Authors' Amazon Awareness 174
Geoffrey.landis writes "Many book lovers were surprised this week when Amazon.com removed books from the publisher Macmillan from the shelves (later restored), including such popular imprints as St. Martin's, Henry Holt, and the science fiction publisher Tor. But readers shouldn't have been surprised, according to the Author's Guild. The Author's Guild lists a history of earlier instances where Amazon stopped listing a publisher's books in order to pressure them to accept terms, dating back to early in 2008, when Amazon removed the 'buy' buttons for works from the British publisher Bloomsbury, representing such authors as William Boyd, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling. In response, the Author's Guild has set up a service called Who Moved My Buy Button to alert authors when their books are removed from Amazon's lists."
Amazon's actions have generated ill-will on the parts of many authors, who — being authors — are only too happy to explain their viewpoints at length. Two such examples are Tobias Buckell's breakdown of why Amazon isn't the righteous defender of low-prices they claim to be and Charlie Stross's round-up of the situation.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon is one party in a two party negotiation. If they don't like the terms of the negotiation, they don't have to accept them. Are they supposed to sell books no matter what the terms are? This is a lot of hot air about nothing. It's simple, really. If authors don't like their publisher, if publishers don't like Amazon - they can go elsewhere.
Kill the DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
This is another reason I loathe DRM. Amazon is apparently the sole distributor of the authorized electronic version of these books. They apparently have unquestionable control over whether or not they'll even be available for purchase, and they can revoke ownership of the books remotely without people even noticing (viz the 1984 kerfuffle).
When I buy something, I want to own it. I don't want to license it at the whim of a service that dictates what I can do with it. That's just ridiculous.
Re:Kill the DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an idea: enforce the calling of things by their proper name. i.e. making it illegal to use a "BUY NOW" button in these cases and force them to use a "LICENSE NOW" button instead. False advertising and all that jazz?
Re:Kill the DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
When I buy something, I want to own it. I don't want to license it at the whim of a service that dictates what I can do with it. That's just ridiculous.
Generally speaking, I agree with you, but I'd say there's a notable exception. If I could choose to buy (and own) product A for $X, or I could choose to license product A for $X-Y, licensing might be a viable alternative in certain situations. Kind of like renting a DVD movie or console game, only with more straightforward (I suppose) DRM. DRM that, of course, by being a licensee rather than an owner, I'd be explicitly agreeing to be "managed" by.
Similar to the difference between buying Windows licenses--and yes I'm aware of the irony in what I've just written--and buying into Software Assurance, only on the sub-$100,000 scale.
Re:Free Market? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, true free market economies will have monopolies. Anti-trust laws make the market less free. Something to think about when someone gets a bug up their ass about a politician being "Socialist."
Uh... everyone seems focused on amazon but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do respect the right of authors to make some money, but when an ebook is twice as expensive as a cheap paperback version, there's something highly wrong.
All of that makes me think they actually are trying to kill the ebook market, where "they" means publishers. Amazon of course is not clean either, and they obviously have been taking advantage of their public policy to look like saviors, that they are not.
tldr: ebooks are way too expensive. Anything above 3-4$ for an old book or 4-8$ for a novelty is just plain insane. It's not like they require a lot of infrastructure. Oh and of course the author should still get most of the money in that grand scheme. But I doubt it's the case.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting aside the fact that Amazon is the 800lb gorilla in bookselling business who currently controls 80-90% of eBook market, the problem has arisen due to Amazon's insistence that authors should submit to restrictive contractual terms in order to be allowed into the Kindle store -- i.e. making the book exclusive to Amazon, negotiating a special low price, and worst yet, making Amazon the publisher.
Prior to the iPad's announcement Amazon's terms for ebooks were 70/30. That's 70% going to Amazon. It's nothing short of a robbery.
I'm sorry to say this, but it is a very sleazy company.
