This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column. I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that.
And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad…
“A victory for authors.”
That’s how some people are describing Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing of ebooks. They say it in the same tone as people describe more expensive milk as “a victory for farmers” or subsidies for domestic cars as “a victory for American auto workers”, which is to say the same tone as you might use to pity a cat with three legs.
Poor authors, after all, need all the help they can get. They work for years on their Great Novel, probably subsisting on stale cheese and rats’ milk as they do so, and what thanks do they get? A measly royalty, chipped away at by heavy discounting in book stores. Thank God then for Macmillan taking a stand against Amazon and its aggressive discounting. And thank Jesus for all of the other publishers bravely following them.
Oh please.
First a few facts, in the form of a disclosure statement. I am an author. Before that I was a publisher. Although my publisher is now Hachette, I’ve been published in the past by Macmillan, both in the UK and the US. Macmillan were a partner of the publishing house I co-founded, and were responsible for distributing all of our titles. Richard Charkin, the former CEO of Macmillan, was an advisor. I like Macmillan. I feel, then, somewhat qualified to call bullshit on the claim that this deal is good for anyone – including Macmillan and especially including authors.
Much like the monarchy, Macmillan started life in Britain even though it’s now controlled by Germans. Its British roots go to the very heart of their negotiations with Amazon. In America, books have always been available at a discount – with book stores relatively free to set prices as they wished. Of course, publishers still choose their wholesale price, but there’s nothing to stop, say, Borders from heavily discounting bestsellers to get people through the door. Publishers didn’t necessarily like this as it led to booksellers demanding more aggressive discounting (sometimes more than 60% off the cover price), but they didn’t have much of a choice but to accept. The fact is that publishers couldn’t justify opening up their own stores, so if they wanted readers to be able to actually read their books, they had to keep bookstores happy.
But that’s not how things used to work in the UK.
In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books would be sold at the price specified on the cover. If a bookseller offered so much as a penny discount, then the publisher would simply withdraw all of their books from that bookseller and encourage other publishers to do the same. The arrangement suited everyone; book shops were the only place to buy new books and the NBA meant they didn’t have to worry about rivals undercutting them; this particularly benefited independent bookshops. For their part, publishers knew exactly how much they’d be getting for each title and authors knew how much of that would form their royalty.
It took until the late 90s for the Restrictive Practices Court to declare that the Net Book Agreement was anti-competitive and should be scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Borders entered the UK market, hundreds of UK independent bookshops went bankrupt and publishers decided to change their contracts with authors. Now, instead of being based on the cover price of a book, the author’s royalty would be based on ‘net receipts’, which is to say the price that publishers actually received from bookshops.
Since 1997, that’s how things have stayed. Authors learned to adjust pretty quickly, especially as fewer than 20% of titles actually ever earn back their advance and start paying royalties. But publishers have remained annoyed. Deep discounting cuts directly into their profits. There was one area, though, where publishers could still make a killing on every sale: hardback books. The fact is that printing a hardback book, as opposed to a paperback, costs a matter of pennies more. But there is a perception amongst book buyers that they are far more expensive, a perception that it has been in no one’s interest to correct as it allows them to be sold for twice the price of paperbacks. Even with booksellers demanding deep discounts, the publishers still make a ton of profit on each hardback sale. By releasing the hardback book months before the paperback, publishers can subsidise a huge amount of their business from hardback sales, while booksellers can still discount highly to get people through the door.
And then along came the Kindle and everything went to hell.
Before e-readers, publishers didn’t care about ebooks. You could tell this by the fact that they gave authors really generous royalties on their electronic sales. It was an easy item to appear generous over – so they could fuck you on the paperback royalty. No one read books on their computer so it was no huge loss. For the same reason, publishers were happy to release ebooks at the same time as hardbacks – it wasn’t like the sales of the former were cannibalizing the latter.
But now, with ebook sales soaring, and with the iPad looking to make them soar even higher, publishers are panicking. Thanks in part to deep ebook discounting by Amazon, but also because the same people who can afford hardback books are the same people who can afford e-readers, people are starting to buy ebooks where they once bought hardbacks. The only cash-cow remaining in publishing is disappearing, like CD sales for music, and DVD sales for movies.
