Reading Nicholson Baker’s long piece in the August 3rd New Yorker while on the beach last week, got me thinking about the role of Amazon in the future of print book publishing. Mr. Baker, a novelist, is coming to terms with his new Kindle – its benefits and as well as its drawbacks. While I don’t get a few of his observations (especially his preference to read on the much smaller and much harder-on-the-eyes LCD screen of the iPhone), one comment made about the Kindle struck me as particularly eye opening. Read the rest of this entry »
Demand Pricing for Ebooks
A stir was created recently when Sourcebooks announced the delay of the ebook version of a brand new title for fear of cannibalizing print sales. CEO Dominique Raccah said, “Hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn’t cannibalize it,” adding, “It doesn’t make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99.” Read the rest of this entry »
17 Responses to “Demand Pricing for Ebooks”
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Dan Holloway
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 3:51 am:I’ve come across this topic a lot in the past week. It seems that whilst the e-book is in its relative infancy we have a chance to get things sorted out properly so as to avoid falling into the endless problems that beset paper book pricing. Of course, there’s a problem, because “sort out” will instantly smack of cartels and price-fixing like the ludicrously protectionist Net Book Agreement. In fact, therefore, the only thing that can really sort the issue out is the market.
And what that means is that we have to debate lots, and try lots, and see what readers respond to. Thsi is the one thing that’s missing in this whole debate – a real focus on readers – on what they want and how they behave. I think the people who really engage with readers in the bottom-up market of e-culture are the ones who will succeed quicker.
To throw my opinion in as a writer – I give e-books of my novels away for free, and I always will. I am thoroughly committed to the 1,000 true fans model, and am also committed to my readers. I want as many people as possible to read my work. And I genuinely believe that if they read it and like it, enough will buy the paper book to help me earn a living – eventually. And if they don’t like it enough to buy the paperbook – at least I gave them the chance to find out before they spent their cash on something they really do want – which has to be good for them (and as a writer, my first thought is always for my readers), and for me, because I haven’t hacked someone of by getting them to shell out for something they then don’t enjoy. Win-win.
There is currently a lot of fear in the industry about e-books being free. I am at a loss to think of any reason other than the good old protectionism at which the industry is so good (always done in the name of the author, ironically – listen up, I don’t WANT someone fighting my battles; I’m gnarly enough to stand up for myself, thank you). If free books are no good, people won’t come back – so established authors have nothing to fear. If they are better than the works of establihed authors, then those authors don’t deserve their slice of the pie.
Thank you, Evan, for another very informative contribution to such an important debate. My blog on the matter is at: http://agnieszkasshoes.blogspot.com/2009/07/free-is-not-four-letter-word.html I will watch the discussion here with interest.
Very best
Dan
http://www.danholloway.wordpress.com[Reply]
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Aaron Pressman
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 4:58 am:Evan, very interesting post but I’m a little confused by your conclusion. In the pre-e-book world, the bigger and hotter the best seller the more likely it was to be discounted heavily by retailers. And only the super-sellers are sold at the biggest discounters like WalMart and Costco.
I’m not saying I understand this logic or that it fits very well with basic economic theories about pricing but it was/is the reality for print books. So it seems to fly in the face of the notion that ebooks should start out at higher prices to capture peak demand. What am I missing?
[Reply]
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Karen Syed @ Echelon Press
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 6:00 am:The solution here is to understand that each business works on its own model and there will never be a solution to the problem that fits every publisher or retailer.
Amazon can work on a loss with their eBooks because it makes up it’s lost revenue in big ticket items like computers, cameras, other electronics, etc. They don’t bottom line those items, because they are tangible.
There is no middle ground when you have different publishing houses with different needs and requirements.
The eBooks I sell at http://echelonpress.com average $6.00 and they are every bit as good as the best sellers, in some case, I think better. That price works for us and we make money. But we don’t have the overhead that a much larger publisher might have.
It is difficult for anyone who does run a business to understand a businesses needs.
As for the demand. People also need to realize that there is a 90% chance that if a reader buys an eBook they never intended to buy the hardback so there is actually an increase in revenue, not a loss.
