Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
reviews.cnet.com
reviews.cnet.com
A similar situation to this frequently arises when big games are released on Steam. Amazon then gets flooded by 1* reviews from people who can't get Steam to work properly on release day or something.
I also find the opposite very annoying: when fans rate something as 5* before it's even released.
I've received early copies of books with the hope that I would review it early.
But I don't often look at Amazon reviews so I don't know if this would fully account for what you're talking about.
People here aren't going to like to hear that, and I understand, but dumping stuff on other people's property to make a point isn't less destructive than dumping stuff for no reason at all; it's just destructiveness in the ostensible service of another cause.
Ebooks started as a wholesale pricing model. The publishers would sell them to the likes of Amazon at some fixed price. Amazon would then set their own price. This is very similar to the brick-and-mortar pricing model. In some cases Amazon would sell those books at a loss in an effort to grow the Kindle platform.
Publishers didn't like this system because they saw cheap prices as devaluing their content. Publishers are also caught in a backwards mindset where they think if the physical book costs $25 then the ebook should cost $25 even though the latter has no printing or distribution costs.
What's more, even if those costs were the same, ebooks should still cost less because there is no resale market, a fact that digital content publishers seem to ignore.
But Apple's iBooks came along and not only gave the publishers what they want, they required it. And that is the agency model, which allows the publishers to set the price, a move I argue is anticompetitive.
This put Amazon under pressure and the publishers got their way so the pricing is now largely out of Amazon's hands (sadly).
Review bombing is an interesting tactic, one I actually support if done for the right reasons. It was done on the PC game Spore for its ridiculous DRM (initially a limit of 2 (?) activations before EA relented).
What publishers--and in fact all digital content producers--are doing with pricing and DRM is beyond a joke. Sadly the Obama administration (the DoJ in particular) is filling with ex-RIAA lawyers so you know which way the wind is blowing there.
At the same time we have the RIAA/MPAA behind closed doors (with the government as willing accomplices) trying to equate downloading a song with terrorism (eg ACTA) in terms of enforcement priorities.
And, like it or not, "bombing" review sites isn't a market action. The market works by price discovery, not application of force.
Sure they do. Markets need informed buyers to function well.
You don't like the word "coercion" or "force" because you think stuffing review sites with non-good-faith-reviews it harmless, even though it contravenes the expectation that a reviewer represents a single entity who has actually attempted to consume the book. But the same logic was used during the Wikileaks Visa DDoS flood. You can choose to believe that DDoS attacks are legitimate, too. But you cannot with a straight face say that those attacks are the market at work.
I don't agree the the reviews are not "in good faith". It is wrong to write a review of a $100 Monster cable pointing out that no matter how well it works, it's a ripoff when a $10 cable is functionally identical? This is the same idea: the reviewers are expressing their opinion about whether the product is worth the asking price. Their criteria for evaluation is different from yours; that doesn't make it vandalism or coercion or a DDOS.
Dissemination of information, which can lead to people making different decisions. For example, a would-be purchaser may feel a price is a bit steep but would have bought the book anyway, but after reading the reviews decides not to in solidarity with the other reviewers.
Or an author might get feedback that their fans aren't happy with the pricisng structure, and may take their publisher to task because of it.
A market is essentially a distributed information processing mechanism. Seen in this light, information transfers that are not buying/selling can be seen as part of the market. For example, haggling has always been part of market behaviour.
The clear intent of the reviews is to hold the publisher hostage; nobody gets to conveniently read good-faith reviews until the nerds are satisfied.
If a review has zero information, then I agree with you that it is absolutely worthless and should be removed. However, if a review clearly states why it is scored the way it is, then it doesn't matter if it is purely about the content of a book or not. I have seen plenty of reviews which indicated shoddy binding... would you say these are worthless as well?
What am I missing about this comment? I am asking seriously: 6 people voted it up, and my read is that it's content-free. I'm willing to believe I'm simply wrong about it and I missed a subtlety, but I'd sure like to know what it is.
I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collusion isn't influencing ebook prices?
I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited.
You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publisher-approved books.
I do not agree; further, I think it's impossible to hold your viewpoint in 2011 and at the same time say you believe in markets.
