OK, I am not very deep into the Kindle vs publishers thing, but isn't it a bit dangerous to root for Amazon to build their monopoly? As an avid reader, I am not sure I want one company to be in control of "my drug".
Not saying the publishers are necessarily the good guys (probably aren't). But this isn't about loving books, this is about market dominance and control. Not exacty the thing that inspires me to write a love letter to Amazon (though I usually buy from them and I like their service).
Ultimately, do we really need Amazon for a proper ebooks distribution? It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes. The Kindle seems more like a Trojan horse to me - we let it into our lives, and then we can't get rid of it anymore, unless we are willing to let go of the 1000 books we bought, too.
I, as a reader, don't want to be held hostage, neither by Amazon nor by book publishers.
I live in a Japanese apartment. Like many Japanese folks, I read a lot and cannot possibly keep all the books I read here. Most go in the garbage when I'm done. I have no particular desire for ownership but, if I did, I own the bits on my Kindle in a much more durable fashion than I own the atoms in my trash bag right now. (Thirty volumes just got evicted.)
It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes.
This has been true in ten of the last ten years, and I have never bought a single book through it. The experience matters, and the Kindle is an amazingly better experience for me than reading on my screen is. (Amazon also beats the stuffings out of Google for book discovery, which is what I'd have to do to get to your website if you sold it directly. I can't very well Google [sci-fi I would enjoy], but Amazon will give me four titles fitting that bill on my front page. And they're pretty good at it, too -- Amazon probably has a better handle on my tastes than anybody except my siblings.)
I have nothing against the Kindle or eBooks. But just because Amazon currently has the best reader doesn't mean I desire them to become a monopoly.
Also, while OT, I have found Amazon pretty useless for discovering SciFi.
Your argument seems to amount to "Amazon is so good, I'll never need anything else in my life". Maybe, maybe not (as I said, I tend to buy at Amazon, too - but lately I feel a bit uneasy about it).
I often suggest people donate unwanted books to the local library, and they say "oh it's not library material". Just to be clear, libraries don't put books that you donate on the shelves - they sell them and use the money to fund their programs. So (at least in the US) they're just as happy to take your "low-brow" stuff. Perhaps things are different in Japan (where the up-thread poster is)
Neither will take books in English. The best option I have is giving them away to friends, and I can't do that fast enough to keep pace with my buying.
Here's why I'm not worried about an Amazon monopoly (I'm open to changing my mind on this).
1) It's not really a monopoly as long as the authors/publishers sell through other vendors too. Will I buy eBooks from Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Sony, or someone else (Wal-mart has to be at least thinking about it)? They're not here yet, but I expect to see eBook readers that work with multiple stores. I'm sure the iPad will through apps like the Kindle app for the iPhone.
2) Lock-in through DRM isn't nearly as much of an issue as it is with music because I don't re-read books more often than one book per decade. I have a handful of books that I re-reference every once in a while, but it's rare. I can switch my supplier very easily if someone comes out with a better device.
I have a lot of freedom to choose both the store and the reader (not complete, but a lot). As long as the stores don't require exclusive contracts, I think we'll be OK.
However at the moment, for me at least, Amazon offer such a great package for the consumer - both in ebooks and hard covers - that I can't help but support them ( within limits).
Amazon is behaving like Walmart here: squeezing suppliers in order to provide lower prices.
Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers, because if you want to sell there, your profit margins will go down and down, and you will need higher and higher volume and lower and lower marginal costs. It's what Walmart does. The resulting type of product is generally known as junk.
Is it good for consumers? Probably, because low prices are good, and if you don't want junk, you can go elsewhere. If the same thing eventually happens for books, then Amazon will be selling mostly cheap and trashy stuff, while other, more expensive, online bookstores will show up and get exclusive deals with better authors.
In such a scenario, Patrick's comment:
I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me. I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature.
strikes me as wrong. While you may substitute other good stuff for good stuff, you won't substitute The Duke's Boardroom Affair for Pride and Prejudice.
Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers
No. Wal-Mart offers suppliers enormous volume at the cost of tiny margins. Sometimes this is a bad deal for suppliers, but Wal-Mart sells the equivalent of $200 worth of stuff to every human being on this planet, every year, and has done so for some time. If this was unsustainable, it would have stopped by now.
Disdain for Wal-Mart is disdain for products that have no story attached to them. Taste-makers promote this attitude -- in part by pushing narratives about how Wal-Mart hurts whoever it does business with -- because their livelihood comes from telling stories about stuff people buy.
The resulting type of product is generally known as junk.
I know I'm supposed to feel class disdain for poor people because their Chinese-factory-made T-shirts cost a fifth of what my name brand Chinese-factory-made T-shirts do, but my brain has never been good at mental gymnastics. It is even less good at them when I can do bitwise comparisons of the two products and be guaranteed of equality.
Note that I didn't say Walmart is bad. In fact I said: 'Is it good for consumers? Probably', and I mean that.
