.99 ‘introductory eBook price’ on backlist and ‘sadly, publishers won’t let us get any lower than $12.99′ price Stick with wholesaling.

15. 15. Tony Noland on Feb 5th, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    The whole book pricing structure is designed to sell Kindles as a way of locking buyers into Amazon. The Kindle iPhone app serves the same purpose.

    Why hasn’t the emergence of viable alternative readers (and alternative sources for books)on the iPhone shaken Amazon from it’s position? Why did it have to take the iPad?

16. 16. CharlesP on Feb 5th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    Tony, I think you answered your own question… there weren’t viable alternatives yet really. Heck, there really isn’t NOW, the iPad is still two months away. I know some like the Nook, but I don’t think it’s got the chops, ESPECIALLY in a world with the iPad. Apple is threatening to eat Amazon’s lunch… it’s performing gastric bypass surgery on B&N’s ebook diet.

17. 17. Chris Meadows on Feb 5th, 2010 at 6:33 pm

    I wondered where all the new commenters to the site were coming from. Tobias, thanks for the link. I’ll probably be blogging this article for TeleRead a little later on.

    One correction, though: it’s a bit incorrect to say “we’re” calling for giving books one-star ratings. We’re a collection of individuals and guest writers who don’t all have the same point of view—we try to cover a wide range of views, and I’ve asked people to write guest columns from “the other side”—and in fact I’m planning on writing something a little more temperate later tonight.

    The whole issue is pretty complicated, and something that’s getting lost in all this talk of pricing models and $10 vs. $15 is that this explosion of anger from readers is not entirely or even mostly related to the Amazon vs. Macmillan feud. That was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    There are a lot of issues bundled up in reader anger, largely relating to the poor treatment e-books have gotten from publishers over the last ten years. In particular, a lot of people are skeptical of Macmillan’s claims they are going to a tiered “variable pricing” model because even now, after a decade of selling e-books through Fictionwise, there are still literally hundreds, maybe thousands of e-books that are still priced at hardcover levels when the paper versions are long since in paper-back.

    85% of the entirety of Macmillan’s e-books, including backlist titles, at Fictionwise are priced above $10. 40% are priced above $20. When I did a survey of the first results page of $20 e-books, 7 out of the 25 titles were in mass market paperback.

    I think a lot of consumers would be more willing to cut Macmillan some slack on this if there was any evidence that they are acting in good faith when they say they want to vary their prices. There sure isn’t a lot of it on Fictionwise.

    By the way, I’m hosting a live call-in panel discussion podcast tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern. All points of view will be welcome, and I’ll be moderating it so that nobody gets out of hand. If you would be able to make it, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

    Details are at http://www.teleread.org/2010/02/04/saturday-4-p-m-eastern-live-talk-podcast-on-amazonmacmillan-affair/

18. 18. Tobias Buckell on Feb 5th, 2010 at 6:43 pm

    85% of the entirety of Macmillan’s e-books, including backlist titles, at Fictionwise are priced above $10. 40% are priced above $20. When I did a survey of the first results page of $20 e-books, 7 out of the 25 titles were in mass market paperback.

    I think a lot of consumers would be more willing to cut Macmillan some slack on this if there was any evidence that they are acting in good faith when they say they want to vary their prices. There sure isn’t a lot of it on Fictionwise.

    That’s a valid point, but separate. Macmillan’s relationship there is that with low volume, little profit being made from that area of sales, there’s been little attention paid to the relationship between these smaller groups and it. Frex: some of my books are not even on Fictionwise right now. No one’s sure what’s going on.

    That’s actually one thing they’re hoping to fix with agency, which is to get the same price going across stores and get the same model going across outlets, whereas right now there are 40 different things going on with 40 different stores. Part of that is because Amazon could demand a 50% wholesale agreement, whereas the smaller Fictionwise couldn’t (not sure what their agreement was). Fictionwise also, doesn’t subsidize their titles, they can’t run at a massive loss, they turned a profit as a business, so they couldn’t compete on new titles with Amazon, obviously.

