The Price of Amazon 298
An anonymous reader writes "As physical book stores continue to struggle and disappear, the NY Times puts the changing book industry into perspective as a cost of the existence of Amazon. Further, it's a cost that hasn't been fully paid, as other effects of Amazon's ascendancy have yet to be felt. Quoting: 'One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim. The first seeds of this can be seen in the Justice Department's suit against the leading publishers, who felt that Amazon was pricing their e-books so low that it threatened their viability. The government accused the publishers of colluding to raise prices in an anti-consumer move. Amazon was not a party to the case, but it emerged the big winner.' Economists, publishers, and readers no longer have confidence that a book will cost the same amount this week as it did the last."
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just Amazon? Just books?
Amazon set the price, customers judges the value. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That was my thought, I don't buy any books from Amazon because they don't offer them in a format that's readable on my Nook. They're the main party that's trying to push their .MOBI crap on people.
This is natural, the price of a book was always largely arbitrary. The book store itself would get to double the price that they paid for the book, and there were some tangible costs, but most of it was arbitrary based upon how much money they needed to make back their investment and earn some profit.
The only thin
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That is kind of an odd way to look at the situation. I have a iPad and I can read Amazon books on the free Kindle app and I can read B&N books on the free Nook app. Not the most convenient setup (plus I have a bone to pick with both for a lack of organization options. The Kindle app won't even provide a rating field so I can know if I liked the book or hated it!), but the tech is obviously there. Wou
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I won't buy anything from Pepsi because they won't sell me Coke! WAAAAH.
NEWS FLASH (Score:5, Funny)
This just in: the market isn't the same as it was 50 years ago! Some scientists are saying we need to observe our market differently. Panic ensues.
Re:NEWS FLASH (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave it to the NY Times to pen something so illiterate: "no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim."
The "real price" of something is exactly determined by each transaction where it is sold. This is the realest price you can get. A MSRP printed on the book is not "real".
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A MSRP printed on the book is not "real".
Wrong: go to any Barnes & Noble store, and buy a book. Look at the MSRP on the book, and compare that to the price you paid at the register. They're the same.
See, for traditional brick-and-mortar booksellers like B&N, the MSRP has long been the "real price". They just charge whatever the publisher writes on there. Amazon was the first large place to change that, and the b&m sellers are sitting around wondering why people don't buy books there any mor
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"Look at the MSRP on the book, and compare that to the price you paid at the register. They're the same."
That merely happens to make them equal in those circumstances. They are not definitionally the same.
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That's a business decision by one business (who happens to be going out of business). So, yeah, not the same.
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What we have here is a typical case of the book publishers being slow to innovate and therefore looking to public opinion/government intervention to "fix" the problem for them. What Amazon has done is found the most efficient use at this time of the limited resources in question. It's just a matter of time before competition in the free market brings more innovations, which will make even greater use of our limited resources. But alas, to the general public and politicians, resources are not limited and pri
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Dystopian? You haven't had very many menial jobs in your life have you?
Re: NEWS FLASH (Score:4, Insightful)
you know what IS the same as it was 50 years ago? a dystopian vision of the future - brought to you by Amazon:
http://m.fastcodesign.com/1672939/think-your-office-is-soulless-check-out-this-amazon-fulfillment-center?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer41153&utm_medium=twitter#9
umm I don't understand the need to compare an office to a fucking highly automated and organized warehouse about being soulless.
you seen offices from 50 years back? yeah, they got soul, not(could smoke inside tho..). any modern papermill is as soulless as the fullfillment center too.
but book prices have ALWAYS BEEN ON A WHIM, the print costs for the book have nothing to do with it. the research cost for the book has nothing to do with it. it's just a guess at what price the people might buy it at.
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That place looks fantastic.. You were expecting maybe Warehouse 13?
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Way to bury legitimate concerns about Amazon's treatment of their workers as "horseshit".
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Also, Amazon doesn't simply have one warehouse nor do they deliver just to you door. They too distribute goods through hundreds if not thousands of locations by having numerous warehouses and taking deliveries to Amazon Lockers Collect+ stores. Why? It t
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However, Wal-Mart force quality down with their push for lower prices. Lower quality means rebuying the same things over and over to replace broken or useless items.