The publishers’ answer to this? A de facto return to the Net Book Agreement, for the whole world. Publishers don’t need booksellers as much as they used to. If an ebook isn’t available from one place – Amazon, say – it will be from somewhere that’s just a click away. Amazon on the other hand, can’t sell Kindles if a huge chunk of popular books aren’t available on it. Furthermore, thanks to the ease of distributing an ebook directly to the customer, there’s nothing stopping a publisher – or group of publishers – from creating their own store. Most sell ebooks directly online already. The balance of power has swung back to publishers, and they’re making the most of it, especially when then know they can play Amazon off against Apple.
For the first time in the UK since 1997, and ever in the US, publishers are able to set – and enforce- their own prices on ebooks. And they will; not to make a fair return on ebooks but rather to cripple their sales in order to protect early hardback book sales. They’ve admitted as much themselves, saying that prices will start high on hardback release, before dropping steadily over time.
The idea that this benefits anyone, least of all authors, is laughable. Every day, thousands more book lovers move to ebooks. These are people who devour books, and who are attracted by the convenience of getting new releases delivered instantly. Yes, there’s a chance that they’ll keep buying hardback books if ebooks go up in price. But now they’ve already invested in ereaders so there’s even more of a chance that they’ll simply turn to piracy to get their fix. It’s like if record labels had tried to encourage people to keep buying CDs by raising the price of mp3 downloads (or slapping restrictive DRM on them). All that would likely have done is drive even more people to Limewire.
Piracy isn’t an industry-killing problem for publishers yet, and if they can keep prices low enough and delivery mechanisms convenient enough, it could even stay that way. Macmillan’s attempt to bring back the NBA though, while it might result in a few more hardback sales in the short term, can only end in disaster for everyone concerned.
As an author, I don’t see a pricing strategy that encourages piracy as a victory. I see it as a backwards-looking quick fix that will do far more long-term harm than short-term good.
Youa culpa, Macmillan.
Anyone would have thought that after the music industries disastrous handling of the switch to digital no other industry could make the same mistakes. Yet here we are with book publishers trying to resist the move to digital whilst movie and games publishers could hardly be described as embracing it.
The move to digital everything has been going on for the last decade and any CEO that does anything other than adapt to it is just driving the company down the toilet.
I think its just plain hard for many of these industries to figure out how to use the tech for their own good WHILE AT THE SAME TIME keep their current business structure and dynamic.
That is actually the problem. They want their cake and to also eat it too. Changing how they do business is a very difficult item to digest ESPECIALLY since most of the top brass probably has no connection to technology and its uses in everyday life. Hollywood, it would seem, has learned the best out of all of them but even they seem to not get it.
Pricing structures, business structures, distribution channels, profit calculations and dependability and so forth all have one thing in common; once set up no one wants to change it.
So why would the publishing industry be any different? Go to any school and the price for “hardcover” text books are 100 to 200+ taking advatage of the inelastic properties of school systems need for books… but at some point it won’t be like that… will they have moved on or will they just go to washington DC and ask the government to enforce purchase of their books?
All businesses go through this, especially mature ones. its hard to change your business structure and profit structure because when you do things get shaky. So they do stuff like what was written above.
ok, this is ironic…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/06/the-war-on-interruptions-an-excerpt-from-switch-how-to-change-things-when-change-is-hard/
Missed that TechCrunch post lol
A book can fit on a floppy, and is rather small compared to music. Once eBooks are popular, the question will be, is there an analog copy. Publishers will begin their war on the customer…
I believe that the leverage applied to the publishers will lead to their ultimate downfall. As Carr asked in the Rose roundtable, doesn’t that hand the customer over to Apple?
oh wait…that might mean that we will start hearing from publishing company lawyers that we no longer ‘own’ the book but rather merely license it as has been argued by software and cinema companies.
In the days of eBooks, what value do the publishers add? For physical books, they provide financing for book inventory and distribution. From what I’ve read, unless you are an “A list” author, you are pretty much expected to do your own book promotion.
I see this move as more impetus to just skip the publisher and distribute your eBook yourself….
Sadly, people don;t buy books- or anything- on merit. They buy on social cues, like what their friends are reading, what Oprah says, and what’s on the official bestseller lists. Only publishers have the marketing reach and budgets to create buzz, word-of-mouth and credibility for new books. Without them, only a very lucky few writers would make it big, as a result of viral marketing- which is like winning the lottery.
It’s a truism in marketing: you can eliminate the middle-man, but you can;t eliminate his functions.