    Frex: Ragamuffin is for sale for $14 right now via Fictionwise, Crystal Rain isn’t, Sly Mongoose isn’t. That implies there’s something broken between the two businesses, not just pricing. Why aren’t all the titles up? If Fictionwise has the same pricing agreement as Amazon, it should be $7.99. So the digital strategy’s a mess there.

    Now it’s all being revamped, all vendors moving to the same arrangement.

19. 19. Ed Greaves on Feb 5th, 2010 at 7:10 pm

    Tony,
    False. I can and do get plenty of ebooks on my Kindle from alternate sources. I am not locked into Amazon. Amazon makes it easy and convenient, but they are not the only source.

20. 20. confluence on Feb 5th, 2010 at 7:55 pm

    What this analysis leaves out of consideration is that many authors are in control of the ebook rights for older and out of print backlist titles.

    How prevalent is this? I was under the impression that the author sells their copyright to the work to the publisher, and that’s that (which is my main ethical problem with the present incarnation of traditional publishing, especially given the current duration of copyright terms).

    Have electronic rights legally been defined to be a completely separate commodity, which is not retroactively covered by previous transfers of copyright? If so, I can see how authors might retain these rights over older works which were sold to a publisher before there was such a thing — but how far back does that start? And is it consistent, or does it depend on quirks of contract wording?

    Do authors ever regain control of more recent out-of-print works? Have any authors (other than Cory Doctorow) been successful in negotiating the sale of more limited rights to their publishers?

    I would love it if authors independently e-published their out-of-print books, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.

21. 21. Ed Greaves on Feb 5th, 2010 at 8:39 pm

    Toby,

    This is exactly why many folks from the Amazon Kindle boards are up in arms though. They simply don’t trust Macmillan (and others) because when they go elsewhere for those titles, they see what appear to be ludicrous prices. No one wants to pay more for an ebook than for the printed book. It gives the appearance as if the publishers are just going through the motions, so that they can say “See we tried, but no one was buying so there was no point in making the ebooks.”

    It’s a perceptual disconnect. I’ve read several good blog posts about how that’s the silliest idea in the world, that publishers *know* that ebooks are the future, and they want to get into them, but that the current miasma is causing nothing but chaos. I believe that. I have friends in small presses who complain about how cryptic and archaic it is for them to get their books into Kindle format that looks good and is acceptable. Never mind the fact that there’s apparently formatting differences between the two Kindle versions (K1 & K2) that make some thing formatted for the new version look a bit wonky on the older ones.

    But people find it hard to accept that there’s all this complexity and work involved. It’s the information age, they don’t understand why someone can’t just open the book in their book making program, and do File->Save as….->Kindle format, and viola you have your ebook. I know many, many good folks have been trying to explain that it’s not that simple, but it’s hard for people to grok when what seems like a simple programming issue is being touted as a big fuss.

    I’m not saying they are right, but those are some of the reasons the general public seems to be siding with Amazon, over the publishers in this.

22. 22. Chris Meadows on Feb 5th, 2010 at 8:45 pm

    Ed Greaves @20: One sad thing is, with the Calibre e-book format converter, it basically is that simple (barring a little bit of user-unfriendliness from its open-source/free-software nature). Open a Mobi, HTML, etc. file, optionally set some metadata and stylistic options, click a button, and boom: you have an ePub, LRF, or whatever other format you were trying to convert it into.

    So people who believe it “should be that simple” have something they can point to as “proof.”

23. 23. J Meijer on Feb 5th, 2010 at 9:30 pm

    Tobias, thank you for another insightful explanation.

    A lot of people remark that the publishers should not and can not set consumer prizes. However, in a large part of the European market this is exactly how it has been done for ages. Even if the consumers are not aware of this situation the publishers especially the ones in the bigger agglomerations certainly will be.

    At the same time, people looking at the backlist of authors should not forget that even though they might own the rights they probably do not have the access to the materials that will make ebook publishing painless. In most cases a physical book will have to be scanned, OCR’ed, proofread and edited, and converted to the correct filetypes. All these processes have to be paid before the book can be published.

24. 24. Chris Meadows on Feb 5th, 2010 at 11:02 pm

    And here’s some more evidence: someone from Digital Mac confirms that $14 is the “correct” price for a $7.99 e-book. No explanation given.

