Answers to some questions from the comments
Hi out there. I have been reading through the traffic from my last post on e book pricing and the agency model. Rather than answer you all individually, I’ll take a shot at answering four questions that encompass the general nature of the responses.
1) What is the difference between a “hardcover” and “paperback” e book? In truth…nothing. It is simply a matter of timing.
In traditional publishing we had three formats, each at a different price. They were targeted at specific channels of distribution and were released at different times. There was some discounting by retailers, but historically not much. Then discounting became more aggressive and the channels of distribution for the formats began to blur. Currently some books never appear in paperback, some books only appear in paperback, and some books are in the market simultaneously in hardcover and both paperback formats (at three different price points). The digital edition (in almost all cases at present) doesn’t change in format over time – there is no difference in what is actually being sold. So, how should the digital edition be priced?
Some argue it should be almost free as there is little physical cost of delivery. But the physical cost of the book has never been the greatest component of cost. The authors who create the work need their rightful compensation, and they need editors. The marketing and publicity are no cheaper. And given that the ink on paper aspects of the business are still here, publishers still need warehouses, infrastructure, and all the other legacy costs of the business. Digital sales as a whole are not incremental (though some of them may be).
Some argue it should be the same price as the hardcover. After all the real value is in the ideas and the words, not in the artifact that sits on the shelf. But certainly that artifact is of some value, and the digital edition is more ephemeral than a printed book.
Some argue the digital edition should be tethered to the physical book and should be priced under whatever the cheapest available format that is currently available for sale.This has a solid feeling logic behind it, but I’m not sure it makes sense in the long run given there is no differential in format (if there are three formats availble, why wouldn’t the right price be a bit cheaper than the wieghted average of the available formats)?
In the end, an e book will be priced to reflect the value consumers put on it. We believe at first release an e book is worth more and people will pay more for it. Over time it will become worth less as demand tapers. However, some digital books will retain their value over time just like print books. Some will increase their value over time (many physical books are now only available as trade paperbacks, after they have been out in the cheaper mass market formats). So our digital pricing will vary to reflect the value of the book at the time. But in general, our plan is to price books below ten dollars after there initial sales demand slows (usually within a year).
A very long way of saying, there is no hardcover or paperback e book, but the digital edition will change in price over time to reflect its value to the reader as best we can determine it.
2) Will retailers have flexibility to price books at a discount? No, the sale price will be fixed by Macmillan. Retailers will promote and market books, but we will control the price for the book.
3) How can we trust Macmillan to carry out its pricing pledge? An interesting question in that we have never made a pricing pledge. Historically, e book pricing has been driven by a number of factors, and it may well have appeared to be inconsistent. We never promised to price books in a certain way and have actually never controlled retail prices before now. And many of our decisions on list prices were driven more by our Amazon relationship than by our relationship with consumers. Looking forward, it will be a very fast moving world. I have told you our intent on e book pricing. I cannot guarantee or pledge what price we will be charging in the future. Personally I doubt that typical prices for general interest digital books will break out over $15.00. I also believe the majority of digital books will be priced below $10.00, as most Macmillan books are now and will be on day one of the agency model.
4) Will we be re-pricing e books that have a $14.00 digital list price while there is a mass market paperback edition available? Yes! To a customer price of $9.99 or below.
More next week, including author royalties…
Thanks for listening and writing in your concerns.
31 Comments to “Answers to some questions from the comments”
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[...] John Sargent again, this time taking questions from his adoring fans [...]
I am doing research on The Analects of Arthur Waley. And I got this from Internet:”The Analects of Confucius / translated and annotated by Arthur Waley. New York : Macmillan Company, 1938.”I want to know its publishing situation.
—Question:
How many times did it is published? Could you give me the exact number? Thank you very much!
“[G]iven that the ink on paper aspects of the business are still here, publishers still need warehouses, infrastructure, and all the other legacy costs of the business.”
Umm, then let those legacy costs be borne by the users of the legacy formats.