Using plastic in place of metal in household appliance gearing, for example. Clothes are also not lasting as long and poorer quality.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
one word ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... Selection.
Amazon beats any bookstore at finding older books.
Brick and mortar stores are all about displaying 20 copies of the latest shit best-seller, sitting side by side, on the front shelves. No thanks.
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Re:one word ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you have a kindle, in which case you have same day delivery. And with prime you can borrow a lot of books for free.
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I have a Kindle, you insensitive clod...
I can tell you that there are a hell of a lot of titles that are not available as eBooks - especially older ones. Not to mention that you haven't lived until you find a few where the Kindle version costs more than the paper edition. I mean WTF?
I hate Amazon. I just hate them less than everyone else. Which appears to be the new standard in business success metrics.
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I generally buy non-fiction books; usually to learn something new or get a new viewpoint on a topic I am already familiar with. In both cases I find that online reviews are far more helpful than thumbing through a book at the book store. If I don't know much about the topic, how will I know the quality of the book's contents? And if I am looking for a new viewpoint, I am unlikely to give the book an honest chance with a short skim. Online reviews and short snippets that I find with Amazon's "Look Inside" ar
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They were selling the books below cost. That is a predatory practice, designed to force other sellers (with less money) out of the market. Then once there was no competition and all their customers were expecting new releases at $10, they could go back to the publishers demand a lower price.
Re:one word ... (Score:5, Interesting)
amazon wasn't selling below cost. amazon was selling books at low margin.
The thing is regular bookstores have massive overhead, and old publishers where using that to keep thing artificially inflated. Why does an ebook cost more than a regular book?
You have to pay the writer the same, you have to pay the editor the same, you have to give a publisher their same pie, but you no longer have to pay multiple levels of distribution, shipping, printing, storage, inventory costs. that right there is 20-40% of the price of a book.
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The thing is regular bookstores have massive overhead, and old publishers where using that to keep thing artificially inflated. Why does an ebook cost more than a regular book?
The biggest cost to running a traditional bookstore is the rent of the property, you need lots of floor space in a good location. Long before Amazon got big in ebooks they were undercutting the business a lot just by shipping dead tree books directly from the warehouse. If I wanted to try reinventing the bookstore I'd have customers browse on terminals, pick a book and a robot will fetch it for you on the spot. That way you could pack many thousands of books in a very small space and have a much wider selec
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Biggest cost to running a bookstore is actually labour.
I sell about 3million $ of books at mine, and labour is the number one cost, then rent, then shipping.
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How do you know? They never opened up their books to scrutiny. . .
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You will often find physical books in clearance sales or other bargains. And they also tend to lower the price with a new edition. ebooks on the other hand have a very sticky price.
People also know that charging the same price for a DRM'd piece of digital data is bullshit, which makes them perceive a price-parity with physical copies, or a $1 rebate as expensive.
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I also find browsing jackets easier at a real store -- the computer is better when I already know what I want, but the shelves at a bookstore filter genre just as well as the machine does.
this is completely true. also, when buying a textbook/reference book, its a lot easier to skim through a physical book to check if it has the topics you want than play awkwardly with the digital "look inside" thingies.
Re:one word ... (Score:5, Informative)
If you want old books, Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] might be worth your time.
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If American bookstores are really that bad, they deserve to die.
I can tell you that UK bookstores are even worse. I received a Book Token [nationalbooktokens.com] a few years and went to Waterstone's to use it.
Of course there was nothing on the shelf worth buying and they flat-out told me, twice, that a book I wanted to order was no longer available. I showed them the Amazon listing on my phone; nope, Amazon must be lying to me.
I gave the voucher awa as a gift and ordered the book on Amazon
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Inventory almost never sells. Barnes and Nobles and Borders raised the bar very high for what was inventory. As for games, DVDs, .... shelf space costs a lot. You may be failing to appreciate how expensive it is to stock anything.
Let us all shed a tear... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let us all shed a car. (Score:3, Interesting)
The "BuggyWhip" makers morphed into GM. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Let us all shed a tear... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot spewing nytimes paid pablum? Will pro-government shills be next?
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Well, I can at least buy a car from many different manufacturers, from a variety of dealerships, and resell the damn thing if I feel like it.