Good points. I don’t think Amazon has done a good job conveying its viewpoint; many people think Amazon is trying to dictate the price publishers receive for their books, not the price Amazon charges.
But Amazon’s argument — and the analogy to discounting in physical bookstores — would be stronger if it didn’t sell in an exclusive, proprietary format. The publishers are worried that, once the shift to e-readers is complete, Amazon will no longer be willing to sell e-books at a loss — so that, in the long run, Amazon will sell both e-readers and e-books at a profit, leaving publishers to absorb the high fixed costs of bringing out titles in exchange for a lower overall return than they currently receive.
While I share your conclusions, I think your argument has a flaw. It is not necessarily Macmillan who wants to raise pricing but Apple who let them. If Apple would have maintained the $9.99 price, the story would go a very different route. Apple – most likely – thought that there is more value and consumers are willing to pay $14.99. Which is probably right.
not at all…is just a punch against Amazon to damage their business
if you look back, Apple also heavily demanded a 99 Cent price cut per song to soar the iPods sales
By your failed logic any price over the marginal cost of replication is “encouraging piracy.”
Piracy is just theft of intellectual property.
Does having a nice car encourage auto theft?
Or is it just theft of something nice? The solution you advocate is like saying everyone should drive a junker car.
Perhaps if you had some sort of Star Trek replicator technology you could create a copy of your friend’s car and not pay a dealership.
That would be more accurate.
@Anthony- No, it wouldn’t be more accurate. We are talking about piracy, which is when one business copies another’s IP and sells that product. Making something for yourself, which is what you are talking about, is different.
More specifically the point is about whether charging for anything over the marginal cost of creating it is a bad pricing strategy, which is what the author is advocating. Which is essentially the idea that profit is bad, or that the author of this article, not person who OWNS the property, knows what the “right” price is supposed to be.
It seems more accurate to me. By reducing the cost of manufacture to zero, the remaining value is intellectual property. What is that worth? Is it arbitrary or set?
@michael : “We are talking about piracy, which is when one business copies another’s IP and sells that product”
So what is it when someone puts it on P2P or Newsgroup for everyone to download it for free ?
You are probably talking about couterfeit items.
“Does having a nice car encourage auto theft?”
It encourage other to “steal” the design (the IP in your example).
Just how many iPhone cloned are their? how many iPad clones are coming on the market?
No, that part of the argument has nothing to do with marginal cost. It has to do with the total cost, including various intangibles, of buying versus pirating. The intangibles are a very big part of it, but if the price is too high to buy, for some demographic, then you may lose a lot of them to piracy.
I won’t pretend to know what the right price is, though.
“Piracy is just theft of intellectual property.”
Nobody cares.
Well, more accurately, nobody except rightsholders care.
That is the sleeper story here… even the so-called “publisher” is not needed. Authors can self-publish. So why bother with any middlemen?
Because authors generally are clueless about the need to market or how to do it, and that everything costs money. And even when the cost to distribute through the Internet approaches zero, there is still the need to sort through the avalanche of things being pushed out. 10,000+ books on business published in US each year. How could you even know where to start to find what you should read? Friends, word of mouth, social networking, search engines, free web sites that highlight the best books? Those are all middlemen. There will always be middlemen.
Yes, but the people in say music who discern music and publicize it have become the ones who lost their jobs or businesses. My business is in a building with that houses what used to be the largest music marketer. He went from 40 to 4 after the latest payola lawsuits.
The successful middlemen that remain, control the media as opposed to the content.
As someone who’s in publishing, I can speak to another major difference between self-publishing a book and recording your own music other than the challenges of marketing and distributing the final product.
In music, people who write the songs and play the instruments tend to have a very good understanding of what it takes to make the music sound good on the mixing board (a generalization, sure, but not an entirely inaccurate one). On the other hand, I’ve encountered very few writers who have a firm grasp of proper grammar, punctuation, pacing, and story structure (even experienced authors). Without the editor, copyeditor and proofreader, even our favorite authors would rarely produce readable prose.
The publisher is much more than a middle man who distributes a product. The fact of the matter is that a vast majority of working authors could not craft a good book without a lot of help, much less first-time or inexperienced authors. It’s true that this expertise can be paid for on a freelance basis, but very few authors can afford this luxury.
