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Boy do I disagree with this! Mike Shatzkin gets it 100% wrong about the agency model!
June 3, 2010 | 10:58 am
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By Paul Biba
Mike Shatzkin publishes a blog that is always worth reading – The Shatzkin Files. One of his latest articles is Agency seems (to me) to be working; I hope its legal.
In that article Mike talks about the beginning of the use of the agency model and how publishers love it so far. In that article he talks about how the Texas AG is investigating the model (we think) and says:
It would make many publishers very unhappy if the Agency model were deemed illegal. One major house CEO I spoke with two weeks ago was positively rhapsodic about the control the new paradigm gives the publisher. That CEO told me about one major bestseller at their publishing house which suffered no loss of unit sales when the price went up from the Amazon-set $9.99 to the Agency price of $12.99. Struck by that, the CEO further raised the price of that title to $14.99 and saw immediate sales erosion. So, two weeks later, the CEO took the price back down to $12.99 for that title, where it sits.
As this person said, “I can’t ever see going back. I have never had this ability to maximize revenue before or to experiment with pricing.”
He then goes on to say the following. When I read it my jaw dropped open:
I’m personally persuaded that universal set prices for ebooks are good for the industry and, ultimately, for consumers. They will definitely foster competition among retailers. My belief for a long time has been that the day will come when almost all web sites will offer their own curated selection of ebooks. (Why shouldn’t ESPN.com be selling the new Willie Mays or Steinbrenner biography?) That will work great in a price-set world. It would make the retailing opportunity about “location, location, location”, rather than “price.” It would boost sales for publishers and authors by putting ebooks a click away from interested consumers across the Web. But it isn’t going to happen if web sites figure that their curation efforts will just be triggers to send people to a deep-pocketed etailer that is pricing for market share.
It would appear that the Agency model is good for just about everybody except the etailers that would use price to drive others out of the market. But will it ultimately be ruled legal? I don’t think we know yet.
Foster “competition among retailers”? The point of the agency model is just the opposite. Fixe prices and avoid competition – both for ebooks and pbooks. With agency a free and open marketplace can’t exist.
Mike simply doesn’t understand the consumer. Agency is not “good for just about everybody”, agency sucks, big time, for the consumer. All you have to do is read TeleRead, and some other blogs, and you will see that the consumer feels that agency is simply a ploy to raise prices and take more money out of the consumers’ pockets. Screw the consumer, kill price competition – we publishers will do everything we can to see that the consumer has to pay what we want, no matter how outrageous.
As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court had long held that his was exactly what price maintenance was doing, and it is only recently that they overturned the long standing rule that price maintenance was a per se violation of the antitrust laws. The big publishers have never sold to the consumers, only to the book buyers from the book chains, so they have no idea what a consumer is, or what a consumer thinks. The cry is going out all over the web that the consumer is being screwed and the publishers have no clue. Mike doesn’t understand that the consumer is mainly interested in price, not “location, location, location”, as he says above. He’s got it completely reversed.
The publishers are setting up a world without any competition – which only a healthy retail market can provide – and I think it’s very sad that our legal system currently allows this. However, since all the publishers agreed to the same model, at the same time, I think, as a lawyer, that a case could be made to prosecute them for a conspiracy to restrain trade or fix prices. Now THAT would be good for the consumer. I could go on and on, but enough said for now.
Mike and I will be on the same panel at the CEA Line Show on June 23 – that could get interesting!
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Comments:
Well, it won’t surprise you that I don’t agree with you when you disagree with me!
The first problem with your position is that there is no evidence to support it. Retailer-set pricing delivered us an Amazon monopoly on ebooks. Agency pricing, which raised prices AND created disruption in the supply chain taking books off sale at various locations temporarily, has not dented sales overall (April was a land office month for ebook sales) and is already creating serious competition to Amazon (some books outsell AMZN on iPad already!)
And the idea that consistent prices mean “no competition” is hogwash. First of all, lots of publishers (particularly aspiring ones) will set prices low precisely to attract the readers more interested in price than exactly what they read.
If you’re looking for a PC way to support my position: consider this. If retailers can drive the price of branded books down (as they did), they don’t leave room for aspiring authors to price below them and attract some sales. With Agency, we will see a bifurcated market: branded books will cost more, books by authors or from publishers you never heard of will cost less. If retailers set prices, then we’ll be seeing big authors selling for 99 cents as promotions.