These electronic books, I'm lost. What do I own? Where's the the secondhand market? If I want to buy the 16 year old book, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, a secondhand paperback from amazon is $0.01 plus shipping (media mail should be cheap). If I want to buy it on a kindle, $8.
So, what exactly is the consumer winning beyond some bookshelf space?
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These electronic books, I'm lost. What do I own? Where's the the secondhand market? If I want to buy the 16 year old book, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, a secondhand paperback from amazon is $0.01 plus shipping (media mail should be cheap).
Man this is hilarious! In the same paragraph you complain about there not being a secondhand market for ebooks, you also point out 16 year old physical books are $0.01. Um, that's not a secondhand market either, at those prices (or for the amount of value the physical retains over the years), a whopping penny, you are better off recycling them. If you literally get rid of a physical book immediately after reading it, you'd be better off using a library.
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Granted I haven't looked at the ebook market for several years, but that's because of my point: the prices were higher than physical books for the selections I was looking for (not even counting used books, which there is a really good selection of at a store by me). Also, for my purpose, the ebooks were a less convenient format.
To each his own, I guess, but I suspect you may be exaggerating a little.
Re:Let us all shed a tear... (Score:4, Informative)
You're ignoring the other costs of buying books.
Yes, they should be cheaper than regular books by about half, but they're still a good deal even at the same price as regular books. The main problem is that there's tons of book stores out there, and there's relatively few stores for ebooks. And if you're foolish enough to buy a Kindle, that leaves you mainly with Amazon, versus pretty much everybody else using epubs.
Anyways, there's storage considerations for the books you buy, the gas to get to the store, the shipping if you don't go to the shop, if it's a book you use frequently it wears out. And when you're going on vacation, it can be costly to bring a collection of books with you.
Personally, I only get rid of books due to space limitations, and with ebooks, I've never felt deprived by not having the ability to sell it.
New technology makes old technology obsolete. (Score:2, Insightful)
What use is a physical book store when I do not want to buy physical books?
And it's not just physical books and bookstores. I have no local computer shop that carries even 0.01% of the inventory that Amazon and Newegg possess, and the stuff they do have is just purchased from Amazon or Newegg and marked up 30%.
Amazon is just better than shopping locally. Better in terms of selection, price, and availability. Best of all I don't even have to leave my house. Books are delivered instantly to my Kindle and ther
Re:New technology makes old technology obsolete. (Score:5, Interesting)
Brick and mortar stores are doing just fine killing themselves on the electronics front.
Just a couple weeks ago i wanted a usb cable. Nothing fancy... a to b. 3 foot.
I wanted it now. So i hit all the stores as i was out that day. they either didn't have it. or in the case of staples... it was $34. thirty four fucking dollars for a 3 foot piece of cable. (not even a monster cable)
After a loud 'FUCK THAT'. I went and got it from newegg. took 2 days total. price. $3 Thats even with state sales tax since newegg has a place in my state.
And places like staples are actually wondering why nobody goes there anymore... they really can't figure it out.
Fail on price? Check. Fail on stock? Check. Fail on service? Check. Fail on convience? Check.
If these phsyical stores wan't to stay open. They're going to have to step up to the plate in a big way on one of those points... But so far... nope. nobody has.
And bookstores are the same. Plus they get to compete with ebooks too. Can i bring my reader to their store and walk out with an ebook loaded? Nope. Fail.
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Re:New technology makes old technology obsolete. (Score:5, Informative)
It was an up sell item on computer systems.
This is the real reason for the ridiculous pricing of cables. Stores don't sell a lot of cables and customers who are only buying a cable are rare, so competing on cable pricing doesn't make any sense.
They jack up the prices on cables because they know that they can often sell them to customers who are buying computers, televisions or other expensive products that the store does have to compete on pricing with. The profit margin on the expensive item will be fairly low, so they want a variety of high profit margin add-ons like cables and extended warranties that they can push the customer to buy.
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Same here.
The dog chewed a laptop cable. It was cheaper to have Amazon overnight a new one than it was to buy it at the local Best Buy. $20 cheaper. The brick & mortar stores that deal in electronics thrive on the folks who simply don't have enough information to make an informed decision. As soon as they get wise, they order online.
Breaking news (Score:5, Interesting)
Economists, publishers, and readers no longer have confidence that a book will cost the same amount this week as it did the last.
Breaking news: prices of goods change based on supply and demand. Film at 11.