“Retailers will promote and market books, but we will control the price for the book.”
So, this new format magically results in more power for you? In a way that harms the consumer by preventing competition among retailers on price? Does that seem fair? Does that seem *legal*? I know the law allows minimum pricing by manufacturers, but isn’t a publisher by definition a monopoly holder on a particular book, meaning that any such minimum pricing requirement is still potentially an anti-trust violation? That is, if I don’t like Macmillan’s price for The Checklist Manifesto, I can’t go to their competitor for a more cheaply made version of the same thing, the way I could with a computer or a piece of luggage. Sounds like price-fixing to me.
You will never see another dime of my money. Your anti-consumer, anti-competitive pricing model will insure that I give my money to other publishers. I have always enjoyed dealing with Baen, and they will enjoy an uptick in sales from readers like me. People who don’t appreciate being treated like thieves with useless and restrictive DRM schemes and pricing policies that have have no connection to the actual market. I find the attitude of big businesses like yours laughable. If the government wanted to control what you charged for a book you would howl that it was too restrictive, but when you take a monopolistic approach to markets it just good business.
One of the challenges facing the book industry is how to maintain market segmentation in the digital era, and clearly this issue is central to the whole pricing debate.
In the past offerings were segmented on the basis of release windows and the physical quality (binding and paper) of the product. What you need is to find a way to differentiate electronic releases in a similar manner. There’s no reason that electronic books should be restricted to one format only, which seems to be the basis of much of what you write here.
Consider the following:
Discount ebook: No cover image, low-res interior images (if the book uses them), no embedded fonts, book text only. (I.e. the sort of thing that is commonly being offered for sale at present.)
Premium ebook: Hires cover image and interior art. Multiple embedded fonts appropriate to the work (and not just freebie fonts from SIL). Extra material that may span a broad range: interviews with the author, notes and critical commentaries, extracts from upcoming work, even short works from the author’s back catalogue.
There’s ample range to produce different electronic offerings for different people. The publishing trade has historically relied on a highly segmented market model, and I can understand why you see ebooks as a threat to that. But it’s perfectly possible to translate this into the digital domain.
More importantly, it’s *necessary* – your market has grown up on the segmented model and that is what they understand. A lot of the uproar that has surrounded ebook pricing is really founded on fears that the transition to ebooks will mean the loss of an option to buy books at a discount.
Mass-market paperbacks played a critical role in allowing the publishing industry to grow in the twentieth century. The discount option must remain a central part of your overall market strategy.
As for agency pricing, well there were very good reasons for the Net Book Agreement to be abandoned in the UK, and the past 20 years of growth would have been impossible if it were in place. I expect you’ll be switching back to wholesale once you’re satisfied the retailers can be trusted once more.
[...] Macmillan: Answers to some questions from the comments Elsevier to Medical Hypotheses editor Bruce Charlton: Enough is enough Who needs record [...]
I think you’ll find there are a lot of people like me, who won’t buy the ebooks if you price them several dollars above the mass market paperback that’s already in print. Likewise we’re not going to buy the ebook at $14.99, when the hardcover is remaindered at Borders and B&N for under $10. The value of the ebook to consumers is very much set in relation to the price of the paper editions, and if you don’t stay on top of that (IMHO your company’s not been very good at that, judging from prices at Fictionwise), we’ll just spend our money elsewhere.
You simply refuse to ‘get it’, don’t you? A fair market price for e-books should be no more than the same novel in mass-market paperback, between $6-$8. The $9.99 maximum price set by Amazon is definitely the ‘upper end’ I and most e-book customers are willing to pay. Period. End of discussion.
And don’t bother with the whole ‘printing is the least part of the cost’ thing. We don’t go to a retail storefront to purchase our e-books, nor do we tend to ‘return’ e-books after purchase, so there’s a definite lower share going to the e-tailer – especially if the e-tailers such as Amazon get forced to accept a mere 30% for their share. That’s 20% less than they’d want for selling a dead-tree version – and with the non-existence of printing, distribution, storage and returns costs, even a $10 price nets you a revenue amount equivalent to what you, as a publisher, would receive from a higher-priced hardcover.
