Comments on: The e-book wars: Who is less evil, Amazon or book publishers?

By: joe sixpak

joe sixpak — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 03:06:20 +0000

low prices are nice
but the only books will be pure crap unless authors can make a living and publishers can make a profit big enough to stay in business

By: Peter Glassman, Books of Wonder

Peter Glassman, Books of Wonder — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:46:54 +0000

An interesting article, but your missing the same basic fact that the DOJ is missing — and that publishers themselves seem oblivious too: there is a difference between selling something wholesale, selling it via consignment or a sales agent, and licensing intellectual property. The one thing publishers have NEVER done is sell e-books wholesale.

Prior to the agency model, publishers were selling e-books by allowing retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to offer the e-books the publishers created (and formatted to each retailers particular platform) and collected payment ONLY if a sale was completed. Under the wholesale model, a retailer commits to purchasing a specific quantity of a product at a specific price and must pay for the product regardless of whether it sells or not. Yes, publishers allow returns, but payment is usually due prior to the point at which returns are allowed. But with e-books, Amazon hoodwinked publishers into agreeing to forgo having to make any quantity or payment commitments, but merely pay after a sale was completed and Amazon had already collected the money. Certainly this was good for Amazon — it allowed them to sell e-books the way they sell used books — by collecting a fee on the transaction. But could you imagine the outrage if Amazon tried to set the price on books being offered by its used booksellers? After all, Amazon isn’t taking possession or ownership of the books that its used booksellers sell on its site, it’s merely collecting the money and giving the used booksellers a share of the price. Just like it does with the e-books from the big 6 publishers. So why should Amazon be allowed to set the price?

Or, if you prefer, you could liken the way Amazon sells e-books to how real estate agents sell and lease property. At no point does the real estate agent take possession or ownership of the property. They promote it on their website(s), have sales agents to facilitate the sale, and only get paid when the sale is concluded. Could you imagine a real estate agent dictating to the owner of a property the price at which the property was going to be sold?

The other problem with your argument is that you seem to be treating printed books — a form of physical property in which a single copy of intellectual property has been placed — as the same as an e-book, which is a license to view intellectual property owned by another individual or company. When you buy a printed book you are purchasing the paper, cover, and binding, which you then own, along with the intellectual property (the content), which you do not own. But with an e-book there is nothing but the intellectual property — which is licensed, not sold. You cannot actually by and e-book. There is nothing to buy or own. You certainly don’t own the data file, as Amazon made abundantly clear when it remotely deleted every copy it had accidentally sold without the right to do so of George Orwell’s 1984 (yes, the irony is rich) from every Kindle without the permission or even advance notification to the owners of those Kindles. Had they accidentally printed the book and sold it, they would have not been able to take the books back — the books would be the property of the buyer and Amazon would have been held financially responsible for their mistake.

So if an e-book is not actually something you purchase or buy, but actually just a license, then e-books are actually actually subject to the laws that govern the licensing of intellectual property, not the laws governing the sale and resale of consumer products. And as any Hollywood agent or licensing agent can tell you, when they license their intellectual property they frequently set pricing as part of the licensing deal.

It seems to me that the DOJ in its desire to seem pro-consumer has blindly stumbled into a legal quagmire. If they go forward with this misguided lawsuit and settlements the only people who will benefit are the lawyers who will be tying up the courts arguing the ramifications of this ruling on property rights and intellectual property rights for years.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:04:17 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Richard — and for the link as well. I wonder if others would share your feelings about paying more for ethical books.

By: Jonathan Briggs

Jonathan Briggs — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:59:59 +0000

Publishers may be setting wholesale prices of hardcovers at less than ebooks. But when it arrives at the retailer and gets put on sale for 20% – 40% off, the hardcover often becomes cheaper. And that is ridiculous.

By: Richard M Stallman

Richard M Stallman — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:09:42 +0000

There is a more important issue about ebooks than price: our freedom.
Commercial ebooks today trample readers’ freedom in several ways.

I’d pay as much for an ethical ebook as I would for a book on paper,
if that’s what it cost — maybe a little more, for the convenience.
But I will not accept an ebook from Amazon or Apple under their
current conditions. Not even if they paid me to take it.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html
and stand up for your freedom.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:19:36 +0000

Actually, publishers are/were selling ebooks for substantially less than hardcover prices. More than 50% less even under agency pricing. In fact, publishers willingly chose to lose money under agency pricing (while authors made more) in order to stabilize pricing and win control over the value of their product.

The fact that books are being compared to toilet paper, and that you think ebooks have been “overpriced” (because they are no longer being sold as a loss leader for Amazon’s ereader) just shows their instincts were right.

By: Sanford Gray Thatcher

Sanford Gray Thatcher — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:57:23 +0000

The comments here all seem to focus on trade publishing, but there is serious collateral damage being done to scholarly publishers by Amazon’s pricing because it creates false impressions across the board that e-books are cheaper to produce than print books, which is true ONLY when e-books are produced under circumstances when all “first copy” costs are attributed to the print edition. Publishing e-books only is just as expensive as publishing print books (self-publishing excepted, where costs are low because there is no copyediting, design, etc. quality to speak of, for the most part), and this is very definitely true for scholarly books. The whole discussion of whether “filtering” is needed anymore is also conducted here in reference only to trade publishing. How is the average person going to arrive at an independent judgment about the q2uality of a scholarly work in a specialized field if it does not come with the imprint of a scholarly press that uses peer reviewers (and, in the case of university presses, faculty editoral boards) to determine what is worthwhile scholarship?

By: Travis Butler

Travis Butler — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:47:54 +0000

I sure as heck want them available to filter.

I spent years in the fanfic community, before I finally got tired of wading through acres and acres of poorly-written garbage to find the few stories I enjoyed reading. I have a very good idea of just how low the low the quality level can sink when there is no filter in place. I also have a very good idea of the amount of work needed to trawl through a sea of sludge looking for occasional tidbits I like, and I have no desire to do so again.

Some people like to point out books that mainstream publishers missed, as evidence that publisher’s filters do more harm than good; but I’d be willing to bet that for every Hunt for Red October or Harry Potter that hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream publishers, there are thousands – if not tens or even hundreds of thousands – of books on the slush pile that don’t meet basic standards of grammar, let alone entertainment.

By: Travis Butler

Travis Butler — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:29:39 +0000

Except that a) Amazon reserves the right to lower the price authors set, and b) has the equivalent of the ‘most favored nation’ clause that people point out with Apple.

See https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A36BYK5S7AJ2NQ

By: Ivy

Ivy — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:25:04 +0000

“The problem with the book industry with a free-for-all self publishing model that is only based on price is that the end product is crap. Ebooks are awash in bad writing now.”

Traditionally published books aren’t any better. I just finished reading the ebook version of The Last Herald Mage by Mercedes Lackey. The publisher is Penguin. Clearly, no one involved in the project was told that “only” is not spelled with a number. I’ve seen “0nly” and “on1y” repeatedly. Is it that hard to proofread?

Let me do this next part in voice, to really drive home the point.
Macmillan published Fated, and the verb tenses changing, shifting, wildly mutating, to the point that, particularly after a parenthetic phrase cuts off a sentence mid-way.

Most of the book reads like that. If publishers can’t even get the basics of spelling and grammar right, what value are they really proving?