Amazon: Publishers Strong-Armed Us On E-Books 171
Nerval's Lobster writes "Strengthened by an agreement with Apple that set the prices for their respective e-books higher, publishers strong-armed Amazon into giving them similar terms, an executive for the online retailer has testified in Manhattan federal court. The U.S. Department of Justice has taken Apple to court over the alleged price-fixing, after reaching out-of-court settlements with five publishers (HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, and MacMillian). Apple, which competes with Amazon in the e-book space, refused a similar settlement. "Certainly if someone offered reseller, we would have taken them up on that offer," Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's vice president for Kindle content, testified before the court, according to Reuters. "Reseller" means a company sells goods to a retailer for a particular price (usually wholesale), allowing the retailer to set the actual sales price. Under the terms of that model, Amazon could sell e-books for super-cheap, even if it meant going beneath the publisher's wholesale price. Macmillan and Amazon ended up in conflict over the issue, with Amazon temporarily yanking the publisher's e-books from its digital shelves. "We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books," Amazon wrote in a statement at the time. "Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book." But Amazon eventually relented to Macmillan's demands, along with those of other publishers, and submitted to the agency model, in which publishers have a heavier hand in setting retail pricing."
Here, have a real article (Score:5, Informative)
The link in the summary is /. masturbation, so here's the Reuters article [reuters.com] that it links to, no extra ad impressions needed. (wtf is "Slashdot Cloud"?)
Re:And this is why I do not do "E-Books" (Score:4, Informative)
Cracking the DRM and converting between epub and mobi is trivial. PDFs suck on e-readers, and tablets suck for reading.
Not to defend Apple, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Amazon's model isn't much better. They make their money by setting the price for a best-seller high, and everything else ridiculously low. And this seems reasonable to a "supply and demand" society, but there's an endless supply of ebooks. More over, that means that authors aren't going to make enough money to keep writing unless they happen to have a best-seller - and the market ends up flooded with garbage like Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. It's a CostCo mentality. The consumer doesn't know any better, and hey, they're getting most of their books for 99 cents! Seems great from their perspective. But that model kills publishing in general. Anyone who thinks the only cost to publishing a book is the time it takes to write it, has never published a book. Even for a bare-bones self-published ebook, you need at the very least an editor. For anything serious, or that crosses over into the print world, then you need a cover artist, a designer, marketing, and probably someone who knows how to bring it all together... they call those people publishers.
Have you seen the absolute garbage that gets "self published" on Amazon? The ability to put a book out there on Amazon's site *for free*, is perhaps the biggest danger to the publishing industry ever. There are thousands upon thousands of "books" that are nothing more than $.99 scams. Some are literally garbage text or word for word rip off's of someone else's work with a new title. They might only get a few suckers, but they do this *thousands* of times over.
Re:What is wrong with these folks? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, that's a lot, right!? Weeeeelllll...... not so much after you deduct author's living expenses while writing the book, the salaries of editors, typesetters, and other people involved in the production of that final .epub file, and less still after you calculate the distributor's cut - Amazon, Apple, B&N, and others don't sell that book for free.
Uh, what? A writer whose e-book sells 50,000 copies at $9 with a typical trade publishing deal makes about $68,000 after giving $12,000 to their agent. Amazon makes about $135,000. That leaves $235,000 to the publisher.
Do you really, seriously believe that editing a book, formatting it as an .epub and sticking a cover on costs $235,000?
Oh, apparently you do.
Re:What is wrong with these folks? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it works. Most people buy into it. Why should I pay $20+ for a BluRay? Oh, because it comes with the DVD and a Media file. But I don't want the DVD and Media file!!!! Too bad. You can't buy it any other way (than used.) So consumers buy anyway. And the sellers sit back rub their hands together with a MUAHAHAHA!
My parents don't have a BluRay player. My mom went to buy some DVD, and had to ask the store if they had it just as a DVD (instead of the combo pack) and the teenage store worker said that they did have just the DVD, but the combo pack is a better deal. My mom asked if the combo pack was cheaper than just the DVD, and they said 'No', but still insisted that it didn't make sense for my mom to buy the DVD because the combo pack was a better deal. My mom couldn't convince the teenager that a combo pack isn't a better deal if you can't use the other disks. So now she kind of holds it as a badge of honor that she's able to confuse the store clerks by getting just the DVD.
Re:What is wrong with these folks? (Score:2, Informative)
Simplistic. You forgot to mention the other 1000 books they were sent that had to be looked at and rejected, that did not come for free, the publisher paid staff to do that. You then for got about the other 100 books that were accepted but went through a lot of editing back and forth until it was publishable, which then left probably 99 of those books selling a few hundred copies. There would be checks made before publication for plagiarism etc. Did you notice how there was a hell of a lot of expenses going on all of the time from people who made them no money.
Meanwhile the publisher still had to pay their staff to handle EVERYTHING that came in, not just for the 1 writer who made them a lot of money.
Re:What is wrong with these folks? (Score:5, Informative)
VHS movies used to cost alot when new also, way back when.
Indeed they did. In fact, it was this high cost that spawned the rental market for movies in the first place. At that time, most people weren't going to watch a film enough times to justify paying more than $20, and VHS tapes had no "extras", so it made sense to rent the film for 1 to 5 dollars instead (early 1980s dollars). As a teenager I worked in a video rental store and I can remember the store owner telling me that he paid $100+ for each of those tapes. One of the first VHS releases to break this trend was Top Gun which was priced at around $20-$30 when it was released. At the time that was an incredible bargain since most other films cost well over $50.00 if they could even be found offered for retail sale (remember that this was the early to mid 1980s so there were no downloads or even digital copies of films).