You whole plan is about gouging the e-book customers. Fine. So be it. *I* don’t have to buy any novel released by your publishing houses, not in e-book, hardcover or paperback formats. Your complete and rabid stupidity has cost you a customer.
The argument that the eBook should be marginally cheaper than the cheapest physical book is, I believe, the only model the consumer will accept. The consumer is well aware that the price differential between formats has very little to do with the cost of production, but is a way of maximising profits by selling a higher priced item to those that can’t wait for a cheaper format. We’re ok with that. If we’re keen we’ll pay for the hard cover otherwise we’ll wait.
Mass market paperbacks used to by my preferred format. Not (only) because they are cheaper but because they are more compact making commuting and storage easier. Others have different priorities and place different values on different formats. Many eBook converts, however, believe this format has less value that the others as they can’t be lent or resold.
Very few people believe the list price should be $9.99 the day the hard cover is released. Equally we feel the value is in the ideas and words and paying more for eBooks than pBooks is clearly unjust.
Dear Mr. Sargent
Thank you very much for this post. I have been one of readers that left a comment to your previous post and I have read this one with a very keen interest.
I do disagree with you on some points, but I deeply appreciate your discussion with your *readers*.
I have a few points for you to consider.
- If you want your readers to perceive an [early release] e-book as an equivalent to a hardback, please make sure that the quality is on par with a hardback. There are lots and lots of commercially sold e-books that have glaring OCR errors and formatting gaffes. It seems that many e-books were generated by simply running a cut-up paperback through a scanner, an automatic OCR processor and then through a very quick spell check and even quicker formatting. Frankly, I do not get this. You [the publishers] have been using computers to typeset books for many, many years now, and it seems that you do not retain the final, “just before it went to the printing shop” electronic “master copy”.
- Please also consider generating e-books in various formats. Once you have your e-book in a form of text with formatting tags, you can easily generate many formats, with various formatting. Let the reader select from several high quality fonts optimized for an e-ink or LCD screen (serif or sans-serif, low x-height versus large x-height), from various values of line spacing, various values of page margins, left or full justification. This could be something that adds value to an e-book. This is one of very few things that can not be done with a paper book.
I have seen many e-books in Sony electronic bookshop that have ridiculously large margins. In some cases less than 50% of my precious 6 inch e-ink display real estate was used to display the actual text.
For an example for an on-demand generated pdf(**) file according to user preferences see this: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/22
- you have to take into account that the situation has dramatically changed with the arrival of e-book reading devices such as Sony Reader, Kindle, and, of course a few others ( http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix )
Writers now have an opportunity to sell their books to us directly. I know, three writers banding together and selling their books for $1.99 a pop is not a direct threat to you, but, as they say here in my country: a thousand times nothing broke the back of an ass(*)
Have a look at some legal alternatives to buying books from you: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/ebooks.php?order=desc&sort=dateline , http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks , http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EBook_Lending_Libraries
- If you want to asses what an e-book is worth to a buyer, you have to take into account that a typical paper hardback is read by more than 6 people. (I personally believe it is more, but 6 seems to be a general consensus). With e-books you virtually eliminate lending and you totally eliminate secondary market.
- I do not have hard numbers, just lots of anecdotal evidence, but owners of electronic reading devices tend to spend more money on books than they were spending when they were buying paper books, even taking into account that an e-book [used to be
] cheaper than paper books.
(*) – a hoofed animal used to transport heavy loads on its back
(**) pdf is NOT a good format for an e-book. An e-book needs to be in a reflowable format so it can be displayed on large variety of devices with screens as small as a mobile phone or a small PDA to iPad held vertically or horizontally. With e-ink devices with 5, 6, 9.7 inch and soon even larger screens in between. Epub seems to be a good format at the moment.