Karen Syed
http://klsyed.com[Reply]
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trav
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 6:29 am:Good post. You make a good case for demand pricing. I’m intrigued by the way you connect marketing/publicity in helping push eBooks and for eBook readers to be considered when plans are being made and specials being offered. It seems that eBooks are often just an after thought in a publishers strategy.
I’m hoping, maybe in a soon-to-be-penned post
you can follow up on your idea of
““ebook co-op” program that effectively swaps in-store marketing for added discount.”
This, to me, seems to be a key concept that would help many consumers and even some slow-to-rise pubs fully accept, demand pricing and eBooks as a whole.[Reply]
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Phil
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 8:48 am:You’re reading your Amazon/Kindle publisher contract incorrectly, Evan. They are paying publishers on net, not list. The contract I’ve seen is 35% of net, or $3.50/sale. Even though the publisher is not incurring PPB, inventory and warehousing costs, none can survive on $3.50/Kindle copy sold.
[Reply]
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Evan
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 9:11 am:Just to be clear – I am not reading anyone’s contract – I am stating what is the most common trading terms between a publisher and a retailer such as Amazon. Every publisher deal will be slightly different, but I can assure you that the majority of major publishers will have terms similar if not identical to what I described.
[Reply]
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Aaron Pressman
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 10:21 am:Phil – that’s the self-publishing term sheet. Major publishers are not selling to Amazon on those terms. They are collecting a fixed percentage of the retail list price they themselves set, and it’s been reported that it varies but is usually around 50% of the retail list price. That means on many $9.99 Kindle ebooks, Amazon is paying out more to publishers than it collects from the customer.
[Reply]
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jc
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 12:19 pm:Great post. I’m curious though: If the book industry should be careful not to disenfranchise ebook readers by releasing titles in hardcover first, why doesn’t this apply to the movie industry where they release to theaters long before DVD/Netflix/iTunes? Or could you argue that we’re we getting to a point where that applies to them as well?
Much of the concern we’re seeing now surrounds consumer conditioning. If ebook buyers get used to purchasing books for $9.99, then that’s what they’ll expect forever more. If they become used to having the ebook available at the time of the hardcover, then they’ll expect that, too. In many ways, we’re already too late to do anything about ebook pricing or release schedule. Amazon made up our minds for us.
[Reply]
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Jussi K
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 12:20 pm:This is a bit of a waste of time, isn’t it? Everyone with an eye to the future understands that all e-books will be pirated and distributed for zero dollars. Even if you set the price to 99 cents or whatever you are WISHING for.
Meanwhile, all the 5-to-10 dollar pricing strategies are just a marketing opportunity for the not-big and not-published writers and/or publishers to have their share of the limelight.
[Reply]
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Barnes & Noble eBook Store Great News For Consumers | Gravitational Pull
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 6:50 pm:[...] questions in the comments of posts by publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s ruminations and Evan Schnittman, who works for Oxford University Press. I wonder what impact Barnes & Noble’s $9.99 [...]
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The Sourcebooks experiment with Bran Hambric: publishers in the early “establishment” stage of ebook adoption - The Shatzkin Files
on Jul 20th, 2009
@ 7:57 pm:[...] Evan Schnittman makes the point that holding back the ebook has consequences. It dilutes the impact of the publisher’s marketing efforts. It could encourage piracy. Evan’s solution is an introductory promotional price that is raised when initial demand has ebbed and he has a notion (which I don’t quite understand) of how publishers can get retailers to collaborate on that. I don’t think that’s the answer. First of all: it strikes me as backwards. The ebook price should be a dollar more than the print book for the 3 weeks or so before the print book comes out when an ebook could be available. Then it should be the same as the print book for the first couple of months so that it doesn’t disturb the bestseller list possibilities. Then it should drop sharply to reflect the lower cost (to publisher and retailer) of providing ebooks. [...]
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Cathy Macleod
on Jul 21st, 2009
@ 1:40 am:When I feel a hardback price is too high I wait a few months for the paperback edition, and I’m prepared to do the same for the ebook version. The market will eventually sort itself out. Meanwhile, interesting challengers on the pricing front are the Secondhand Booksellers. I was ready to pay $16 for an ebook novel, then bought it paperback instead at Abebooks for $1 plus $8 postage, condition as-new.
