NPR’s Terry Gross interviews Ken Auletta about the future of ebooks.
This transcript makes for interesting reading
but nothing those of us in the epub world haven’t already thought about and discussed.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=126196977
For me, probably the most significant segment of the interview is when Mr. Auletta discusses Amazon’s 80% market share and then goes on to talk about the arrangement publishing houses made with Steve Jobs before the release of the iPad, to allow them to set what’s called an agency model - essentially allowing them to set the price points - which are higher than Amazon’s. Here’s a quote from Mr. Auletta:
“Steve Jobs will go along with that for at least one year, and obviously there’s a question whether he will continue beyond a year at that pricing. But that pricing is going to be, instead of $9.99 as Amazon was doing, it’s going to range between 12 and $15, let’s say.
And what happened is that Amazon did not want to go along, but five of the six major publishers, who publish 60 percent of all the hardcover books, squeezed Amazon, and with the backing of Apple, and with the coming backing of Google Google said that they would go along with the so-called agency model as well Amazon was forced to surrender and agree to that as well.”
My opinion? Consumers of ebooks will be unwilling to pay that higher price. I suspect higher prices will encourage pirate sites and file sharing…not in anyone’s best interest. I also suspect the inflated prices will go by the wayside in a year or so.
***Interesting stuff: Rebecca over at her site, Dirty Sexy Books, responded to requests to follow up her posts regarding what authors do wrong on their websites by writing a funny, insightful post about what book bloggers do wrong on their websites! This makes for very entertaining reading! Rebecca and the hilarious ladies over at Smokin’ Hot Books have become my go-to sites when it comes to new books, old books and what’s going on around the blogosphere. Why? Because these women are funny, responsive and informative. They come across as regular human beings who love to read, and their sites are easy on the eyes.
http://smokinhotbooks.com/blog/
***The Romantic Times Convention starts tomorrow in Ohio. Quite a few authors I know will be there. Hopefully they will have loads of fun and if they have specific goals…success! I’ll be attending next year when the convention is in L.A. Waaaay closer than Ohio!
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April 28th, 2010 at 10:21 am
I agree that over-pricing ebooks will destroy their allure to consumers and encourage file-sharing which is E-Piracy.
What angers me is that Amazon, Kindle Store, Apple, Barnes & Noble etc.. are looking for ways to increase their profit YET refusing to invest in protecting the product they sell! How short sighted can you get? Put a lock for the front door of your store folks… We can’t prosecute individuals but large file-share sites who repeatedly get caught should lose their monetized status on the web. It would help discourage pirates from maintaining those sites.
April 28th, 2010 at 11:05 am
Kat - extremely short-sighted!!! ICAM!
April 28th, 2010 at 11:39 am
I listened to that too, and the part that enraged me was when he said that EPublishers do not worry about piracy the way that music execs did. He said that the danger for pirating with EBooks is just not an issue.
Riiiiight. I suppose to someone who isn’t losing thousands of dollars a month to theives wouldn’t see that there is a problem.
These so called experts just make my blood boil sometimes.
Thanks for the post!
XoXoXo
Dakota
April 28th, 2010 at 11:54 am
Dakota - I’m so glad someone else was paying attention. Didn’t it strike you that he was a day late and a dollar short? I kept thinking…like…where have you been, dude? Lots of disrespect for the epub world!
April 28th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
They are trying their best to make paper and ink books sell better in a more competitive environment. Pirates will be the big winners. But in another turnaround, maybe folks will figure it’s far better and cheaper to buy from the publisher’s website than to double the cost and buy from Amazon just to get the books in Kindle format. Amazon DOUBLES the price readers pay for books that the reader could get for half as much over at the pub’s website…then they only give us a percentage equal to one quarter of what we make from publisher website sales. We have to sell four times as many books to get the same amount we would get from publisher site royalties.
April 28th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Don’t you think that sharing our e-products with the large e-retailers like Amazon and accepting tiny royalties for the honor of doing business with them should come with some protections and advantages? Right now there is NO advantage for me to do business with Amazon or Kindle Store-in fact every sale through Amazon is a sale I wish came from my publisher…
I wish one of the so-called giants would see the writing on the wall and start punching back at pirates. The e-age can’t move to the next level until they do.
April 28th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
My feelings about Amazon are a little different than yours. I do all right with the pubs I’m with now and Amazon gets my name and my books out there. The prices for my books are good for the consumer, lower than what they pay on the publisher website. I still get a pretty good percentage too. The issue as I see it is that it is nearly impossible to police e-piracy, and it will continue to be difficult to enforce any rules and regulations until the government gets involved and that’s not always a good thing. This is the mixed blessing of the internet age.
The other issue is the big pubs. If they could turn back time, believe me, they would. The increasing popularity of epublishing and ebooks is killing their old model and until they can regroup and re-establish themselves in this new market and do the best they can to keep profit margins high, they will not make a major commitment to epublishing. Epublishing is the democratization of what has been a pretty closed publishing world. At least, that’s how I see it, and I, for one, like it!
April 29th, 2010 at 4:48 am
The big houses don’t seem to grasp that pricing e-books to be higher than paperbacks is dooming them to fail. The fact that this will encourage pirating though will be probably be the boot in the butt needed to make e-books more secure by eventually coding them to be readable only by the purchasers e-reader. Or at least this little author hopes so. I almost cried when I saw my very first book being offered on a pirate site 11 days after release. If I had a cannon, I’d sink their ships!
April 29th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Eve - I agree. The big houses are trying to stop the tide of change. It’s an impossible task.