Amazon Finally Bundles Ebooks With Printed Books 135
nk497 writes "Amazon is bundling ebooks with print copies for the first time, via its Kindle MatchBook programme, admitting that 'bundling print and digital has been one of the most requested features from customers.' The digital copies won't all be free — as with AutoRip, which offers free MP3s for selected CDs and records — but Amazon promises to charge no more than $3 per digital copy. The programme will apply to books bought as far back as Amazon's 1995 launch. So far, only 10,000 books are listed as being part of Kindle MatchBook, but Amazon hopes to add more, telling publishers it 'adds a new revenue stream.'"
Thanks to the competition (Score:3)
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Not actually answering your question, there are other places selling *unprotected* music. Does it absolutely have to be MP3? e.g. iTunes songs are AAC, but have no copy protection.
emusic sells mp3s, and amplified.com, and I think a lot of other places. (I got a ton of free music with the now-dead pepsilootstore app that simply gave you free credits on amplified.com.)
I can see how a PDF would be useful on a computer, but would it be useful on an e-reader? Not as much, I don't think so, e.g. no reflowing/
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When I can buy an ebook... (Score:1)
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I used to think that, but at some point I can't keep doing it. What the hell am I supposed to do with the books? I have an entire wall covered in them. Unless I want my house to look like a library something has to give.
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Unless I want my house to look like a library
Sounds like a dream-come-true to me. :p
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Go look at what shelves/bookcases cost and get back to me. I am already putting up shelf supports and wood planks as that is cheaper than real bookcases.
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$59.00 for a 6 shelf tall unit. IKEA is your friend.
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Now go find one the wife will tolerate, not some particle board thing.
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Go find a wife that is not a high maintaince money grubbing type. If she freaks out at those you need to ditch her as soon as you possibly can.
You will save a LOT more in the long run.
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I save a lot more by just hanging decent wood shelves on the wall.
She is not high maintenance, but she does recognize cheap shit when she sees it. Do your really want to have particle board furniture in your home? That shit is for dorm rooms.
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Until it gets a single scratch or starts to sag as it will with time. Buying good furniture once vs buying that stuff over and over is worth it.
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No it's not.
$60.00 shelf every 2 years versus $2500 "good stuff" Yes I know how much the overpriced anal rape "good stuff" costs, I used to have a trophy wife that though money = happiness.
You can buy shelves for the next 80 years for the price difference.
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Or you can get $100 worth of lumber and do it yourself. You could also get $500-$1000 worth of unfinished furniture and finish it.
There is also cost to removing everything from the shelf and placing it on the new one, that you must also construct.
Putting shelves up, by screwing brackets into the studs and putting up big wood planks is the cheapest reasonable answer I can find. Plus you can put them up in interesting ways and fit them into or around corners.
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$59.00 for a 6 shelf tall unit. IKEA is your friend.
Can that support books without bowing? I'm under the impression that IKEA sells meatballs and compressed sawdust, but that's just from hearsay, they don't have them around here.
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I am sure it can for a very short time.
The food is decent, the particle board furniture is good for what it is. They are meant to generally be decorative and not that durable.
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Our non-IKEA book shelves are made from compressed sawdust. They don't bow unless you try to fit three layers of books onto a shelf designed for one.
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If it's anything like the IKEA shelves I've seen, it can't support itself without bowing.
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Can that support books without bowing? I'm under the impression that IKEA sells meatballs and compressed sawdust, but that's just from hearsay, they don't have them around here.
IKEA sells cheap stuff for cheap money. They also sell excellent quality products for a lot more than the cheap rubbish.
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But have a very nice sauce made of paste and old sneakers.
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I don't mind my house looking like a library. But there's a non-trivial chance that if I kept buying physical books, I'd hit critical mass and my entire house would collapse into a black hole.
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But there's a non-trivial chance that if I kept buying physical books, I'd hit critical mass and my entire house would collapse into a black hole.
You'd be lucky to get off with a black hole.
It can get so much more dangerous [wikipedia.org]
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Have a banana.
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This is it in a nutshell (dammit, I hate agreeing with h4rr4r ). I have a bedroom converted to a library, and about 1000 physical books, and I regularly purge them when I move. If I could find a reader I actually like, I'd be happy to stick to ebooks and recorded books in the future.
