A dark day for the future of books | Hacker News Reader

A dark day for the future of books

edition.cnn.com

16 pointsColinWright24 comments

I will never buy an eBook when I can get an actual used copy of the same book in mid to great condition for a tenth or a twentieth of the price of the eBook, both from Amazon. eReaders may have gained acceptance (I have a Kindle and a Sony eReader) but they're not "better" than real books, at least, certainly not better enough to justify paying fixed prices w/ no opportunity for second hand sale (esp. for non-reference materials).

With almost any popular, still-under-copyright book, this is what the pricing looks like on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Sorcerers-Stone-Book/dp/0...

Paperback: 8.79 dollars. Kindle: 7.99 dollars. Used: 1 cent. Used via Amazon Prime: 3.98

To save NINETY CENTS you get an arguably inferior copy that you cannot resell, pass on, share, touch, or truly experience. No, thank you. And don't forget that your Kindle cost a hundred dollars - you'll need to buy a hundred and eleven such books before you're actually "saving" money.

Also a physical book can be lent and resold. They are pulling a fast one with digital content licensing. Everybody talks about price while there are more significant long term issues.

To each their own I guess. Personally I love how awesome it is that I can have one book in many places. I can read from my laptop at work, on my phone on the go, and from my tablet at home. Each automatically syncs to the last read page and my notes/highlights move between them. Mind you I don't actually ever USE notes or highlights, but it's pretty cool that that option is there. Sure I like to hold a book in my hands, but the convenience of an ebook is really hard to beat.

Plus if I have a moment to read and I want a new book, I don't need to wait 3-5 days for shipping, I can download it instantly. If I'm ever out of the country (as I am now for half a year) I can still get any book delivered to me instantly. For me that's just a convenience, however it's critical for areas that normally have to wait 15-20 days for shipping from a place like Amazon.

EDIT: As a quick note to your edit, you're really ignoring some of the best parts of ebooks while pointing out their worst. I don't own a Kindle however read ebooks through Amazon on three different devices.

Like I mentioned, I have a Kindle, and I've loaded it with tons of classics and DRM-free materials. It's nice and convenient, and I really like it.

But buying something is different - buying is, by nature, a matter of value. The fact of the matter is, buying a second hand book gives you more value/dollar than buying an ebook at 3 times the cost. An ebook you read once but cannot resell is eight dollars literally lost overnight. You no longer have the eight dollars and you don't have anything worth eight dollars. When you buy the book second hand, you get the same (or better) value of reading the book, but you also retain a residue value that lives forever.

I contend that I get eight dollars of value out of the conveniences the ebook provides. Like I said, to each their own I guess.

I live in a tiny apartment with no room for all the books I read. I don't like the clutter much anyway - and it makes it hard to move. I have no one local to me to lend books to. Being able to download a book instantly, whenever I want, is a huge advantage.

When I travel, carrying a lightweight kindle or iPad is simple and doesn't take up tons of space like the 3 giant paperback books I would read without an e-reader. Plus, assuming I bring an iPad, it does tons of other stuff as well.

On top of that, as other people have mentioned, all the syncing that is done between reading devices is fantastic.

Also, I can read in the dark on my iPad, and I can read with white words on a black background, which is much easier on my eyes.

I suppose that when you're younger and moving often, acquiring a library can be a problem. I live in a smallish Manhattan apartment, but I've been here for years, so I designed my space to accomodate my books. I take great joy and pleasure in having my library there to surround me at home, available to browse and grab at will. Scrolling through a menu on a little screen will never fulfill that same need for me.

I definitely agree about the advantage of e-books when I travel, which is why I sometimes buy light entertainment that I don't care about owning in e-book form.

Reading in the dark is one of the worst things about iPads, however. Light that is reflected from a page is much easier on the eyes than light shone directly into your eyes, even if it's white on black. I wouldn't presume to argue with your personal preference, but I find the eyestrain of a glowing screen in the dark to be a considerable drawback.

That argument doesn't work nearly as well for people who live outside the US. The 1 cent price doesn't take into account the $12.49 international shipping costs (as well as the up to six week wait for delivery) I have to deal with if I buy used books via Amazon. Also, I almost exclusively read foreign books and I love being able to tap a foreign word and immediately get the translation. That would be worth a lot to me even if ebooks weren't cheaper and delivered to me a million times faster.

I essentially find his argument incoherent. What's he complaining about, that publishers don't have the right to illegally fix prices? They can set prices to whatever they want but can do so on their own marketplaces. Amazon has the right to impose whatever it wants on their marketplace. You don't have to sell there. Now we can once again make this argument that Amazon dominates the marketplace and you HAVE to sell there to sell any books, but that argument is ridiculous. Plenty of small publishers are selling books solely by themselves or with limited agreements with independent marketplaces.