And, by the way, we’ll kill brick-and-mortar faster. Are you willing to take responsibility for the degree to which your position fosters THAT?
At least when I read yours, my jaw didn’t drop. The veteran digerati are predictable.
Mike, ebook sales are up — no question about that; but whose ebook sales are up? Is it Random House’s, who didn’t sign on to the agency tactic, or is it the sales of the Agency 5? Or is the rise in sales a result of sales being made by low-priced vendors like Smashwords?
So what if we see Stephen King novels selling for 99 cents. That may reflect what the market thinks his books are worth. Isn’t that the idea of the free market?
What the agency pricing is really doing is fragmenting the market and encouraging B&N and Amazon and Google, among others, to enter publishing to compete with the big 6 by signing exclusive deals. Do you not think that Amazon has the resources to sign James Patterson and Stephen King, for example, to exclusive book deals? And wouldn’t they rather have Amazon’s marketing power behind them than that of Hachette or Simon & Schuster? Do you really think they care if Amazon pays them $10 million and sells their books for 99 cents? How likely are they to prefer earning $5 million from HarperCollins and have their books sell for $14.99? I find altruism among the top tier (earning wise) authors to be a far-fetched concept.
The iPad is too new a device to know how successful it will be in the reading market. I am not surprised that right now a few books sell better at the iTunes store than at Amazon, but no trend is discernible from the initial sales. The real test will be in 1 year.
One other thing to think about. The agency model you think is so great isn’t really an agency model. It is an Apple-dictated pricing scheme. A true agency model would let publishers set their prices as high or as low as they want — regardless of whether or not the product would sell at the designated price. But Apple set the prices that publishers could charge based on the print list price. So here’s the question: When Jobs decides that he can make more money off of books if they sold for $5 less and unilaterally changes the pricing schedule (which he could do by threatening to block access to the iPad for noncooperative publishers), how will that be any better than when Amazon decided $9.99 was the magic price? (What will happen when Jobs decides that the next Philip Roth novel is obscene and can’t be sold at any price in his bookstore?)
Bottom line is that neither Amazon nor Apple are publishers’ friends and Jobs sucker-punched publishers with the pseudo-agency model. I expect current pricing levels to last about as long as Jobs let pricing last with music downloads — until he reads his first book and decides that reading can be fun and profitable.
If this agency model is so great, then why are publishers not doing it for physical books? I only read ebooks now, but would buy popcorn and a front row seat to THAT trainwreck!
I think everyone above is missing the point that the ENTIRE point of the agency model was a hit at Amazon specifically and ebooks in general.
I don’t think that publishers get the (consumer) point that a book that a)can’t be passed on or resold, b)may become obsolete as tech changes or c)is in essence just a license to view–holds the same value as a physical book where none of the above apply. You can remove DRM (the other bugaboo) from the equation altogether while making that point.
Amazon understands the book customer, thus, in most cases priced accordingly. I don’t get how publishers hate Amazon for becoming a so-called monopoly because they gave consumers what they wanted, if their model wasn’t good, they would not have become a leader in ebook sales. Does everyone forget that the Sony Reader came BEFORE the Kindle?
Frankly, as I look around to my ebook friends, the only thing that agency pricing has done for them is to make them more savvy on where to get the ‘free’ (read pirated) ebooks.
To me, the agency 5 have become the Pirated 5. I buy between 300 and 350 ebooks a year. I keep authors and publishers in business. However, the agency 5 pricing has totally ruined my purchasing habits. I no longer buy any books from them. Not only are their prices too high, but they have destroyed the rewards program I (used) to have to buy books. So, I now buy books from non-agency 5 publishers and simply pirate the agency 5 books for free. You screwed me over, so now I am screwing you over.
“And, by the way, we’ll kill brick-and-mortar faster. Are you willing to take responsibility for the degree to which your position fosters THAT?”
If we were taking that position, a portion of the price you pay for your car would still be going to subsidize the horse and carriage people who will now be out of work.
Bricks and mortar stores may have to diversify a little. I have written at length for this blog on ways they might do that and continue to serve their core market.
Mike Shatzkin says:
(some books outsell AMZN on iPad already!)
Without a doubt, if you refer to things like Ariana Franklin’s A Murderous Procession which is priced at $12.99 in the iBook store and $17.99 on Amazon.
Pretty impressive that the iPad book is outselling the other one. Must be a vote for the Agency model, nothing to do with the unfair price difference which was set by the publisher. I bought neither and checked it out of the library.
