Amazon Now Discounting HarperCollins EBooks 136
Nate the greatest writes "Late last week three publishers and the Department of Justice finalized an agreement to settle the claims that the publishers conspired to raise ebook prices. One of the terms of the agreement was that publishers were going to have to allow ebook retailers like Amazon to set the price of ebooks. Today it looks like the new prices have gone into effect. Amazon, B&N, and a small indie ebookstore called BooksonBoard are all offering HarperCollins ebooks at a discount. B&N and Amazon seem to be using the same price book, while BoB is having a 24% off sale."
Re:Good for Whom? (Score:4, Informative)
What is the point in these "publishers" and "book retailers" when we can buy and sell our books online now?
Good luck selling eBooks from your collection.
The point in "publishers" is that they take care of the proofing, typesetting (yes, even an ePub looks better if it was formatted as something other than a raw text dump), marketing, artwork (nice covers sell better), and so forth.
The point in "booksellers" is that you get one-stop shopping, and the publisher and author don't have to set up and maintain retail accounting systems and delivery servers (or did you think the Internet is powered by fairies? Those books come from tangible source machines with tangible operators powered by real live electricity).
Yes, one person can do it all, but doing everything yourself doesn't always mean it gets done well. If my favorite author can be more creative and more productive because he or she or they or whatever have outsourced the grunt work, I'm willing to pay for a middleman or 2.
Not being an idiot (no matter what they say), I won't pay more for electronic books than their dead-tree versions, but I don't consider paying a resonable price for intermediary services as a complete waste of money.
Re:Good for Whom? (Score:4, Informative)
I write stories and have a book coming out next year so I have a dog in this one.
What I have seen and what I have been told by Tor is that ebooks will split the market. You will have a flood of cheaply produced, low-cost titles and you will have a small boutique market of high-end interactive books that cost a fortune and will be updated from year to year.
Every house wants their boutique titles. In the early 2000s those would have been the Harry Potter series. Tie-ins and marketing galore. That was a publisher's wet-dream. The boutique titles, as seen right now, will be a mixture of interactive magazine, tv show, and music video. Sort of like a subscription to a super-version of your favorite cable channel. Words will make up some of the content but a lot of it will be pictures and music. Like mystery novels? Think what you could do if you had four or five top writers pumping out a dozen titles, all tied together, and with it's own episodic tv show. Science fiction is a no-brainer, as are fantasy and spy 'novels'.
By the way, we already have all of this, only the stuff is spread out across a dozen studios and publishers. What will happen is a single house making all things. Okay, maybe a little cooperation.
On the other end of the scale are the books I will be writing. Text edited by a professional and thrown into an ebook template. IF my book sells and IF there is a little interest by Barnes & Nobel and IF I can pull together a tour, Tor *might* do an actual print run - paperback - very limited. Tor said they will help with some local tour dates in the midwest but all travel and hotel costs are mine to cover.
Nearly everyone can be published now. The downside is there isn't any more money to o around.
Welcome to the new publishing.