I called their goods junk, just as I'm willing to call The Duke's Boardroom Affair junk, because that's how those products are seen, even by people who buy them. That doesn't imply any disdain for people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts, or people who read romance novels.
(If you consider the number of people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts or read romance novels, you'd have to feel disdain for an extremely large percentage of people).
The point is simply that what Amazon is doing could turn them into the Walmart of bookstores, for better or worse.
Razor blades are junk? Toothpaste is junk? No. They are commodities. Wal-Mart traffics in commodities, selling them at commodity prices, squeezing suppliers but generally benefiting their customers.
If MacMillan can't work out a deal with Amazon and sells their books elsewhere, bully for them. If enough publishers did that, maybe Amazon would have to capitulate. But I suspect that Patrick was right, and that most of us would just buy other books, most of the time. The reality is that there is an enormous ocean of good to great books, more than I can ever read, and Amazon's conveniences are likely more significant than which authors get published on Amazon.
Walmart sells junk because the marginal cost of junk physical goods is lower than the marginal cost of quality physical goods.
In contrast, the marginal cost of an ebook is zero. The marginal cost of a paper book is independent of the quality of the book.
A book makes money on volume (enough volume to cover fixed costs), not price. A junk book will simply not achieve enough volume to cover fixed costs, even in the Amazon marketplace.
I just posted this to the comments of Patrick's blog
I think you’re misreading the publishers, Patrick-- I haven’t seen any of them proposing "windowing", except as a retaliatory move against Amazon. Instead, the main point of disagreement is about the price-point, and your post provides support to the publisher’s position.
Amazon is trying to set a universal $9.99 price point for e-books, similar to iTunes $.99 price point for songs. Macmillan, on the other hand, wants a sliding system with e-books starting out at $12-$15, and gradually dropping in price over time (similar to the current system, whereby the price drops as books move from Hardcover to Trade Paperback to Mass Market paperback to Remainders.)
I think you’re misreading the publishers, Patrick-- I haven’t seen any of them proposing "windowing", except as a retaliatory move against Amazon
You're incorrect. From the horse's mouth:
This past Thursday I [John Sargent, from Macmilla]n met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale [i.e. the ones where Amazon acts as a wholesaler and can set prices], but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles.
The windowing only would apply to the "old terms of sale", where Amazon can arbitrarily set the prices. Macmillan wants new terms, with prices to be set according to a sliding scale.
"Windowing" is being used as a threat here, to push Amazon to the new terms-- it's not what Macmillan wants. (Amazon in turn retaliated by opening the ultimate window-- delisting Macmillan altogether.)
Fair warning: not my usual software marketing beat, at all. I saw all the Amazon/Macmillan flap today and wanted to chime in in more depth than a HN-friendly comment.
100% on the same page with these letters. It frankly astounds me how out of touch the media companies are with their respective customer bases, and this Amazon v. publishers battle is just more evidence of that. Sadly, it shouldn't astound me that this is going on, since I've been it time and again. Maybe Publishers 2.0 will get this right...
He already describes himself as promiscuous to authors and publishers, so I doubt he would have any qualms about leaving Amazon for another company that beat the experience of a) finding, b) buying, and c) reading books.
And I'm with you by the way. Kindle is changing the way I read. I'm not sure if I like it or not - I'm jumping around a lot more, because I don't have to worry about finishing a book to take off the large stack of books I'm traveling with. So I'm reading a little history, a little philosophy, a little fiction, and so on.
Anyways, while we're on the topic, may I recommend Gutenberg.org if you haven't already thoroughly perused it?
Oh my, Gutenberg is just awesome. That's just the beginning of what I got. If you like literature, definitely try out Genji. If you haven't read On War, you simply must check it out - it teaches you how to think. At least read the first 20 pages, it's that valuable. Very incredible even if you don't care about history or military science, it's definitely been more valuable to me than Sun Tzu, and a lot of people like him.
As for Nietzsche... he's an odd duck, isn't he? Anyway, check out Zarathustra, you'll either love it or hate or both. I find myself disagreeing with quite a lot of it, but then occasionally he explains himself so completely perfectly and explains reality so succinctly and accurately. The good parts of Zarathustra are like Individualism Crack, it's a huge high reading and getting excited at.
There's lots more on Gutenberg, too! Almost everything out of print that's well known. I got 53 books from Gutenberg the day I got my Kindle so there's quite a lot I haven't gone through yet. Got copies of a lot of the foundational science texts to skim later for inspiration, etc. Really great stuff, highly recommend you spend some time on Gutenberg if you're the voracious reader.
Not saying the publishers are necessarily the good guys (probably aren't). But this isn't about loving books, this is about market dominance and control. Not exacty the thing that inspires me to write a love letter to Amazon (though I usually buy from them and I like their service).
Ultimately, do we really need Amazon for a proper ebooks distribution? It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes. The Kindle seems more like a Trojan horse to me - we let it into our lives, and then we can't get rid of it anymore, unless we are willing to let go of the 1000 books we bought, too.
I, as a reader, don't want to be held hostage, neither by Amazon nor by book publishers.