By the way, I happen to agree with much of what the author says above. The notion that he’s suggesting a retail price more than a few cents over the cost of production is the de facto cause piracy is absurd and is not borne out of a careful reading of the article above.
The one matter I think he is off about is his argument that the cost of a product is the only reason it’s pirated. It’s certainly a factor in some piracy. But ultimately, a product simply has to exist and be proven popular to be pirated. It doesn’t matter how cheap the original version is, if a pirated version can be sold for just a little bit cheaper, that’s all the reason the less-than-honest need to do it.
We need to get rid of the big evil book publishers as quickly as possible.
Google Books needs to happen now and Governments need to enforce global licences for the free unlimited access for everyone to all books for $3 permonth paid through taxes. This will be the extermination of publishers.
Add $2 per month for journalists/bloggers, $5 per month for all TV/video/movies.
For $10 per month we should be able to legally pirate anything we want and content creators will make more money thus create better content because of it.
Before someone tells me redistribution of a global culture tax would not be possible:
- It is possible. Google Analytics, server stats, Last.fm type global multimedia scrobbler installed voluntarily even only at 10% of the global audience would give very accurate statistics.
- Advance payments for content creators can be managed automatically based on the creators popularity of previous works and based on support by the people for future projects (fan clubs, votes)
- $10 per person per month in average global content tax means about $10 Billion per month for USA + Europe + few other rich countries. Means $120 Billion per year. Don’t tell me that cannot sponsor huge amounts of content creators in all fields of content creation. In fact, if you add all the revenues up of all current content creators, $120 Billion per year means a lot more money for content creators. And if $120 Billion per year is not enough for all content creation, then let’s pay $20 in average per month, or even $40 in average per month, or whatever will be required to pay for all content creators. (make sure you eliminate all moneys that go in the pocket of evil golf playing publishers/tv moguls/movie studio execs/newspaper owners/wall street investors and other people who have absolutely no reason to exist when content creators can publish content directly on the Internet)
What should qualify a content creator is quite simply anyone publishing content on the web.
You upload an original video to Youtube and get a lot of views? The global culture tax should pay you accordingly based on the global statistics of all original contents on the whole web.
This way content creators don’t have to rely only on Youtube overlay advertising and stuff like that.
What this might mean, I would estimate, possibly as much as about $20 CPM per 1000 views in additional income. I mean calculate it like this:
- How many video views on Youtube do average people do per month? Average people probably don’t view more than 100 videos on Youtube per month.
- How much other content “consumption” do average people likely do per month? I’d say probably read 100 articles/blog posts in average, read 1 book per month in average, watch 5 movies/month in average and watch 20 hours of TV/video in average (which eventually totally includes Youtube style contents when those are easy to watch on the TV).
- How much CPM might the global content tax pay for blog post unique views? Probably a lot less than for video, but I guess $5 CPM per 1000 visitors or something like that is likely.
Funnily, even people that post content in forums could make money based on popularity and usability of their contributions.
No government would ever do that. It makes too much sense.
I’m a big fan of this capitulation by Amazon. I think it brings around the downfall of publishers far more quickly and I view that as a good thing. We already saw how this move exacerbated the decline of CDs. Pyrrhic victory anyone?
Greed, greed, greed!!! With all the money they are saving printing books and distribution you would think they would lower the book prices but they still want to make the same. The industry is saving a bundle but they still want to price their books the same as before. I think their fate will be the same as the music industry. Either you cater to our needs of find some other way to make money. We users have the final word on this. As electronic devices abound, the industry has to understand that we expect value for our buck. Adapt or perish!!
Publishers are 85-90% about distribution. Do the math on their value and revenue generating needs to get back to parity.
Tis going to be ugly soon!
Thanks for taking the time to write the article. Really eye opening.
But I guess only time will tell on how this game will end…
“an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books would be sold at the price specified on the cover”
And I thought France was the only country in the world crazy enough to do this!
Thank you, and good luck to finish your book.
I agree with the author about driving people to piracy. The publishers and authors need to realize things are changing. If they keep the price of downloads down, I think most of the reading public will pay for their books. If they raise the price or with hold release, they are going to alienate their customer base. Especially with so many people already buying a kindle and expecting $ 9.99 books.
Just my opinion
@James, you are so right. Why don’t you publish a list of everything you own with a price that you would sell it for, and if we don’t like the price, we could just take it from you?
@michael, as soon as you publish a list of all the items you bought from manufacturers who forbid you to resell those goods for less than you paid.