98% of my book purchases are now e-books (about 50-80 per year), and there are and will be very few e-books I will buy that are priced more than 10% less than the paperback version. And when the paperback version is out-of-print, the price should drop again.
While e-books should share in many costs (editing, marketing, etc.), expecting e-books to share in the costs of the ink on paper aspects of the business, infrastructure and returns is ridiculous.
One problem another comment has addressed, and I’ll repeat: booksellers will discount the physical books, hardcover especially; ebook editions that are priced higher than this discount, the same, or only slightly below it, will not sell many copies.
Another aspect that you don’t address, but consumers consider, especially as they get more knowledgeable about ebooks, is that ebooks with DRM have a lower intrinsic worth than the cheapest mass-market paperback. That paperback, if treated right, will still be readable in 50 years; the encrypted ebook may not be readable in 10. (Anybody else have data on floppy disks?)
Whenever there are more than one edition of a text available, prices will come to reflect the relative value readers place on these available editions.
That’s the biggest dilemma to publishers seeking to follow the ‘agency’ pricing model in ebooks. It just doesn’t work when the hardcovers and paperbacks are not sold on that model. I fear you’ll have to institute agency pricing for your hardbacks as well as the ebooks; I don’t know how many booksellers and librarians will suffer that.
A brave new world, and I will follow Macmillan’s experiments with interest. But in the long run, might I suggest that the big publishers to survive will be the ones that cut their expenses to the bone — even if it means moving out of Manhattan.
Mr. Sargent:
You are ignoring quite a bit.
Yes, publishers have fixed costs: offices, clerical staff, editors, advertising, marketing & sales, art & composition.
Electronic books should not bear the cost of printed matter. The cost of “warehousing” is almost negligible. Transportation, paper, ink and bindery are not used. Editorial costs should be split betwixt paper and electronic editions, if both are produced. Nor are inventory taxes a problem. Returns simply do not happen, there IS no failed binding, missing, upside-down or reversed signatures, smeared ink. At most, a file garbled in transmission, which is easily re-transmitted at negligible cost.
Baen Books follows a tiered pricing schedule with their e-books, in some cases offering what they call an e-ARC (an ARC in electronic format) for a premium price of about $15.00 (dropping in some cases as the release date gets closer) well in advance of the release date of a book, their Webscription package — a month’s release for $15.00 — and individual e-books at ~$6.00. These are offered in a variety of electronic formats, all without DRM.
Some publishers (notably TOR) are demanding prices for electronic editions well in excess of what hardcovers are sold for, for example, the electronic version of David Weber’s OFF ARMAGEDDON REEF was priced at $18, it was available in hardcover for $16.80 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It’s my impression that the electronic edition did not/does not sell well.
Will some e-book files be passed around betwixt friends and family? Certainly, just as printed books are passed around, with similar effect — some individuals will like that author’s work well enough to purchase it for themselves.
Some time ago, Mercedes Lackey noted that her backlist print sales had risen significantly because of sales (in electronic form) of her then-current titles.
Specialty publishers such as Mosby are selling electronic versions for the same price as hardcover — and as a Mosby customer I note that I have not, nor am I likely to, purchase them. Gouging customers >$180 for a CD of a hardcover medical book is not winning Mosby friends. Whilst I might pay $75 for MERRILL’S on CD, I’m certainly not paying $180 for it. I’m not stupid, I know what production costs of a CD are and I’m quite frankly not going to pay more than they’re worth.
In conclusion, sir, if you — and your authors — want to ride the digital wave, you’d better revise your firm’s thinking — or you’ll be buried underneath it and washed ashore, broken and gasping for breath. If you’re lucky.
Leon W. Jester, Jr., RT-R
Roanoke, Virginia
Here is an idea: since so many people insist that ebooks should be cheaper because they don’t have the paper-printing-binding-warehousing cost element, why don’t you present a typical cost breakdown so everyone can judge for him/herself?