For a DRMed ebook, I'll pay no more than a paperback, because both have a diminishing chance to still be readable as the years pass. But a DRM-free ebook? I'll happily pay hardback prices, because I literally have a ton of h
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I used to think that, but at some point I can't keep doing it. What the hell am I supposed to do with the books? I have an entire wall covered in them. Unless I want my house to look like a library something has to give.
Several years ago we bought my wife a Kindle for this very reason - our bookshelves were full, and we had resorted to stacking books on the floor in front of them! It's worked out quite well; and now my daughter and I both also own Kindles.
I still chafe at the DRM (which I strip, and save copies of the books to our main backup drive); but electronic books are very convenient. I'm now a believer.
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What the hell am I supposed to do with the books? I have an entire wall covered in them.
Donate them to the public library; donate them to organizations that provide books for the poor; sell them at a used book store, there are all sorts of solutions.
Textbooks! (Score:1)
Please do this with textbooks!
As a completist... (Score:2)
I would say I couldn't be happier about this, but I want this extended to audiobooks.
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Amazon today sells their Kindle+Audible bundle cheaper than the audiobook alone, though it's more than the per-audiobook price with an Audible subscription.
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though it's more than the per-audiobook price with an Audible subscription.
Depends. You can get a number of ebooks+audiobooks for less than the Audible subscription of $15. For instance, I just got David Brin's Existence for $8.54+$3.99 to tide me over until my next credit comes in. In the past, I bought The Man in the High Castle for $2 (Kindle Daily Deal) + 3.99, which was pretty cool.
O'Reilly's been doing this for years. (Score:2)
Only they do it with multiple ebook formats.
Viva la ebook? (Score:2)
I had no idea I would take to ebooks so vociferously. I checked my Amazon account recently and was astounded that I have over 200 titles in there that I've picked up (some free, many at the .99-1.99 range) over the years. I still buy dead trees (mostly programming references.. I have yet to embrace electronic documentation in full), but I did notice that Manning (?.. the ... In Action books) seems to include an ebook code in all of their print books.
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My Kindle lets you put books in categories. Or do you mean they should automatically give you a category view using the categories from the Amazon site? That's what I'd like to see.
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One thing I really wish they'd add to the kindle reader (they had it in the WebOS beta version, but that never left beta) is categories for books.
Check out calibre [calibre-ebook.com] for library management and sideloading of e-books. It can do categories, and export them to the Kindle.
SWEET!!! (Score:2)
This should keep me from scanning, OCRing and formatting books I bought off of Amazon just for the convienance of reading on an eReader. I was just so annoyed that print copies cost less than digital copies.
Re:SWEET!!! (Score:4, Funny)
My God... How much time did you waste just scanning books?
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He works for Google, it's part of his job.
(j/k)
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I use a combination of two different ones. The best OCR software seems to be http://www.paperfile.net/ [paperfile.net] which is free. So I usually scan into a PDF, run through that, OCR, output to RTF, and then clean up in word, then use Calibre to convert to epub.
A good proprietary piece of software is Wondershare PDF converter - http://www.wondershare.com/ [wondershare.com] It is actually really good for quicky conversions and keeps formatting, but I am not too thrilled with the OCR - I have some issues with spacing and with it convertin
Very nice (Score:1)
There's definitely some titles sitting in a box somewhere I'd love to have the ebook for now that I've moved most of my reading to it (outside the out of print stuff they haven't deemed worthy of ebookness yet).
I've been pretty pleased with the AudioRip stuff on amazon - in a few cases its actually been cheaper (with Prime) to get the CD instead of the digital album (or maybe $0.50 difference). True that it starts out in the "cloud player" but its been easy enough to file the resulting files off to my home
Big deal... (Score:1)
A lot of the Baen hardcovers come packaged with CDs that contain multiple ebooks. If you buy a hardcover copy of, say, Mission of Honor, of the long-running Honor Harrington series, the packaged CD contains the *entire* series in multiple formats.
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Those have went away, the new deal Baen has with Amazon killed them.
I wonder about gifts (Score:2)
Long after I started switching to eBooks, my wishlist still had print titles on it and I continued to receive them as gifts from friends and family that know I read a lot. I wonder if this will apply to those books that were purchased off my wishlist directly.
Of course they will only work on Kindle, since that's what Amazon sells. But that's easy enough to get around :)
TPB has been delivering this for years. (Score:2, Interesting)
I get all my Ebook versions of dead trees that Iown for free from TPB, and will continue to do so as I refuse to allow DRM on my books.