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Film at 11.
Well, you got that part right.
(Please don't go on about supply and demand at us, when the supply is effectively infinite.)
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
eBook prices are mediated by the supply of good writers, which is not infinite. Same goes for everything digital. Replication costs going to 0 isn't sufficient to remove supply to 0 as long as the cost of the initial thing you're replicating is nonzero.
There's an interesting question about how to economically model that, of course. DRM is one way, extremely unpopular on Slashdot, but certain forms have had market successes (Steam, eBooks). There are others, many of which are more radical departures from the current model -- one is to assume that enough people will have the desire to do art for its own sake to supply worldwide demand and thus rely on "donated" art (free supply) and then infinitesimal replicated costs. Another is product placement, which isn't nearly as common in books as in TV and movies but could be done. Closely related is using the books as a platform to sell things that aren't reproducible, like kid's toys (Transformers and He-Man in book form). There's individual / corporate patronage. There's a model where the government (or a charitable foundation or something) sponsors a fixed amount per year, and distributes books for free and unencumbered by anything save a counter that tracks the number of downloads (or perhaps aggregate time spent reading the book or similar), distributing their money according to these stats. They could be written in less-common languages by companies that control professional high-quality translations, and kickstart a translation effort into English, Spanish, and Chinese. Lots of others.
But there must be some model, whether it's explicit or implicit. Because the supply is restricted.
To the consumer, supply is infinite (Score:3)
The supply of good writers is only a factor if you assume that the supply of ebooks is limited by the production of new books.
We've reached a point where the current supply of existing content exceeds the average person's lifespan by several orders of magnitude.
If authors were to stop writing books tomorrow, there would be no shortage of books available to read. The world might be at a loss, but the supply would still be far greater than the ability of readers to consume.
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"eBook prices are mediated by the supply of good writers..."
Actually, it's the supply of 'good writers willing to write.' Few authors are going to keep writing if they can't make any money. As much as we like to think otherwise, publishers are still needed for most writers. At the very least you need an editor. If you want a reasonable cover, you're going to need an artist and/or designer as well. Then there's marketing, etc. A publisher takes care of all that and lets a writer write. Of course, publishers
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Hm, so all ebooks are sold for free then? Because the supply is basically infinite (up to the bandwidth of the internet).
Yes and no. You seem to be assuming that there's some precise formula, but supply/demand is a tendency, not a formula. Further, the cost to the publisher of sending you a copy of an ebook is not just the cost of pushing electrons around. There's also the the author's royalties and the amortized costs of running the company in general. Market pressure will push the price towards zero plus those costs, and those upstream costs which can flex (such as the royalties) will also get downward pressure.
What you're
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The supply isn't infinite, because the ability to reproduce is limited by law. If copyright were repealed, then yes, ebooks would be for free. That may in turn cause the supply of new ebooks to shrink, as authors stop writing if they can't make a profit. The future of ebooks would depend on a different business model.
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Hm, so all ebooks are sold for free then? Because the supply is basically infinite (up to the bandwidth of the internet).
If you intend to actually obey the law, supply is not infinite, supply is set by the publishers.
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
That's not the supply. An infinite number of books full of random words wouldn't have much demand.
I dunno. I mean, if the Twilight series can be a bestseller, then...
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Let us not mice words, then.
"An arbitrarily large number of copies, each at a cost approaching the infinitesimal, of each of an arbitrarily large number of distinct books, each of which is ostensibly not merely full of random words, and each of which furthermore can be offered in an arbitrary number of formats and editions, with or without various add-on and/or tie-in products, many of which are of the same sort of product with the same modes of supply as just described" <<-- "Supply", if you're Amazo
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Someone should make a browser plug-in that detects this kind of behaviour. It could anonymously submit every price seen to a central database and then display the lowest price anyone was offered in the last week.
If you see other people getting lower prices you can sometimes get them for yourself by switching browser and IP address. Make sure you are not logged in with the other browser and Amazon will assume you are someone else and offer a difference price, at which point you can add it to your basket and
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Speaking of clueless...
Nope. Amazon's prices fluctuate often, based upon supply and demand. You saw t
Does this mean anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
'One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim.
How is that a consequence? Haven't books always been priced based on demand and whim? They don't think the price of a $200 textbook is primarily in the print materials, do they?
