{"id":3527,"date":"2010-02-01T20:06:39","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T04:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=3527"},"modified":"2010-02-01T20:21:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T04:21:20","slug":"amazon-and-macmillan-raise-ebook-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2010\/02\/01\/amazon-and-macmillan-raise-ebook-prices\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon and Macmillan Raise eBook Prices"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"There’s been a huge battle of the ebooks going on between Amazon.com and publisher Macmillan.\u00a0 Last week, Macmillan, in response to rotten Apple’s announcement of $14 and $15 ebooks on its new iPad, insisted that Amazon give Macmillan the right to choose its own higher ebook pricing for the Kindle ereader device.\u00a0 Amazon got peevish about the deal and simply de-listed all of Macmillan’s books.\u00a0 I thought that was a nice nasty smack in the kisser for a doomed publisher at the time.\u00a0 I was feeling so good about Amazon and its Kindle and so snitty about Apple’s iPad that I was within 60 minutes of plunking my digital money down on a brand new shiny Kindle.\u00a0 But wait!\u00a0 Amazon caved!\u00a0 They rolled over and gave Macmillan what it wanted.<\/p>\n

So now, dear reader, your Kindle ebooks from Macmillan will cost more<\/a>.\u00a0 Frankly, I was always kind of miffed by the whole $9.99 price tag on Kindle ebooks.\u00a0 Too high.\u00a0 Ebooks are invisible.\u00a0 You can’t stack them and put boards across to make a coffee table.\u00a0 Ebooks don’t have nice covers or fancy paper that you can bend and spill coffee on.\u00a0 I don’t know about anyone else reading this blog out there, but when I walk into a book store I’m just a customer.\u00a0 I don’t frankly give a damn about how the publisher is doing or how Amazon is getting along, or care a whit for Steve Jobs’ health, or the status of your average mid-list author and how he or she’s going to pay their mortgage.\u00a0 I don’t give one syllable of a damn.<\/p>\n

I just want a good price.\u00a0 I’ve been involved with technology and code and content since the WWW went live and I can tell you without hesitation that no ebook is going to remain in your digital library for 10 years.\u00a0 You are going to lose it and forget it and wonder if you ever even had it.\u00a0 Most of the books I owned when I was nine are exactly eight and a half feet away from me right now.\u00a0 There’s Pinocchio on its shelf off to my right.\u00a0 It’s a huge hardback with giant illustrations and is as beautiful as the day I first saw it.\u00a0 Ask yourself where that diary is that you were writing in Microsoft Word back in 1996?\u00a0 It’s in the same place your ebooks are going.\u00a0 Nowhere.\u00a0 An ebook is worth about $2.\u00a0 But publishers don’t want you to know that because they are afraid that these ebooks will replace all the hardcovers and paperbacks they sell for anywhere from $8 to $50.\u00a0 How will these publishers explain to their authors that ebooks are only worth $2?\u00a0 Where will all those big advances and royalties go?<\/p>\n

Poof.\u00a0 Ebook prices should be heading down not up.\u00a0 An ebook costs a publisher nothing to produce beyond the editing, layout and marketing costs.\u00a0 It doesn’t have anything to print, warehouse or ship.\u00a0 As online systems and ebook formatting software get more powerful, the cost of producing these things gets even lower.<\/p>\n

So Macmillan will not sell me any ebooks for $14 and Amazon will be very lucky to sell me a Kindle sometime this year if at all.\u00a0 I think the problem here is the publishers.\u00a0 I think publishers are too frightened of cheap ebooks.\u00a0 What they should be doing is giving ebooks away if you buy the print version.<\/p>\n

Here’s another thing the publishers don’t want you to know:\u00a0 you can avoid giving any of these people your money by just reading free ebook versions of all the world’s greatest literature.\u00a0 Just go to Project Gutenberg<\/a> and you can download more books for your computer or ereader than you will have time to read in your life.\u00a0 That’s how you drive prices down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been a huge battle of the ebooks going on between Amazon.com and publisher Macmillan.\u00a0 Last week, Macmillan, in response to rotten Apple’s announcement of $14 and $15 ebooks on its new iPad, insisted that Amazon give Macmillan the right to choose its own higher ebook pricing for the Kindle ereader device.\u00a0 Amazon got peevish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,319],"tags":[224,243,902,323,754,200],"class_list":["post-3527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-publishing","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-ebooks","tag-ipad","tag-kindle","tag-publisher","tag-publishing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3527"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3532,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3527\/revisions\/3532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}