[Reply]
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Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary » Blog Archive » Link Round Up Tuesday
on Jul 21st, 2009
@ 7:57 am:[...] Schnittman of Oxford University Press disagrees with the delayed [...]
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Dave Creek
on Jul 22nd, 2009
@ 5:10 am:Seems to me that since you’re not publishing a physical book, that e-books should be less than the hardcover or the paperback price, and even less than $10.00. If I’m paying, say, $8.00 for the paperback and receiving a physical object that had to be manufactured and shipped somewhere, why do I have to pay more for just the words?
The price for an e-book should be a dollar or two less than the (eventual) paperback, and the money should be split 50-50 between the publisher and the writer. Talking about the hardcover bringing in more money makes no sense if the expense of making the hardcover eats up much or most of that money.
Dave Creek
[Reply]
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Evan
on Jul 22nd, 2009
@ 7:29 am:The basic problem with your suggestion is that you assume manufacturing costs are the majority of the cost of creating a book. The “words” as you say, are generally the greatest expense – if you are talking about general trade books. So if the value of the “words” are needed to recoup the costs, then it stands to reason that all versions should be priced to extract the maximum return on investment. Furthermore, ebooks are sold on consignment, where as print titles are bought in advance in bulk. The cash that generates is by definition more valuable to a business than the trickle of income that ebooks bring in. See the first posting on this blog, Why Ebooks Must Fail to get an understanding of trade book economics.
[Reply]
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The Daily Square – Ako Edition | Booksquare
on Jul 22nd, 2009
@ 4:30 pm:[...] Demand Pricing for EbooksEvan Schnittman makes an argument for demand pricing for ebooks — and smarter pricing strategies by publishers. [...]
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Creating experiences out of content | Digital Business
on Jan 5th, 2010
@ 3:11 pm:[...] being generated in the publishing sector continues to build when it comes to the pricing of ebooks (Evan Schnittman’s post in July) and digital rights management (DRM) where the publishing sector is seeking to [...]
Leave a Reply
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Books, Business, Costco, Digital Publishing, Dominique Raccah, E-book, ebooks, Fictionwise, Google, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Kindle, Music Industry, publishing, Sony Reader, Trade Publishing, Wal-Mart, Waterstones
There Will Be Disintermediation
The first two parts of this series, Disruption and Generation On-Demand, explored my own personal content consumption disruption and traced it through the seismic shift in my reading, listening, and watching habits. My experience seems to align with the generational experience of content at one’s fingertips, on-demand. I called this phenomenon Generation On-Demand because this generation has grown up with and expects that everything and anything (content) be available to them, however, whenever, and wherever they want.
4 Responses to “There Will Be Disintermediation”
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Gary Arms
on May 11th, 2009
@ 5:43 am:As someone who teaches the Online Generation, I think it will happen the way it did with music and the way it is now happening with movies and TV shows. People with no ownership stake will put content on line so that others can “share” it. And so the dike will be breached. I agree completely with Evan’s analysis of the Online Generation and his prediction that they will increasingly ignore anything not in the cloud. Anyone who teaches knows it is increasingly difficult to get students to read books. There is a small but significant young audience for books, but a distressingly large portion of the younger generation will not read entire books unless required to do so by professors. When the online generation does research, they do it almost entirely online. Publishers and authors will continue to squabble. Again, I agree with Evan’s analysis; they will never come to general agreement. Meanwhile, the cloud will expand, gobbling up everything that exists in digital form. In music, it appears that artists will continue to make money but most of their revenue will come from live performance, the sale of tee shirts etc. To a considerable degree, the music industry has lost control of its product. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” The success of Hulu suggests that TV and movies can make money selling ads on their own site, a site that is easy to use, reliable and free of viruses. A huge amount of print (especially periodicals) is already on line; the magazines sell ad space too. This is the single most important problem facing all content providers. The future will belong to those able to adapt to the new environment.
