Once again this is a lesson to us not to get overly excited or angry about what we think Apple is about to do, but wait until Apple actually does it to decide.
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Apple Set to Match Amazon's $9.99 Price Point for eBook Best Sellers?
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In the case of the iPad, not preloading gives ( or perhaps gave at this point), them several more weeks of software development time. Given the software was in an unfinished state at the dog and pony show , they likely need more time to stabilize the software. The software would have had to freeze middle Feburary, or so, to be present in the gold image being replicated at the factory.
They also were likely quite aware know that part of the issue is that several media companies in part want to go with their own "reader" software. Similarly there are other ebooks formats already out there and in motion multiple platform ( Kindle , B&N ) and some coming online ( Blio http://blioreader.com/ with a tons of books already queued up. ) Doesn't make sense to exclude them from the iPad. It is a consumption device. Need consumption demand to sell the system.
This isn't quite the same as the anti-digital music phase pre-iTunes store. There are already succesful commercial digital book formats making money in flight at iBookstore launch. Loading apps is easy, so not like huge barrier to getting the app loaded. Anyone want to bet that this app doesn't get prominent visibility placement by Apple ?
Right.....apple isn't preloading the ibookstore simply to avoid being like microsoft, and so that their competitors have a better chance....
More likely is the fact that the ibookstore is only going to work in the USA, while the ipad will be shipped to many countries. They don't want to piss off their customers by reminding them that because they're not living in the grand old US of A that they're missing out on a service that they could be getting. The software is only needed for US customers. There's no sense loading it onto ipads destined for other countries. It simply makes more sense to have their US customers load it on afterwards, rather than having to make two different production lines. This keeps it simple.
Just like every other company, the motivation behind everything apple does is to increase their profit. Don't delude yourself into thinking that apple as a company cares about individual people.
Lol, you don't get it! The reason they didn't preload was because they have never done that and never will. Apple does not give away a dime. Heck, I'm surprised they're including the AC adapter with the iPad. Wait 1 year - I bet it won't be included anymore!
Right.....apple isn't preloading the ibookstore simply to avoid being like microsoft, and so that their competitors have a better chance....
Strawman. That's not what I said.
they already had, they got to sell their books to the retailers for whatever they wanted. What they want to do though, is eliminate the middle man remove the retailers ability to sell accoridng to their own store's strategy. How you think this is more "free market", and less "price fixing" I don't know...would you like it if all different grocery stores had the exact same prices for all their items and there were no sales? Think about it.
Maybe not in the US ( although the Bush folks are gone so someone might actually enforce the law now. ), but very likely would get into trouble elsewhere in the world. iTunes/Fairplay did. There is little substantive difference between iBookstore and iTunes (in the era before dropping DRM) , especially if take measures to squash competitive formats for books.
Antitrust thresholds are uniform across the world.
Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/5.0.17405/1076; U; en) Presto/2.4.15)
I hope eventually I could loan a book from my library. That would be awesome.
I hope eventually I could loan a book from my library. That would be awesome.
That's nice, but the original poster referred to the attorney general taking antitrust measures, and since the attorney general is a U.S. government official, he probably doesn't care about the antitrust thresholds in other countries.
They aren't "giving away" anything with allowing other book formats to thrive on the iPad. In fact, they will likely make more money if they do that. The more folks that buy iPads as "readers" the more money Apple makes.
Apples overall profit margin is in 40% range. They are taking 30% on selling these books. Sure they'll make money but if they ever let selling books become a quite substantive part of their revenue stream their margin would actually go done. Not that the revenue bump isn't a bad thing either but it is not as necesary as you seem to make it out to be.
Apple is still going to get a dominate share because the "purchasing account" is hooked to the rest of the iTunes store. There is also large number of folks who don't have an ebook library and there are folks who may like Apple's features ( color and whatever they come up with) better.
