Amazon Pulls Thousands of E-Books in Dispute
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
That button is on every title that's not available on Kindle, for whatever reason, and has been for ages. As you say, pretty poor reporting.
It's a combination of the two. For tech subjects at least, the Kindle pays for itself within 3 or 4 ebook purchases, but of course the math works out that way because the Kindle itself is cheap.
I finally bought a Kindle (just got it yesterday), and you know what drove me - a dead trees lover - to buy one? The publishing lead times. In the HN thread re Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example, I asked when the print edition would be available, and Michael Hartl said it would take about six months. A six month lead time after the ebook is released! That's a long time in the evolving world of Ruby.
I had the same thought, and guessed I.P.G (or their allies in the publishing industry). This is not a great feat of analysis, though: there are two parties in the dispute, and _Amazon_ certainly didn't buy this coverage. One hopes not, anyway, for their sake.
followed by
Mr. Suchomel said the publishers were solidly behind I.P.G. “They were almost unanimously positive, saying, ‘Don’t change your terms,’ ” he said.
First, if the publishers don't care, or if they would simply prefer not to concede to Amazon, is this news?
Second, maybe I'm too young and too inclined to believe that technology may cure all ills, or this is just my ignorance of the actual requirements of the bookselling industry showing, but to me that "unsustainable" line reeks of "we're not willing to optimize our processes, customers be damned." If I'm not mistaken Amazon has singlehandedly propped up this industry in the last decade, so unsustainable for whom? If the answer to that question is three tiers of middlemen who are unwilling to take a hit on their profit margins due to some combination of habit, entitlement, and spite, why should authors or readers give a shit?
Unless it's the case that it actually costs Amazon money to offer books at the prices that IPG wants, this is a pure power/spite/warning play. And I very much doubt that it costs them money.
Only something that is able to be read on any platform, in any of hundreds of apps will it be viable competition at this point.
It would genuinely be refreshing to see some sort of innovation come out of the old-media content creation industries for once.
Pakt http://www.packtpub.com/ and O'Reilly http://oreilly.com/ do exactly that. Pakt's pdfs have your name and address printed on each page.
Also, the simple idea of putting your name and address on each page is pretty good low-tech copy deterrence, IMHO. I didn't know about that – thanks for the insight.
Though
Relatedly, it's about simply making people choose one of three options (at the moment): 1) Don't copy it 2)Be okay with everyone knowing your name – i.e.: take a stand and flaunt your disagreement with copyright law or 3) Do a lot of manual work to scrub your name off (even harder if they're PW locked).
Regardless, I like it because it's simple and it embraces the new realities (and abilities) of digital distribution. They could never do that with mass-market books 10 years ago, but now, it's trivial to do with on demand pdfs.
And there's the problem. You shouldn't need but one device to read any ebook, from any source.
(Think about the authors here. Amazon takes 30% of the money that goes to the distributor. The distributor takes 30% or more of that money. The publisher takes 30% or more of that money. And finally, a few cents are left over for the guy who wrote the book. How sorry I feel for IPG...)
Actually all middle-men!
Similarly, Apple, Dell and Lenovo can't legally form an agreement between themselves to double the price of all computers.