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In reply to the discussion: Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly) [View all]apnu
(8,717 posts)So when you drop a book to $1, the author only sees a couple of pennies. Most authors are midlist authors, so dropping these prices is, effectively a Amazon ordered pay cut because they're only going to sell a few thousand copies of their book (print and ebook combined).
Not to mention the publishing industry which provides a valuable service in terms of quality of books being published. The general editors, copy editors and proof readers also have to take a pay cut (rather the publisher will take the hit and just fire those people to make up the cost). Not to mention the industry of agents who are the ones who do the discovery of talent and polish it up for consideration by the publishing houses. And then finally there's the publisher's advertising department which makes sure the book is presented to the targeted audience (or genera as its called).
So yeah there are savings with ebooks in terms of running printing presses, shipping and storing mountains of books, but to drop a paperback from $7.99 to $.99 is too big of a slash in cost and doesn't even come close to the production costs of one professional book.
Sure you can self-publish, because there are critical problems with the large publishing houses. And the small houses have trouble getting books to market and can't afford very much advertising. So, the self-published author loses access to a stable of professional editors and proofers plus has to manage all the advertising alone. That's a daunting list of tasks for any author. If you look in the acknowledgements of most books, you'll see authors thanking their editors and agents for the invaluable service they provide. Also, when dropping the price of a self-published book to $1, you can't afford to hire an agent or editor on your own dime. There have been some people who have been very successful with cheap self publishing, but they're few and far between. Most self-publishers don't earn enough to quit their day jobs.
Now, in this whole mess, enter Amazon as a monopoly who will can control the whole process of self-publishing besides the initial content creation. They can then tell the author, "You're book will cost 'x' and you'll get 'y' percentage of 'x.' If you don't like it, piss off." And believe me, given time Amazon will. They have a proven track record for abusing their suppliers, their own warehouse staff and customers.
My point is: Amazon controlling price is very bad for everybody but Amazon. The big house publishers are idiots for colluding against Amazon in such a open and public maner, and that's bad. But they need to do something quick or they'll die out. Already the loss of Borders in the United States has left a moon-sized crater in the industry and B&N just doesn't have the assets to pickup that slack. Thanks to big-box bookstores, all the little stores are long out of business, now more than half of the big-box stores are gone with the loss of Borders. There are whole cities in the US without a bookstore now, so where are people going to buy books? Online, that's where. And they'll buy from Amazon who has the cheapest prices. And these prices are dictated by Amazon, not the publishers.
This is a big problem for the publishing houses. They're dying and they know it. They're trying to figure a way out to survive and they're doing a poor job of it.
Why they have not attempted to sell ebooks from their own websites is beyond me. The Kindle supports all manner of book formats, and the Nook and iPad even more than the Kindle. They could easily publish their books and make them compatible on any and every e-reader that exists today and in the future. Granted they have a piracy problem to overcome, but they have that problem now and its rampant. Breaking Amazon's ebook format it technically trivial if you're Google-fu is decent. So even Amazon's vaunted copy protection isn't all that.
Please don't be offended, I'm not attacking you. I know several people working in the publishing industry and I thought I'd share some of the things they talk about and worry about.