Lets see, now: *one* major besteseller (read: “currently hot” book) didn’t experience sales erosion from $9.99 to $12.99 but it did at $14.99, so obviously $12.99 is *the* perfect price for *all* books. One data point to set policy for an entire industry! Man, I’d like for that CEO to come forward publicly if he so strongly believes in his righteous policy. Let’s see what his stockholders think.
Fact is, one data point is meaningless. In an industry with over half a million active titles and hundreds of “bestsellers” you can find anectodal evidence for pretty much anything if you pick the right point in time.
Second, he’s cherry-picking data by focusing on the best seller. Howzabout finding a mid-list author or back catalog title that *isn’t* sensitive to a 20% price hike. Or come back in six months to see how that “bestseller” is doing then, when its *not* hot. Bestsellers tend to have short sales lives (that’s how they end up in outlet stores and discount tables); lets see how long that bestseller remains a best seller at the higher prices. Instead of remaining a top-seller for six months he just might have strangled it into a three month sales life. 20% higher per-unit profit traded in exchange for 40% less unit sales? That’s a fair deal? Tell that to the author. Or the stockholders.
Right now the PriceFixFive are seeing modest gains and accrueing all of them to the higher unit prices.
But that is at a time that ebook sales as a whole are exploding. The proverbial rising tide lifting even the leaky ships. But wait a while. Lets see what happens as the ebook market stabilizes and the numbers come in on catalog-wide *market share*. Let’s see how things look after Amazon Encore or B&N’s publishing arm start racking up a few bestsellers.
I can probably write next year’s SEC filing:
“Per unit profits increased slightly but we saw a noticeable decline in market share as the overall market is being flooded by new competitors, who persist in unsustainable discounting practices, especially in the growing ebook sector. We expect print book sales to be flat or decline slightly over the next year and to see steeper volume declines in the out years. Sales revenue is becoming dominated by short life-cycle bestsellers that accrue the bulk of their funding in the first month of sales. Overall margins are under pressure by the failure of mid-list content to move as fast as expected and we may need to trim the content acquisition budget and reduce the active print catalog to contain fixed costs. Legal costs pertaining to the 15 State AG inquiries and the three class action lawsuits from our authors are expected to mount but should not seriously impact our lines of credit. In addition, the search for a new CEO continues apace and we should have a new one in place within 6 weeks.”
It may very well turn out, in the long haul, that Agency Pricing is very good for consumers and very bad for the price fixers, just by teaching the BPHs that we live in a buyers market and free market economics actually works; that price elasticity is real and that you *can* make a small fortune out of a big one, just by raising prices. It just takes a bit of time.
What they are doing is milking the unwary for all they’re worth *now* and creating a pricing umbrella under which competitors will flourish and establish themselves at the expense of the PriceFixFive. They are in effect providing a free incubation period during which their would-be competitors can grow their catalogs, experiment with new business models, and establish their brands and market presence with no significant competition from the Oligarchs of publishing.
By the time the numbers are in and the current CEOs realize what they’ve “achieved” the die will be cast and it will be up to future CEOs to try to salvage something of the wreck the current economic illiterates are making of their Empires.
Felix, as always, you have a thoughtful and insightful analysis of this mess. Thanks for writing.
Paul, you seem to be confusing what some of the more vocal consumers think with what’s actually happening. There’s ample reason to believe that the major publishers are adopting agency pricing at least in part to prevent Amazon from successfully using the trick that railroad robber barons used in the late nineteenth century to take over and control a market.
Imagine a town with a modest, locally owned railroad connecting it to the rail network of a city not far away. Then a large rail baron builds his own rail line paralleling the local one and, because he can finance it from profits elsewhere, he is able to substantially undercut the price of the local rail company. Does that sound like what Amazon was doing when it bought ebooks at $14.95 wholesale and sold them for $9.95 retail? It should. It’s the same trick. No doubt, the rail baron had some local consumers singing his praises and talking about just how greedy the local railroad was. Again, just like Amazon
Aha! But there is a catch. Unable to attract customers at its higher prices, the local railroad goes out of business. There is now only one rail line to the town. What happens then? Precisely what you’d expect. Now owning the market, the rail baron is able to dictate prices and conditions. If you want to travel or ship goods from that little town, you do so on his terms.
