They really don't make a lot of money on the App store. Here is a map of Apple's prices for the last few years. The Appstore came in June of 2008. Their margins from iTunes didn't expand much.
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Amazon Reluctantly Agrees to Higher eBook Pricing
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But don't forget the writers. Yes, it's cheaper to distribute e material. But the writers get paid by percent. So a lower price means a lower cut.
Thomas
Photocopies you know, ever since I can remember. And just do a search for a book name and rapidshare in google.
AFAIK, 'copyright' began as a way to protect book authors, a few hundred years ago, after the invention of the printing press. Interesting huh?
No, that's not true. There are tremendous costs involved. The writer, the editor, the assistants, the advertising, the book tour, the advance, the utilities, the gallies, ect. . .
Tons of costs.
thomas
No No ! I do see your point....
But the point I was trying to make is that the Kindle does a better job emulating an actual book. I could burn my retinas all day on standard monitor if want ( Kinda have to ) but when I choose to PURCHASE a book,....It better be a Friggin Book. Something I can Read in normal Natural conditions.
If it is on this iPad thing,....and I am restricted by having to be in a low light situation to read the thing,...I feel it looses to the kindle , and so , should not be as expencive.
Yes Kindle needs some light to read it,...But I do not live in a cave, nor am I a Camper in a tent. I live in a world of light.
You are right.
Amazon was offering 70/30 splits provided:
1. The publisher agreed that competitors could not undercut them, whether paper or digital copies
2. Let Amazon set the price of the book... up to a maximum of $10.
i.e. conditions that were entirely stacked in Amazons favour.
What Amazon have done here with this press release is pretty underhand. Especially coming out with terms like "monopoly". Macmillan owns the rights to these books - they should be able to sell them for whatever price they want, and to whoever they want.
If the publishers had their way, they would probably love to stop us sharing paper books.
The price of ebooks is far too expensive considering how little they have to do compared to publication and distribution of hardback books. This is particularly true with etexts in my field which are currently running at $130 compared to the hardback price of $180 on amazon. This is even worse when you consider that the $180 hard back can be sold used for $100 and the ebook cannot.
Exactly..... Apple promised publishers a better price in order to butt into the business. Thanks Apple!
One would think that competition will lower the price for consumers but in this case I guess it won't
One would think that competition will lower the price for consumers but in this case I guess it won't
Meh. Who cares about the contemporary stuff! I live in the now, I don't need to be able to "relate". Oprah be damned! What's my alternative? I could easily spend a couple of lifetimes reading the classics, which are free for the most part (e.g., the Gutenberg Project). Contemporary lit is crap, and will be for at least the next 7 decades (when the best of it becomes classic and starts selling for buck 99 or less).
They are all crooks. Publishers for taking such huge cuts from the authors, and Amazon for doing the same. It is kind of like Adobe crying foul for the lack of Flash, because it would cut into itunes profits for apple. Adobe is making, and stands to loose profits because of it. I am all for free market and fairness, but the monopolies all of these companies now hold are causing problems across the board, because their ultimately will not be enough pieces of pie for all of them to sustain the profits they have become accustomed to.
Its just stinks the consumer gets to pick up the slack, for all of these politics.
Its just stinks the consumer gets to pick up the slack, for all of these politics.
thats my point i doubt those are the ones who will be reading books. I read they had a study on the kindle and the younger folks didnt like it because it was very limited to just books. the more mature part of that group like it bus missed the puzzles. all this talk for pirating books will not be as big as pirating app is.
This is patently false. I see this posted frequently around here and it is not accurate. Apple makes most of their money from hardware, but by all reports the iTunes Store makes hundreds of million dollars per year. Apple does not disclose figures from the iTunes Store.
This source is from 2008: http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/apple-apparentl/
I'd bet Apple makes close to a billion per year from the iTunes Store.
EDIT: I see some people kind of addressed this by citing some estimates on the App Store, but that is not really relevant. This is about content which would be more similar to iTunes for music and video. And again, while Apple still makes most of its money from hardware, a billion dollars from content is not something to discount altogether.
What?
Whatever happened to the producer of a product deciding what to charge? And the market deciding what it will bear?
If people want e-books at $14.99 they will buy them. If they don't - well - it's up to the producer to change the price so they can sell product.
I still buy the occasional hardcover, and they are NOT cheap. You can wait for paperback or get it at the library.
What I don't understand is Amazon, deciding what the split is going to be AND deciding what the producer of the content can charge. Talk about a monopoly. (Amazon used that term for the products that Macmillian produces)
I'm all for lower prices, but Amazon is just using the lower prices to foster a market for their 10 year old, overpriced hardware. It's also a one trick pony. No other uses than reading black and white books. At least the iPad is going to offer an opportunity for some great full color comics and graphic novels.
Whatever happened to the producer of a product deciding what to charge? And the market deciding what it will bear?
If people want e-books at $14.99 they will buy them. If they don't - well - it's up to the producer to change the price so they can sell product.
I still buy the occasional hardcover, and they are NOT cheap. You can wait for paperback or get it at the library.