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Sadly, neither the summary or the article makes the situation clear.
No, in print books have pretty much never been priced on demand or whim. For an individual book, the price remains the same for all customers at a brick and mortar store. Amazo
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You know, there are other online bookstores besides Amazon. If the price differences matter to you, shop there.
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and this sort of personalized pricing is not happening on amazon. it might start happening some time in the future, but right now everybody sees the same price for an item. they may increase or decrease the price suddenly/rapidly, but the change applies to everyone.
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Prices of books have in many places been set by price controls and monopolistic practices. Of course, the consequences have been a massive government handout for publishers and making books less available to people who weren't rich. This is particularly true in Europe. Even in a monopoly, prices are set by demand, but they are generally set much higher than in a competitive market.
It's nice to see this system undermined by technology and progress. There is now hope that the cozy and corrupt relationship bet
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What TFS means is that books will be priced differently for each individual. If the online shop thinks you will pay more then me for a given book they will try to charge you extra, something that physical shops can't do.
Amazon isn't the only company that does it. I remember a few years back there was a story about iPhone users being charged more by certain websites.
Re:Does this mean anything? (Score:4, Interesting)
What TFS means is that books will be priced differently for each individual. If the online shop thinks you will pay more then me for a given book they will try to charge you extra, something that physical shops can't do.
This is something physical shops have been doing for AGES, though not as much recently with commodity items.
What's the price of that new car? Sure, ANYBODY can get it for the sticker price, if they're insane. Everybody can also get it for less, and just how much less depends on their negotiating skills and those of the salesman. If you look desperate, expect to pay more.
The same is true in the US medical industry. Look desperate, and you can expect to pay more (don't worry, I'll give you a "discount" since you're paying cash...). I love it when people talk about how much they save by not having insurance, as if the insurance companies pay list price (healthcare list prices are almost as inflated as RIAA math).
The only real difference with something like Amazon is the level of automation - they can give you an experience that looks like Walmart, but in reality is more like Jimmy's Used Cars.
Linus T. knew long ago (Score:2)
The marginal cost of 'manufacturing' and hence the long term price for any piece of information is $0.
No mention of the other costs? (Score:2, Informative)
A Financial Times photographer visits an Amazon fulfillment center in England. [fastcodesign.com] This is what your one-click purchases are doing to people.
Re:No mention of the other costs? (Score:5, Informative)
As I said to the other guy ... you haven't worked very many menial jobs in your life have you?
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Sounds like a model of efficiency.
But this is what menial jobs are like; cashiers scan barcodes all day, warehouse workers pick and pack items all day, etc. And if the people working there didn't want the jobs, they are not forced to continue working there - there is always an out.
I'm not sure I see the problem. (Score:2)
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more of this "fairness" nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Price is supposed to be set by demand. And if it is set wrong on a whim, people don't buy it.
If by "fairly" you mean that bloated, overpriced, arrogant publishing houses with excessive internal costs can't force their customers to pay inflated prices anymore, then yes, they can't price "fairly" anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, the revolution in the book market isn't done until every single big 20th century publisher is out of businesses, and most authors sell and market their books themselves through convenient and inexpensive online services.
How selfish do you want to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point of the article is about: Do people want the changes that are happening to the main street to continue?
From a purely consumer standpoint, sure, cheaper is better. And as long as there's no development of monopolies or other devious practices, that's fine for consumers.
But. Stores closing down in your town leads to decrepit town centres; decaying cities aren't nice and have other, unpleasant consequences. Massive corporate tax avoidance (partly why Amazon has such great prices in the UK?)
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Stores closing down doesn't lead to "decrepit town centres", it leads to new stores moving into the now free stores: coffee shops, maker spaces, skateboard vendors, who knows. That's a good thing.
And if there really were no demand or need for "town centres" other than to keep obsolete businesses there, then we should demolish them and get rid of them. Why should people who have no need of "town centres" continue to pay high taxes to maintain them? And make no mistake: high density living is expensive once y
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As far as I'm concerned, the revolution in the book market isn't done until every single big 20th century publisher is out of businesses, and most authors sell and market their books themselves through convenient and inexpensive online services.
...and it's impossible to know if a "book" is total shite, hyped by phony reviews. The cost of a book will be not an hour's wage, but multiple hours trial and error.