My hunch is that we’ll need the major publishers to maintain agency pricing for top-selling books until consumers establish buying patterns that aren’t dominated by any one source. Remember, to have a competitive market, you must first have a market. You can talk until the cows come home about publishers destroying competition, but there’s simply no way half-a-dozen publishers can dominate a market like one Amazon can.
I don’t think the railroad example is a valid one. I don’t think Amazon will ever be the only ebook seller in town. For one thing all the different formats insure that other ebook sellers will still have customers. There are a lot of Sony and Nook owners (just to name a few) who can’t buy from Amazon due to DRM issues. Not to mention all the free books and independent publishers. Furthermore even if there was no DRM and just one format, once Amazon raised the prices, sales would decline causing them to lower prices again, and/or another company would jump in with lower prices.
Having been an author’s agent I am fascinated by the above exchange but rather depressed that the emphasis only seems to be on finding a model where the consumer can pay very little and the distributor can make shed-loads and the publisher only wants to maximise his profit and no-one seems to be factoring in how the creator of the words you are reading should be paid. If publishers have to sell to Amazon at a below cost price they don’t take they do not take the hit; the author does. Just think about it Paul before complaining about the good val of $12.99 for something you want to read for what is probably more than a year’s work by someone who might just have written an interesting and good book, not a bestseller.
The BPHs and their apologists seem to think that Amazon is their enemy and seem determined to destroy it at all costs. Now, aside from the fact that they can’t (Amazon isn’t just, or even primarily, about books anymore) there is the fact that their great anti-Amazon hope (end discounting and price-based competition on *their* precious books) is neglecting the real threat; the horde of viable alternatives to the Oligarchs which will be only to happy to see price-based competition, both at the retailer level (Amazon vs B&N vs Apple vs whoever) and the *book* level (one book vs another).
The Oligarch seem to think *their* books are the only ones worth buying and that somebody interested in one of their books today will eventually buy it, no matter what they do.
Both are demonstrably false; just because somebody is interested in a book today doesn’t mean they’ll be interested in it tomorrow so windowing will *not* increase or even sustain sales. If the price is unacceptable today, consumers will simply move to another book; we live in a market of abundance not a market of scarcity.
And, as to the idea that only Oligarch-approved books are worth buying; well, reality shows that the public *is* increasingly buying other publishers’ content. The Oligarch’s combined market share is hardly dominant. And yes, one of the reasons why their market share is withering is Amazon; their infinite shelf space and crowd-sourced marketting (which is what the reviews and automatic recommedations add up to) allow books to compete based on their intrinsic value not their publishing source. Only problem is, Amazon is not the only retailer doing this; so are all the others. B&N, Apple, Borders, BooksBoard, etc; everybody doing ebooks has infinite shelf space and everybody offers up customer-based reviews and profile-matchig recommendations. And everybody is tapping into the disintermediation wave to set up their own house brands.
Amazon simply does it best.
In holding up the threat of a hypothetical Amazon monopoly, the BPHs merely reveal their own disconnect from reality; Amazon doesn’t control the modern retail market, they merely *conform* to it. What they are doing is merely what is necessary for a retailer to survive and not get dragged down by the BPHs bad decision-making.
One more time: it is a buyer’s market.
It is consumers that actually control it, not publishers and not retailers. In trying to eliminate price-based competition and raise prices, the BPHs aren’t attacking Amazon, they are attacking consumers.
And consumers are aware of this atack.
They are responding appropriately by showing their disdain, by taking their business elsewhere, to other competitors. Other publishers.
And these other publishers are only too happy to take their chances and take advantage of the opening the BPHs offer them to grow their sales, burnish their image, gain the “stamp of legitimacy” the BPHs think is their birthright.
What we’re seeing is a clash of worldviews; one seeks to turn the clock back a half-century or more to a top-down supplier-controlled market, the other seeks to adapt to a new era of abundant content, abundant distribution channels, and consumer control.
Content is no longer king, folks.
Money is king.
And consumers have the money, they can give it or they can withold it. It is time for the BPHs to get off their high horses and sing for their supper.
Or else.
And the “or else” is this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html#printMode
June 3rd, 2010 WSJ article on the increasing viability/respectability of self-published authors.
Just anecdotes, so far, but they are telling anecdotes.
This is the real enemy of the BPHs; not discounting and not price competition; they are fighting the wrong war with the wrong tools.
@Pantasillia:
One word: disintermediation.
Check the WSJ link in my post above (if its still live).
eBooks are an *opportunity* for writers to get out from under the oppressive thumb of bad publishers and go find a different publisher with a different business model.
