Best-seller price wars on the E front: Amazon Kindle store vs. Sony Connect, Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard

Synchronicity. YMail has been wonky today (too much turkey yesterday?), so you might not have gotten the email I sent around before you posted this. I did my own little search today for one of my fave authors, Christopher Fowler. His excellent Bryant & May mysteries are now e and both Kindle Store and Sony Connect have them are identical prices, except for the latest. The prices are low due to them bow being in paperback — and I even think the e prices are *lower* than the paperback ones! The one price difference, for the hardcover, is a $2.37 or so gap. I can wait for that price to drop when it goes paperback in print. And Victor Gischler’s excellent mysteries are identically priced at Connect and Kindle stores.

Point is, for what I read, the price of e has now dropped to where I should really get a Reader now. I never bought these books in print because I can no longer sustain their storage and moving. In one swoop, though, there are now *9* books I want to buy in e. That’s a *huge* change in things!

If other people start investigating like I have, they might come to the same conclusion. Hope so.

Hi David,

Thanks for revealing this untold story in the ebook world.

One note I have is, Fictionwise has implemented our new pricing not just on a hundred or so best sellers, but on every single DRM ebook released in the past 90 days. That’s over 1000 titles that have an effective price of $9.99 or less for Buywise club members, after rebates and discounts apply. Even for non-Buywise members, the prices are typically in the $10 to $13 range depending on what the list price is, after rebates.

Something that is a little misleading is, when Amazon first put kindle on their front page they strongly implied that hardcover best sellers would *always* be $9.99 or less. Arguments broke out in their own kindle groups about whether their phrasing really meant “always”, or was simply easy to misinterpret that way. A couple days later Amazon changed the wording a little and added “unless otherwise posted.” So they are already backtracking on the “always 9.99” language. Stay tuned.

As far as title counts, those can sometimes be deceiving. Fictionwise carries over 43,000 titles right now, and those are actually different titles, and all of them are from reputable publishers, not vanity publishers. We do not count each different format as a different title. We have found that many ebook retailers inflate their counts by, for example, counting the same title four times if they carry Mobi, LIT, ereader, and Adobe.

Amazon’s title counts are also a little misleading, but for a different reason. A very large number of their titles are things the average consumer would never read. For example, out of their 88,000 titles, over 7,000 are in the category “Sociology”. Which is great if you’re a sociologist, but most consumers won’t be reading those kinds of titles. That’s just one example. As far as mainstream reading material from non-vanity publishers go, my impression from combing through it for a while is that Amazon’s catalog is roughly the same as other major ebook retailers.

But overall, the kindle is great for the ebook world. It brings much-needed attention to our industry. and is already causing publishers to release more material in e-formats. I wish it were an open system, but that may come with time. I truly hope Amazon has a smashing success with Kindle, because that will encourage more devices to hit the market, and will bring many more people into the ebook world.

Take care,
Steve Pendergrast
Fictionwise

Hi,

Thank you for the coverage of the pricing and of BooksOnBoard.com. As you noted, we are matching and will match many of the $9.99 prices on a day to day basis – without rebates or paid club memberships. We want to keep customer accounting simple and give the individual max price benefit upfront, without requiring future purchases for the customer to get the benefit.

For a handful of titles meant to be at $9.99 (buit not there on our site), including two mentioned in the article above, we have also implemented a special ongoing promo code (999now) to bring Clive Cussler’s “The Chase,” David Baldacci’s “Stone Cold,” Valerie Plame Wilson’s “Fair Game,” Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s “Wheel of Darkness” down to $9.99. This is because our pricing system was designed to prevent pricing (except via promo code) below a certain calculated cost to us. We did not anticipate that Amazon, as the dominant player in the space, would risk anti-trust action with pricing below cost.

The BooksOnBoard.com promo code is 999now (case sensitive) and we invite your readers to use this for these specific titles. Meanwhile, our developers are working to change the price/costing mechanism to reflect below cost pricing when needed. Other $9.99 pricing questions your readers may have can be directed to support@booksonboard.com and our team will investigate to see if we can help further.

