The thing is, they've had the ability to do this for several years now, by dropping the wholesale rate they charge smaller e-book vendors such as Fictionwise.
But I've seen a number of examples of Macmillan e-books that are still at hardcover prices, months or years after the printed versions went paperback.
Even leaving aside the price-fixing issues, how are we to believe that the leopard has suddenly changed its spots now?
]]>Please keep the discussion of the pros and cons of DRM and proprietary file formats out of this topic. Further diversions will be policed, with prejudice.
(This should not be taken as an endorsement of DRM -- which sucks -- and proprietary file formats -- which also suck; it's an attempt to keep the signal from being drowned out in the noise of yet another standard internet holy war.)
Thomas Womack: the ability of crowdsourcing to spot errata has been somewhat exaggerated. In particular, please bear in mind that the other side of the coin (using lots of eyeballs to voluntarily but lossily proof an ARC of my next book) is the opportunity cost incurred in lost commercial sales.
(Hint: I already use a web-based focus group to check my novels, before they go anywhere. It's very far from perfect, and this is with high-double-digit numbers of participants.)
]]>(90% or more of novels have one author, and their textual length is around thirty to fifty times that of a paper. Torvald's law applies: many eyes make bugs (or typos) transparent. In the absence of many eyes ...)
rpg @103: yes. Baen is doing ebooks Right because Arnold Bailey's one man show, Webscriptions (I believe part-owned by Baen) is effectively a retail gateway. So Baen's ebooks don't go through someone else's distribution channel.
Alas, you need to at least have sufficient brain cells to know how to download a file and install it on your reader of choice in order to use Webscriptions. And the not-there-yet mature ebook market is presumed to consist of couch potatoes for whom this would be an insuperable technical challenge.
]]>If publishers want to wait until a certain period of time before they allow e-books to be issued, that is up to them. Just as it is the right of the customer to wait to purchase the books until they become paperbacks or e-books. If publishers think e-books are going away, they are naive. The American public increasingly wants them for many reasons.
I do use Kindle, but even if I didn't, I would feel the same way. I debated all of this before I got one, which was a present. I for one can list many reasons why I prefer e-books am I have always been a bookworm. I debated which company to get the e-book reader from and I investigated all of them. If someone doesn't want an e-book reader, that is up to them. People can choose other stores to purchase the publishers' books from that won't play nice with Amazon. Books-a-million sells their books at often ridiculously low prices, even on new issues, but you don't hear people complaining about that, except maybe the authors.
]]>(Can't be bothered arguing with know-nothings and trolls. Kindly piss off.)
]]>Answer: Because, as I am becoming sick and tired of repeating, I am not a publisher. Publishers do a hell of a lot of work that is largely invisible to the reading public (except when it goes wrong). I don't want to take on their workload along with my own. It's called division of labour.
Put it another way, if I wanted to do that I would already have done so.
]]>Over in the romance genre, there are several thriving small press publishers doing nicely by small press standards on being ebook publishers first and treeware publishers second if at all. There is a significant online romance fandom which likes ebooks and discusses, often loudly, what they do and do not like about buying them. I write for that market, and so I have some real, hard reader feedback on ebook purchasing.
Let me assure you that cover art does matter for ebooks. It matters very much indeed. I can point you at reader reviews of my books that start "I was browsing through Loose Id's catalogue looking for something to try, and my attention was grabbed by the cover of..." There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that bad cover art signals to readers that the publisher is unprofessional, and if they're unprofessional about covers, they're probably unprofessional about selecting good manuscripts and editing those manuscripts.
Editing matters. Readers notice when they try a new press and the editing isn't up to snuff, or standards at an established epub slip. Editing fiction is more than typos and correcting the grammar -- it's about story structure.
Gatekeeping matters. There are working models for crowdsourcing it -- but when I'm reading fanfic, I'm pretty picky about whose recs I follow, and I pretty much don't read fanfic without a rec unless it's an author I'm familiar with. Go read a random sample of fanfiction.net if you want to understand why gatekeeping matters.
Some readers will buy direct from publishers, and some even prefer to do so. Some readers refuse point blank to go trailing round the different publishers every week to see what's on offer, and go straight to Fictionwise instead. With my author hat on, I'd really rather they bought my books direct from my publisher, because I and my publisher get a lot more money that way. With my reader hat on, yes, I understand perfectly well why people would rather go to Fictionwise.
Back to editing -- I have seen examples of Charlie's manuscripts at draft-for-crit stage, after he's revised it courtesy of focus group feedback, and the final published version. Charlie is a damned good writer and even a first draft is extremely readable, and he has a competent crit group, but there is a noticable polish put on by the publisher's editor. crowdsourcing your editing only gets you so far.
There are already systems in place to allow public libraries to lend ebooks. I can't give the details, because I have no personal experience.
Pricing on ebooks from the small press epublishers is around the same as a US mass market paperback, even though they're small press with the lack of economies of scale. This is because they are not paying DRM licence fees, and are typically selling a large chunk of turnover direct from their own website rather than handing half or more of the cover price to a distributor. Yes, the distributors do want half or more of cover even on ebooks. And want contracts that allow them to do "buy one get one free" where the one free is paid for by the publisher rather than the distributor.
Treeware isn't going away any time soon, and there will always be paper editions for those who want something signed by the author.
And if you still don't get why Charlie, and a lot more of us, don't want to be our own publishers, read Scalzi's post on the costs involved in self-publishing, which sets out clearly the advantages and disadvantages of going it alone.
(Sorry Charlie, I seem to have run on at length.)
]]>Trying to unseat an incumbent like Amazon today ... well, Barnes and Noble would love to do so, and have financial muscle to put behind the project, but have they done so? Have they hell!
Building a dot-com startup to market dominance and near monopoly status is hard. And the Invisible Hand tends to suffer from motor neurone disease once a monopoly or monopsony takes root.
John Brown @130: this blog gets 11-13,000 visitors daily, spiking to 35,000 visitors on a hot news day (like Sunday 31st just past), 130-160,000 unique visits a month. I'm taking on moderators this week, and doing some re-structuring. It is the proverbial internet launchpad. Nevertheless, if I tried to sell my books direct to readers and could get even a 2.5% conversion rate ... my sales would crash.
That's what most of the peanut gallery doesn't seem to understand -- the biggest enemy of any author is not some moustache-twirling villain in a publisher's office: it's obscurity.
]]>Nonsense. The cost of the physical book block is around 10% of the SRP -- we're literally talking about $2-3 to print a hardback, around $0.5-1.0 for a mass market paperback.
If the cost of the book block was a substantial chunk of the overall price, we wouldn't be witnessing this flame fest: it would be obvious to everyone that ebooks had to be cheaper than pbooks.
]]>Blaming Amazon for acting this way is a bit like blaming the scorpion for stinging -- it's in its nature -- but only a bit. There's also such a thing as intangibles, and maintaining customer and supplier goodwill in the long term is something that even accountants nod at, grudgingly.
]]>You want usenet -- down the hall, second door on the left.
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