Amazon sucks anyway. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free Market? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free Market? (Score:1, Insightful)
In a free market, the best suited coorporation grows more rapidly than its less suited competitors. Once it reaches a certain size (compared to its competitors) it starts to use various methods of coercion to squash competition, possibly stomping out competitors that are better. This creates a monopoly in place of the free market. Thus, free markets tend towards monopolies. It follows that a free market is a self-destructive utopia. Many governments have laws to offset this development, but they often do not perform that well, having to balance out various issues, such as not stiffling innovation, not being to expensive to enforce, and politicians taking "campaing contributions" (or whatever you want to call the bribes) from monopoly coorporations.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon is one party in a two party negotiation. If they don't like the terms of the negotiation, they don't have to accept them...
You're missing the point. Amazon didn't merely say "we don't like your terms, so we won't sell your e-books." What they did was say "We don't like your terms on one item, e-books, so unless you accept our terms on that we won't sell anything else of yours, either, no hardcover or paperback, sales, not just electronic."
They were trying to use their market dominance in one area to allow them to dictate prices in another area. And not for the first time.
This why monopoly is bad.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
...Prior to the iPad's announcement Amazon's terms for ebooks were 70/30. That's 70% going to Amazon. It's nothing short of a robbery.
I'm sorry to say this, but it is a very sleazy company.
That's the one good thing about competition. It tends to force change on monopolistic pricing and "sleazy" agreements. Of course, in the case of Apple(iTunes) and Amazon(Kindle), we're talking about two 800-pound Gorillas going at it. Should be a good fight.
Re:Free Market? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the whole premise of the article is a fraud anyways, since amazon already caved to McMillan [themoneytimes.com], which will now set the price of e-books on amazon.com, and already sharply raised amazon's previous pricing. So tell me, who is dictating terms here?
Re:It's all about the money (Score:1, Insightful)
You really, really don't want to read a book unless the publisher's editor and proofreader have made it readable for you. Most authors can't spell, few are capable of coherent grammar and until someone else has told them that their story doesn't add up, their books aren't worth reading. The editing part of the publishing industry does very useful work.
Re:30% for an author wouldn't be a bad deal (Score:2, Insightful)
I”m sorry?? Amazon’s work in selling these e-books is next to nothing.
I can have a online e-book shop set-up by tomorrow. And a author upload service on the next day. Then all that’s left, is moving money back and forth! You must be kidding!
There are authors out there that made way less than 30% of sales, while the publisher took a big chunk. I was just reading a published author that has had over eight books published. On some of them, he got .50 cents per book. On others, he got a flat rate and no royalty fees at all.
Have you ever heard of ad populum [wikipedia.org]?
It’s faulty logic. Something worse does not make something bad OK. Just like if your limit for badness is <=1, and it’s at 0.7, then telling you that it could be 0.3 or 0.0, does not make 0.7 > 1.0!
Let me use your quote on another topic:
There are people out there that were left with way less than 30% of their money, while the state took a big chunk. I was just reading about a famous guy that has had over eight houses in NY. On some of them, he has left only the couch and toilet. On others, they took everything, only left the blank walls standing, and no money at all.
Now tell me: How would that quote make 70% taxation right? Hm?
Re: Epic Fail on RTFA? Or Amazon Shill? (Score:2, Insightful)
You obvoiusly know little to nothing about the relationship between authoring a book and publishing a book.
Book's most often require editing, fact checking, layout, artwork - even hiring a set of on the cheap professionals this will cost thousands.
You also seem to not grasp the simple fact that E-books are not yet a signifigant part of the bookspace - read the nuimbers and you'll notice that it's about 1% of the book market.
Going to Amazon with a e-book and having no physical book is dropping the vast majority of your customers.
Re:Free Market? (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all monopolies are the result of government intervention. The anti-trust laws were written to break up monopolies that had been created by government intervention in the market. Some of the classic examples of "essential" monopoly were created by the government. When electricity and telephone service first came on the scene most cities had many competitors selling either. The government stepped in and decided to make both of these regulated monopolies.
[Citation Needed] because I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Bell#Formation_under_Bell_patent [wikipedia.org]
The telephone (and telegraph) markets were consolidated by Bell Telephone/AT&T.