What I don't understand is Amazon, deciding what the split is going to be AND deciding what the producer of the content can charge. Talk about a monopoly. (Amazon used that term for the products that Macmillian produces)
I'm all for lower prices, but Amazon is just using the lower prices to foster a market for their 10 year old, overpriced hardware. It's also a one trick pony. No other uses than reading black and white books. At least the iPad is going to offer an opportunity for some great full color comics and graphic novels.
Monoploy
We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.
Really?? Macmillian has a monopoly on the titles they own? So if I buy the rights to a book I have a monopoly on that particular title? This all sounds very petty for a company the size of Amazon....
We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.
Really?? Macmillian has a monopoly on the titles they own? So if I buy the rights to a book I have a monopoly on that particular title? This all sounds very petty for a company the size of Amazon....
You think bits are cheap? Think again.
I see you don't work with technology for a living, specifically IT. Let me illuminate you a bit, if possible.
Here's a non-comprehensive list of some of the costs associated with producing anything digitally, including ebooks, but (hopefully) excluding the overlap with dead-tree versions of books (remember, this is not comprehensive or perfect):
1. You need data center space. You either lease space in an existing facility or you own your own building, whichever is appropriate for your company's needs. Neither option is cheap. Owning your own building comes with extra expenses, such as property tax, zoning and inspection issues, facilities maintenance, insurance, and more.
2. You need electricity. To run the servers, storage devices, air conditioning, lights (so the admins can see what they're fixing), network equipment inside the data center, network equipment connecting the data center to your ISP(s). For a large publishing house such as Macmillan, the yearly bill for electricity in their data centers (they probably have more than one) is likely somewhere between 6 digits and 7 digits long (in front of the decimal), assuming US dollars.
3. You need people to keep the data center running for you. You're paying for them whether you're renting space or own it.
4a. You need system administrators to keep the computers, namely the servers and storage devices, running.
4b. You need network administrators to keep the networking gear running. In some cases, the system admin and network admin may be the same person or people but this doesn't scale terribly far so it won't last long.
5. The servers. Servers needed to mediate access to the network-based storage devices (think Netapp or Hitachi SAN). Even if the storage devices are inside the servers, rather than network (ethernet) or SAN (fiberchannel) based. Enterprise servers are not cheap; even for the low-end servers, you may spend a small fortune on enterprise server-class RAM, especially if you need the new 8GB 1266MHz stuff.
6a. The storage backend. This equipment, in the case of a large company such as Macmillan, will not come from any place like Newegg or Fry's. It's very likely that it's purchased from Netapp, Sun (nee, Oracle), HP, Dell, Hitachi, etc; basically, companies that sell stuff you can run a large business on 24x7 for years on end. This sort of storage is never cheap for anything you'd want to rely on, even for SATA drives; usually, it's based on SCSI or SAS disks. Although, the drives are really the cheap part compared with the infrastructure required to make them useful.
6b. You will need someone (or several someones) to administer the storage backend, both logically and physically. This may be the same person as the system or network admin, or it may not be because it can get extremely complex and consume a lot of time to manage it.
7a. You will be paying for throughput used between your servers and your ISP, definitely upstream and possibly downstream, generally by the megabit. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 and $30 per megabit, depending on too many variables to list here. Note: This is megabits, not megabytes. This includes data transferred between your data centers that doesn't go over a private WAN link. Some of the non-WAN costs can be mitigated by using content distribution networks, such as Akamai, but then of course you're also paying Akamai for their services.
7b. The cost of private WAN links between data centers, if you have them. These are, however, almost always cheaper than paying by the megabit for traffic that transits the public Internet, but they're still a non-trivial cost.
8. Support contracts for the hardware.
9. Support contracts for the storage management, and other, software you will almost certainly be using for the petabytes or exabytes of storage space you're managing across all of your data centers.
10. Backups for all that data. You don't think these guys sit around with one copy of everything, do you? They don't. Granted, backups may be worked into the storage systems linked across data centers but there's still whatever software is being used to manage those backups.
11. Annual or bi-annual hardware upgrades to at least some gear; annual or bi-annual hardware replacement of outdated gear.
12. Costs associated with disposing of that outdated gear.
13. Periodic costs for software upgrades that fall outside the support contract. Also, costs for acquiring new software as becomes necessary.
Data storage may cost next to nothing for you, the average end-user/consumer, but it is far from cheap for publishing businesses of the size we're discussing with respect to the iPad.
I see you don't work with technology for a living, specifically IT. Let me illuminate you a bit, if possible.
Here's a non-comprehensive list of some of the costs associated with producing anything digitally, including ebooks, but (hopefully) excluding the overlap with dead-tree versions of books (remember, this is not comprehensive or perfect):
1. You need data center space. You either lease space in an existing facility or you own your own building, whichever is appropriate for your company's needs. Neither option is cheap. Owning your own building comes with extra expenses, such as property tax, zoning and inspection issues, facilities maintenance, insurance, and more.
