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Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

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Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#121

Post by DanBC »

XorNot wrote: post #100
JulianMorrison wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that books are way undersaturated. The reason is: paper. Dead tree books weigh a lot and waste space. Therefore owning a library is a cost . Costs to move, costs storage space, costs effort to collate and maintain and protect. E-books do not have that cost. Having a hundred e-books in your purse is a normal thing. Having a thousand? Well, it might make sorting through your personal equivalent of a branch li…

Yet oddly enough Amazon seem to have gotten stingier with the flash memory on a Kindle. 2 GB? Just give me a damn microSD slot so I can bump that up to a level I'm happy with. A few biggish PDFs (e-Textbooks come to mind) will obliterate that space.

Other ereader devices exist.

Kobo devices have microSD cards. You have to unscrew the case to get at it, but still, you'd probably only have to do it once.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#122

Post by mcguire »

IgorPartola wrote: post #96
chatmasta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know exactly what you mean by market saturation in this case, as your logic seems to imply that each book has a finite market of N customers, and enough of a subset of them, M , are willing to pay $1000 (or whatever), such that M (1000) > N (5). The error in your logic is that the size of the market for a given book actually depends on the price of that book. There's millions of books out there. Why would I p…

> Why would I pay $1000 for one when I can get so many others for $5? Let me ask you this: would you rather buy one of the first 100 prints of Djikstra's "A Discipline of Programming" for $1000 or would you rather buy 200 Nancy Drew novels at $5/book? Books are not, to some extent, able to be substituted. Yes, if you are looking for a good vampire erotic fiction novel and are choosing between two unknown authors and…

Many factors are involved here. On one hand, you're right about Dijkstra (Is $1000 an option? I never actually got my copy signed (sigh), but....) and Nancy Drew, but on the other I think it's likely that most of the money involved involves "mass market" books: thrillers, Oprah's picks, the stuff on the New York Times list. At some point it does boil down to the marginal situation of "two unknown authors" (or two approximately equivalent ones) that really are semi-commodities. Think of a reader who has read everything that has been suggested or is from their favorite authors, and is looking for something new.

Also keep in mind that the "mass" entertainment market is not competing with speciality books, but is competing with other entertainment options: Netflix, movies, drunken debauchery, etc.

Then there is the price levels we're talking about. Everyone (probably) has some price X below which they will have no problem impulse-buying. Then there's a price Y below which they're willing to take chances, with information, and then there are prices above that, which require actual consideration. And for most people, at least those buying ebooks, we are definitely arguing in this range. For my inner economist, publishers want ebook prices up in the high segment, above Y, while Amazon wants them roughly between X and Y.

"If Amazon has helpful data to add to this, why don't they open it up and let everyone, publishers included, see it to help price the books better?"

The specifics are very likely competitive trade secrets. Don't forget Amazon gets to deal with Apple, B&N, and a host of other retailers. I'm surprised they released the one number they did. On the other hand, judging by negotiations I've been in, I would not find it unplausible that Hachette is aware of those numbers.

"They are trying to squash publishers, gain control of the market and dictate prices, which they cannot currently do."

Yes, just like the publishers are trying to squash Amazon, gain control of the market, and dictate prices. Heck, this isn't even a particularly new situation: I'm sure the negotiations between publishers and distributors that led to the lovely "stripping" practice were just as entertaining.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#123

Post by mcguire »

mkal_tsr wrote: post #58
chatmasta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know exactly what you mean by market saturation in this case, as your logic seems to imply that each book has a finite market of N customers, and enough of a subset of them, M , are willing to pay $1000 (or whatever), such that M (1000) > N (5). The error in your logic is that the size of the market for a given book actually depends on the price of that book. There's millions of books out there. Why would I p…

> The error in your logic is that the size of the market for a given book actually depends on the price of that book. This is only part of the picture. You're missing genre / topic which is a huge component.

For the genre/topic/market in question, I'm not sure about that.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#124

Post by WalterBright »

kamakazizuru wrote: post #72
bsder wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I pay $1000 for one when I can get so many others for $5? Because market data suggests that most people won't switch. They will buy book from "the new, hip writer X" or they won't buy at all . Someone who intends to buy something by Malcolm Gladwell is unlikely to buy something from somebody else just because it's a little cheaper. Amazon wants to maximize sales volume whereas the distributors and authors…

Yes - but a person looking to buy the Malcolm Gladwell book - willing to buy it at 10$ - but who can only buy it at 15$ or more - will probably end up then either borrowing it from a friend or in the worst case downloading it as a PDF illegally. Both of which are a lost sale for the publisher and author.

Bestsellers are the books that normally wind up in the thrift store for a buck. Ironically, it's the obscure books that wind up being pricey.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#125

Post by mcguire »

cstross wrote: post #99

John Scalzi's response to this piece of self-serving agitprop is worth reading in full: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/07/30/amazons-latest-volley/ (Shorter Scalzi: Amazon are presenting as "good for authors" policies which, in fact, are only indisputably "good for Amazon"; the only authors they might be good for are those who cleave unto Amazon like limpets and don't do business with the other 70% of the book distr…

Hm.