[Reply]
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The Daily Square - Rockin’ of the Ten Thousand Edition | Booksquare
on May 11th, 2009
@ 4:32 pm:[...] There Will Be DisintermediationEvan Schnittman looks at the messes and possibilities we’re facing, and asks what happens on January 1, 2013. Will there be disintermediation? [...]
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Another copyright reshuffle that’s in the cards - The Shatzkin Files
on May 12th, 2009
@ 5:11 am:[...] Schnittman at Black Plastic Glasses posted the final chunk of a 3-parter yesterday that contained a real shocker (to me) at the end. The 3-part post shows through [...]
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AmazonEncore Is Amazon’s First Step Toward Dominating Publishing | Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary
on May 17th, 2009
@ 3:01 am:[...] effectively wrests control of the entire value chain. (Authors, if you don’t know what disintermediation is as it relates to publishing, you should and yes, we will talk about the very last paragraph in that blog article soon). Like [...]
Leave a Reply
Tags: App Store, Apple, Audio CD, Authors Guild, Business, Digital rights management, DRM, ebooks, econtent, Evan Schnittman, Google, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Kindle, publishing
Disruption
Disruption is the first part of a 3-part series on the zeitgeist of the digital era and the significant impact it has on publishing and all other content businesses. Disruption is personal as I look at my own content consumption over the years and document its transformation. There are no answers in part 1, just the facts as I understand them and the questions they spur.
Read the rest of this entry »
7 Responses to “Disruption”
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MikeShatzkin
on May 5th, 2009
@ 6:48 am:Evan, I think just about everybody buys less music as they get older. Two reasons.
1. You get introduced to music much more readily and frequently when you’re young and single and music is inextricably bound to the discovery of social opportunities with those of whatever sex interests you.
2. As you get older, your stash of stuff you KNOW you like gets bigger, and you never stop listening to it. So your NEED for new new music diminishes.
I bet if you checked you’d find that the pace of adding new ARTISTS has slowed even more than the pace of adding new music.
None of this applies to the other forms of content because they don’t tend to be reused the way music is.
[Reply]
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Topics about Harry-potter | Disruption
on May 5th, 2009
@ 7:26 pm:[...] [CinemaRatty] Latest Articles added an interesting post on DisruptionHere’s a small excerpt…a bit of sports… all (except NFL games) on TiVo … I went to the movies by choice (taking the kids to see Harry Potter doesn’t count.) Why… [...]
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Generation On-Demand « Black Plastic Glasses
on May 6th, 2009
@ 2:52 am:[...] On-Demand is the second of a 3-part series. The first installment, Disruption, explored my personal content consumption over the years and ended with the observation that [...]
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Will Hawkins
on May 6th, 2009
@ 5:24 am:Evan,
It’s a very interesting article. I can relate to the diminishing amount of TV you watch each
week, fewer movies watched and music purchased.I find that I am reading more in my forties than ever and most of it is through blogs or my
mobile phone. I read the same amount of books but not on a Kindle or other device.The difference in habits now to those I had ten years ago to do with when I read books and news, watch TV or listen to music. More often than not, I am reading on the underground, listening to the radio through the web at home while working, or watching a video on my
mobile phone.Reading, watching and listening are far more fragmented in when I do them, whereas in the past I would have devoted long periods of a day to each of them.
Will
[Reply]
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There Will Be Disintermediation « Black Plastic Glasses
on May 11th, 2009
@ 3:28 am:[...] first two parts of this series, Disruption and Generation On-Demand, explored my own personal content consumption disruption and traced it [...]
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Best of… « Black Plastic Glasses
on Jun 11th, 2009
@ 5:31 am:[...] 4 is a series that started with Disruption, moved into Generation On-Demand (a phrase coined with Fast Company contributing writer Adam [...]
Leave a Reply
Tags: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon.com, App Store, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Barney Miller, Blu-ray, Books, Brady Bunch, cable TV, DVD, ebooks, Evan Schnittman, Harry Potter, HD, hollywood, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Kindle, movies, radio, recors labels, studios, Television, TiVo, Ulysses S. Grant
Tommy
In 2006 The Smithereens did something really unique – they did a covers album. Actually, they covered an album. The Smithereens recorded the Beatles breakthrough album, Meet The Beatles, from the first track through the last. Meet the Smithereens is a fun romping and wonderful re-imagining of the spirit of the early Liverpool Beatles as heard through the power-pop chords and Marshall amps of New Jersey’s Smithereens.