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Watch out, people, we've got a badass here. I'm sure you'd find some other excuse for pirating books even if they were DRM-free.
Nice attempt to claim the moral high ground when it's clear you don't have any morals.
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If I am being compared to your morals, then I am proud to have NO morals at all compared to you, utterly beaming proud.
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Your reply is content-free ignorant chest thumping, and deeply stupid besides.
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Hmm, it is a bit of a stretch to call "pirating" the act of downloading an electronic version of a book you own. I would more easily call "pirating" someone trying to get you to pay multiple times for different formats of the same content.
This new Amazon feature though definitely a good move. Especially if the $0-$1 charge are more common than the $2-$3 charge - we'll see about that I guess.
Retail bookstores (Score:1)
Hey Chapters/Indigo,
Retail bookstores need to do this. If they can get the pricing right, they might actually get my business back
Makes lending easier. (Score:1)
I really wanted to get one of my friends into the "Planetary" series of comic books. I made the decision to buy them all for the Kindle. I'm not about to lend out my Kindle. Now I can lend out the hardcopy for someone to check out.
Matchbook for books bought at indie bookstores (Score:1)
This could be useful. (Score:2)
Gifting (Score:2)
I wonder how they will deal with buying books for gifts. If I bought a physical copy of a book and gave it as a gift to someone else, would I get a free/cheap Kindle copy to keep for myself?
Finally, a blinding flash of the obvious. (Score:2)
After all, they know every book I bought off them over the years, and that I own a Kindle. It does not strike me as such a big insight to offer me, for a fee, my whole library in E-book form.
Done. (Score:2)
Done. I've already set up my books to give the eBook away for free when you buy the paperback.
So that means y'all should rush out and grab my paperbacks to get the free eBook, right? ;)
(P.S.: Just in case you're ready to take me up on that, http://amazon.com/author/thomasaknight [amazon.com] is where they're at.)
Kindle viewer on computers? (Score:2)
Do they exist on computers (Linux, Windows and Mac OS X?) for those who do not have Kindle hardwares?
No good for me (Score:2)
First I thought that it's nice, maybe they have some of the books I bought if the go back to the days of Amazon starting. Then I checked and I haven't bought any books since before 2006. I know that because the only entry in my order history the last years is from 2006, and it was some CDs.
All books I have bought have been using other email accounts, accounts I no longer have access to, or even remember. So no ebooks for me.
Here's a question (Score:2)
Re:So the value of an ebook is $3? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because you've paid for the base content already. That's like saying if a restaurant offers you a free dessert with the purchase of an entree, the dessert must be worth $0.
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But if a restaurant emails you a free photo of a dessert you just ate and paid for, then the photo must be worth $0.
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No, the analogy is correct. Physical printing and distribution is a tiny part of the cost of a mass marker paperback - 5%-10%, depending on volume.
All the significant costs for crating a book are fixed costs, not per-unit costs: the author's advance, copy-editing (which can get expensive for genre books - someone has to double-check usage of all those made-up words), page layout for printing and/or ebook formatting, marketing costs, and so on.
The cost of a book is your share of the one-time costs, not the
Re:So the value of an ebook is $3? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I've bought a hardcopy I've paid my share of fixed costs.
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There are additional fixed costs to prepare each format of a book: hardcopy, paperback, mass market paperback, ebook, etc. The $3 pricing model for each format after the first makes a lot of sense to me.
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Consider that the resale value of the physical book in mint condition is almost as much as its original cost, and the market of people who still want physical media is still pretty overwhelming, it probably costs a bit more than 10 cents just to make the pattern of purchasing the bundle, then immediately reselling the physical media only, unprofitable enough to guarantee that others will pay their share of the fixed costs.
Of course ultimately price isn't that directly tied to cost-to-produce, it's tied to m
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You've paid your share of the fixed costs of the PHYSICAL medium... Now it's time to pay your share of the fixed cost to GENERATE and HOST ebooks/pdfs.
Although the "master" copy of the book is most likely in digital form somewhere, you can't say with a straight face that it costs nothing to turn that into something available on amazon (or elsewhere). Time to convert it to the standard ebook/pdf, programming to provide service, hard drive space, electricity, ISP charges, etc... Its undoubtedly less, when considering mass "production", than $3/per but it's still Amazon's prerogative to make money.
