Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#91

Post by JulianMorrison » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 12:23 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #31

While I believe they saw these numbers, specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases, I don't believe that this is a good general rule of thumb. Here's the problem: there are only so many potential ebook readers out in the world, and they only have so much time. This means there will be market saturation at some point, or at least market movement. This elasticity is there,…

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 library a little more fussy, but it won't weigh more or waste space.

People may not have more time, but they can divert time to books, and they can divert re-reading time to new-book reading time.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#92

Post by notatoad » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:09 PM UTC

credo wrote: post #59

Amazon has mastered the art of saying nothing with a lot of self-serving words :) Their post is titled "Update re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption" . However, they don't state what their specific demands are and why the business was (in their words) interrupted. Amazon's proclaimed objectives aren't as important as knowing what their specific demands (from Hachette) are. I'm not a book-author, but as a develope…

They seem to be pretty explicitly stating their goals here: they want the vast majority of ebooks to sell for $9.99 or less. The publishers want more.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#93

Post by freehunter » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

lotsofmangos wrote: post #54

bsder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what? All of the evidence points to the fact that people have more than sufficient entertainment options and have set their budgets at a fixed point. It wasn't piracy that killed music. It was the fact that the prime purchasers of music had a fixed entertainment budget and switched to buying video games aka. zero-sum market.

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what? Me probably. And all the folk I know with reading habits like mine who have not bothered getting an ebook reader yet, despite having problems seeing the floor for books sometimes. edit - I think Amazon are complete and utter [redacted] over DRM, the 1984 debacle, their general attitude, etc. That said, I think they are probably right that everyone…

>[redacted]

Either you can say the word or you can't. Luckily our language has ways of working around saying certain words, so you don't have to put in [redacted].

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#94

Post by preinheimer » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

I've written a book, it's available on Amazon (including kindle).

What % I get when it's sold (kindle or dead tree) is absolutely none of Amazon's business. I negotiated with my publisher (not Hachette), I'm happy with the results, I don't need other people telling me what's best.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#95

Post by romaniv » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:04 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #91

IgorPartola wrote: post #31

While I believe they saw these numbers, specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases, I don't believe that this is a good general rule of thumb. Here's the problem: there are only so many potential ebook readers out in the world, and they only have so much time. This means there will be market saturation at some point, or at least market movement. This elasticity is there,…

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…

Therefore owning a library is a cost.

Owning a library has a higher value than owning a library of ebooks: social, decorative, nostalgic, works without power, easy share, can resell, etc. It more than evens out. But there is Steam effect - people will stockpile ebooks they don't read.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#96

Post by IgorPartola » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #45

IgorPartola wrote: post #31

While I believe they saw these numbers, specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases, I don't believe that this is a good general rule of thumb. Here's the problem: there are only so many potential ebook readers out in the world, and they only have so much time. This means there will be market saturation at some point, or at least market movement. This elasticity is there,…

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 one is priced at $15 and the other at $10, sure you would get the one priced at $10. But if both are priced at $10?

The point is that books are not bought as a simple commodity. Nobody says "I am low on books, let me go grab a random handful, based solely on price." No, people buy books with good reviews and by recommendation. When you are viewing volume book sales from Amazon's point of view, sure they all look the same. However, taking a closer look, a publisher might be able to price books more efficiently. 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? Presenting a single data point in the huge possibility space of book prices is not a valid argument. Even if you let go of all the economics involved and stop thinking about how people buy books, don't you think that that ratio of 1.74 would be different for books priced at $12 and $17? Does this vary by month? Do certain genres have different price elasticity? Amazon is not trying to be helpful here. They are trying to squash publishers, gain control of the market and dictate prices, which they cannot currently do.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#97

Post by oddevan » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:15 PM UTC

SDGT wrote: post #14

krschultz wrote: post #2

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…

It's the steam model. "Why not buy this game if it's only $5?" 20 minutes, 10 purchases, and $50 later with another set of titles to stale in the library.

But there's also the iOS model to consider:

"Why buy this game if it's not $1?"

I know there's other factors at work, but this is what publishers are (understandably) afraid of.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#98

Post by krschultz » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

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...

I buy my OReilly books direct and send them to my Kindle all the time. They even work in the Kindle cloud reader on my desktop.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#99

Post by cstross » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

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 distribution business, and even then, it's somewhat questionable: Amazon's T&C's for authors publishing directly are invidious and include binding arbitration clauses and boilerplate giving AMZN the right to vary their terms unilaterally -- meaning AMZN basically have those authors by the short and curlies, in a manner that no real publishing company even attempts in their author contracts.)

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#100

Post by XorNot » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #91

IgorPartola wrote: post #31

While I believe they saw these numbers, specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases, I don't believe that this is a good general rule of thumb. Here's the problem: there are only so many potential ebook readers out in the world, and they only have so much time. This means there will be market saturation at some point, or at least market movement. This elasticity is there,…

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.