This looks scary for authors, and maybe it should. Like digital music and movies, the marginal cost of an ebook is pretty much zero. If you are an author, you need to rethink how to make money from your work. It won't be from selling $10 books much longer.
Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
31–40 of 240 posts
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#32Looks like the same book selection available through the Prime Kindle Owners Lending Library, which gives you one a month with Prime membership. A nice to have, but not worth paying extra for to me.
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#33I wonder about the average use specifics for kindle users. Obviously Amazon has insight into this and would set their pricing appropriately. Assuming the kind of books listed here are the kind on the daily deal (1.99): The average user would have to read only 4-5 books a month to break even (say 9 books every two months counting taxes). I doubt most users would read that consistently. Maybe the first month, but usage…
Things look a lot rosier for audiobook listeners, though, because audiobooks are significantly more expensive than textbooks. Even the cheapest Audible subscription is $15. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they mean by "thousands of audiobooks;" if they're incorporating the Audible library, then this is an easy decision.
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#34This won't have the major publishing houses titles (beyond those who have agreed to work with Oyster). So no Penguin Random House, the market leader in print and audio. It also remains to be seen if the subscription model can work for books - they take longer to consume than movies or music. So you can imaging slower or busy readers being punished with a subscription unless they make it through 1.5 books per month wh…
> So no Penguin Random House, the market leader in print and audio
The market leader in print and audio fiction.
Fiction is ephemeral - mostly read and then discarded. The awesome potential for this service is in factual and reference books that are used hundreds or thousands of time each in their lifetime.
The 1.5 books per month metric is diluted in that case when it's possible to dip into 100 books per month just to extract the one snippet of information needed from each.
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#35Interesting. I wonder what this implies for authors. Amazon might take a cut currently, but the lion's share ends up with the author -- a royalty based scheme significantly changes the playing field, and I worry that it could be for the worse ( http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25217353 ). EDIT -- and what it implies for publishers.
It'll definitely be interesting to watch. The article you linked talks about the effects of Spotify on making a living as a musician. Spotify economics are, as you've pointed out, much tougher for authors than for songwriters. Books take a lot longer to create than songs. Also, people listen to the same songs hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of times before getting sick of them. People generally read books once. M…
> Also, people listen to the same songs hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of times before getting sick of them.
But people also don't read as much books as they listen to songs, so naturally the royalty per unit consumed will be higher for books.
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#36This looks scary for authors, and maybe it should. Like digital music and movies, the marginal cost of an ebook is pretty much zero. If you are an author, you need to rethink how to make money from your work. It won't be from selling $10 books much longer.
The following analysis of self-publishing's future is from an author who had two successful books on self-publishing. Those (excellent) books are now free on his website. The economics and discovery challenges sound like mobile apps. And this is before fractional book royalties are introduced.
http://www.newselfpublishing.com/blog/#partyover
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EDIT: trimmed quote
POD books provided a handsome profit margin even at reasonable prices. But Kindle books, with their lower prices, have decimated POD sales. Meanwhile, Kindle customers expect more and more for the low prices they pay. Many feel cheated if they spend 99 cents or even less on a book that isn’t “full-length.” And the flood of easily-published books makes it harder and harder for individual ones to stand out—a problem that can only worsen with time.
The upshot is, if you want to self publish and are new to it, then by all means, hop in. But for a long time at least, it’s likely to be more for love than for money. Sure, self publishing is still a money machine—but nowadays, that’s mostly for Amazon, not authors.
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Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#37Most of these books are available through your local library for free.
> Most of these books are available through your local library for free.
All inter-library loans in my library board cost 1 UKP ( c. $1.40 ) which quickly mounts-up when there's very little on the shelf in the local branch.
I could read 'Excel 2003 for Dummies' again, I suppose, but I'm a bit bored of it to be honest...
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#38A few weeks ago Jon Evans of TechCrunch said this: "Despite my techie contempt for their business practices, I really do want traditional publishers to survive, because their employees — unlike, I suspect, Amazon’s — tend to genuinely love books in the same way that I do, and because good editors are worth their weight in gold. But it’s hard to see how they can thrive fighting like this. In the long run their only re…
It's not exactly a huge win for authors, but you never know. While the business of selling millions of individual copies of a books might go away, the opportunity to grow an audience and leverage that is a different thing.
The authors who figure out how to leverage more than just selling a book are the ones who will do well. The ones who don't build an audience will likely fail at a higher rate than they did previously.
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#39Interesting. I wonder what this implies for authors. Amazon might take a cut currently, but the lion's share ends up with the author -- a royalty based scheme significantly changes the playing field, and I worry that it could be for the worse ( http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25217353 ). EDIT -- and what it implies for publishers.
It'll definitely be interesting to watch. The article you linked talks about the effects of Spotify on making a living as a musician. Spotify economics are, as you've pointed out, much tougher for authors than for songwriters. Books take a lot longer to create than songs. Also, people listen to the same songs hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of times before getting sick of them. People generally read books once. M…
People consume fewer books than songs, though. I might listen to hundreds of songs in a month, but only read two or three books, so that $10/month fee is being split between very few authors. Say this means that an author gets $2/reader under this model. Is that unsustainable? It doesn't seem too different to me than what authors have always gotten in the dead-tree model.
It also seems like the incentives depend on how Amazon is compensating authors: a fixed per-book fee would incentivize splitting large books into small pieces, so as to collect the fee multiple times, while a per-word or per-page fee would be more neutral (assuming that Amazon tracks how many pages actually get read, e.g. Piketty would only get credit for the tons of people who read his first chapter).
Re: Amazon leaks Kindle Unlimited
#40It'll be fascinating to see how our relationship with books plays out over the next 10-20 years. On one hand, unlike music, books are very physical objects, their content very much associated with their form, used by many as decoration within their home. On the other hand, most of us only read most of our books once. I suspect that many, like me, then hang onto those books primarily for sentimental reasons (along with the slim chance that someone else might want to borrow them, future children might want to read them, we might re-read them one day, but probably never will), but that feels very much like a cultural fad, albeit quite a long-lived one!