Just rambling and babbling…lol
An awesome and beautifully written article as always! Paul Carr, you rock \o/
nice URL!
Seconded!
Since we all know some idiot is gonna ask like every other week.
NSFW IS THE NAME OF HIS COLUMN.
There, now at least we shouldn’t have that in the thread.
When an author chooses a name for his column, he has just created his first brand.
It tells prospective readers the type of material they are likely to encounter in the authors article. And NSFW hints at swearing, lewdness and other unsavory politically incorrect nonsense that we all love so much.
If readers are questioning the NSFW statement in the column, to such an extent that a reader feels a need to pre-emp the weekly question mark, perhaps its time to change the slogan to YWBBS-G(You will be bored shitless-guaranteed)
Congratulations,
You’ve managed to embarrass yourself even more then the folks who ask why it’s NSFW.
I suggest not being so anal about someone else’s “brand” (lol) that you way overanalyze it only to end it all with something as terrrible as YWBBS-g.
Especially since I’m pretty sure Paul Carr would be quite proud of being called the things you “hinted at”.
His posts are the best ones on this site.
lol. it’s in his url. it’s nice fuck off slap to the head message.
The real problem with all of these schemes is copyright. Copyright has always been used as a form of censorship and control… see here for a history: http://questioncopyright.org/promise
By and large, right. But the albatross around authors’ and readers’ neck that are the copyright laws, as executed and safeguarded by the publishers, are just one side of the equation. The other is the extent of social disruption that would result were current book publishing status-quo to be abandonned or even modified much. After all, publishing houses are but frontmen of a vast rights-acquisition, production, distribution and promotion food chain. And that’s some snacking, to stay with the metaphor!
)
Being one of the pillars of the society, the book industry can therefore not be expected to “wither away,” much less overnight, as seem to be the wishful thinking of not inconsiderable segments of the reading polity. Nor are there any clear-cut, speedy solutions in sight. At best (from the consummers’ point of view) book publishers will realize that if any serious disrupting and cannibalizing of their current practices is to happen, they had better be doing it themselves.
Ie. they need to come up with some scalable new economic models of how books –whether all-electronic; substrate-based; or hybrid– be conveyed from authors to readers (with the middlemen in the, er, middle) still at a profit. Models that function in times of free content overflow, which is practically upon us already. I suspect that, when automatic tools for TURNKEY eBook production appear [so far the process is anything but], and the market ends up being flooded with largely-unreadable, impossible to overview matter, the reading public will once again start appreciating the cumulative value of having plenty of book-publishing thresholds in place: because when anything can (and does end up) being published, yet nobody makes any money out of it, then nothing of that is worth reading.
That said, because of the book-business upheaval to come, in the short-to-intermediate run (present-to-2025 perhaps?) hardcover books risk becoming rare/ luxury/ collectible/ heirloom items. So hold onto your physical libraries even while you upload the entire home-produced eBook editions of “Collected Family Wisdoms and Season Trivia” to the Gutenberg archive.
important difference between the old NBA and the current 70/30 agency model that Apple (and I guess now Amazon) are using for ebooks: each publisher independently sets pricing with Apple and Amazon. sure the potential for collusive pricing parity is strong, but this time there is no formal agreement to collude. which may mean that pricing for all ebooks across all publishers may not end up similarly over-priced as suggested. (unlikely, I know.)
Not quite like music. Record companies were forcing users to pay over $10 for an album just to get one or two good songs they liked. Hence pirating to get the one song you want, or legally turning to iTunes to get it for a dollar. Books, well 99% of them, are a single work. Consumers either get the value they want at the available price, or they pass.
Not trying to say anything about Paul’s main point re: how selling prices are set, and what is fair/competitive. However I don’t think the consumer issues re: need for piracy are the same as with record companies product & pricing before Napster.
Brilliant article. No one else is really looking at the bigger picture of Macmillan’s win
I recently received the Kindle as a present and was instantly in love with the convenience. As a road warrior, it is the perfect way to have plenty of reading material on long flights without killing my laptop battery.
My only issue with Amazon is the pricing. eBooks should be discounted off of the current average price in the bookstore. $9.99 – $14.99 if the book is only available on hardcover, fine. But if it is out on paperback for $7.99 then seeing on the Amazon site for $9.99 just rubs me wrong, making me less likely to just go for an impulse buy.