Yeah, can't wait.
Ecnomics 101 (Score:2)
That is the "real" price. Basic economics [answers.com]. Any other price than one set by demand is artificial (as in "price-fixing"). If prices are dropping due to the advent of Amazon, there are a number of possible causes: Decreasing marginal cost of creating each book (especially since the marginal cost of an e-book is probably less than a few millionths of a cent), supply increasing faster
Where's the problem? (Score:2)
Not sure I see the problem here. Books are like any other good. They're "true" market value is only as high as the target market is willing to pay. This is going to shift frequently. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Quality and available will play the same role with books, as with anything else.
Amazon not profitable (Score:2)
The other amazing thing in this is Amazon is not very profitable. They have been reporting losses, not gain.
When expenses exceed income, shareholders have a loss negative earnings per share
Amazon has been declining, and yet the analysts have awarded them this amazingly high valuation, as if they were the next Microsoft or the next Walmart.
Guess what though... revenue doesn't mean squat, if your expenses are higher than what you make, and you therefore aren't able to convert that revenue
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Being profitable means spending money on taxes. It's more interesting to put spend on the extra money on R&D.
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That's not what the trend in their financials shows is happening though. Cash from operating activities has been decreasing, free cash flow declined dramatically over the past year, they are borrowing an enormous amount of money -- getting more and more money by taking out more and more debt.
And they wind up with a negative EPS and declining margins, which essentially means that they are moving towards a trend of destroying shareholder value.
They are not dying, but the picture shows essentially
Wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me get this straight. Based on the "struggle" and "disappear" links in the summary, I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for Barnes & Noble as well as Borders. Is that correct?
It wasn't all that long ago people lamented how these mega-stores - specifically Barnes & Noble and Borders - were killing all the little independent book shops. Their response was they delivered what the consumer wanted at lower prices. Well, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot now! I actually felt bad about the independent book sellers (a few of whom have managed to adapt and do good business)... but not these guys. If they can't compete in the modern marketplace, that's their problem.
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You wait for them to go out of business or until they raise their prices; one or the other has to happen sooner or later.
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Amazon was losing money for many years in the beginning, and isn't all that profitable today. If Amazon can achieve market dominance against established stores, clearly there must be many more players in the market who can do the same thing to Amazon. Furthermore, for online or digital distribution of books, it doesn't take much to compete with Amazon.
Right now, we just have two generations of price gouging, monopolistic business models (independent bookstores and megastores) having their lunch eaten by a c
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I guess I've never associated the independent book stores (at least the ones that I've liked, I probably just ignored others) with price gouging, but I take your other points. Some part of me likes to buy on principle to prevent one or a few players gaining so much market dominance (rather than, as you say, fixing it once there is a demonstrable problem), but at the same time it's probably also silly to think that's effectively accomplishing anything.
PS - I also just now placed an order on Amazon, though no
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How do you compete against a near monopoly that undercuts you to sell at a loss?
buy from them? duh.
I highly doubt anyone was selling ebooks at a real loss though. think about it, if an author got wind of them selling their book for cheaper than they are paying the author...
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you do something the customer will pay extra for.
My experience with Amazon (Score:2)
I live in Finland, where Amazon does not have a "local" presence and I've sometimes ordered stuff from UK, Germany and US Amazon. You'd think that international shipping would kill the idea, but you would be very mistaken regarding how bad the local retailers (and sometimes even local online stores) are.
I recently purchased a Mac Mini and wanted a DP-miniDP cable to connect it to my monitor. I looked the cable up in various finnish retail and online stores. Not a single retail store I visited had it, not ev
The Real Cost of a Book (Score:2)
If you are talking about the content, i.e, the information in a book, there has NEVER been a 'real cost of the book'. It has always been, like for any information resource, dictated by how valuable the information is to a certain set of people. What value a publisher sells the book is determined by the highest price the publisher think he can sell the book at. A little thing called the 'free market' principle that seems to be lost on TFA.
If you are talking about the physical object (paper, binding etc.) , y
Kindle Books are a bad deal (Score:2, Troll)
A Kindle book is a rental that you pay buyer prices for. In many cases, Kindle books are more expensive than paper books, sometimes ridiculously so. Yet, you cannot do any of the things with a Kindle book than you can with a regular book: you cannot lend to as many people as you'd like; you cannot keep a personal backup copy; you cannot resell it; you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle.