This seems like sour grapes from more middlemen who are unneeded. This is why the music industry is so bitter--because the Internet makes them irrelevant. There will be a need for promotion, yes, but I'd rather pay a smart literary agent 15% or even 20% to handle that rather than some publisher where I'm basically getting dimes on the backend. I'm not aware of any promotion that Smashwords ever executed that reached me, so clearly they are not even doing a great job.

It's a dark day for industry middlemen and that's it.

BY THE WAY, I will pay a premium well over $20 if you distribute your ebooks in multiple DRM free formats. I just paid $40 for the InDesign CS5 Classroom in a Book yesterday which came with a PDF and an EPUB. If publishers are too lazy to do that, we have no use for them anyway.

...the responsibility for pricing decisions should rest with authors and publishers. If they price fairly and competitively, customers will reward them. If they price too high, customers will migrate to lower-cost books.

I agree authors and publishers should set prices, but not in collusion. As for the argument consumers will migrate to lower-cost books, that may hold for some genres, but books are not really fungible. The books I am interested in are each unique works.

If I understand his argument correctly, @markcoker is suggesting that if Lord of the Rings is too expensive people will buy Eragon instead?

Okay, could understand the lack of knowledge of basic economics, but I'd have hoped that someone who has started their own business would at least have read a couple of wikipedia pages on the subject.

Are you suggesting that people will buy LoTR no matter how high the price? Or are you suggesting that if LoTR is priced too high for someone who wants to read it, they will give up on reading rather than entertain themselves with some other book?

I disagree. Pricing decisions should rest with the party doing the selling. They have both the most market information and most expertise. They can find equilibrium prices the fastest and most efficiently.

Author's and publisher's are free to set up stores and set the price on the goods they sell. But if they have an intermediary, they should set an MSRP and accept the price might be changed.

I shouldn't have stated it in a way that sounds like I advocate authors/publishers setting prices. They should be free to pursue whatever business model they choose, just not colluding on fixing price.

There are two major flaws with this article. The first is the author's reliance on the reader's understanding of the phrase "agency pricing model." A hyperlink to yet another article that presumably contains an explanation of the term somewhere within it is not the same as a simple one-sentence explanation.

The second is his assumption that "customers will migrate to lower-cost books." Books are not fungible objects. If I want to read the latest Eric Flint novel, I'm not going to pick up a Danielle Steele book instead because it's cheaper.

I read a lot and I don't really notice or care who wrote most of them.

Sure, I would be willing to pay 50$ to read the next Jim Butcher novel right now, but I also get a fair amount of free novels on my Kindle. If it's good I am more than happy to buy something by the author, but there is a lot of free stuff out there and I don't feel the need to spend money just because someone was published.

> By assuming responsibility for the roles once played by publishers, authors are earning up to 70% of the list price as their e-book royalty versus the 17.5% paid by traditional publishers.

I'm trying to figure out why this is a dark day for the future of books. It sounds to me like authors just got a sizable raise.

Assume for a moment that all authors in a given genre are interchangeable. In other words, they're unskilled labor, and it's really the publishers who bring all the value to the table.

Come to think of it, I am sure a lot of very successful people in the publishing industry view it this way.

Since the author of this article is an "e-book publisher" (ugh), I think your assessment of his viewpoint is spot-on.

He's a middleman who delivers a vanishingly small amount of value, and is worried about being made redundant.

I have an amicable solution. Don't let big publishing be a cartel setting prices willy-nilly, and if it bothers him that Amazon or whomever wants to have a sale on a book, they can negotiate a "bulk buy" of the paper or ebook with the author or publisher and then discount it however they choose.

But, he's insane if he thinks collusion is the answer.

The publishing industry has a chance to actually make the transition into the electronic commerce world a success. What has worked in the past isn't going to make the transition.

One of the larger problems is the lack of a second sale. Many people, especially in non-fiction, looks to second sales as a way to add to their knowledge base. Without second sale there has to be a more effective method of engaging these people and it is price.

Collusion among the publishers ensures that the logical price dropping for ebooks wouldn't happen as it should normally.

Smashwords has done a ton to ensure ebooks have entered the market by mitigating the normal distributorship model. I can see where they are coming from in terms of author royalties, but other publishers will look to protect the old business models.

One thing I've been noticing with arguments against this lawsuit is that people are saying "If prices are too high, just buy from another publisher." The thing is that it just doesn't work that way with books. If I want to read Moby Dick but I think the price is too high, I'm boned. That publisher owns that specific book, and I can't just get a knockoff book. There's only one Moby Dick. They are the gatekeepers to that intellectual property.

Typical strawman. Authors and publishers are not a single group. Publishers are just gatekeepers.

The author argues for a centralized command economy of e-book sales, in which large bureaucratic institutions set prices based on the consumption patterns of their executives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com