25. 25. Ed Greaves on Feb 5th, 2010 at 11:39 pm

    Chris @21,

    Interesting software. Not sure if it reads in the common formats that publishing houses use. (I know for POD publishing they use PDF, but I don’t believe offset printers use it. I’d have to ask my contacts for the formats.) It is a boon to have a free tool like this, but in big businesses, folks tend to be leary of the free products. Sometimes irrationallly so. It also doesn’t help if the layout and design of these things isn’t digitally stored, in which case the books have to be scanned, OCRd, etc, etc.

    It also doesn’t preclude someone’s time to do the layout work, design, and proofing. IE, non-trivial, since the person doing that work would probably like a salary and benefits, etc, etc.

26. 26. Jon Lundy on Feb 6th, 2010 at 12:33 am

    Something is really strange about Macmillan and fictionwise. After reading Crystal Rain as part of Tor.com’s startup, I purchased both Sly Mongoose and Ragamuffin when they came out. Sly Mongoose was a while ago, and Ragamuffin was just a couple weeks ago. Right now I can still download copies of Sly Mongoose from my bookshelf, but it is no longer for sale.
    http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b73335/Sly-Mongoose/Tobias-Buckell/?

    In both cases Fictionwise runs very strange sales, I purchased them for considerably less than they are currently on sale for. (probably about the Amazon price).

    BTW, I enjoyed Crystal Rain and thought that Sly Mongoose was superb. I was delighted to pickup up Ragamuffin a couple weeks ago.

27. 27. Chris Meadows on Feb 6th, 2010 at 1:09 am

    Here’s that more temperate post I was talking about.

28. 28. Chris Meadows on Feb 6th, 2010 at 2:09 am

    Tony @15: Most of the alternate readers on the iPhone/iPod Touch actually pre-date the Kindle. eReader pre-dates it by about ten years, if you count the prior platform versions.

29. 29. Travis Butler on Feb 6th, 2010 at 4:03 am

    “One correction, though: it’s a bit incorrect to say “we’re” calling for giving books one-star ratings. We’re a collection of individuals and guest writers who don’t all have the same point of view—we try to cover a wide range of views, and I’ve asked people to write guest columns from “the other side”—and in fact I’m planning on writing something a little more temperate later tonight. [...] There are a lot of issues bundled up in reader anger, ”

    Just a point of order, Chris: Even though you note Teleread is ‘a collection of individuals,’ after following it from time to time for several months now, I think it’s safe to say that it is still not representative of the general reading public, or even of the ‘general’ e-book reading public. (It’s certainly not representative of my sister’s family, who got a Kindle 2 last spring; or of my mother, who was given a Cool-er for Xmas by my stepfather, and needed me to load a batch of books onto it for her.)

    Teleread is a collection of *e-book enthusiasts,* many of whom have been e-reading for a decade or more – long before devices like the Kindle made it easy for the non-computer-enthusiast public. In my observation, they skew heavily tech-savvy, and have a high degree of what I’d almost have to call combat fatigue from having to deal with the hassles and pains of e-reading over the last ten years. (And indeed, you note this in your ‘more temperate post’; I’m glad.) But in this, they do not represent the general public.

    The baseline for the general public is the Kindle era. They don’t know or care about pricing issues at Fictionwise or eReader, because they’ve never visited them and probably never will. They’ve never heard of Webscriptions. All of the combat fatigue issues for the Teleread crowd are not issues for them. And because the Kindle era has opened up e-reading to people who aren’t tech fans, I’d be willing to bet that they now outnumber the long-term e-reader enthusiasts by a substantial margin – particularly since, frankly, the long-term enthusiasts were never all that large a group to start with.

    So when you say ‘reader anger’, it sounds like you’re trying to generalize to the broad reading public, and that just isn’t true. It’s true mainly of the long-term e-reader enthusiasts, and not even all of them; I’ve been e-reading for at least as long as you have (going back to reading Project Gutenberg books on the original Palm Pilot), and I think the overall reaction on Teleread has been pretty unreasonable and inflexible. When Ficbot says “All our efforts to advocate for ourselves have been in vain – nobody is noticing the letters, the blog posts, the veritable shouting from the internet rooftops begging someone to help us out…” well, I’m sorry to say it, but maybe that’s because she doesn’t represent the constituency she thinks she does. And the constituency she does represent isn’t as important as it thinks it is.