Following a government antitrust suit in 1913, AT&T agreed to the Kingsbury Commitment in which AT&T would sell their $30 million in Western Union stock, allow competitors to interconnect with their system, and not acquire other independent companies
AT&T did everything but that last bit. They kept buying up telephone/telegraph companies until the government came back again in 1934 and set AT&T up as a regulated monopoly.
I'm not sure why the "all monopolies are the result of government intervention" meme lives on.
During the hey-day of laissez faire economics, "classic" monopolies sprouted up left and right.
The government didn't create railroad and boat shipping monopolies.
The government didn't create the oil production/refining/distribution monopoly .
The government didn't create the monopoly in the telecom market.
I realize that facts are inconvenient to your ideology, but they won't go away.
In case that was all too long:
AT&T built up a monopoly in spite of the government's attempt to prevent it and before the government officially sanctioned them as one.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that Amazon has nothing even near a monopoly on books, whether electronic, paper, or audio.
Except this is clearly not true. Think about it. After Amazon says "we don't like your price on e-books and so we won't sell them," what is their motiviation to not to sell Macmillan paper books; an unrelated product? What do they gain from this?
Up until they disagreed with e-book pricing, they had no problem with Macmillan products, so it's clearly not a case of them not liking their prices on paper books. So what exactly do they gain by what appears, on the surface, to be an economically unjustified decision? If the market were indeed completely fungible, as you suggest, this would only reduce their sales volume. It would put no pressure on Macmillan, since their customers would just buy from somebody else.
The only reason that they would attempt to muscle Macmillan into accepting their pricing terms on e-books by refusing to sell paper books would be if they do have some degree of monopoly power (or, at least, they think that they have power). You say "negotiate using any leverage they can," but there simply isn't any leverage there unless they are market dominant.
Here's a rule of thumb you might consider: When a company uses market dominance to set pricing terms, it pretty much never is a good thing for the consumer. Even if it looks good on the surface.
Re:30% for an author wouldn't be a bad deal (Score:4, Insightful)
I”m sorry?? Amazon’s work in selling these e-books is next to nothing.
I can have a online e-book shop set-up by tomorrow. And a author upload service on the next day. Then all that’s left, is moving money back and forth! You must be kidding!
That's up there with "Rock Stars don't do anything difficult- I could do that if I wanted to!". Why don't you then? Undercut the big players, offer lots to the authors? Make your millions?
I'll tell you why- if you set up an e-book website, it'd flop. There's more to being a mega-retailer than just writing a web-page and setting up a money transfer. Advertising, promoting, negotiating with publishers and authors, maintaining partnerships... the website itself is no more significant than the shop-front is for a jewelery shop- it's everything else that makes the shop, not the bricks and mortar.
Plenty of people do try and fail- only the ones who are good at all that other stuff survive. Amazon have, Apple have, lots haven't. It's their talents in all these other niggling little areas that enables to act like the juggernaut-bullies that they are.
Re:Uh... everyone seems focused on amazon but... (Score:3, Insightful)
an editor, proofreader, any cover art, conversion to ebook format and some quality checks, oh, and an author to spend near a year working on the book.
Wow. Isaac Asimov must have been born in like the seventeenth century!
Re:It's all about the money (Score:3, Insightful)
If as an author you can't write, then you should be in a different job.
Re:Uh... everyone seems focused on amazon but... (Score:3, Insightful)
And besides, devices like the kindle do not lend themselves to very specific layouts by the publisher; they allow you to change font sizes, and the text reflows automatically. Like HTML the publisher doesn't spend lots of time pouring over kerning and leading, making sure that white space rivers don't appear and that text flows meaningfully around any illustrations. You just don't have that much control in an e-book.