The story for Amazon MP3s is nearly as bad, with one saving grace: they give you a physical copy of the file,
Re: (Score:3)
you cannot lend to as many people as you'd like
How often do you actually do that?
you cannot keep a personal backup copy
But someone else does that for you. And with Calibre, you can do it yourself.
you cannot resell it
But you usually get it for less than the cost of the physical book, so you already took the price break of selling it later, up front.
you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle.
Except a phone or a tablet or a computer.
And here are some things you can do with a Kindle eBook that you can't do with a physical book:
Own 4700 of them without taking up any shelf space or having to move heavy boxes.
Take 4700 of them with you on vacation.
Carry 4700
There's much more to this than Amazon (Score:2)
Defending tuf (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "real" price. Prices are determined by what sellers can get for a product, and what people will pay.
This isn't even about "real" prices. The big publishing houses have for years inflated prices because they could. Now an upstart comes along and starts to eat into their profits, and the old school publishers aren't happy about it. Of course not!
The book publishing industry is now following the same path that the music industry started following when iTunes disrupted their little racket back in 2001. The book industry has been ripe for change for years. It's nice to see it finally happening. Now if we could just see the same thing start happening to textbooks!
Re: (Score:2)
Editors have caused as much harm as help to trade-published authors, and, if you believe you need one, you can buy their services for a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. Only the big-selling authors get any kind of marketing and publicity beyond putting it in a catalog to send to book stores, so that's irrelevant to the majority of writers.
If publishers are really, actually, needed as middle-men between writers and readers, they'll continue to exist. If they're not, they'll vanish. So what's the
Re:When the shift hits the fan. (Score:5, Insightful)
Y'know, when Baen Books started selling e-books through Amazon, they had to -raise- the $6.99 prices of books sold through their own store - because Amazon would price-match their store, otherwise.
As a result of this, Baen increased author royalties on e-books by 25%, so more of the customer's money is going to the author.
So I'm guessing Amazon's $9.99 default price isn't hurting fiction authors much unless their publisher's an asshole.
(Though really, buying them through Amazon instead of direct from Baen is silly - Baen gives you your books in Kindle's .mobi, Nook/everyone else's epub, EBookwise, Microsoft .LIT, Sony Digital Reader, HTML, and as a .rtf file.)
You're right that the publisher and author should set the price of the ebook - they should set the WHOLESALE price, that Amazon - or whoever else - pays them for the book.
If Amazon wants to sell books below cost as a loss leader for Kindle sales, that's up to Amazon. The publisher should take their stated wholesale price and be happy with it.
That's actually how it USED to work before the 'agency pricing model' came in.
You know what else happened when the 'agency pricing model' came in?
Most of the indie e-bookstores closed.
Great job letting the publishers set prices, there. With publisher-set pricing, there was nothing else for the smaller stores left to compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple over.
The one I used had a 'book club' program, that offered discounts with multiple purchases. Suddenly, they couldn't do that any more.
And they only avoided going under entirely by getting bought out by B&N.
So, in short: Fuck the 'agency pricing' model. And fuck the publishers using it.
Set a wholesale price for the thing, sell it wholesale, put a 'suggested retail' price on it, and let the retail channel decide what to actually sell it for.
You know, like almost every other product on the market.
Re: (Score:2)
" If Amazon continues forcing authors to sell at low prices, you'll end up with a large quantity of books that are very short and with low quality of writing."
I doubt that. I have 130,000 high quality free^h^h^h^h books in my collection and none of them came from Amazon.
That's enough for several lifetimes.
Re: (Score:2)
their day is done, since they can't or won't compete with the Internet.
I suspect they can't unless their business model devolves into "sure, let me Amazon that for you", or start offering services that the digital retailers still aren't good at, like good advice or recommendations. The place where book stores have dropped the ball is their costumer service, and the one place where Amazon is still way behind. All Amazon can do is rely on generic algorithms to offer a "what others are also buying" kind of recommendation, and in no way a match for an actual human being's experien
Re: (Score:3)
I honestly don't see the link with your message and what you replied to.
The price of goods is decided what the market of buyers at large is willing to pay, not what every single buyer is willing to pay.