(I say this knowing full well that I'll "pirate" PDF/ebooks for stuff I already "own" without guilt. I wouldn't consider paying $10-15+ for an ebook when I have the physical copy... I will consider up to $3, personally, just to know I'm not getting a bad copy - virus', bad scans, etc.)
(I wish this was an option for audio-books... I can't see myself paying $10 for a paper book and then $45 for the audio book, which is too common. I don't buy audio books for this reason, although I own the hard copies for most of my audio books)
Unless the general book market is a lot different than what I have seen working in more specialized areas, I doubt very seriously that you'll find a publisher willing to accept a manuscript submitted on typewritten pages. Unless maybe it was from Stephen King, where it would be worth it to pay a typist. And King isn't a Luddite anyway. He's been using computers longer than a lot of people.
There is a certain amount of work to be done in converting to ebook format, but not that much. The computer-ready manusc
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You've paid your share of the fixed costs of the PHYSICAL medium
That's what's usually called "marginal costs" [wikipedia.org], which is why it is by no means called "fixed costs" by anyone (well, by anyone who knows what he's talking about).
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Do tell! Do these things include marketing (which Amazon won't have to pay because it is selling these as an "upgrade" item to people who already own a different edition)?
You think publishers pay for marketing?
Oh, sure, they do, if you're Stephen King or JK Rowling[1]. For everyone else, maybe they'll send your book to a newspaper reviewer and ask them to review it, if they really think it's worth pushing.
[1] Except when you're JK Rowling publishing under a pseudonym, when you get as much marketing as any other unknown first time writer. That is, probably none.
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That's what's usually called "marginal costs" [wikipedia.org], which is why it is by no means called "fixed costs" by anyone (well, by anyone who knows what he's talking about).
"fixed costs" [wikipedia.org]
In economics, fixed costs are business expenses that are not dependent on the level of goods or services produced by the business.[1] They tend to be time-related, such as salaries or rents being paid per month, and are often referred to as overhead costs.
GP claimed there are additional fixed costs for production of the ebook. This is independent of marginal costs of an ebook which are essentially zero.
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You're already paying for the server's time, the restaurant overhead, and so on. Whether it's a $20 dinner with free desert, a $20 desert with free dinner, or somewhere in between is just marketing.
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But the marketing can be useful. A real world example I'll use is for fountain drinks at a sit down restaurant (at takeout places, I rarely get a drink, unless it's part of a free combo promo). If the meal is $15 and the drink is $2, I'll be much less likely to get the drink than if the meal is $16 and the drink is $1. Since people are there to get food, it actually makes more sense to charge more for the food, and less for the drinks. But places don't seem to do that. $2-3 for a soda that costs a coup
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So you expect Amazon to sell you the ebook at wholesale? Why would you expect that from a retailer?
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The flawed physical analogy is that electronic "goods" cost nothing to duplicate. If I have paid for the hardcover and they want $3 for the ebook, fuck 'em, I'll go to TPB for the ecopy because I already paid for the damned content when I bought the hardcover.
I'm really sick of the greed these days. Charging extra for an e version when I've paid for it already is just plain wrong. Those people must have no shame or morals at all.
And they have the gall to call pirates "thieves".
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You seem to think that creating an ebook version of a book is free. It's not. There may be no variable costs in creating more copies of an ebook (actually, there are, but they are so vanishingly small that they may as well be zero), but the fixed cost still exists. It's not surprising that the publishers want to recoup this cost and turn a profit; they aren't running a charity.
I'm not sure why so many /.ers don't seem to get this. Doubly so for people who think that all ebooks should cost only $1. But you k
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But you know what the beauty is? If you think something isn't worth the price, you don't buy it. If enough people agree with you that it's overpriced, the price will go down.
And if even more people agree with you, you can modify copyright laws, impose price controls, and generally regulate the market. If authors think they're getting a raw deal, they can always wait tables. Of course it's unlikely authors will take their ball and go home; relatively few independent authors make a living solely from writing now -- lots of them have day jobs or rely on outside support. The money's nice to get, no question, but for many authors it is not the only reason to write and often not the
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The "variable costs in creating more copies of" a physical book are vanishingly small as well, something else /.ers don't seem to get. There's very little difference. There are some additional costs to prepare both a physical book and an ebook for printing, and many shared costs.