    I’m not a Macmillan partisan, as you constantly try to label the people who disagree with the Teleread manifesto, even in your ‘more temperate post.’ I agree that the pricing situation at Fictionwise and eReader is a mess (which is why I don’t buy from them), and can understand why that would make the long-term enthusiast crowd wary of Macmillan’s stated pricing plans. However, I also view Fictionwise and eReader as legacies of the pre-Kindle era, back when e-reading was a tiny niche market for tech-heads; I’m willing to cut publishers some slack for not having a clue how to deal with such a market, and am willing to wait and see what they do now that e-reading has arguably reached the general public.

30. 30. Travis Butler on Feb 6th, 2010 at 4:49 am

    Calibre, frankly, is not all that great a piece of software; the most I can say about it is that ‘it operates.’ (I was tempted to say ‘works,’ but that’s gained enough positive connotation from ‘it just works’ that I think that’s giving it too much credit.) It does indeed convert many formats into readable digital book files, but the conversion quality is haphazard. I’ve had to go back and do a fair amount of cleanup on many files to get them to look decent in conversion – even on HTML versions of PD books that have obviously had a fairly extensive cleanup and formatting job done on them. Several wouldn’t convert at all, with Calibre running through the entire process but producing a blank file (with no helpful error messages) until I finally tracked down the high-ASCII character that was giving it fits. While it provides a number of parameters to let you tweak the conversion process, they are neither well-organized nor well-explained. Basically, it’s software by geeks for geeks.

    From what I’ve heard, right now probably the most ‘professional’ set of ePub production tools are add-ons to Adobe InDesign. With Apple announcing ePub as the primary book-reading format for the iPad, I’m hoping someone will put out a conversion tool that’s far more polished than Calibre, but less expensive than InDesign. We’ll see.

31. 31. confluence on Feb 6th, 2010 at 6:41 am

    The format conversion process is the other thing I wanted to ask about. It really should be as simple as “Open…” and “Save as…” (for someone who has the electronic copy that the print book is printed from). There is no inherent technological barrier to this; the obstacle appears to be that nobody has yet written sufficiently good software to do this conversion.

    So if publishers have to go through a laborious and expensive manual process to produce every individual e-book, has anyone considered hiring programmers to write a reliable automated process, as a once-off upfront cost? They could make in-house software from scratch, or inject funding and resources into the Calibre project.

    Does anyone know what electronic format the big publishers send to their printers, if it’s not PDF?

32. 32. ficbot on Feb 6th, 2010 at 10:38 am

    Delighted though I am with the discussion my article at Teleread has generated, you’ve (with all due respect) totally missed the point. I don’t know why you assume I am advocating for the “9.99 crowd” and don’t want to pay for my books when what I outline in the article is a reader who is passionate about books and authors, read (and paid for) over 100 ebooks this past year, and has tried (and tried and tried and tried) to work with authors (who have for the most part been either indifferent, defensive or completely unhelpful) when I wrote to them about difficulties I have had trying to legally buy their book and send them profit.

    The MacMillan thing is just the straw that broke the camel’s back here. The real issue for me is, readers are totally getting the shaft here and all attempts by them to fix the issues have fallen on deaf ears. My complaint about the agency model is simply that I don’t trust MacMillan to actually lower the prices since they have not int he past and decades-old $7 mass market paperbacks are still going for $14 at Fictionwise. It’s not that I object to paying such a price for new releases for certain authors. But when I can get in paper for half that and nobody seems too concerned about adjusting the ebook price to make them at minimum on par, it makes me feel like they’re trying to just kill the ebook market altogether, and that worries me because I don’t have the space to store a million paper backs, so it will mean that I won’t be able to buy books anymore.

    All I want is for the publishing market to understand that I am a customer too and to implement some changes to make the marketplace more friendly for me. That means I will pay a FAIR price (and $14 may be fair for a new release but it is not fair for a decade-old mass market paperback, and it is not fair when my rights to read the book as I choose are crippled by restrictive and cumbersome DRM, or when the book is riddled with errors) and that means that outmoded concepts like geographical restrictions need to end now.