2. You need electricity. To run the servers, storage devices, air conditioning, lights (so the admins can see what they're fixing), network equipment inside the data center, network equipment connecting the data center to your ISP(s). For a large publishing house such as Macmillan, the yearly bill for electricity in their data centers (they probably have more than one) is likely somewhere between 6 digits and 7 digits long (in front of the decimal), assuming US dollars.
3. You need people to keep the data center running for you. You're paying for them whether you're renting space or own it.
4a. You need system administrators to keep the computers, namely the servers and storage devices, running.
4b. You need network administrators to keep the networking gear running. In some cases, the system admin and network admin may be the same person or people but this doesn't scale terribly far so it won't last long.
5. The servers. Servers needed to mediate access to the network-based storage devices (think Netapp or Hitachi SAN). Even if the storage devices are inside the servers, rather than network (ethernet) or SAN (fiberchannel) based. Enterprise servers are not cheap; even for the low-end servers, you may spend a small fortune on enterprise server-class RAM, especially if you need the new 8GB 1266MHz stuff.
6a. The storage backend. This equipment, in the case of a large company such as Macmillan, will not come from any place like Newegg or Fry's. It's very likely that it's purchased from Netapp, Sun (nee, Oracle), HP, Dell, Hitachi, etc; basically, companies that sell stuff you can run a large business on 24x7 for years on end. This sort of storage is never cheap for anything you'd want to rely on, even for SATA drives; usually, it's based on SCSI or SAS disks. Although, the drives are really the cheap part compared with the infrastructure required to make them useful.
6b. You will need someone (or several someones) to administer the storage backend, both logically and physically. This may be the same person as the system or network admin, or it may not be because it can get extremely complex and consume a lot of time to manage it.
7a. You will be paying for throughput used between your servers and your ISP, definitely upstream and possibly downstream, generally by the megabit. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 and $30 per megabit, depending on too many variables to list here. Note: This is megabits, not megabytes. This includes data transferred between your data centers that doesn't go over a private WAN link. Some of the non-WAN costs can be mitigated by using content distribution networks, such as Akamai, but then of course you're also paying Akamai for their services.
7b. The cost of private WAN links between data centers, if you have them. These are, however, almost always cheaper than paying by the megabit for traffic that transits the public Internet, but they're still a non-trivial cost.
8. Support contracts for the hardware.
9. Support contracts for the storage management, and other, software you will almost certainly be using for the petabytes or exabytes of storage space you're managing across all of your data centers.
10. Backups for all that data. You don't think these guys sit around with one copy of everything, do you? They don't. Granted, backups may be worked into the storage systems linked across data centers but there's still whatever software is being used to manage those backups.
11. Annual or bi-annual hardware upgrades to at least some gear; annual or bi-annual hardware replacement of outdated gear.
12. Costs associated with disposing of that outdated gear.
13. Periodic costs for software upgrades that fall outside the support contract. Also, costs for acquiring new software as becomes necessary.
Data storage may cost next to nothing for you, the average end-user/consumer, but it is far from cheap for publishing businesses of the size we're discussing with respect to the iPad.
Well said!
I had a link to Cory's site from John Gruber, and there was another link in the comments to another author. You would think that less well known authors would welcome the ebook model, but excepting the bestsellers and well known authors, it can be a pretty pathetic return.
I wondering if the itunes store business model and ratings system will open up opportunities to self publishing that would otherwise be deadends for authors.
If it's a bestseller, same-day release it sounds reasonable to me. I think new hardcovers go for something like $30 nowadays? Even with B&N/Borders big bestseller discounts of something like 20%-40%, you're still saving money and don't even have to leave your bed to get it, almost instantly.
Exactly. The goal is sell from between $12.99 and $14.99... sounds fair to me for a bestseller. Books to eventually go to $5.99... awesome. I think when you have to slice up $13 and $15 between probably a lot of people, it is a fair price. I don't know how they were doing it at $10.
$15 ebook price is not the whole picture
I believe with Amazon, all the ebooks are $10, and under iBooks, new books are $15, but older ones can be $10 and $7. So in the end, this all balances out. Probably less than 20% of the books will be $15 anyway, so majority of the other hype-free titles could be cheaper than in Amazon. This is a big win for consumers.
I believe with Amazon, all the ebooks are $10, and under iBooks, new books are $15, but older ones can be $10 and $7. So in the end, this all balances out. Probably less than 20% of the books will be $15 anyway, so majority of the other hype-free titles could be cheaper than in Amazon. This is a big win for consumers.
Bonus points for incorrect use of the word monopoly!
In the same way that BMW has a monopoly on the BMW X5, Coke has a monopoly on Coke Zero, and I have a monopoly on my fingerprints.
Monopoly.
Monopoly.
Mon. O. Po. Ly.
Eh. The meaning's gone.
ONE DOLLAR for each book, CD, DVD or Blu-ray is the fair price for something that does not exist physically, that can be copied at no cost and that can be downloaded from Internet using P2P networks, so distribution is at no cost for the owners. That will boost sales thousands of times worldwide and stop piracy overnight!!! BUT THEY ARE TOO GREEDY to acknowledge. A shame for them, because Internet is here to stay.