But first they have to take their fate in their own hands. No risk, no reward.
Essentially, the writers willing to work “on consignment” stand to make out like bandits, those that rely on advances will be ground into servitude unless they get on Oprah.
(And Oprah is going away.)
Different spin.
I have an iPad and love it. Does everything promised and replaces a laptop for me for carry around. I bought my son a big Kindle for college last year in the hopes that textbooks would be coming to it – no luck on that yet!
I also love Amazon and almost always buy used books there. Price-price-price. I also love the power of the Amazon search. It is the Mac UI of the web and nails things almost all the time. Location, location, location = Amazon also.
I have a large library at home and will always want to own certain book in hard form. There is no way an ereader can match flipping through a book in speed and in how the brain remembers relative location inside a book and on certain pages to find things quickly.
But, I will read e-books on planes and such. What I would pay for is a library model where I just check out the e-book for $.99 for a week or two and then is disappears. Many books I would read that way. They are just throw away fiction or pop nonsense that I never want to own – Stephen King comes to mind.
The library model in digital form will do to publishing what iTunes did to music in the end. Most people would use it because most books are throw away after a read anyway and just entertainment too many times. The few books you want to keep everybody will pick themselves out of the swamp of drek.
As of this moment, Amazon is offering a print copy of Stephenie Meyers’s new book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner for $6.99 in print and $9.99 on the Kindle. Does this make sense to anyone?
I look at this whole pricing thing as much like the shift from audio cassettes to music cds. Even though a cd was cheaper to produce, it cost more – simply because the industry decided that was how things should be.
If they can keep the price of e-books close or even more to the physical copies, the profit potential is enormous. I think all the publishers are engaged in fantasy if they actually think that is going to happen long term, however.
Oh dear. As a used and rare bookseller and former digital librarian, I say this re: Felix’s fulminations:
The uproar over published raising prices is simply economic self interest on everyone’s part. Buyers like cheaper prices – publishers like higher prices for their product. Publishers should certainly be able to set whatever prices they want for their books. Doesn’t Amazon make demands of publishers that independent’s can’t make? Doesn’t Amazon try to set its own terms, aka the dustup with Macmillan? Apple NOR Amazon should be try to determine what those prices should be. You folks tearing at apple are smearing Amazon with the same brush, whether you know it or not. Remember Amazon’s dustup with Macmillan? Or are you waiting on the Kindle ebook history of it? Amazon is as much about control as Apple, and the Kindle/Sony eReader will be in museums long before I am in a grave.
Also, self published vanity press stuff is 99% crap. For every Paolini there are hundreds if not thousands of authors spewing pointless pages. The only advantage digital publishing makes is that it will hopefully save thousands of trees from being wasted on stuff only the very few really want to read. I look forward to the (very few) discoveries that will be made, but I will buy from a known house with real editors first.
And any author with talent would greatly prefer being published by a known house over a vanity press, whether they got an advance or no. New, long, postmodernist words like disintermediation will not change the above.
Correction in order:
Instead of ” and neither AUm”, I meant “.”
Lord protect the editors. At least I am not self publishing.
regarding:
“If they can keep the price of e-books close or even more to the physical copies, the profit potential is enormous. I think all the publishers are engaged in fantasy if they actually think that is going to happen long term, however.”
The only reason some books prices in ebook form are cheaper than print copies is because the publisher can sell a TON of them.
IF they can’t sell a lot in print or in ebook form (i.e. the audience is small, like an academic book on a medieval Norman Duke) then the ebook is gonna be a lot more than $9.99 or $14.99, because the publisher still has the costs of editing, prep, etc. and can’t spread those out over a jillion copies like they can with mass-popular works.
Just because a book is digital doesn’t mean it is economically feasible to price it low. Each title has its own economics. Same reason why some obscure classical music digital albums are more expensive than the latest tune by Lady GaGa.
What was good enough for grandpappy should be good enough for us?
Bet the buggy whip makers thought the same.
I understand change can be scary but the only thing worse than facing change is ignoring it and getting run over by it. But some people are actually capable of ignoring the onrushing train right up to the point it runs them over.
Nothing can be done for them but to let them go under.
