Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle 280
angry tapir writes "One of the oldest customs of book lovers and libraries — lending out favorite titles to friends and patrons — is finally getting recognized in the electronic age, at least in one electronic book reader: Amazon has announced that it plans to allow users of its Kindle book reader to 'lend' electronic books to other Kindle users, based on the publisher's discretion. A book can be lent only for up to 14 days. A single book can only be lent once, and the lender cannot read the book while it is loaned out." Kindle may be the best-known e-reader, but the similarly featured Barnes & Noble Nook has had this ability (complete with 14-day timeout) for several months, if not from its introduction.
Not exactly the first... (Score:2, Informative)
Barnes and Noble's Nook e-reader has been able to do this since it was released last year.
Re:Still not good enough. (Score:5, Informative)
This would be reasonable if the digital versions cost less than the paper. This is often not the case. [amazon.com] (Dammit Slashdot, fix your comment system, I had to type the entire URL because for some reason I'm not allowed to paste...)
Let's look at a $7.99 paperback: (like this one [amazon.com]) :$2.40
Components making up the selling of this book are:
Retail Markup: (30-45% for B&N) (We'll go with 30 for simplicity)
Wholesale Markup: 10%: $0.79
Author Royalties: 8-15% (Lets be generous, publishers rarely are): $1.20 (I normally hear around $0.70 per paperback, but we're being generous)
Printing: 10%: $0.79
Pre-production (editing etc): 10-15%: $1.20
Other (Marketing, lunches, power ties...): The rest.: $1.60
With an Ebook, you can cut out the wholesaler and the printing cost. Marketing is probably a lot cheaper too, since it's taken care of for you by the digital seller (amazon, itunes). No big cardboard cutouts, no phoning stores asking them to stock the book etc. Pre-production is slightly cheaper, since you don't have to worry nearly as much about absolutely perfect layout, since the ebook formats don't support it anyway. (As far as I've noticed, they don't even bother proofreading the ebook versions...)
We've cut out at least $1.50 from the costs, and probably closer to $2-3.
Unfortunately, if we just reduced the selling price by that much, the author would get screwed (they get a percentage), so authors need to think about that when negotiating. I would say reasonable royalties on ebooks are 25%. So for the author to get the same $1.20, the selling price of the ebook should be around $4.80. With the agency model, that would be $1.44 for the retailer, $1.20 for the author, and $2.16 for the publisher, which would easily take care of their associated costs.
Of course, that's not what happens. As we see, the books sell for about the same (maybe $1 less), and the publisher skims twice their normal share.
Baen, the only enlightened ebook publisher, has a guideline that they sell their e-books for around 75% of the lowest cost paper edition, capped at about $6. It's done very well for them, but it's going to take years for the dinosaurs in the rest of the publishing business to die out and be replaced by people that actually know what's going on.
Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... (Score:3, Informative)
11. They take up a lot of space if you want more than two or three.
Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... (Score:4, Informative)
As a european user, War and Peace for the Kindle is listed at $3.44, $10.45 and $13.79. No, I have no idea what the difference between those 3 versions is. Yes, we're forced to pay in $'s, yes, we're forced to use .com (apparently .co.uk isn't part of Europe or something), and, yes, we probably have different content and pricing to what stateside users see.
Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... (Score:4, Informative)
the logic behind DRM is, frankly, sound.
No, it's not. I'll quote Doctorow: [craphound.com]