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I'm really sick of the greed these days. Charging extra for an e version when I've paid for it already is just plain wrong.
If you have already paid for the e-version then yes, charging extra is wrong. If you haven't paid for the e-version, then you haven't paid your share of the additional typesetting and formatting costs and so charging extra is absolutely correct.
Now, my moral compass is such that when I got my Kindle, I downloaded all my paper books from sites like Mobilism and TPB because I have already paid for the content (I do pay for ebooks that I have not yet purchased offline or online). But it doesn't negate the poin
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You're paying twice for the same content, just in a different format. That's the difference between a physical book and an ebook.
I don't know that you can use a food analogy here since the content isn't consumed once.
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I know RTFA is frowned upon, but even from RTFS and a bit of reading comprehension you will realise that it goes something like: book = full dead tree price, eBook = full digital price, book + eBook = full dead tree price + $3.
captcha: smolders
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And their customers have stated that an eBook, without a dead tree version, should sell for whatever they're willing to pay. Who are Amazon to argue with their customers over this matter?
So now you know why I practically never ever pay for an ebook. Aside from the well-discussed problems of DRM (thanks again, ignoble*.py), I view the prices of e-books as drastically out of line with cost. No diff from the insane premium music CDs commanded over vinyl. So until ebook prices drop to maybe $5 or so, fuggedabadit.
Heck, in all honesty, I'd probably drift over to a NetFlix-style rental system if such existed. Pay, say $1 or so to rent a book for a month or so. That's more or less equivalent,
Re:So the value of an ebook is $3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck, in all honesty, I'd probably drift over to a NetFlix-style rental system if such existed. Pay, say $1 or so to rent a book for a month or so.
Wow, you kids are sure willing to part with your hard-earned cash for shit that used to be free. TV shows, bottled water, books... you can "rent" a book from the public library for free. If I'd had to pay for all the books I've read in my life it would take more money than I've ever earned.
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I understand -- and I rented a zillion library books in my youth as well. Now that I'm old and rich ( :-) ) I can enjoy the luxury of paying a buck or two to 'rent' a book without having to leave my comfy chair & wolpies.
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you can "rent" a book from the public library for free
I can't rent a *current* tech book from my public library, but if I could, the round-trip gas cost for a two-week rental is about $2.
If somebody were willing to rent me the current book online for a month for 99 cents, I'd be a fool to not take the offer.
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What insane premium? I got the vast vast vast majority of my CDs (of somewhere around 300, as my 300 CD changer was close to full and I've still bought more since stopping using that long ago) through CD clubs, and averaged under $6/CD even including the inflated "shipping" charges. (Just wait a couple of months for the frequent buy 1 get 2 free, or better, deals and buy a couple then.)
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Authors get rather little relative to what the publisher gets.
And your first question is invalid. Ebooks have no marginal cost and microscopically small cost of delivery, and AFAIK no inventory value (see FIFO vs. LIFO tax codes), and seeing as print books are generated from an electronic copy to begin with, they've got nearly no fixed cost either (assuming the publisher continues to produce hardcopies).
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It's obvious to everyone that ebooks don't cost $8 to $15 to produce and distribute. Publishers have always said that they set ebook prices higher to prop up dead tree sales.
This makes some sense as hardcover sales are still very important for things like the New York Times' Bestsellers lists.
I think they also
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no.. they've stated that people will pay three bucks for text of a book you bought alredy while they will give you digital copy of an audio file ripped from a cd for free.
book publishers are ripoff artists, that's their message.
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I think you have things backwards. They aren't going to start only selling ebooks with paper books. They are going to give the ebooks additionally for a small fee. If you want you still can just buy the ebook alone.
And Amazon is not a publisher - it's just a retailer.
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Yes, because I want to buy a 1 pound paper wrapper for my ebook. By the time the publishing industry figures out how to adapt to technology it will be too late.
Surely the logical fallacy of, "I'm a consumer, and thus every consumer on the planet is just like me, and thus if I have no need for a product or service than no such need exists" is already named?
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Or less generally, generalizing from a sample of "me".
But people are egoists, whether they realize it or not. "Of course, my opinion matters more. I'm normal. Anyone who disagrees with me is probably too dumb to matter."
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An article (possibly even TFA, but I wouldn't know) I read earlier said that it will only apply to purchases of new books, not used. Probably only those fulfilled by Amazon, too.