Quote:
|
So for instance, for a new e-book, let's say the list price was around $24.99. Amazon paid publishers $12.50 per copy, but then turned around and sold the e-book for $9.99. They took a loss on e-book copies to help sell Kindles and to build a huge early lead in the e-book market.
|
This has long been clear to anyone who buys a lot of books. Not the necessarily the
wherefore part, but certainly the
why part.
In the past few years it has been possible to get a classic (Dickens, Balzac, etc. the kind of books usually offered by so-called thrift publisher niche, Dover books et al) for zero dollars in a Kindle version.
I have in recent memory, a painfully similar marketing trick here in Sweden, one applauded by dummies when it appeared but which energetically and painfully screwed the general public in the long run, (no, make that "within a short planning horizon).
Background. As long as I have lived here, which is half a century, we have traditionally had excellent and dependable public transporation (both rail travel and bus) at affordable prices. Some years ago a bus operator from another country muscled in. They printed vouchers in newspapers that anyone could cut out and present to the bus driver and travel anywhere, anytime for free. No need to book in advance, just be there. If the bus was full, another would be called to take up the slack.
After a while you had to pay to ride, but still it was a ridiculous price compared to what a ticket cost on the established transportation modes, esp. rail, which as we know, leaves a much smaller environmental footprint than busses do.
After another while, the national rail transport--then a state responsibility--was losing lots of money and was privatized. In other words, a company built up by tax dollars was sold out. Local bus companies which were undercut went belly-up.
The situation now is that most of our transportation is owned and operated by foreign companies. A rail ticket is set according to supply and demand. So if you want to travel on a weekend or holiday at a popular time, expect to pay up to ten times what it costs to travel on the late, late train. This method means that young children, old people, the handicapped can't travel at a reasonable cost at a reasonable time. Do trains arrive on time? Guess.
Needless to say, there are fewer bus alternatives throughout the country. Also, not surprisingly, it is no longer possible to "show up and board". The ticket must be booked in advance, via the internet, and when a bus is full, it is full. Sorry, bye-bye. Bus travel prices have gone up to fill in the gap left by bankrupt competitors.
I expect this to happen in the book branch when publishing is consolidated to the major actors in the field who see a book as a commodity just like any other and to hell with cultural or educational value-added. And don't expect to find a kindle version of books that almost no one buys. Even if old books are sold as physical objects on the second-hand market, handling and postal costs will make it prohibitive.
Since e-books have no postal charges and a minumum of handling cost a.k.a. fewer employees, when the book market settles back into its present price level, the difference will go to the distributor, not the author or the buyer. I am as skeptical about authors being contracted to a major player-supplier such as Amazon, as I would be if they were being bound to an organization controlled by a totalitarian state.
The answer is not, alas, to buy more books, but to get a government that is not influenced by lobbyists and controlled by greedy big business. I'll stop there.
signed
a Luddite and proud of it.