But the now great great grandparent's point about collusion interfering with fair market value was valid and becomes more true the smaller the number of major players there are in a market. The collusion doesn't even have to be explicit. Cutting prices hurts everyone in the market if everyone does it. My reference to Jabba the Hut fiction was hyperbolic, but I do think the smaller players (and thus typically the ones with lower quality) tend to be the ones that don't join in on the collusion.
I certainly don't believe in the infallibility of markets. I don't spend too much thinking about economics, but one thought I've had is that we should tax collusion -- make companies pay a tax proportional to, say, the logarithm of their number of employees / worth, and otherwise keep things pretty laissez-faire (with regulation where needed).
If you want to say that a price a product is sold at is dictated soley by what the market can bear, then I don't see why it isn't acceptable to say that vandalising review sites is (one of )the market's way of responding to the pricing.
Edit : (When I say "I don't see why...", I'm geniunely curious )
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2011/01/16/why-do-ebooks-cos...
Three of the elephants in the room are:
* That the $9.99 price point comes in a package deal that includes promotional advantages authors want
* That the $9.99 price point is calculated by publishers to maximize return on the ebook product offering, not to maximize the number of people who buy the ebook (but this is obviously how market pricing is supposed to work)
* That the $9.99 price point comes with access to the publisher's brick and mortar distribution system, which is much more powerful than the indie distribution system (but is also dying).
It's an interesting dog fight, if you don't have a dog in it. As an author, though, it looks mighty risky.
would you care to expand on this? I am not sure I understand what you mean by this, nor why.
The $5 difference is causing quite a stir which I am sure is not worth it in the long run.
Valuing a book by it's physical properties is a practice that's gone on for far too long. Lots of technical books are full of "padding" and duplication because no-one will buy a 50 page book which concisely provides the useful information for $10-$20. It waste a huge amount of time both of the author and the readers.
1. Modern Algebra by John R. Durbin
2. Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser
3. Machine Learning - An Algorithmic Perspective by Stephen Marsland (not quite on the same level as the above two, but still pretty solid)
I think Tanenbaum's Operating System and Appel's Compilers books both go in this category too, they're big but not compared to their subject matter. But, I've seen enough people disappointed in both to think this is more my personal opinion at play.
I think if we are talking about entertainment books (novels and such), there simply is too much competition. At the end of the day, a lot of those entertainment books could be exchanged for another entertainment book. I suppose for similar reasons cinema tickets tend to not vary too much with the content of the movie?
A few years ago Stelios of EasyJet fame tried to start a cinema chain which offered dynamic pricing, Warner Bros, Disney, and 20th Century Fox all refused to licence any of their movies to him which more or less killed his business.
Until you find those authors you adore to that degree, however, yes books are totally interchangeable after a certain quality threshold is passed.
On the flip side, the convenience of ebooks helps to defray some of these obvious cons.
It doesn't when an ebook is priced higher than paper editions with the same content. I do agree on the padding, though.
If you don't believe this, absent a conspiracy theory about publishing†, you don't believe in markets.
† For instance, that it's impossible to publish without a publisher, which seems objectively false in 2011.
If the parent poster is correct then we'll see a price correction towards a lower price. We'll also see a more active black market appear as has happened in the world of music if the price doesn't drop.
The 9.99 price is likely low enough to discourage most market participants from piracy but if it goes much higher then who knows. To suggest that the state of the market as we see it now is the optimal one isn't correct since the free market should always be fluctuating as things change in the world.
That said if the price was really too high then no one would buy ebooks and everyone would have fixed that by now or decided to abandon the idea for the time being.
If your logic held, every paper book would cost the same amount; _The Very Hungry Caterpiller_ would cost within pennies of the same amount as Volume 1 of _The Art Of Computer Programming_. After all, you're not paying for the paper. Judging from the amount of junk mail in my mailbox every morning, paper is pretty cheap.
Clearly it is also the case that _The Art Of Computer Programming_ as an ebook has exactly the same scarcity as _Twilight: New Moon_'s ebook; according to your logic, they must also cost the same.
