6 Responses so far

1. 1. Blue Tyson on Feb 6th, 2010 at 6:26 pm

   Remember also that there are readers like ficbot who is mentioned, and me, that they will no longer sell to at all, anywhere.

   They also often don’t do books at all, and don’t sell in multiple venues. e.g. there will be books that are only available at Amazon (not such a great plan, as just discovered. ).

   If we weren’t worried about it, we wouldn’t talk about it. That is, things like you losing sales from anywhere but the USA, forever.

   If we stop talking about it, that likely means we’ve given up in disgust and started to get all our books free and moved on to doing something useful.

2. 2. Chris Meadows on Feb 7th, 2010 at 1:39 am

   Something else the publishing industry really needs to address is the whole “point of sale” double-standard. If some English-speaking expatriate in Afghanistan or Vietnam wants to order a paper book from Amazon.com, they’ll be happy to ship it to him, no problem. The “point of sale” is Amazon’s warehouse, and so they’ve sold that book “in the USA” even though they’re shipping it overseas.

   But if he wants to order an e-book, he’s usually out of luck, because the “point of sale” is considered to be his computer in that foreign country. Thus, by selling to him, Amazon or whoever would be selling that book in that foreign country, and the publisher of that edition doesn’t have sale rights for that country.

   It’s all very well to say that these people should order from e-book companies within their own country—but there’s no way any publisher in a non-English-speaking country is even going to be interested in licensing English language books, let alone any local e-book vendor to carry them.
   I’d say it’s a “catch 22,” but he probably can’t buy that e-book either.

   This is part of the problems that have caused such frustration for Ficbot, though since Canada mostly speaks English she can at least find some local English-language e-book vendors—but not as many as America where there’s Amazon, B&N, Fictionwise, eReader, Kobo, BooksOnBoard, DieselEBooks, Mobipocket, etc. etc.

   This is a pure relic of the print publishing days, when no publisher had the size or facilities to serve the entire world so you had to license nation by nation in order to be able to fully exploit your work. But it’s really getting in the way of adoption of e-books, and there’s no reason except inertia that national licensing should should apply to a product that can be delivered in a heartbeat anywhere the Intertubes go.

   Damned if I know how to fix it, though.

3. 3. ficbot on Feb 7th, 2010 at 10:52 pm

   Also, when we do get the books, they are more expensive. Amazon charges $2 even for the ‘free’ ones here in Canada.

   I commented on the last post in this blog and didn’t get an answer, but I really do want to re-iterate, I am pro-author and pro-book (if I wasn’t, I would be expending all this effort to try and actually buy them legally…) But I am at the point where I just didn’t know what else to do, and that’s where my post on some of the on-line reader initiatives was coming from.

   Now that dialogue here and elsewhere has brought some of these issues out into the open a little more, I would love to move beyond ‘explanations of what the issues are and why they are the way they are’ and into actual solutions. Ideas?

4. 4. Travis Butler on Feb 8th, 2010 at 11:36 am

   As someone who imported the latest Pratchett book from amazon.co.uk for years, I can understand the motive here. However… maybe I’m just a contrarian, but there *are* at least some arguments (or at least valid questions) for the way things are with single-point-of-sale for e-books.

   Canada, for example, has native content laws, designed to encourage local authors, producers, etc. I don’t pretend to know the specifics, but would such laws apply to US-based publishers selling directly to Canadian customers, and if so, how?

   More generally, does the reasoning behind the law apply elsewhere? Presumably, a local publisher would know the area better than an international one – both encouraging books tailored to the interests of the local market, and developing local authors. If international publishers are allowed to sell into these local markets, what will that do to local publishers?

   Finally, many people in the Amazon/Macmillan threads have expressed concerns that the big publishers in the US are already too big and powerful. Giving them the right to sell overseas means giving them more power and influence.

   Where would people draw the balance?

5. 5. Gigaflop on Feb 9th, 2010 at 3:51 pm

   I for one appreciate this post and all of the discourse surrounding it. It has been a very educational discussion, and this blog incidentally turned out to be one of the best sources of information on this whole battle, when combining the posts with many of the incredibly insightful comments.

   I for one was about to write you off as a complete *sshole given your treatment of the comments from your first post on this subject, but clearly that’s not the case and you’re a lot more levelheaded than I first gave you credit (not that my opinion matters on these interwebs, but it matters to me).

   Anyhow, I am incredibly interested to see how this whole drama plays out and find myself coming here repeatedly to get an inside view of the action.

   I might just have to check out your books. Just have to figure out what medium I’ll get them on. =)

6. 6. Tobias Buckell on Feb 9th, 2010 at 3:58 pm

   ficbot: apologies for the non-answer, I’m under a print book deadline on two fronts, and while I would like to wade back into conversation, keeping the twins in formula ranks higher on the priority list!

   Gigaflop: thanks! No matter what medium you choose (used/eBook/cheap massmarket) I hope you enjoy. You can also read the first 1/3 of them free (books links on the nav bar) to make your call before investing hard earned cash!