Random House ‘caves’ on Kindle price policy?

Comments:

• Josep says:

  August 20, 2009 at 2:48 am

  About Stephen King issue. You see, I think those are the kind of things that happen when you force one company to give the prices you impose. If that book costs 23,10 how on earth are they going to give more than the half of it for free? Even assuming that there is not paper costs, there’s still all the other costs in. And 13,10 is a big cut isn’t it?

  So at the end, to have a blind boycott on EVERYTHING it doesn’t benefit the final user (because the publisher wants to avoid problems, and won’t release an ebook version). I think it should have been tought better.
• bowerbird says:

  August 20, 2009 at 4:26 am

  chris said:
  > many industry observers are worried that
  > Amazon might, at some point, force the publishers
  > to accept less money for their e-books in order to
  > continue selling them at the $9.99 price point and
  > make a profit—and perhaps threaten to
  > stop carrying those publishers’ books altogether
  > if they do not acquiesce.

  extremely poor logic, chris.

  amazon will not “force” publishers to do anything.
  and amazon surely won’t stop carrying any books!

  what amazon _will_ do is to stop eating the loss…

  so, using the stephen king book as our example,
  with a $35 hardcover list-price, amazon priced at
  $23.10 for the physical-book, the kindle version –
  let’s assume a 50% discount, to make the math easy
  – will come in at $17.50.

  this means amazon won’t make _any_ money on it,
  since that whole $17.50 will go to the publisher, but
  then again, amazon won’t lose anything on it either.

  of course, a kindle edition at that price will encounter
  extreme customer price-resistance, thus low sales…

  but whose fault is that?

  in other words, amazon will just pit the publishers
  against the customers (who are the real “deciders”,
  as amazon knows, and the publishers often forget.
  amazon is much more in touch with our budgets;
  they’ve studied our price-points quite thoroughly.)

  nor will the publisher do any better by refusing to
  issue a kindle edition, since that will only engender
  a customer backlash. (and it is good to remember
  kindle owners are heavy book-readers/purchasers,
  hardly the group that a publisher wants to piss off.)

  also, when you consider that kindle sales constitute
  35% of the total sales when combined with p-books,
  giving up that much money in the here-and-now is
  going to be a tough nut for publishers to swallow…
  (since they know sales deferred are often sales lost.)

  all of this, of course, is a _good_ thing, because
  publishers have been pricing their books too high
  for some time now, gouging their customers, and
  supporting their bloated corporate infrastructure,
  so this bezos intervention is doing them a big favor.
  whether they like it or not is a different matter, sure.

  the choice for publishers then will be quite clear:
  price your books so customers buy, or lose sales.
  which is the way that it should be…

  -bowerbird
• jess. says:

  August 20, 2009 at 11:51 am

  publishers should just die, roflmao!

  i’ll get an e-reader in future once the price goes down a little, much like cell phones in the past…
• Chris Meadows says:

  August 20, 2009 at 2:02 pm

  bowerbird, I think you’re quibbling over semantics. Whether Amazon “forces” them by insisting they take a lower cut of the retail price so they can keep selling the books at $9.99, or Amazon forces them by no longer selling the books at $9.99 and letting the consumers stop buying in droves, the publishers are still going to be forced to drop their price. And I’ve seen dozens of of places where publishers say that having to lower their prices even a little bit would be a catastrophe as they’re already running on a razor-thin margin.

  Now, granted, it is the publishers themselves saying that, so you could just accuse them of lying through their teeth. But on the other hand, it is true that we don’t know as much about the publishing business as they do. It’s one thing to call books overpriced because they cost more than you personally want to pay for them. But from an economic standpoint, they may not be overpriced at all in terms of the equilibrium price that will let the publisher stay afloat.

  I am reminded of the loud complaints coming out of the role-playing sector that “RPG books are overpriced” because they cost more than hardcover fiction books—ignoring the fact that the RPG market was so much smaller that fixed costs of each print run had to be split among many fewer units sold—thus driving the price up. But did gamers care? No, they just said, “These books are overpriced” because they cost more than they personally were willing to pay—and so they went off to download them from peer-to-peer.
• bowerbird says:

  August 20, 2009 at 2:44 pm

  books are priced “correctly” now — in terms of
  supporting the bloated corporate infrastructure.

  but who promised corporate publisher dinosaurs
  that their business model would go on forever?

  they decided to price themselves out of business,
  and they’re now facing the consequences of that.

  in competition with the scads of _free_content_
  on the web, corporate books are too expensive.

  and things will get worse for dinosaur publishers.

  new authors who self-publish are getting brash,
  and that’s bad enough. but mid-list authors are
  getting the message now too, and they cannot
  be swept aside with “amateur” innuendo so easily.
  they’ve already received a stamp of authenticity,
  and have fans, so they can’t be branded as hacks.

  moreover, as these self-published e-books flood
  the marketplace, they’ll soon create a _very_low_
  price-point — maybe a request for donations? –
  and the corporations will not be able to compete.

  so they will fold their tents, and quickly move on.
  because that’s exactly what the corporations do
  when the profits dry up. that’s how they operate.

  this will be _long_ before many people are willing
  to give up their paper-books. (indeed, it will be
  reminiscent of how computer manuals vanished.)

  but, given their inability to muster an audience of
  any size, publishers will rely on print-on-demand,
  and they’ll lose the economy-of-scale obtained by
  large print-runs, so p-books will double in cost…

  and then triple… and then quadruple…

  to the point that readers simply can’t afford them.

  so even if we could prop up corporate publishers
  in the short run — and why would we, anyway? –
  it would not stave off their long-term extinction…

  besides, the world will be better off with ‘em gone.

  authors will start giving away their books, as gifts,
  and fans will return the favor with monetary gifts,
  and this new gift-exchange culture will be able to
  overturn the greedy selfish capitalist mentality that
  poisons our planet and our interpersonal relations,
  and — if we avoid extinction ourselves as humans –
  we’ll be able to create a new, non-exploitive world…

  -bowerbird
• Felix Torres says:

  August 20, 2009 at 2:46 pm

  Yeah, we don’t know as much about the publishing business as the publishers.
  But to hear their constant whining and FUD about ebook pricing one would think they don’t know much to start with.

  Aren’t they the ones who for the last 50 years have been constantly raising prices because of “increasing print costs?”, “increasing gas and transport costs?”, “Increasing inventory costs?”. Aren’t they the ones cutting back on inhouse editing, proofing, and slush-pile reading (content acquisition, no less!) because*all* those print costs were eating them up alive in their fancy Manhattan, Toronto, and London glasshouses?
  And now that they have a way to deliver their product without any of those obnoxious added costs they’ve been bemoaning for decades it suddenly turns out that book pricing isn’t *really* dependent on those things at all?
  Riiighhhttt…!