If you're a parent you know that the Very Hungry Caterpiller uses different paper and different production techniques (holes in the pages, thicker paper) which while raising the cost is offset by the demand for it being much greater than TAOCP. TAOCP costs more due to a smaller demand and the fact that substitutes don't really exist. VHC has tons of substitutes.
I mean to say that ebooks' lack of scarcity seems to trigger consumer expectations about pricing and what they are willing to pay. This has implications for the demand curve. I wouldn't suggest that the ebooks should all cost the same but that their cost to produce additional units is zero. If a paperback book experiences a massive spike in demand that's protracted and extreme the costs of books to consumers would rise or a shortage would develop. There is no chance of an ebook shortage apart from amazon.com going down.
If someone found something is poor value for money I'd rather know it before I buy. That kind of reviews saved me from a few bad purchases already.
I do agree there must be some part of "activist reviews" there too, not that they are worth the trouble of weeding them out.
A 1-star review saying it's completely overpriced, while not perfect, is still better than reviews I see in the app store like "Amazing app, love it! 1/5" or "Pretty cool app, but it crashes on load and I can't use it, 4/5" (and those are the intelligible ones).
If I had to guess, most people only click on items with high numbers of reviews, read the "top 3 most useful," and then make their purchase decision from those, rather than the long tail of rants from either the easily-bribed or disillusioned masses. These voters may inadvertently be steering people to the Kindle version by inflating the number of reviews associated with it over the hardcover.
I'm not arguing this is rational, just something I noticed myself doing - if others are the same, I can see a feedback loop where more reviews lead to more purchases.
This is especially apparent in certain categories, like Blu-rays, where people will arbitrarily use the star ratings to review either the content of the movie, the tech specs of the film print, the transfer from original stock to Blu-ray, the number of extras available, and so forth. It's gotten to the point where a star-based review of a movie, at a glance, is essentially meaningless. (Conversely, at least Netflix removes some of this problem due to its contextual purity).
The same thing applies, albeit to a different and lesser degree, with books. People use star ratings as referendums on the publisher, the author, the price, the cover design, the time of day, the weather, how many people showed up to their party last weekend, etc. There is no consistency in measurement. That's the nature of UGC, I suppose, for better or for worse.
I also seem to recall reading elsewhere that authors get a much bigger cut of hardback sales than they do of mass market paperback sales. Perhaps this should be advertised more prominently?
The only problem I see for publishers is they currently enjoy flexibility in their hardcover-to-paperback window. If a book is a blockbuster, I'm sure they extend the window. I suppose they could alter the delivery window on the cheap price, for customers that had not yet locked in the original delivery window and price.
As far as the author's cut, it is time for authors to negotiate different contracts. In 5 years, perhaps less, their hardback bonus is going to be meaningless.
It seems the sellers want to have their cake and eat it, too. You sell an e-Book for more than the hardcover -- be prepared for people to lower the value they assign to the product that you are selling at your price.
Otherwise, just relabel your review section to "Whore for us".
(A bit strong, admittedly, but this is starting to stink of hypocrisy. Pooor Amazon! /sarcasm)
EDIT:
At the same time, people should learn that the physical costs of a physical book are actually a fairly small component of it's overall cost. IIRC, often a dollar or two (US). Amazon et al. discounts on physical books often represent in good part the lack of retail overhead.
If you want bookstores, you need to patronize them. And decide that you find enough value to pay the additional expense that keeps them in business.
When a staff member helps you, directly or by stocking/shelving an item you otherwise would not have found, realize this and make a decision to "pay the freight".
Ebook pricing is unfortunate, and a lot of that has more to do with the publishers than with the authors or with Amazon/B&N.
The Fifth Witness, mentioned in the CNET article, currently has an average rating of 1.7 out of 5:
http://booklends.com/books/4d959054461b264b37025bd3
It is not lendable, unfortunately. Again, blame Little, Brown, & Co for that. I think it would be in their best interests to allow their books to be lent to others. While I have no data (yet) to back this up, I believe that people who borrow a book that they enjoy are likely to buy more books from the same author.
At the worst case they'll just have to change. Maybe they'll become cafes where you can borrow a kindle at the counter for browsing the selection.
Or they'll become like lists on Facebook.