Apple can also get rid of a slew of crap apps that just shovel public domain (and some not so public domain content ) into dubious apps just to present the content and hustle money. There was no substantive good reason for those to be multiple applications.
try typing "ministry attorney general " into google or yahoo search engine and see if you still think that title is exclusively used in the U.S.
For example Malta has an Attorney General
http://www.mjha.gov.mt/justice/attorneygeneral.html
As well as few other not quite so small countries.
Your points are sound and logical. If I was in charge of the company I would do that. But I stand by my point that Apple will never do that because they are Apple.
Steve is a very stubborn man. Suggesting ideas to Apple is like talking to a brick wall.
That's lovely. I'm sure the poster was referring to Malta, a nation infamous for it's hard-line antitrust enforcement.
I used to date a girl who was an editor for a fairly moderate-sized publisher of computer how-to manuals. She got paid peanuts. And the work was a contract job, so the publish house didn't even have to pay benefits.
Anyways, I think it is a little shortsighted to say that production costs are miniscule. A lot of money goes into actually printing books. The publishing company has to pay the salaries and benefits of all the works (not just running the presses, but also custodial people), the cost of utilities to keep the building running, the maintenance of the machines, insurance for the building, etc. And this doesn't even factor in the actual materials they have to use to produce the book. As another pointed out, publishers have to continue to print books to sell them. If it's an eBook, once it's transcribed, it out the door and done. The publishers don't even have to pay for bandwidth. They just send a file and collect the check. That said, I would agree that marketing is costly.
One real reason they aren't pre-loading iBooks with the OS is to allow for faster updating of the app. Making it an app store application will let them update it as needed rather than having to wait for each OS update.
Seriously? And a few other not quite so small countries (but none that you could actually name, of course).
OF COURSE he was referring to the US AG. Sheesh.
The current number one book is House Rules, which is published by Simon and Schuster, so publishers who haven't made deals with Apple yet aren't going to have their books displayed.
Slowly but surely. I hope.
I guess I just don't read any NYT best sellers. I have never paid even $9.99 for an ebook from Amazon, and I have bought several so far. So far my purchases have been anywhere from $0.00 to $6.39 (Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn). I hope that Apple also matches prices on these lower cost books.
The iBookStore will be US-only for the near future. Since the firmware is identical everywhere, they might be trying to get keep a useless icon from most screens.
In fact I'd appreciate if they did this for every one of their apps. Keep my home screen clean!
Publishers pump out a lot of books. Divide the cost between all the copies of the books and it comes out between $1 and $2. Yes, once they pay off the initial marketing and editing costs, the cost of an E book is very low. The same is true for a paper book (Did you know the physical cost of a hard back, trade paperback and paperback are all about the same? They charge more for the hardback and trade books so they can pay off the initial expenses. People would not pay $20 to $40 for a paperback book.)
Yup.
Folks should check out John Scalzi's and Charles Stross's blogs. They've written extensively about the misconceptions about publishing and their costs.
Of particular interest is that these are authors who've done a lot of self publishing. Scalzi, in particular, got started by self-publishing. And both authors would laugh their asses off at some of the naivete about how e-books should be priced so much lower....
See, for example, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html#comments, comment #15 and #21....
Also, http://markterrybooks.blogspot.com/2010/02/book-pricing-for-dummies.html might be useful.
My library does offer downloadable books in ePub format, but when I went to download one, they told me it was out at the moment. Bizarre, I thought, you would think they had unlimited copies as it is merely a download of a file, but "no" said a librarian friend, the library may only have paid for x simultaneous copies out at a time. I will try again. It probably has a DRM on it too, so I will continue to experiment. I may have to download their reader which only comes in PC and Mac versions, didn't see iPad, of course because it isn't out yet.
Will explore further.
I'd say with some confidence that people posting on an internet forum aren't the best qualified to determine what a "fair price" for anything would be. See the threads about component costs etc. to get good examples.
If it were up to a lot of people here, companies wouldn't be allowed to make any money at all.