Amazon Pulls Book Publisher's Listings; Ebook Wars Underway?

As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple's new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon's way of "expressing its strong disagreement" with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: "It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes' insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that's selling the content. Last time, everybody compromised and walked away mostly happy: Universal and NBC got more flexible pricing, iTunes got DRM-free music and more TV shows for its catalog to sell. ... The difference in this fight is that Macmillan is one of the publishers signed to deliver books for Apple's iBooks store. They have somewhere to run. And credibly. That wasn't really the case with record labels, who tried to fuel alternatives to dilute iTunes power, and failed."

Re:Abuse of dominant marketshare...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Wal-Mart does it all the time, so I think it is possible to do it without legal repercussions. If a company won't meet Wal-Mart's chosen price, or won't do RFID the way Wal-Mart wants, they just drop them. Seems similar to this where Amazon is dropping them over price.

iPad isn't an ebook reader

[zippthorne]

I really don't understand why people keep trying to shoehorn epaper and netbooks into the same category. I wish apple luck, and I think i might get iPad if i didn't already have an apple laptop: iPad + iMac would cover more use cases than Macbook + iMac, and cost less as well*, although just a macbook + generic LCD external monitor covers a lot of those cases as well.

*presuming of course, an all-apple home.

But it's not an ebook reader, and the Kindle is not the only e-reader, nor is it the only widely-held e-reader. Sony has a number of mature offerings, and Barnes & Noble's device looks very interesting, although it can't possibly have the numbers to compete with amazon yet, it's only two months old and it's been sold out for one and a half of those months.

I think publishers would be making a mistake if they think they can play apple and amazon against each other in this case, or if they think that trying to do that worked for them in the last case (e-music)

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[seanadams.com]

I would like to remind you that the Kindle has a e-ink screen is much easier on the eyes than an LCD is.

Saying it doesn't make it true, but thank you for "reminding" me of the points I already specifically addressed. Have you actually used a Kindle in typical indoor lighting conditions for any length of time?

The development of new kinds of e-ink tech (both color and faster refreshing) also gives Amazon a road-map for future screen improvements.

Agreed, I like what ePaper manufacturers are promising for the future. But I would like a usable eBook reader today.

Re:Is Apple ePub DRM free?

[mejogid]

It's DRM'd to high hell [teleread.org] - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon. There's something slightly frustrating about using an explicitly open format and then spewing their own brand of DRM all over it.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[BrokenHalo]

...but of vastly poorer quality and without the ownership and durability advantages of a dead tree.

I'm not so sure that we can count on such a durability advantage. This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'll try to keep it brief...

I am of the opinion that in the future, the 20th and most of the 19th centuries are going to appear to surviving generations as something of a "dark age". Since publishers started using woodchips to provide the requisite fibre to make paper in about the 1820s, residual acids in the paper have had a destructive effect on the paper. While some quality publications still appear on rag or otherwise stabilised or buffered paper, much has simply disintegrated.

The trouble is, although printers must be aware of the problem, they don't seem to be doing anything about it. I have many texts from the 1980s which are in very poor shape, which is bad enough. But what has disappointed me more is that a number of books I have bought *new* in the last year are already showing signs of serious foxing.

Although I still love the feel - and the smell - of printed paper, I'm inclined to think the textual content has a better chance of survival in digital form, provided that it is stripped of proprietary formats and DRM.

MacMillan

[arkenian]

I've got to say that MacMillan has never liked the concept of e-books to begin with, has been one of the fiercest supporters of strong DRM, and have ALWAYS wanted to price their e-books way too high. MacMillan is, for those who don't know, the owners of the TOR imprint (read: Wheel of Time) as the one most likely to be known by /. readers. That's right, the same people who will price an e-book like a hardcover after the paperback is out, and who regularly charged $15 for the PROLOGUES of the wheel of time books in electronic format. Plus they almost always delay the e-book publications, which annoys me. I have never liked MacMillan, and the only reason they get away with it (from me) is because while I don't like their company's policies on digital media, they actually do have pretty high quality editors and authors.
And while they could probably care less at Amazon de-listing their kindle books, if they've delisted the dead tree books, that's a real threat. And they deserve it, probably. That said, this is a game of chicken. Amazon can't afford to de-list their dead-tree for very long, and MacMillan can't afford to have them de-listed for very long. Who will blink first?
Or it could just be a glitch, there's no official reasons posted and TFA even admits they're not sure of the link, here. Amazon has had some wierd glitches before.
In another note, I do a lot of e-book reading on both my Kindle and my Laptop and other devices, and if what I want to do is 'sit and read a book' for several hours, the kindle wins every time.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[jonbryce]

In Britain, ebooks tend to be expensive relative to paper books because paper books have 0% VAT (sales tax), and ebooks have 17.5% VAT, or 15% if they are delivered from Luxembourg, which they quite often are. Is it a similar situation where you are?

