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The electronic book wars are heating up
Submitted by Capt. Xerox on February 2, 2010 - 10:30pm.
With the announcement last week of Apple's new iPad, it looks like Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, will have some serious competition. While the iPad isn't more of a multi-purpose device than the Kindle, many readers are intrigued by the possibilities of the new Apple tablet, especially comic book fans.
If that wasn't enough bad news, Amazon got into a public fight with the book publisher Macmillan over setting the price of electronic books. Macmillan, which operates the science fiction imprint Tor, wants to control pricing, but Amazon wouldn't let them, so they delisted all of their books from their site over the weekend.
It wasn't long before Amazon caved in and agreed to let the publisher sell the books at prices higher than the $9.99 set by the online retailer. SF author John Scalzi thinks the move has tarnished the company's reputation with its users as well as authors.
Amazon has been working hard to get people to buy their electronic books and one strategy they have is to give away free books for people to download to their Kindles although they are primarily public domain classics.
Meanwhile, the company which is most likely to prevail in all of these electronic book skirmishes is Google. They have been quielty digitizing books for years and are slowly building a massive online library of electronic titles and are poised to begin selling them. One author who is pissed off at Google's strategy is Ursula LeGuin. She's been mobilizing other authors against the agreement to let Google sell their books because she sees it as surrendering of copyright to a huge corporation.
In other electronic book developments, futurist Ray Kurzweil is entering into the fray with a new reader platform called Blio. It's not a device, but is software that will run on computers and mobile devices.
While all of this posturing for market share continues, the Chinese are working on their electronic book readers that will ultimately force reader prices downwards and probably outsell all of their American competitors by a wide margin.
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iPad and Comics
This is great, maybe we could hear the BÄÄÄMM! and ZNAAAAP! When we touch the iPad Screen. I'm excited.
Amazon is 90% right / Publishers set on repeating RIAA mistakes?
I'm with Amazon on this one, to this extent: Amazon's suggested ebook pricing model is well researched with the purpose of achieving maximum ebook sales.
Conversely the Publishers are making the same old arguments the RIAA made/makes concerning "acclimatizing the public to a higher initial price for digital content" and assorted other greed oriented biz market-think-boy arguments.
'owever, much though I believe it'd be much _wiser_ to defer to the customer-satisfaction-studied pricing-suggestion of _hyper-successful online business people_ (ie. I'd pay for Amazon's advice in tis field) I don't agree with Amazon pulling the books from their digital-shelves over the dispute.
If the publishing companies insist on price-gouging the public let them learn the hard way just how RIAA-well that works, in the long-term.
That's my view.
The Avante Guardian. ---- Einstein's Hair^2 //Approved.
Amazon *is* right
I agree with you. Publishers don't want to give up on their old business model, but what sense does it make to charge the same amount of money for an electronic book than you would for a physical book?
Yes, books cost money to produce. You have to pay the writer, editors, marketers and so on, but the cost of producing the good and distributing it is zero when it is done electronically and people want the price to reflect that. They don't want to pad the publisher's profit margin.
While they push for higher pricing online, you can bet that will only help spur e-book piracy in the years ahead.
C.X.
No DRM please
And the main impediment to ebooks adoption ...... DRM.
The thought that I have to rely on my player 'staying alive' while me ebooks reside on it does not sit well if I can't have an easily accessible back up, and one that I can use if I were to upgrade or buy a new device. To say nothing of the fear of the publishers 'pulling back' access to what is legitimately mine (as in last years Amazon kindle fiasco.
No DRM for me thank you very much.
~ Lazarus ~
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