In spite of ebook readers having been available for quite a while now (I got my Sony 3+ years ago), the technology is still immature. By that I mean current readers do a pretty good job of displaying text but are truely terrible with images – or PDF formats come to that.
This is going to impact on the publisher and will limit what they can offer, and ought to be limiting what they charge for a digital version.
Mass market paperbacks are, for many people, read once then discard, and I can’t see a digital copy of the same book being any different. Arranging presentation for a digital version is simplistic – keep the chapter separation obviously, but fonts come from the set known to work on most (if not all) platforms. That’s the low-end of the market, and the book may as well be available online forever, storage costs being as low as they are.
What current technology doesn’t support is high-end digital content – good quality images, multimedia, internet links and fonts perhaps more tailored to the content. This will come over time of course, and maybe ebook pricing will look better when that kind of market stratification is practical. In the meantime, publishers must walk a line between pricing which attracts early adopters, and higher prices which produce good profits on a unit-sold basis but reduce overall sales.
Are MacMillan doing this right? Dunno. I don’t know enough about their business to tell. But, I do know that there’s a substantial psychological difference between a product sold for $9.99 and one sold for $10.00, even though the financial difference is only a cent.
I don’t believe that publishers should dictate prices to retailers. For one thing, the retailers are a step closer to their customers. For another, I don’t believe that anyone should dictate to retailers how to run their businesses. If they want to have sales, higher prices or lower prices, that’s no different than it works in brick and mortar shops for just about any product I can think of. It shouldn’t be different for ebooks.
I notice that virtually every ebook I’ve bought has massive typos, and in many cases many more typos than the print versions of the same books. Funny considering the prices larger publishers are charging those of us who prefer to read ebooks.
Considering that I can’t sell or give away the ebooks I buy, and the DRM they use may at any time cease to work, not to mention that fact that if I buy a reader that doesn’t work with the format I’ve bought, I won’t be able to read my entire libraray, I’ll be happy to buy from other publishers with a more realistic and reasonable outlook on ebooks and their pricing.
A book should have value to a customer beyond the material between the covers. There is ample evidence that book collectors will pay a premium for “first editions”, “signed copies” “hand illustrated editions and so on. If the content is only bytes, the owner has nothing to display and collect. Publishers must understand that they have the real value of their product is something no ebook can provide–a physical collectable product.
This really is a shame because obviously at Macmillan, it is about the format and not about the words. I read about 2-3 NEW eBooks a week @ $9.99 each – that’s $30 a week and $1560 a year from one reader. I’d be curious as to how you translate this antiquated business model to Audible, of which I’m a member, pay a monthly subscription and $0 per book. So, if you want to charge more than that go right ahead, you just won’t be getting my money which will be hurting your authors as well. Sure, once the hardcover is done and the paperback comes out, you’ll reduce the eBook price but I’ll have forgotten about your book by then and moved on to something else. Sooner or later like musicians, your authors will figure out a way to do it themselves.
Ever since Macmillan had that spat with Amazon last year, I have not purchased a single Macmillan title (I buy two or three ebooks a week). I also will never (have not yet) buy an ebook priced over 9.99. What you guys are doing is pure stupidity.
Warner stated their iTunes share dropped dramatically when the record industry introduced variable pricing to iTunes — 1.29, .99, and .69. 1.29 for newer trendier music, and people aren’t biting. When will you learn that ebooks are a whole different animal than traditional paper books?
I commented in the other post, and I’ll say it again here.
The only part of an e-book that’s a “book” is the name.
What you’re really selling is the right for one person to read the book, and that right doesn’t have any possibility to be resold, or transferred to someone else.
For the consumer, that makes the value proposition different, and you have to factor that into your pricing model.
I work for a company that does DRM solutions for software companies, feel free to contact me if you want to pick my brain about how the “right to read” model differs from the book model. The software industry has been in this boat for years now.