Read the rest of this entry »
3 Responses to “Tommy”
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Miico » Blog Archive » Tommy
on Apr 26th, 2009
@ 11:46 pm:[...] the rest here: Tommy Tags: covers-album-, early, ever-wrest, first, first-track, liverpool, nachos-cases, national, [...]
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Daily News About the Moon : A few links about the Moon - Monday, 27 April 2009 01:00
on Apr 27th, 2009
@ 1:18 am:[...] Tommy [...]
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Evan
on May 9th, 2009
@ 4:24 am:http://blog.oup.com/2009/05/the-who/
[Reply]
Leave a Reply
Tags: Amazon, Audio CD, Dennis Diken, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Jim Babjak, Keith Moon, Music, Pat Dinizio, Pete Townshend, Smithereens, The Beatles, Tommy
Discounts Must Align to Risks
To be perfectly clear, this blog is not sanctioned by, endorsed by, or even remotely associated with Oxford University Press, my fantastic employer. What I say here is my opinion and my opinion alone.
In my inaugural post, Why Ebooks Must Fail, I promised to follow up by exploring a variety of business models I believe could work in the long run for publishers of all sizes and shapes. This is the first part of a 3-part series in which I propose changes and new initiatives for ebooks that, I believe, will help ensure that ebooks don’t fail.
Read the rest of this entry »
12 Responses to “Discounts Must Align to Risks”
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Jenny Ruhl
on Apr 15th, 2009
@ 9:04 am:Unless publishers confront head on the monopolistic nature of the ebook market–B&N’s Fictionwise vs Amazon and not much else, you’ll have no choice of models. And as Amazon has shown, they can and in the future will determine at their owner’s command what books should be sold and how.
Isn’t it time to fund a nonprofit organization to create a mega site that would provide open access download sales? Open it to all publishers. Put in a better review/rank algorithm than Amazon’s very flawed version to allow readers to find books they’d want to read. Offer multiple discounts to publishers of the type you’ve suggested here.
Right now you have as much ability to negotiate discounts with Amazon as you did with Ma Bell in the 1970s.
[Reply]
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MikeShatzkin
on Apr 15th, 2009
@ 10:46 am:Evan,
Discounts shouldn’t align to “risk”. They should align to “contribution.” In this case, they’re quite similar. The “contribution” of a brick-and-mortar store is huge: maintaining a physical location, buying in stock on spec, handling heavy physical merchandise, shelving it so that customers can find it, and then pulling and sending back stock brought in with the hope of profit that now represents a loss.
I have written that compensation to ebook retailers is bound to diminish. Amazon is actually taking the lead on that, going for NEGATIVE margin in order to offer a $9.99 price point much of the time.
However, I don’t think your models have much of a chance to succeed. Aggressive buying and selling in the physical world is not done to make an economic model work; it is done because more stock equals (at least the opportunity for) more sales. I don’t think bringing the ideas of returns and distressed inventory into the ebook world constitutes progress.
Mike[Reply]
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Mike Violano
on Apr 15th, 2009
@ 12:40 pm:Evan,
I think you’re actually raising the bigger issue of publishing business models. Reseller discounts in the print book world have evolved and increased based on multiple factors such as returns, volume purchasing…and “risk” and have actually contributed to rising cover prices to accommodate both higher discounts and lower net unit sales.Ebook pricing, reseller discounts, author royalty share and publisher profit is a very perplexing equation; traditional book selling models are not an effective guide. Most trade publishers do not yet embrace ebooks as an intrinsic part of their business…they continue to consider ebook sales as incremental to “core” (hardcover, paperback, audio) formats.
eBook sales are growing but not as fast from trade publishers points of view to cause an extreme makeover of business models, discounts, author agreements or even book production processes. Until ebooks make a greater contribution to revenues most publishers will continue to apply or tweak the old print rules to handle ebook sales, reseller discounts, and authors royalties.[Reply]
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Links for 16th April 2009 | Velcro City Tourist Board
on Apr 16th, 2009
@ 6:01 pm:[...] Discounts Must Align to Risks [...]