To add to Steve P’s comments: BooksOnBoard and his company offer a value to readers Amazon does not offer, in that readers can put their purchases from us on multiple devices and have several formats from which to choose. This allows them to select whatever device they want, including PDAs, Macs, PCs, phones, etc., and does not lock them into a single $400 device and vendor. Our product is also more likely to work on other new devices likely to come out in the year ahead, keeping customer options open. For example, it’s not likely the Amazon proprietary format will ever work on a Sony Reader, but Adobe DRM format might. An obsolete ebook device – and there is a history of them – will not recover a few dollars in savings for a customer at the end of the day.

One other note of interest: MacMillan pulled Rhett Butler’s People from our Mobipocket feed two weeks ago after we had already positioned it for promotion. They are making it available only through the Mobipocket.com store, Amazon and Sony. It is not available to the rest of us, nor are the rest of the MacMillan imprints. Other MacMillan titles include all of the Andrew Greeley titles, the St. Martin’s Press line, etc. No explanation has been provided by MacMillan. This kind of action by dominant players in the book space is troubling at many levels.

Thank you again for your coverage of this issue. We are delighted that Amazon has entered the fray again after its pullout last year. Hopefully, they won’t delete customer bookshelves en masse again (as they did last year) if their device fails to meet their high expectations. Hopefully, too, they will only work constructively with ebook customers going forward.

Best regards,

Bob LiVolsi
BooksOnBoard.com

Steve, I absolutely agree with your wishes for the Kindle’s success–given the lift-all-boats effect! Of course, I hope that the Kindle’s standards compliance will come sooner rather than later. Meanwhile happy holidays!

An aside to readers: Fictionwise not only has devoted much thought to the standards issue, it’s also been a leader in the use of non-DRMed titles. Steve undoubtedly would love to see many more books unshackled if the publishers allowed (keeping in mind that like me he is anti-piracy and just want to make life easier for legitimate owners).

I wish S&S, Random and the rest would check out stats from FW suggesting that DRM harms sales. Same for Jeff Bezos and friends. Ample reasons exist for me to call DRM a lit and sales toxin. The best DRM is none, but social DRM could be a wonderful compromise.

Thanks,
David

>>>Other MacMillan titles include all of the Andrew Greeley titles, the St. Martin’s Press line

WTF?! St. Martin’s Press publishes one of my favorite authors: Ken Bruen. It’s shocking enough that his two series from them aren’t all e. It’s also shocking that while amazon has several titles for the Kindle, Sony Connect only offers *one*. As a potential buyer of ebooks (now that the prices have reached sane levels for titles available in print paperback), I can see there is no one-store-fits-all-needs. I don’t mind having to shop around (especially to compare prices — attn Fictionwise, your prices are higher and I don’t like having to “join” things for lower prices), but I don’t like the idea of book publishers restricting titles to a few sellers. Restraint of trade, anybody?

Regarding DRM, we are making progress there. We recently convinced Harlequin to release several titles in their “mini” series (novelets of about 10 to 12 thousand words) without DRM. With the music industry starting to release unencrypted MP3s, and with Random House recently experimenting with unencrypted audio books, I think there was real progress in 2007 on that issue.

We have over 14,000 unencrypted titles available in mobi format that can be read right now on Kindle. We have nearly 8000 in LRF format that work on the Sony reader, with more being converted every week, soon we should have all 14k multiformat titles for Sony.

And could support for iphone be far behind at Fictionwise? Hmmm, stay tuned.

The Kindle news caught my attention naturally as I am a writer and yesterday I noticed a lot of my titles up at Amazon in that format. Hmm. Let’s see what that does for sales overall. I will be most curious to get numbers. I have print titles with them, but quite frankly sell most of my books at Fictionwise, Ebooks.com, Mobipocket, etc. in that order. This is an interesting trend and may say something about the popularity of e-books…and not just that but the wonderful aspects of not having a title yanked off the shelf in two weeks as with some print distribution. My older titles are selling better now than when they were first released and some of them are over two years old. Of course, there are a lot of factors that influence your audience, but I am talking a steady increase with four different e-publishers in which my last quarter sales showed a significant gain in numbers in all books.