"Amazon’s assumptions don’t include, for example, that publishers and authors might have a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer, narrowing the number of venues into which books can sell."

So Scalzi and Hachette want me to subsidize Barnes & Noble? Mighty nice of them.

"...it appears to come with the ground assumption that books are interchangable units of entertainment, each equally as salable as the next, and that pricing is the only thing consumers react to."

That's an interesting statement to appear next to the Kirkus review of Lock In: "...yet more evidence that Scalzi is a master at creating appealing commercial fiction." My impression is that Amazon is more correct than Scalzi concerning the specific market in "commercial fiction".

Further, I'd be a little more sympathetic to him if he didn't include the argument, "...then I feel perfectly justified in considering your cost of production position vis a vis publishing as entirely hypocritical," if the publishing industry had not made that same argument for all of the price increases in the thirty years previous."

And then, of course, there's the bit about "Which is to say that between my publisher and Amazon, one of them gets to utter the immortal Darth Vader line “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further” to authors doing business with it and one does not."

It contrasts entertainingly with the fact that neither he nor his publisher are operating under the terms of the Kindle Direct agreement with Amazon, although I suspect his publisher has more authority than he admits, if he wants to get anything new published. Also with the fact that "Amazon is just 30% of the market."

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#126

Post by mcguire »

cstross wrote: post #112
opendais wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalzi, like usual is ~90% correct and what little he is off about is easy enough to ignore. ;) I easily see #3 resulting in the bottom end selling at $5 and the top end selling at $9.99 because I suspect the reason Amazon picked that number is, overall, it generates more total sales [by dollar volume]. One of the few things Amazon is good at is accurately pricing products to maximize gross revenue. That being the ca…

Ebooks, once created, are a sunk cost...not an ongoing one so maximizing gross revenue works in everyone's favor. What you're missing is that, from the author's point of view, ebooks are not interchangeable. A unit of my sales is not usefully interchangeable with a unit of Scalzi's. To Amazon we're fungible produce, but to us we're suppliers of bespoke one-of-a-kind products. The Amazon move squeezes those of us who…

"A unit of my sales is not usefully interchangeable with a unit of Scalzi's."

You sure about that? I haven't read anything by either one of you. You both have a bunch of good reviews and some interesting titles. Or, I could just go get a new paddle leash for the price of your book and go kayaking.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#127

Post by mcguire »

tjl wrote: post #114
JohnTHaller wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publisher can always sell directly as an unencrypted EPUB and MOBI (works on Kindle) to the consumer and set their own pricing and percentages.

Do you know which publisher sells for all your favourite authors? I certainly know for some of them, but not others. What about when you just hear about a book from someone? This is why people go to bookstores. I'd be a lot happier if everyone went to no-DRM or at least interchangeable DRM so you could move to a different e-reader. Amazon and iBooks are the odd ones out. iBooks doesn't have a big marketshare, but Ama…

There's this thing, on the internet. It's specifically designed for locating the publisher of a given author. We call it a "search engine". :-)

I personally go to bookstores to find books and authors that I've never heard of before---something that is actually quite hard to do online.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#128

Post by mcguire »

lesterbuck wrote: post #18
JohnTHaller wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publisher can always sell directly as an unencrypted EPUB and MOBI (works on Kindle) to the consumer and set their own pricing and percentages.

Not exactly. Turns out you can sell via Amazon, or you can sell directly, but if you use the undocumented Amazon-only tool to construct your .mobi, you can't sell that directly. And Amazon is now blocking the output of many/all other ebook construction software so you can't use Send to Kindle or email. USB is the only option to load a book. http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/04/02/why-does-amazon-hate-eboo...

On the other hand, I've had absolutely no problems pointing a tablet's browser at a .mobi's URL and downloading it directly to ebook reading software.

(Do modern Kindle readers not include browsers? I've never looked on mine.)

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#129

Post by mcguire »

jmedefind wrote: post #23
fpgeek wrote: post #20

I'm a bit surprised that Amazon said listed "no returns" as one of the differences with ebooks. I have personal experience with their incredibly generous ebook return policy (right in line with their other generous return policies). Is this an implicit admission that Amazon is eating the cost of those returns? Or do they mean something specific like the physical infrastructure for returns?

When I worked at a bookstore we would ship boxes full of un-sold books back to the publishers every month (Mostly consisting of cheap Romance novels). I imagine having to track and handle all of that to be a major cost to publishers.

Boxes of unsold books? Not just the covers?

Publishers don't want paperbacks back, they just want proof that the book didn't sell. That was always just the front cover. You may have shipped the books to someone who did the stripping, but I very much doubt the publisher ever saw the text block.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#130

Post by mcguire »

gknoy wrote: post #71
pyoung wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I re-call an internet comment (most likely on HN) about how some publishers would instruct bookstores to shred the unsold copies. Apparently it was cheaper than shipping them back and trying to re-sell them somewhere else.

Is there any way to find out when they're going to do this, so I can offer to buy a few? :D

According to the agreements (that used to be) in place between publishers, distributors, and booksellers, that would be a very serious no-no.
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