There is no way production costs on an e-book are higher than any printed form. Printed forms have the same (or more demanding) layout requirements, more proofreading (making sure the are not words which fell off the page when making plates, for example), plus physical material costs, man hours to run and clean the presses, run the paper shears, collate the pages, fold them, bind them, box them, then there's the physical shipping involved. I worked in a press room for a couple of years in college. Until you get into the very, very large publishers, there's a whole lot of manual labor involved, and even when you're one of the very large publishers, there's still a lot of very expensive equipment involved (whose price needs to be part of the cost of the books printed on them).
The e-book has none of that overhead, someone performs the same level of quality control as the print plates (less really, there aren't blue lines and gels to produce for proofing, etc), then someone runs a software tool to produce the e-book format (which most likely takes less than a minute), and the process is complete. It's ludicrous to suggest that the production costs of an e-book are anywhere near similar to a paperback. Sure there are shared fixed costs which need to be recouped (writing and editing mostly), but an e-book should be half the price of a paperback - or less.
Re:So what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Putting aside that authors have 100% control over their work due to law known as copyright, and they are the hunter with the big bore rifle loaded and pointed who controls 100% of the decision making with books in ebook or print format, the problem has arisen that Amazon has in turn used their wits to provide a platform that changes the game to make books more available to the consumer, yet they are seen as the bad actor in this situation.
Prior the Kindle, the publisher controlled 100% of the books that made it to print, and the ridiculous hardcover prices. They got 100% what they wanted, and they print industry was suffering. They were taking down their own market, and they even remarked as such that the print industry was shrinking, and how the internet and ebooks would be welcome. Yet they did shit to provide for either as a platform--$100million+ companies that couldn't be bothered to come up with a digital store and delivery practice.
Now someone has, they blame them for their initiative into putting together a hardware, software, and marketing platform. Still, many publishers and authors don't sell on the system at all, their choice, their copyright. Yet the innovator is seen as the bad guy here.
Which is sleazy to you?
"That's 70% going to Amazon. It's nothing short of a robbery."
Amazon created the Kindle store, the hardware, and the software, indeed much of the ENTIRETY of the demand for ebooks. It's their work. You're surprised, appalled, mad, or whatever when they want to take a cut? Development costs and free wireless is part of the Kindle platform and it's appeal to cut consumers to purchase it, and in turn, people have been buying ebooks at a greater rate than print. They made the ebook platform jump into acceptance by years, if not a decade.
And you don't honestly think that's these costs are NOT going to be recouped in the split? It's their platform, their marketing that has this ebook platform succeeding, and you want them to be more fair to author's who have done SHIT for ebooks yet are going to profit from it?
"I'm sorry to say this, but it is a very sleazy company."
JK Rowling is mentioned. She didn't and probably still doesn't have ANY of the Harry Potter books up in ebook format for ANY ebook plaftorm (Kindle, Nook, Sony, all excluded). Is she evil and sleazy and anti-competitive because if her and her publisher's decisions on this? Is she evil, having her Harry Potter movies licensed on DRM only formats in video? They have, in fact, forced Amazon not to make that work available. How come Amazon is considered sleazy, but the author and publisher practices are not?
The industry adopted a format war, not a works war, and Amazon is trying to break it. The industry wanted print only, yet complained mightily how print prices were going up and consumers were buying less. Amazon breaks this, when the industry had every opportunity to for years prior, and Amazon gets blamed for their work. Lovely.
The author is not obligated to sell ebooks. The author is not obligated to sell ebooks for the Kindle--there are a host of other platforms like the Nook, Sony's ereaders, and a bunch of smaller readers that are quite impressive hardware-wise. The author is not obigated to accept Amazon's terms--they can release their stuff in pdf or epub and sell it on there own using PayPal.
Yet Amazon should bow to the publisher and author demands when they do want to sell on their platform and appliance?
Further, when you say sleazy company, that's all encompassing. So I call BS. One thing they do is dubiously bad, and on that you're taking the authors point of view near exclusively and you still aren't persuasive. And yet you KNOW that Amazon does more than the Kindle, and the customer service experience and product selection largely is still far better than most online vendors.
How is a company sleazy when I can get something $5 delivered under a 20% off sale locally, before sales tax? And provides a longer and better ret