    My whole mission, Mr. Buckell, is to improve the marketplace so people like me can buy more books and spend more money. If you don’t want to work with me on that, I will cross you off of my list of authors to read.

33. 33. Ed Greaves on Feb 6th, 2010 at 11:27 am

    I tested Calibre. Bleh. Not acceptable results. You want to see books produced by this? You’re going to get books that people complain about, and say “Why can’t big name publisher do a better job converting their books.”

    Which means that the files I had, already electronic copies in a few different formats, didn’t produce high quality results with simply loading and then doing the “Save as…” feature to Kindle format, then uploaded to my device.

34. 34. KingTaco on Feb 6th, 2010 at 11:41 am

    “I’m not a Macmillan partisan, as you constantly try to label the people who disagree with the Teleread manifesto, even in your “˜more temperate post.’ I agree that the pricing situation at Fictionwise and eReader is a mess (which is why I don’t buy from them), and can understand why that would make the long-term enthusiast crowd wary of Macmillan’s stated pricing plans. However, I also view Fictionwise and eReader as legacies of the pre-Kindle era, back when e-reading was a tiny niche market for tech-heads; I’m willing to cut publishers some slack for not having a clue how to deal with such a market, and am willing to wait and see what they do now that e-reading has arguably reached the general public.”

    Will publishers just throw a switch and suddenly ‘know how to deal with ebook readers’, as it’s mostly acknowledged they’ve done a poor job for a decade? Or are they primarily motivated to protect their old business-model/hard-cover prices? They’ll do a good job because the number are there now, but let’s also all hate on Amazon for directly building those big numbers?

    There’s a topsy-turvy deal going on about the logic in regards to ‘The Kindle era’. On one hand, Amazon is to be beaten back as a greedy monopolizer, holding 75-80% market-share and looking for more, boo! Distorting the market by subsidizing prices, boo! The pusher-man, trying to get a Kindle in every home, boo! On the other hand, from the argument above, the Kindle has brought ebooks to a non-techie mainstream, hooray! It’s ubiquitous enough to even call ‘The Kindle Era’, hooray! The ebook market is bigger then ever, hooray! It’s not just argued above, this is a pretty common theme. The trouble is, it divorces results from cause, cherry-picks one and air-brushes out the other. The Kindle is ubiquitous, and the ebook market growing (relatively) mainstream, precisely because of Amazon’s heavy marketing, investment, and subsidizing of prices. Up front, that of course doesn’t make Amazon a saint, prove that they are serving the ebook market from simply the goodness of their heart, nor that Publisher’s should roll over and play dead to a distributor eating their business model. But it’s a logical disconnect to attack how Amazon has built the market, yet then place the results in a vacuum (as if Amazon was some un-connected variable), and claim them a success…for publishers.

    Whatever it’s faults, Amazon has invested heavily in positive experiences in the ebook market. At this point in time they have goodwill with many consumers. The publishing side, whose standard business model has made for tales of woe before many of the commentators here were even born, has not exactly been ace’s with it’s treatments of ebooks. That doesn’t mean they (the publishers) won’t eventually adapt to the digital era, but it’s also not a ridiculous fear on the part of consumers that the publishing side is foremostly interested in protecting current traditional market prices.

35. 35. SarahLynn on Feb 6th, 2010 at 4:59 pm

    The one thing that drives me crazy above anything else is when an ebook is priced higher than the retail price of the lowest-priced print version available. I’m okay with everything else — so if Macmillan wants to charge $15.99 when the only print version is a hardcover, great. I’ll buy or decide to wait, just like I did in the past. But that’s not what the president of Macmillan said (just ‘variable over time’) and history has shown this isn’t what happens — see Chris’s post re Macmillan prices at Fictionwise.

    If Macmillan (and other publishers) made an explicit commitment that the price of ebook editions will never exceed the lowest-cost print edition, I’d be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But when ebook prices remain higher than the cost of the MMPB, it says to me that the publisher either thinks ebook readers are morons, or that they don’t really care about the ebook business.

