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Macmillan vs Amazon: can I root for Baen?
Background: Amazon has been clashing with big-name publishers for a while now, over its $10 bestseller prices. Publishers are unhappy because they don't want the public thinking new bestsellers should only cost $10. (They are not, it should be noted, losing money--Amazon pays them the full value, and takes a loss on those sales.)
So. Recently, Macmillan (who owns Tor books) apparently insisted they put bestsellers up to $15. Not necessarily all of them; just that they have a max cost of $15, not $10, for bestsellers. In response, Amazon pulled Macmillan books from its virtual shelves. Among the drama-bits involved is the factoid that Macmillan is partnering with Apple to be involved in something iPad-ish; details are, of course, unknown, so speculation is intense.
Details are blurry and ranty at Scalzi's Whatever, BoingBoing, The NY Times, Mobileread, VentureBeat and several individual LJ's. Comments at the more bloggish spaces include a lot of standard clichés and confusion about ebooks. (Bits about whether ebooks are, or are not, "worth" more than $10. Misconceptions about DRM, and polite corrections thereof. General bitching about Amazon. General bitching about the publishing industry. Anti-piracy ranting. Pro-torrenting ranting. "Authors deserve to get paid for their hard work!" ranting.)
I am *so* not up to entering this debate and playing Ebook 101 Informer at the same time.
Most of me is cheering about this. Not about the authors getting screwed out of sales because the companies who publish them are in a fight with the company that owns the store that sells their work; that part sucks. But only through this kind of megacorp posturing (really, could someone write the Macmillan/Amazon hatesex slash already?) are we going to get the kind of *change* that will let consumers & creators find ways of connecting that make both groups happy. Right now, the corps are getting in the way, because they're trying to use business models that no longer work. Their marketing departments are panicking, trying to figure out how to force the public and the authors to continue to use those models, despite obvious options that work better for everyone... except for stockholders in the megacorps.
Let Amazon & Macmillan bash each other to little *shreds*--a plague on both your houses!--and let a dozen small digital publishing-sales houses appear in their wake, ready to sort slushpiles, edit writing, and promote new books. Let authors start insisting on keeping their ebook rights so they can sell those to the company best able to exploit that market, just like they do with their foreign sales rights. Let readers learn to shop at a dozen stores because shopping at Fictionwise, Baen, Freya's Bower, and Smashwords is *four mouse clicks*, not four drives-to-store, find-parking-places, pack-purchases-in-back-seats. There are plenty of ebook stores other than Amazon... let us find them, browse them, and use our dollars to let them know which of them are doing it right.
So. Recently, Macmillan (who owns Tor books) apparently insisted they put bestsellers up to $15. Not necessarily all of them; just that they have a max cost of $15, not $10, for bestsellers. In response, Amazon pulled Macmillan books from its virtual shelves. Among the drama-bits involved is the factoid that Macmillan is partnering with Apple to be involved in something iPad-ish; details are, of course, unknown, so speculation is intense.
Details are blurry and ranty at Scalzi's Whatever, BoingBoing, The NY Times, Mobileread, VentureBeat and several individual LJ's. Comments at the more bloggish spaces include a lot of standard clichés and confusion about ebooks. (Bits about whether ebooks are, or are not, "worth" more than $10. Misconceptions about DRM, and polite corrections thereof. General bitching about Amazon. General bitching about the publishing industry. Anti-piracy ranting. Pro-torrenting ranting. "Authors deserve to get paid for their hard work!" ranting.)
I am *so* not up to entering this debate and playing Ebook 101 Informer at the same time.
Most of me is cheering about this. Not about the authors getting screwed out of sales because the companies who publish them are in a fight with the company that owns the store that sells their work; that part sucks. But only through this kind of megacorp posturing (really, could someone write the Macmillan/Amazon hatesex slash already?) are we going to get the kind of *change* that will let consumers & creators find ways of connecting that make both groups happy. Right now, the corps are getting in the way, because they're trying to use business models that no longer work. Their marketing departments are panicking, trying to figure out how to force the public and the authors to continue to use those models, despite obvious options that work better for everyone... except for stockholders in the megacorps.