Publishers and authors could be making more if they allowed the free market to set the price.
Macmillan, and all those above arguing about “piracy is piracy” and theft of IP, don’t get it. Read Starfish and the Spider where the authors lay out the horrendous mistakes made by the music industry. Read World Wide Rave, where David Meerman Scott explains how you achieve success by losing control of your message. Check out the Baen Books free e-library and the philosophy behind it. Baen has been able to correlate increased sales to giving away ebooks for free.
Paul – I didn’t see a way to contact you privately. I noted a typo in the above post. “especially when then know they can play Amazon off against Apple” where “when then” should be “when they”
Nice bit of history, and nice summary of how the economics of retailing works. Well done. Now get back to finishing that book!
Paul, your first two paragraphs were completely redundant. But I suppose you couldn’t resist writing about yourself a little bit, before tackling the issue at hand, which is ebooks.
Your monumental egoism aside, I agree with your point that this is merely a stratagem to protect a threatened cash cow (hardbacks) by making the alternative (ebooks) too expensive.
However, this can only work if the major publishers collude on prices (an informal version of the NBA). And they seem to be doing so: it’s unsurprising that once Macmillan won the right to raise ebook prices, everyone else follows suit. Becaue they are an oligopoly, they can keep prices artificially high with no fear of competitors driving prices downwards.
And this is obviously exploitative pricing. The marginal cost of an ebook is close to zero. In a pure ebook world, there would be no logistics, printing, inventory or distribution costs. The full cost of publishing a book will comprise typing one copy and marketing it.
As such, these guys can definitely afford to sell ebooks at a much lower price and still make very handsome returns on capital if they eliminated the costly legacy infrastructure of dead wood, pulping plants, big vats of ink, delivery trucks and printing presses. Ironically, ebooks could be as profitable as hardbacks if these guys were willing to completely transform their operations to become purely digital.
Of course, they need to be pushed to do this. Maybe the catalysts will be independent, digital-only publishers. Maybe one member of the oligopoly will see the chance to gain first-mover advantage by shedding its brick-and-mortar operations. Maybe regulators will bust the price-fixing cartel. Maybe pirates will do them in. Or maybe consumers will start asking why ebooks- which are just bits and bytes- should cost as much as something printed on paper.
Time will tell.
Seems to me that in the progression of this discussion the answer is for the authors to screw the ebook sellers, all of the rest of the middle people and the publishers and sell their works on the WEB at their price.
I don’t want to defend the increased prices that the new Macmillan deal will result in, but Amazon’s own anticompetitive pricing behavior should not be forgotten, either.
Amazon was (and still is) willing to lose as much as $5 on every book it sold so that the Kindle would have cheaper titles than any of its competitors. So Amazon subsidized the sale of titles in order to make give the Kindle the kind of domination in the eReader game that Apple has in the mp3 player game. Selling below cost in order to drive competitors out of the business is a classic anticompetitive move. Once the Kindle achieved critical mass and all other competitors were either driven out or rendered irrelevant to consumers, Amazon would have been free to raise prices to whatever it wanted to (and negotiate very good contracts with publishers, too).
I don’t mean to say that Macmillan was being altruistic or farsighted with its demands, but let’s not make Amazon out to be some benevolent white knight, either.
If the publishers band together on something like this, isn’t it price fixing and therefore illegal? Or is the difference here that one publisher at a time is going to go after Amazon and company, so it’s not fixing until they all do it?
Thanks for writing this. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out compared to the music and film industry. The book publishers have the benefit of hindsight and being able to learn from others’ mistakes. Hopefully they do that.
what a coincidence that all this went down exactly at the same time as the iPad press launch – the device isn’t even on the market yet.
you don’t suppose Jobs had anything to do with Macmillans timing do you ??? oh of course not, he wouldn’t do that – heh heh heh – would he?
you bet – whether we ever find out the truth about this, you can be sure some kind of “inspirational” ideas flowed between Jobs & Macmillan.
it seems quite obvious – Jobs thinks, “how can I hurt or kill the Kindle?”
we’ll take their advantage away by making it a level playing field for ebooks. then it’s head to head for the devices, and Jobs thinks if all things were equal we’d buy an Ipad over a Kindle. with apple’s brand identity and legions of blind followers he may be right.
it is all about world domination, isn’t it ???
wonder what nsfw word will be injected in the slug next week