36. 36. Travis Butler on Feb 6th, 2010 at 5:15 pm

    “But it’s a logical disconnect to attack how Amazon has built the market, yet then place the results in a vacuum (as if Amazon was some un-connected variable), and claim them a success”¦for publishers.”

    Er… no, that’s not what I was arguing, at all. Let me spell it out a little more clearly. First, history:

    * Macmillan (and other publishers) made some serious screw-ups in the handling of e-books at the time when e-books were a tiny niche market of tech-savvy e-reading enthusiasts, and that market was splintered between a group of small enthusiast-run resellers. (I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing the efforts of Peanut Press et al, but I’m open to correction. Baen/Webscriptions is a bit of an odd bird, here; they’re a publisher running their own direct sales operation, and thus didn’t have to deal with all the publisher negotiations that Peanut et al did, but they were and are a fairly niche operation themselves – a single-genre publisher and focusing on a limited subset of that genre.)

    * It is at least possible that said screw-ups can be attributed to Macmillan and other publishers having no clue how to handle a tiny niche market of tech enthusiasts and enthusiast-run resellers. I’m willing to keep an open mind here.

    * Fictionwise and eReader are legacies of that era, and the current state of pricing there is a product of that era.

    There’s our history. Now to the present day:

    * The market is no longer limited to tech enthusiasts and enthusiast-run resellers. And I do credit Amazon for that development. However, I would argue that this is due far more to the fact that the Kindle is the first system – and I do mean *system*, both the reader and the method of purchasing books – that is accessible to the non-enthusiast crowd. Pricing is a factor, but not the dominant one; without an easy-to-use system for buying and reading e-books, e-books could have been priced at a dollar each without ever growing the market beyond tech enthusiasts.

    * Because the tech is now usable by the general public, and thus (I believe) the ordinary reader now outnumbers the tech enthusiast, the e-book market is starting to look… a lot like the general book market, actually. Instead of a splintered group of small enthusiast stores with limited reach, the market is now open to mass-market retailers that can actually reach large swaths of the reading public. (And I think there are echoes of the small independent bookseller being driven out by the big-box chains, but I don’t think they’re relevant to the issue at hand; this post is getting too long already, so I’ll save it for another day.) Amazon, B&N, and soon Apple can all sell to a market that’s both much broader and more ‘ordinary’ than Fictionwise or eReader ever could.

    * This expanded market is much closer to what publishers have experience dealing with. Before, they were trying to make e-book plans for a small group they didn’t really understand – tech-skilled people willing to fiddle with all the hassles of making an old-style e-reader work, the small enthusiast resellers catering to them, and a multiplicity of formats and delivery options that they had to cope with. Now, they can make plans for selling to the general public, through resellers that can reach wide segments of that public, and let those resellers handle the distribution issues. This changes the situation to something a lot closer to what they ought to know how to handle.

    * Given this, I’m willing to wipe the slate clean, and wait to see what publishers do with an open mind – instead of assuming that they will act badly, because they screwed up in an old market reality where they obviously didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and because the legacy of those screw-ups is still present in the resellers remaining from that period.

    If they pull bad pricing moves under the new e-book market reality, like setting hardcover-like e-prices on books out in paperback, then by all means call them on it. But do note that I don’t consider Amazon-esque subsidized pricing to be a requirement of the new market – as I said above, I think the new reality was created by ease-of-use, not pricing – and that I consider subsidized pricing to be unsustainable. If e-books are going to be a mainstream edition, they’re going to have to bear the same share of development costs as the other mainstream editions.

37. 37. sbtx99 on Feb 6th, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    “Given this, I’m willing to wipe the slate clean, and wait to see what publishers do with an open mind ““ instead of assuming that they will act badly, because they screwed up in an old market reality where they obviously didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and because the legacy of those screw-ups is still present in the resellers remaining from that period.”

    I would have been willing to give Macmillan the benefit of the doubt *if* their “screw-ups” were indeed a thing of the past. But this is simply not the case. Macmillan continues to get it wrong when it comes to ebooks. And it’s not just with “legacy” resellers, it’s at Macmillan’s own website. Because Macmillan does sell ebooks directly to the general public. There are many examples on Macmillan’s website where the ebook sells at double the mass market paperback price for months, and sometimes years, after the paperback was released. And some of those ebooks were *never* sold as anything other than mass market paperback. Which makes it appear that the higher priced ebook was a deliberate marketing strategy by Macmillan rather than simply a “screw-up” in a market they didn’t understand.

