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Eoin Purcell on Google as a bookseller
June 1, 2009 | 10:49 am
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By Paul Biba
The new Google ebook initiative has been sparking some comment, but since Eoin Purcell is actually in the publishing industry (he is Commissioning Editor with one of Ireland’s oldest independent publishers, Mercier Press) I tend to take his comments more seriously than some others. Here’s an excerpt from his blog:
… My thinking on this is that letting publishers set the price is a good way to steal a march back from Kindle and Amazon. For one thing it will give them a greater sense of control and allow them to do the experimenting with price, a very valuable tool considering how tight Amazon is being with info and data about Kindle sales. Michael Cairns has a short but chilling post on this.
Secondly if one platform allows pricing and another doesn’t and the publishers can make sales through the Google platform anyway, then the Kindle might well wither and die as publishers pull their titles. last but not least, if Google look to retain a lower percentage of revenue (Say 30-40%) than Amazon currently do, the prices may well shift lower naturally as publishers seek to attract sales.
Right now I can only think of this as a positive move for the industry, he nor competition to provide a solid e-book platform the better.
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Comments:
A book covering the “book wars” is needed. Trying to keep up with all of the shenanigans going in the the book world, which includes the ever-growing e-book section, is a time-sucking chore. There’s too much information. I’d like it condensed into a single book, or better yet, a pill I can take once a month.
Yeah well, this ‘pricing’ issue is the fun part.
So you can buy your Kindle edition of the new bestseller for $10, or the Google edition for $29. Hmmm, hard choice that.
And your $29 (full hardcover price, as Google expects, and probably fears) only gets you a chance to read the book from the google site. Not connected, google down? Well you can read the ‘cached’ version in your browser’s cache.
Really, that last is weird city.
But back to the pricing: your big publishing house will be facing a dilemma here: sell on Amazon and move a lot of copies, but the retail price will be controlled by Amazon, or sell on Google and sell only to people lacking any way to read Kindle content. Or they could withhold some books from the Kindle editions, and forego the revenue.
I predict that Google’s plans and models will change a lot if they actually bring this to market.
Google going in is not going to kill the kindle but it going to hit the profit margins of every other vendor since google is more then likely to run this the way they do everything, go for volume and lower the unit prize to almost cost, ie sell at 9.99 at googke get 9.50 sell back in royalties at 9.99 at amazon get 8.5 back in royalty.
were seeing the same thing happen in the music business apple have had to cut profit pr unit a lot since it initial launch because the competition.
I expect that the DRM move by Google will be short-lived and is spawn of all their legal wars with the other book projects.
Yes, the book may be more expensive than the kindle book, but it’s available without having to buy the $250 reader. That’s a big plus.
Google Gears is very powerful and with in-app purchasing allowed through Google Android, it’s not hard to see a desktop and mobile client release sooner than later. You might be able to browse and read Kindle Books with the iPhone app, but you can’t buy them through the app.
Returning pricing control to publishers is a huge win for publishers and consumers. When a middle-man distributor is in a position to call all the shots (from file generation, format, pricing, etc.) everyone looses, but the middle-man.
trav
headsubhead.com
So many misconceptions in one post. Amazon pays publishers the hardcover royalty rates, which in most cases is MORE THAN 100% of the price they charge their customers for e-books, not the widely quoted 30% rate they pay to self-publishing folks.
Second, what’s the basis for suggesting publishers would lower prices to consumers if they got more control? Everything they have done and said suggests they want to increase prices and are outraged that Amazon is selling ebooks for $9.99. If they really want consumers to pay more, they should make their ebooks worth more by removing the DRM, an option that Amazon and other sellers permit.
I also think many in the publishing industry don’t get the close bond Amazon has formed with its avid reader customers who have been buying books, posting reviews and lists and benefiting from recommendations on the site for more than 10 years now. Google has done little to demonstrate that it groks selling in any market or to customer base beyond search and its failures are legion. Will its book selling effort be any more successful than its video download store, radio and newspaper ad sales efforts etc?
Finally, to the above commenter @trav, you can currently read and buy Kindle books without a Kindle device using the iPhone/iPod Touch app, via the recently upgraded 1.1 version and specialized mobile Kindle store front. Apps for Blackberry and perhaps other platforms have been rumored as well. This sentence made me laugh out loud: “Returning pricing control to publishers is a huge win for publishers and consumers.”
@Aaron Pressman – I realize that Kindle books are available on the iPhone, which is still a $200+ device that a reader must have bought. So you’re still tethered to an expensive eReader.
I don’t have an iPhone but have enjoyed my first gen Kindle for quite some time. I do think that the market needs to allow publishers to control the pricing. Amazon’s artificial pricing and loss-leaders give a false impression of the value and costs in generating a book, in any format.
It doesn’t matter what Amazon pays it’s publishers, they should have control over pricing, just as they are awarded control of content. The fact that things are nudging to a vertical system that rested solely with one company is scary.
We need competition to keep things level and Amazon isn’t interested in allowing ePub and such on their devices. Which is fine. It’s their call. Which is why the best device/content and pricing structure will win out.
And you are right, Google doesn’t have the retail mindset that Amazon does… because they are not retailers. They are building a toolset and framework so that retailers and publishers can make an honest go at selling their books, for whatever they think they are worth, without Amazon dictating the terms and formats.
It’s that simple. A black slate for publishers to remain competitive. So again, if pubs can price as needed and communicate value to their customers, then the good ones will win and the bad will close. Which could never be the case if Amazon went unchallenged.
@trav Amazon is hardly going unchallenged. Sony says it has sold hundreds of thousands of its ereader and plans to add wireless capability real soon now. Barnes & Noble just bought Fictionwise and its ebook platform. Adobe has its whole ebook strategy. The iPhone/iPod Touch platform has a bunch of competing solutions, including some that read epub format, I believe, as well as the one-off editions direct from publishers (how many copies of Tess Callahan’s April & Oliver app do you think they’re selling at $24 each?). Soon we’ll also have the Plastic Logic reader, the device David Pogue just reviewed, the one Rupert Murdoch keeps alluding to, and now Google.
And I think it’s all that competition which has pushed Amazon to offer low ebook prices, upgrade and cut the price of its Kindle reader device, come out with the iPhone app, come out with the bigger screen DX, offer free wireless access etc. Seems good for the consumer.
I’m not suggesting publishers shouldn’t be allowed to offer their wares on their own at prices they establish. I’m suggesting that they wouldn’t be very good at it and it wouldn’t be good for the consumer. Look at the history of music CD pricing. Prices skyrocketed in the 90s and it turned out that the music publishers had illegally colluded to force retailers to raise prices. It was a fine short-term strategy perhaps but the damage was done. Look at what book publishers are doing right now in Apple’s app store (not at all illegal but certainly foolish).
p.s. I don’t get your point about how much an iPhone (or iPod) costs. Surely however Google formats its ebooks you’ll have to read them on some piece of technology that costs money such as a mobile phone or laptop. I thought your point, mistaken as it was, related to requiring a dedicated e-reader device (“it’s available without having to buy the $250 reader”). All e-books sold by anyone, anywhere require some kind of device.
The cost thing is simple. Unlike the US-only locked in expensive Kindle thing – if google is browser related, you can read them on any PC.
You can get a PC that is capable of running a browser for close to nothing, if you want to.
Google might be dumb enough to make you use the very latest operating system or hardware, but you’d hope not.
@Blue Tyson I’m not sure many PCs cost less than an iPod Touch, certainly not many that have a screen you’d want to read a book on…