Re:Abuse of dominant marketshare...

[mobby_6kl]

IIRC, the rule is that the Kindle book can't be more expensive than the dead-tree version (or has to be below X% of the paper thing), rather than an absolute price ceiling.

I think amazon will win this one.

[dhickman]

The kindle was designed for book junkies, and for people who like to read newspapers/periodicals. Does it have limitations, yes, but it does do its key functions well, deliver text content anywhere there is a cell signal with a very long battery life.

There are several key markets for books.

Premium customers - new books in hardback
technical customers - technical books.
children books
paperback customers
bargain hunters
periodicals -

The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.

Amazon has realized that only their premium customers will even pay for the 9.99 price for new books. If I pay that kind of price for a book, I want the dead tree trophied on my book shelf with the thousands of other dead trees in my house, so I can re read them later in life.

Personally I use my kindle for disposable media, like news papers ( the oklahoman and St. Louis Post dispatch) and magazines ( reason, mit tech review and reader digest.) All those combined equals a little over $20 a month, that before the kindle, I never would subscribe to.

When I am in the mood I usualy do the following to get free and cheap books, usually classics.

1. Every day or so amazon will offer a free book on the kindle, to lure you into a series ( it works, i usually end up buying the free book and the others in paper form)

2. type "-domain" in the kindle search bar. It will return all of the current free and cheap books. Usually around 20,000 or so.

3. Go to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide [feedbooks.com] with the browser on the kindle. That will download a "book" that will allow you access to most of the guttenberg and other free book repositories on the intertubes.

Due to the ease of free content, amazon has been posting low cost collections of authors for usually a $1.00 that has excellent indexing and tables of contents.

I think the ipad will have its market but until they can make a device that I only have to charge once a week is useable any time during that period to allow me to read ( usually 2-3 hours a day) in addition to all of it computer usage, I will stick with my netbook and kindle in my backpack.


dhh

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[Fallingcow]

Anyone who wanted just the ebook copy could buy the dead-tree, get the ebook, then sell the dead-tree and effectively get a discount while flooding the second hand market with like-new copies and driving down the price.

Re:books should be cheap SOOO cheap

[TheRaven64]

Well, part of it is the author's royalty, but that's quite often the same rate as for paper books (something to remember when you buy an eBook; unless it's published by Amazon's own publishing arm, most of the profit will go to the publisher). As long as this is the case, authors won't want companies selling eBooks cheaper than normal books, because it means that they get much less per sale.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[MistrBlank]

You do know you can adjust the brightness right?

Re:Macmillan already lost at least 1 customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. They have said that they sell one kindle edition for every two paper editions, and they also said they sold more Kindle books on Christmas day than paper books (surprise surprise with all the gift Kindles...), but they've never said it's 60% of their sales.

Though, I would imagine primarily big readers buy Kindles, not people who are practically illiterate (read: iPad owners)

overpriced? not all ebook publishers do this

[alizard]

Baen Books sells most of its backlist (the part it doesn't give away free) for $5-6 per DRM-free book. I regard that price as reasonable and probably have spent $150 on their product in the last year, which I might read on my netbook or PDA or even my desktop. That's what DRM-free means, no happy horseshit involving proprietary DRM software locked to a single machine in a time when most likely customers are going to want to read or listen on more than one device. IOW, readily available, decently priced, and oddly enough, they make money for the publisher as well as saving it for the reader.

I don't have a lot of use for "walled garden" setups, whether they're Apple's or Amazon's.

Needless to say, I don't read e-books on Kindle.

Re:books should be cheap SOOO cheap

[TheRaven64]

Did you actually read my post? Authors typically get some fixed percentage of the net price (the price that the publisher sells the book to the retailer for). On most book contracts, this is the same percentage for eBooks as for paper books. That means that the author gets the same amount from a $10 eBook as from a $10 printed book. The publisher is expected to pay the printing and distribution costs from their cut, so their profit from a $10 eBook is close to 100% of their cut, while for a printed book it is closer to 10% of their cut. If you make a printed book $10 and an eBook $5, then the publisher makes more profit on the eBook than the printed book, but the author makes less.

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[PCM2]

I'm guessing you're too young to have been around when the majority of home computer users had dot-matrix printers, which used a ribbon. When I was in high school, my school bought an HP LaserJet II printer, which had 300dpi resolution. It was amazing looking. Nowadays a couple hundred bucks will get you a printer with twice as much resolution, but back then you couldn't get documents looking that sharp without spending thousands of dollars. Resolution matters, even for text.

That said, the iPad's screen resolution is 132ppi, while the Kindle's is 170ppi. Books on the iPad will not be higher resolution than those on the Kindle.

Re:Price at Apple store?

[arkenian]

Also note that webscription books are $6 AND UNENCUMBERED BY DRM. Yeah Baen Books (if only all publishers were that smart.)