    So, no, I am not willing to give Macmillan the benefit of the doubt.

    http://us.macmillan.com/tangledupinlove
    Tangled Up In Love – Heidi Betts
    St. Martin’s Paperbacks, February 2009
    Book Mass Market Paperbound $6.99 Buy other sellers
    Ebook Ebook $14.00 buy from us other sellers

38. 38. sbtx99 on Feb 6th, 2010 at 11:25 pm

    Also, I might have given Julia Spencer-Fleming’s “Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries” a try. Unfortunately, Macmillan has all six of her ebooks listed at $14.00 while the mass market paperbacks are priced at $6.99 & $7.99. And that isn’t the result of a screw-up with a reseller; it’s the price Macmillan sells them for via its own website.

39. 39. srichey on Feb 7th, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    Let the publishers set their own price; sit back and let the market decide. There are plenty of books out there and some are very cheap, so it’s not like there aren’t plenty of choices.

40. 40. Travis Butler on Feb 8th, 2010 at 10:33 am

    If they’ve been at that price on Macmillan’s website for more than a couple of weeks, then yes; I’m still ‘wait and see.’ I think it’s pretty clear from the comments on the post Chris linked that the right hand still doesn’t know what the left hand is doing w.r.t. Macmillan’s e-book pricing. And that’s a big part of the problem I posited above; what sounds like lots of different sales outlets under the control of part(s) of a large corporate bureaucracy and no consistent guidelines from the top on how to set pricing. I consider it perfectly possible that the direct-sale pricing on Macmillan’s website is currently under the control of the same people who didn’t get it with eReader and Fictionwise.

    The position taken in the current battle over pricing with Amazon, on the other hand, does sound like something coming down from the top. However, even if it is, directives like that don’t filter down through the chain of command immediately. If the prices remain the same on Macmillan’s website a while after they change on Amazon, then I’d start worrying.

41. 41. Bryce Dayton on Feb 10th, 2010 at 3:56 am

    The thing that I don’t see being discussed is why everyone thinks that the Ipad is a revolutionary device that will “change the game.”

    It doesn’t have an e-ink screen. That means eye strain. For the same reason that most people don’t enjoy reading their books on their computers, they won’t like them on the Ipad. I’ve yet to see someone discuss this.

42. 42. Travis Butler on Feb 10th, 2010 at 4:33 pm

    Possibly because e-ink screens are not a universal preference. I actually find them *less* readable in many circumstances; contrast is more important to me than the problems some people have with standard LCD displays (which admittedly I have some trouble defining, because I can’t see them myself). e-ink is relatively low contrast, and in many settings with less-than-perfect lighting (such as my apartment, which has no ceiling-mounted light in most of the rooms, or many hotel rooms with the same limitation), I find it both harder to read than paper books and harder to read than a traditional LCD screen.

43. 43. Catalin Bratosin on Mar 25th, 2010 at 2:51 pm

    @25. Ed Greaves
    Mr. Greaves i couldn`t resist to reply.
    I work in a software company as a producer. We make products that are hundreds of times more complex than converting an ebook to a specific format. Any of the the 30 employees of this company could convert an ebook to the Kindle format using free or comercial tools in less than 2 days, including OCR where needed. It could take from 10 minutes to 2 days. How much do you pay in the US for 2 days of work of a junior computer professional ? $200 maybe ? That`s the price an US author has to pay to get his book into digital format. This is taking into consideration that he doesn`t learn how to do it by himself which is very easy and the information is widely available on the net, he doesn`t want to use free tools or pay for commercial software and doesn`t want to deal with outsourcing (he could get that done for $50 in India, $30 in China and $150 in Romania)
    Self publishing is the easiest and best option for a somewhat known author to maximize the profit from his back catalog. For a neophyte it`s probably better to stick with a publisher because they will provide the much needed marketing but regain the rights for his backcatalog after a while