All right, as an author, that means something. A book you published two years ago is selling more copies now than it did when it was released? Something is up.

Is this Fictionwise gaining popularity? I think a great part of it is, but I have noticed just an increase overall from the home sites of my publishers and distributors as well.

I have made PAN, the published authors network acceptance to RWA through e-book sales, and the changing of the rules this year shows they (RWA is the largest writer’s organization in the U.S. last I knew) no longer measure author success through the name of their publisher but how many books they sell.

Good for them.

This changing technology is an interesting journey.

All best,

Emma Wildes
#1 bestselling author at Fictionwise, past six months

Emma and Steve both: Glad to hear the happy tidings!

Emma, congrats on your continuing success.

Steve, you’ve been great on the DRM front. Nice going on the progress with Harlequin! If you’ve got a moment, why not write up some details on the sales of DRMed versus nonDRMed titles, and I’ll quote you in my PW blog. Same for any updates on your no-DRM-related efforts with large publishers. I remain baffled why Random House didn’t follow through after that experiment at FW some years back. What happened? Is it possible that the current people at Random would be more open-minded? And if they won’t try nonDRMed books, how about social DRM?

Finally, let us know if, like Bob LiVolsi, you’ve seen publishers withdraw certain Mobi feeds or any otherwise favor Amazon and Sony and the like.

As usual, I remain supportive of publishers and booksellers of all sizes and I want to make sure that the current excitement over the Kindle does not unfairly harm FW, BoB and other independents. Here’s to a diverse marketplace! In the PW blog, I’ll do what I can to encourage that.

Happy holidays,
David

Hi David,

I’ll compose my thoughts on the DRM stuff, can’t whip that off in a quick post here.

We were “de-authorized” by a couple of publishers from selling DRM mobi titles recently, but my understanding is that this was more of a clerical error in one case and part of a review of retailers in the other. One of them has already re-authorized us, and our expectation is the other should follow suit soon. I don’t think it has anything to do with Amazon.

Even if it did, my feeling is there is no anti-trust implication. Publishers can choose who is allowed to sell their books. Always have. The reason is simple: the publisher is in effect extending a line of credit to the retailer. The retailer can sell the ebook before being charged for it by the publisher, and that’s effectively a line of credit. Therefore, publishers are totally within their rights to pick and choose which retailers can sell their titles.

As far as I know there is no anti-trust implication from Amazon’s pricing policy either. Anti-trust laws allow for “loss leader” products that are sold below cost. Amazon selling a few dozen titles below cost would clearly fall under the loss leader provisions, in my opinion. Fictionwise sells ebooks below cost just about every week through our 100% rebates. It’s common practice in just about any kind of retail operation. And I think it’s great if it brings more people into reading ebooks.

-Steve P.

Steve, please take your time on the DRM commentary. If you want, email it to me with a big FROM STEVE P. in the subject line and I’ll run it in the main part of the blog. Many thanks! BTW, I really like the idea of Kindle-related things being settled without anti-trust lawyers, etc. Really appreciated your extra perspective on that. Bob L. feels the same way. But it sure won’t hurt to discuss Amazon’s impact on the indies!

Thanks,
David (feel free to call me at 703-370-6540 if I miss your DRM thoughts and don’t respond via email — usual busy email box thing)

Bob I read your comments but your company too has a real problem when it comes to customer support with your preferred hardware – the Cybook. If you don’t return it within 7 days UNOPENED then you can’t get a refund. So guess what – I opened it after a month and it was Dead On Arrival (not sure how I am expected to find out it was DOA without opening it – but I am sure your support team will get back to me on that). After a bunch of try this, do that with your support team they finally asked me to submit it for repair – they didn’t offer to replace it and weren’t willing to refund my money as I requested! So now I have to submit a device I never managed to use for repair! Given that level of customer service – do you really think you can take on Amazon????? Of course,Bookeen the manufacturer doesn’t believe this has anything to do with them since I didn’t purchase it from them….