This may surprise you, but publishing houses are now software companies.
After having read both of Mr. Sargent’s posts on the agency model, I am convinced that Macmillan does not really want to be in the ebook business and has developed this plan with the hope of driving most Macmillan readers back to hardcovers and paperbacks while simultaneously gouging the ones that do choose to cling to ebooks. What I think Mr. Sargent fails to realize is that ebooks are here to stay, and while a few folks will continue to buy overpriced ebooks out of author loyalty, most will satisfy their urge to read from cheaper sources. Especially if Random House holds firm on its resistance to the agency model and retailers are able to price RH titles competitively. Macmillan has a few authors I adore, but I will certainly be exploring other options now, and getting Macmillan titles I must read strictly from the library. No more money from me as long as Macmillan ebooks are priced above paperbacks. Oh, and this will only encourage ebook piracy, which is already a huge problem to hear publishers tell it. I look forward to checking back with Mr. Sargent in a year or so to see how badly this plan has worked.
Mr. Sargent,
Clearly you’re entitled to price your ebooks as you see fit.
Equally, if consumers can find an ebook of similar content at lower price, they will force you to lower the price in order to compete. For example, if I want a book on economics, I might find roughly equivalent books. If I feel like reading a novel and find that your company’s offerings are overpriced, I may choose a different novel from a different author. Maybe I’ll even download a public domain book from Google.
If your ebook prices are not competitive with, say, remaindered hardcovers (many of which sell for less than $10), I will feel free to purchase the remaindered hardcover.
Now, if you were to sell non-DRM’ed books, I’d gladly pay more. O’Reilly is making plenty of money doing just that — I shell out more than what the paper copy costs at Amazon because I am assured that the book will not become obsolete over its useful life and I can use it on any device I possess.
To me, the biggest question is this… will your ebook prices match Amazon’s discounted paper book prices or not. If not, then I will continue to order from Amazon and you would have missed an opportunity to make a profitable sale.
I was just at Amazon and about to buy a book for my Kindle. The price for the Kindle book was higher than the paperback! Instead of buying it, I’ll now borrow it from a friend or get it used.
You lost a sale. And a customer. And I’m not alone. Just reading the comments on your blog, I can see I’m in like company at being fed up with your pricing model. Had you priced it a few dollars cheaper, I would have bought it for my Kindle. The whole reason I even found this blog was because I came to the Macmillan site from Amazon to complain to you about the price.
The e-book reader crowd are the early adopters of this next generation of book format. This format is not going away, no matter how hard you try to ignore it. You are generating extremely bad PR for yourselves and will be increasingly shunned by your future e-book readers as this format moves forward.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling you’ll just chalk up the lower sales numbers to piracy and lobby for even more draconian laws to protect your old way of doing things. Even if that’s not true, that’s what my generation thinks is true because that’s the image you present to us.
My parents never taught me to pay attention to the publisher of a book before buying it. Why in the world would they? It didn’t matter when I was growing up. I’ll be teaching my kids to pay attention, though. Guess which publisher is one I’ll be teaching them to stay away from?
So let me get this straight..The ebook for BURNED by PC Cast is MORE expensive than the hardback because it costs less to produce? How about matching the Hardback cover..I am willing to pay the hardback price for the book but NOT more then the cost of a hardback for an ebook..give me a break
I read the article “Publish or Perish” in the New Yorker magazine this week, ironically, while waiting on a plane’s pilot to give me permission to fire up my Kindle. I was disappointed to learn that Macmillan had recently made the decision to withhold books from Amazon’s e-book division, especially since I was waiting for Emily Giffen’s book to come out this summer.
Reading has been a favorite hobby since I was a young child, however, as life got busier, I read less and less. The books I did read had to either be worth spending the money on a hardback or borrowed from a friend. As a result, I read fewer than 10 books a year.
In addition, I was running out of space for books. Both my husband and I love books and don’t throw them away so storage was always an issue.
