Amazon’s e-Book Pricing Problem
I intended to write a detailed examination of Amazon’s pricing problem with e-books. However after doing just a little research, I found there are plenty of people who have already provided excellent opinions and recommendations. So, instead of providing my classic unsolicited advice, I am posting links to the two most insightful pieces I found in addition to a general news story if you just want an overview on current events.
General news
ChannelWeb: “Amazon Gives In To Publisher’s Demands For Higher E-Book Prices”
BusinessWeek: “Amazon’s E-Book Price Reversal: A Mixed Blessing” – considers the impact of pricing on demand for e-readers and e-books.
Opinion
The Big Money (Marion Maneker): “Amazon’s Self-Defeating War on Publishers”
Tobias Buckell: “Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon”
Maneker recognizes that sales of e-books will inevitably dominate sales of physical books and recommends the following:
“There is…a compromise that might benefit all parties. Amazon has been pushing the Kindle to heavy users of frontlist books. But the agency terms offer an opportunity for backlist books that gives everybody a win. With the agency model, a backlist book becomes a goldmine for publishers, authors, Amazon and Apple. Priced at $9.99, the publisher receives pretty much the same amount of money under agency terms as it would have for the wholesale book. Still protecting their preferred terms for electronic books, the publishers could maintain their 20-25% of net receipts formula for author royalties because the author would be getting more money ($1.75 vs. $1.05 in paperback royalties on a $13.95 physical paperback). Leaving the publisher with $5.25 in margin, more than they’d get from the physical paperback. When you include the savings in paper, printing and binding, freight and warehousing, the margin jumps even more.
This detente would flood the book market with titles that have stood the test of time where demand remains strong–a good incentive for Kindle and iPad buyers–while protecting the physical book distribution business. It would also buy publishers some time to divest the distribution assets that will inevitably erode as e-book selling takes off.”
Buckell write an extremely long piece, but it is worth the read given it comes from a concerned author. He laments that Amazon is attempting to abuse its market power to fix prices and thwart publishers’ ability to implement dynamic pricing. Buckell also describes process of making books in extraordinary detail. He explains his interest in writing this piece in personal terms:
“I’m not trying to exhort anyone to do anything, but to explain the situation I’m in, and to educate. I’m seeing a lot of people state things with certainty (points I try to knock down above) who have no involvement in the trade.
A lot of readers are going to take this out on authors, and I wanted to basically show my homework to explain things that people may not be aware of. People toss out prices of what eBooks ‘should be’ who’ve never even stopped to understand how the math of something like this works. They demand things they’d never demand of a jacket salesman, just because they think economics and supply and demand and volume don’t apply to eBooks. They do.
Seriously. I’ve thought about these things a lot. Mostly because I have a novel series that has not been renewed, and I keep running the numbers to see if I could write it as an eBook, and when I run these numbers, I come up looking at making a few thousand dollars for half a year’s worth of work based on how eBook sell now. Yes, there are a few J.A. Konrath’s selling well on Amazon, but as I’ve linked, other authors aren’t automagically selling thousands of eBooks there. Most who follow these footsteps sell hundreds. Not everyone becomes JK Rowling.”
The last point reminds me of Nassim Taleb’s “The Roots of Unfairness: the Black Swan in Arts and Literature“. Taleb notes that artists and writers work in a field where a few successful people take the majority of the rewards in the industry. He attributes this situation to largely unrecognized random events (luck!) that are highly improbably but have large impact (“Black Swans”). Moreover, he observes:
“The occurrence of the Winner-Take-All effect in any form of intellectual production has been accelerating along with the speed of reproduction and communications.”
So, ironically, e-books will continue the democratization of publishing and reading (through convenience, easy access, and low costs), but the percentage of winners may narrow further even while providing those winners more wealth than ever.