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Why Ebooks Must Fail « Black Plastic Glasses
on Apr 18th, 2009
@ 6:09 am:[...] inflammatory title, but this article, especially when taken in context with the follow up piece Discounts Must Align to Risks, is about supporting growth in the ebook market, not predicting its demise. Ebooks are the future [...]
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bowerbird
on Apr 21st, 2009
@ 4:40 pm:when you start censoring comments,
it indicates an implicit wish for the dialog
to stop. sure enough, you got your wish.-bowerbird
[Reply]
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Anita Pyke
on Apr 22nd, 2009
@ 6:39 am:Evan, how do you see new discount models possibly rolling out in practice? Would publishers band together to negotiate with Amazon and other retailers?
What incentive would there be for ebook retails to renegotiate the current discount structure?
I still feel strongly for revision of advances. Big authors should take their cue from the players in Hollywood – the real money is in profit share.[Reply]
Evan Reply:
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 pmThanks for the comment.
Publishers cannot band together to negotiate with resellers as that would be collusion. Each publisher must negotiate on their own and set their own rates.
The big question is why would retailers accept this change? My answer is that it will take some work, some cooperation, and some experimentation. I am not sure the specific plan outlined here will work – though I am convinced that publishers and resellers need to find smarter ways to work out risk management in publishing. Payment terms and discounts are one obvious place to start – but there are others – profit sharing by authors is certainly one route, as you mention.
[Reply]
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Dagger DiGorro
on Apr 25th, 2009
@ 4:00 pm:I’ve been around publishing for a long time, and I can’t recall a greater feat of verbal masturbation since, perhaps, Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul.
Since when do American trade publishers – light years behind the cutting edge of the eBook phenomenon – get to pick their “business model” and impose it on the retailers who’ve dictated their terms to publishers for more than two decades? Who really cares that publishers can’t meet their cash flow needs without bloating their monthly revenue numbers with money they know they will have to credit back to retailers as returns come in? Where is the model in which inefficiencies are eliminated?
Sure, these models may look nice to publishers (though it’s hard to see a retailer jumping at the chance to share more of the risk), but it’s just another manifestation of publishing’s myopia that people of influence are wasting their time on this nonsense while the important work is done elsewhere, and while even their most crippled competitors are eclipsing them.
I’m sure newspapers would like it if subscribers would pay for content, too, but they abandoned that idea in, oh, 2002…
[Reply]
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J.
on May 3rd, 2009
@ 3:48 pm:Hey Evan,
First of all, thanks for posting all these interesting perspectives on the publishing industry. As a student I started a project about ebooks and I need to do some research for it. So I contacted several publishers but nobody gave me clear answers or possible solutions on how to (r)evolutionize the industry for the new way of reading. But your blog is very helpfull and I’m really looking forward for your other posts. There’s only one big question that rose when I read all your posts: what about the educational market? In your posts you’re only talking about the trade book market… I guess there is a big difference in the educational segment because of lower risks in that segment.
What do you think?
[Reply]
Evan Reply:
May 5th, 2009 at 8:15 amJ:
Yes, education is quite different as nothing, to date in the world of ebooks or electronic content delivery has come close to being successful. Textbooks still reign as there isn’t a direct to consumer pathway as is found in consumer (trade) oriented publishing. Textbooks are selected (adopted) by faculty and/or administrators who in turn require the purchase by students or local schools. There are too many competing interests for this to work now – but watch Amazon as they will supposedly be announcing a unique experiment in Higher Education for a new Kindle.
[Reply]
Jeroen Reply:
May 5th, 2009 at 3:07 pmThanks for replying! So a good way to get the educational market into e-reading would be to team up with universities and decide on which books need to be transformed into e-content? By teaming up with the universities an e-book distributor knows, by estimation how many students are going to buy the books so a model of Advance Purchases should be applicable. I think for the educational market this is the way to go… Or is this just to shortsighted? What about the competing interests? I dont understand that part.