Felix T. Cutting out the middle man is fine and dandy if you know how to set type, design a jacket, market a book and arrange for publicity etc. Most authors I know are hopeless at this sort of thing and what is more hate doing it as they want to write. There used to be a rule of thumb that the author and the publisher after costs of production etc. made the same amount of money out of any book. In the 1930s there were contracts where each of the publisher, author and bookseller got 30% of the price. Simple and fair as each contributed their talent. In the noughties the author might get 2.5%, Amazon 70% and the publisher the remainder. Not fair. And that is on a normally priced book but Amazon might discount it after a while if they wanted a loss leader. If the punter just wants cheap books go to Abebooks or ebay where you can get loads of books for less than 50c.
Pantasilla; that is the whole point about how ebooks *are* changing publishing.
They make most of those traditional skills obsolete. And the rest, the ones that wil remain relevant, editing, proofing, etc, are already available via agents and freelance professionals.
*That* is the whole issue that has the Big Publishing Houses scared; over the last 50 years they have concentrated their core inhouse competency in functions that are no longer vital to publishing,as we move forward to a world where ebooks are the mainstream.
The smaller publishers have long understood they need to sing for their supper, that they need to add value to the product, that they need to strip cost out of their production processes. That they exist to bridge the author to the consumer.
The BPHs don’t get this; they are in arrogant denial. They think they *are* the publishing industry, when in reaity they are a diminishing part of it and if they don’t wake up and smell the lack of ink they are going to end up in Chapter 7.
“They make most of those traditional skills obsolete. And the rest, the ones that wil remain relevant, editing, proofing, etc, are already available via agents and freelance professionals. ”
All that is just lipstick on a pig if the core writing quality is not there. And the author will have to pony up to pay for all that and manage it. And agents will only take on authors who they think will sell – and that means thru an established publishing house.
The “smaller publishers” do much the same thing as the bigger publishers, and perhaps they do it more efficiently, but that is still a far cry the digital vanity press torrent of junk.
I’m all for revolution comrade, but arrogance goes both ways. I think you need to learn how current publishing actually functions before you force the czars to abdicate.
I retired four years ago but was one of the very few agents who refused to grant e-rights to a paper-print publisher unless my author was in control. In the same way I would not give them translation or film rights. These are not rights either BPH or even small publishers are best at exploiting. I am a firm supporter of an author’s right to control their copyright and benefit from it. Google’s arrogance in assuming ownership of digital – and Amazon insisting publishers allowed them to digitise large sections, “because it would help sell the book” when the author was going to make less than half a peanut from the sale but Amazon would make a lot, enraged me and then depressed me because the “trade”, all business people having to maximise profits for shareholders or themselves, could not see this from an author’s p.o.v. and I could see nothing was about to change. I sold e-book rights in specified formats and my authors received between 50% and 75% of what the buyer paid. But these were published books so the “filtering” and editing had been done.
I think that if e-books are a substitute for paper books the price should be similar. This does not mean as high as a hardback at £25 or as cheap as a mass market paperback at £2.99, but should take into account the cost of writing the book, the editorial work, the – albeit minimal – marketing budget and so on. Even if the savvy author employs his own editor and pr people they have to be paid. If there is a market for it perhaps if you buy a hard copy you get a special deal on the e-version. There are many possibilities but the main thing is that the author should always be at the centre of the equation.
Pantasilla, if you could convince me that higher costs actually led to more profits for authors, that would be one thing. But right now, I think they are going toward either propping up publishers as they see sales decline for various reasons, and propping up parts of the supply chain that they really should be working on phasing out by now (e.g. DRM development costs, paper-based costs etc.) It’s hard for readers to feel sorry for authors when a) things seem so non-sensical from their point of view (e.g. the Stephen King book that retails new in paperback for $6 but costs $25 in ebook) and b) many readers are prevented from doing actual purchasing due to things like DRM and geographical restrictions. I have personally written to authors about these issues and been told (if anything) ‘oh well, that is not within our control.’ Imo is authors want more money, they need to stop calling for increased prices and obsolete technical restrictions that drive customers away and focus instead on banding together into some sort of author’s coalition that will help them negotiate a better deal for themselves. The problem is NOT the reader here.
You know, I don’t personally have a problem with their “hardback” pricing. It’s over-pricing the “paperbacks” that’s cut my ebooks spending from almost $500 per month pre-Agency price-fixing model, to around $100.
But my library borrowing is increasing again…
(And yes, I know I spent way too much, so for me, this might be a good – temporarily good – thing to gain control of my lack of impulse control). It’s not doing the authors whose books I’ve been borrowing any favors, though.