Let Amazon & Macmillan bash each other to little *shreds*--a plague on both your houses!--and let a dozen small digital publishing-sales houses appear in their wake, ready to sort slushpiles, edit writing, and promote new books. Let authors start insisting on keeping their ebook rights so they can sell those to the company best able to exploit that market, just like they do with their foreign sales rights. Let readers learn to shop at a dozen stores because shopping at Fictionwise, Baen, Freya's Bower, and Smashwords is *four mouse clicks*, not four drives-to-store, find-parking-places, pack-purchases-in-back-seats. There are plenty of ebook stores other than Amazon... let us find them, browse them, and use our dollars to let them know which of them are doing it right.
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Great post. Thanks!
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Neither Amazon nor Macmillan is "the good guy" in this exchange; Amazon wants to corner & own the ebook market, and Macm & other publishers want ebooks to be as expensive as trade paperbacks (or more) and *also* limited to a single reader. Neither of them gives a damn about authors getting paid or readers getting access to good books.
The four-click shopping is a hassle. You have to create an account at each site, give them insane amounts of info (some insist on a street address... for mine, I give my real street address but not my apartment #, and a phone # that doesn't work anymore), and they all have different shopping cart methods and download instructions and bleh, one-stop shopping *is* nicer.
But. Comes with a cost. Amazon users have found themselves thrown out of Amazon for "too many item returns"--and then their Kindle account is locked & they no longer have access to their Amazon library.
I keep meaning to make a series of basic ebookish info posts--good free book sites, stores I like (I won't buy DRM'd ebooks), list of web articles about various aspects of ebookery. Overview of devices, maybe, although that seems weird 'cos I haven't tried most of them.
And another series about conversion methods and softwares. But dammit, the tech keeps changing; the post I would've written a year ago is obsolete now.
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If you do end up making ebook 101 posts, please don't be shy about smacking a "For the beginning beginner" tag on it and starting simple. Meaning REALLY simple. ^^;;; I'm really grateful for anything you (and other comm members!) post here. My internet time is limited and I get overwhelmed trying to google information. What I know about "various aspects of e-bookery" :D I've read here.
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When I've got a bit more free time (I've got a major convention in about two weeks), I want to start making beginning ebookish posts.
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also, I am such a dweeb. I am all agog at the idea that I can now download library ebooks onto my firmware updated Sony Reader. I, er, have yet to buy an ebook because I use it strictly for (free) classics, fanfic and now that I can, library books. Oh, and the occasional copy/pasted online magazine article. I am sure there are probably rules about that?
just tossing this one out there, I feel a bit of love from Sony at offering us "early adopters," the owners of the PRS-500, the option to upgrade with discount or send it in (at their expense) and have firmware added to bring it up to Epub standards. smart move, Sony. It may well influence my next big electronics purchase!
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I haven't sorted out the ADE software for library books 'cos I recently "upgraded" to Vista (it doesn't feel like an improvement) and haven't bothered installing anything that will read DRM'd ebooks. Between fanfic, free promo ebooks and the occasional multiformat book from Fictionwise, I never run out of stuff to read.
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Which doesn't mean Macmillan is anything resembling "good guys" here.
All the major publishers have delusions about ebooks; they want to price them with hardcover or maybe trade paperback, and they want to believe every ebook sold is a lost print sale *and* a jump to the evil file-distributing darknets which will destroy all their profits, forever.
None of them want to realize, people are buying less books period, in part 'cos they're reading blogs, which are free (and entirely legal), and the publishers aren't just competing with other publishers and the television for buyers; they're competing with slashdot and digg and reddit and twitter.
They don't know how to think about that, so they ignore it. They know that ebooks are a tiny market niche, so they're thinking of them like special editions with embossed leather covers: we'll just charge double for it, and whoever's willing to pay for that is our nifty-special-item customers.
(I like Baen. A lot. I want to club all the other publishers over the head with Baen's successful ebook business model.)