When it looked like the Kindle was here to stay, we bought two. If there’s a book we both want to read, we swap Kindles, just like a regular book. I’ve learned about many new authors through the recommendations that Kindle provides. In addition, books have now become an impulse buy. Since July 2009, I have bought and read 57 books – a far cry from the ten per year that I read in the past. My old hobby is back full force.
It appears from the New Yorker article that the publishing industry is hoping the iPad will be its savior. I have no plans to buy the iPad; I already own an iPhone. I certainly won’t buy any electronic device in its first generation. Finally, as the New Yorker piece pointed out, Steve Jobs is no stranger to raising prices when it works for him. In one year, your company could be in the very same position with a different foe.
I certainly understand the company’s concerns regarding pricing of the books and potential profit losses. But there were always be books I won’t buy on Kindle – cookbooks, art books, design books. No e-reader can replace those. However, the price wars are merely serving to keep books out of the hands of readers like me.
I just tried to purchase my second book since this new model took over. The first one wasn’t available because the publisher and Amazon were fighting but the previous 11+ books in that series had been. NONE cost me more than $9.99 and I’d bought all of them. Surprise, the book was available “elsewhere” easily, in fact that author’s entire collection was available.
Tonight I tried to purchase another book, published first 7 years ago. Much to my surprise is was nearly $16 and Amazon had clearly labeled this as the price the PUBLISHER had set. No sale. DO YOU HEAR ME? NO SALE! I might have paid $9.99 but $16? LOL! In the past year I’ve read about 60 books, all of them legally purchased and all of them $9.99 or less. No more. You’re about to experience what the music industry has been experiencing and you’ve done it to yourselves.
I laugh at your quoting of the hardcover price. Who pays that? No one I know walks into a bookstore and forks that over. If it’s not discounted I and everyone I know walks away. I read many books in just a few sittings. $25 for that? I guess we can all dream right? Next you’ll be posting huge “losses” from piracy because all of those downloads could have been sales at your dream “list price”. Your greed sickens me, as a consumer you’ve lost me. If this continues I predict the e-pub world will grow quite slowly, if at all. Nice going…
HAHAHAH! Oh, man. This is high comedy. HAHAHA! Sorry. *snicker* HAHAHA.
Okay, I’m better now. I’ve printed this blog out so I can mail it to my representative when you go crying to congress that piracy has driven you out of business.
Not only will I never buy a book from you, and not only will I discourage friends and family from buying a book from you, I will no encourage authors currently printing with you to end their contracts with you.
I drink to the day you go bankrupt.
As for the price of e books, I would be happy if they were all sold as per the price of a paperback as I would never buy hardcover!
I bring a different concern to your blog that of availability!! I live in Canada and have an e-reader from Sony. I am increasingly annoyed about the availability of your fantasy books through their site. For instance LE Modesitt Jr’s series the Saga of Recluce, Natural Ordermage is availabale through Sony’s site for purchase in Canada.
The previous 2 books, Well Sping of Chaos and Odermaster are NOT available to be sold on Sony’s site for Canada! How is this possible??
My question then is this, How do the books get released for sale in Canada in e format? Is there going to be a big push to get more of your fantasy books in e format available to Canadians?
I would like to hear from the publishers what they feel is the advantage of the Agency Model over the Retail Model (other than the fact that they want more control). I think a lot of people want to know how authors and readers gain from the new model.
Why do ebook consumers have to pay a premium, compared to mass market paperback editions?
Case in point: Love in the Afternoon (released June 29, 2010) by Lisa Kleypas. Ebook is $7.99, mass market paperback is $4.79.
I refuse to pay a premium for an ebook, when the paperback is available for so much less.
If you’re going to shaft your ebook customers with “publisher-set” higher pricing, I’m going to simply boycott buying your ebook or print editions.
I’m citing J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English, 1961. The copyright page mentions Macmillan 8 times, but there is no city. Can you tell me the city of the Macmillan that published this book? Thanks.