[Reply]
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Tags: Amazon, App Store, Authors Guild, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Books, CoreSource, Digital Publishing, ebooks, econtent, Evan Schnittman, Fictionwise, Filedby, Google, Hachette, HarperCollins, Hodder, IDPF, iRex, iTunes, Kindle, Libre Digital, Overdrive, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Plastic Logic, publishing, Simon & Schuster, Sony Reader, Taylor & Francis, Trade Publishing, Waterstones, XML
Aaron Pressman
on Aug 3rd, 2009
@ 6:23 am:
I think you may be off-base here on your assessment of what Amazon is up to by not including results for dead tree versions of books when you search the KINDLE STORE either from a Kindle or the Kindle section of Amazon’s web site. Originally, Amazon did display print versions available on the Kindle pages for books. From the point of view of customers, there’s both a good and a bad reason explaining why Amazon changed the layout and neither is really about losing sales. Amazon is not in business to forgo any sales. They constantly change and tweak everything on their web site to maximize sales.
First, the positive. Almost always when I’m on my Kindle and I want a new book, I want a Kindle ebook to start reading. I don’t want search results showing me non-Kindle books because I’m looking for something to read on my Kindle. It’s actually annoying to click through to a search result that isn’t available on the Kindle. When I’m on Amazon’s web site and I go to the trouble of limiting my searching to “Kindle books,” I REALLY only want a Kindle book. In a minority of cases, when I’m looking for a specific book, it’s trivial to broaden the search by clicking on the “any department” line.
I think there is also a nefarious rationale for why they changed the policy. Amazon has been creeping up the prices of ebooks and frequently displaying a made-up “digital” list price. With some older books, they’ve actually priced the ebook edition above the price of available paperbacks. By “hiding” the prices of those competing, dead tree editions, Amazon is hiding information about relative pricing and doing a disservice to its customers. This is tilting a sale towards digital and away from print but only in cases where there’s a Kindle edition available. It’s not forgoing a sale completely, as you suggest.
You final point about the coming wave of competitors is right on. I think the growing and, hopefully, heated competition will improve things for us customers.
[Reply]
Evan
on Aug 3rd, 2009
@ 6:38 am:
They are books, not dead tree editions.
As to ebook pricing, I think you fail to understand the impact of low ebook pricing. Its the death of ebooks and the sooner publishers establish control over pricing and payment terms, the sooner they can rescue this fledgling industry.
Finally, I don’t think Amazon is hiding anything nor do I think they are inching up prices. They are testing pricing and seeing what works. Don’t confuse price testing with price manipulation.
[Reply]
Scott
on Aug 3rd, 2009
@ 12:20 pm:
Great post. I too have noticed the absence of other versions on the Kindle side of the Amazon store. I wonder if it is an attempt to show publishers/authors that if a book is not in Kindle edition then it won’t be seen (and therefore won’t be purchased) by a growing set of consumers. While some consumers (those who know exactly what book they want) will then search and buy on the print side of Amazon or search for the book elsewhere, others may simply find an alternative book in the Kindle format.
[Reply]
The Daily Square – From Her Fingers Edition | Booksquare
on Aug 3rd, 2009
@ 4:30 pm:
[...] Quo Vadis, Amazon?Evan Schnittman on Amazon’s apparent strategy to steer customers to the Kindle store and keep them there. Yes, indeed, why is a company so devoted to choice in other areas trying to force customers into a single choice? [...]
Anthony S. Policastro
on Aug 10th, 2009
@ 12:34 pm:
I would have to agree with Evan’s assessment of Amazon. Now wouldn’t it be nice when you searched for a book on your Kindle and it said not available in Kindle format you could order the print edition right from you Kindle and have it delivered anywhere you want?
Because of the small and slower access to the Kindle catalog on a Kindle, I would keep the catalog with Kindle books only. But, if the book was not in the Kindle format I would have just those books presented as print books and be able to purchase it from the Kindle.
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Tracy
on Jan 7th, 2010
@ 9:30 pm:
I suspect that long term Amazon is training a new customer base to want digital and buy digital. Selling ebooks is a way easier business than stocking and shipping paper books all over the place. Digital sales also have the potential for a better profit margin. This is likely Amazon’s dream and goal.
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