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Here's something that may be more fallout from the iPad announcement. Yesterday, as noted by several of my friends and fellow writers, book from Macmillan (which includes, for SF/Fantasy folk, Tor) suddenly went missing from amazon. You could order them from third party sources, but not from amazon itself.
Assuming this bit of news from the NY Times is true, the reason they all went missing is that Macmillan insisted that amazon raise the price of its e-books. Amazon's response was essentially "to hell with you, and in fact, if that's what you want, we won't sell your books at all, so there. Nyah nyah nyah!." Two years ago, when amazon introduced the Kindle, it made itself the 800 pound gorilla of e-books, and it used that muscles to force publishers to do whatever it wanted. If publishers wanted their books available on the Kindle, they had to play ball with amazon and knuckle under.
The iPad, of course, fits in here because Apple is giving its book partners far more pricing control than amazon has allowed them, and far better terms. My understanding is that amazon takes 70% of the sale price for its e-books; on a $9.99 Kindle edition, that leaves $3.00 to be split between the publisher and the author while amazon takes $7.00. Apple is offering the publishers a higher percentage of the take, and the ability to price the e-book higher than $9.99.
(For those out there who believe $9.99 is already too much for an e-book because "e-books are so much cheaper to produce than print books," I have serious doubts that's actually the case if you examine all the costs attendant to getting a book into circulation. I'd be curious to see someone on the publishing side give a breakdown of costs...)
As a writer, I like Apple's stance far more: hey, I make a percentage of the sale price, and I have a mortgage and bills to pay, and frankly our finances could stand more input. And for those who argue "Yeah, but if e-book book prices are lower, you'll sell more books and ultimately make more money" I'd argue that selling twice as many books to make up the difference isn't likely to happen. My bet is that in the vast majority of cases, the author ends up making less money, not more.
For amazon, they're not so much interested in selling e-books as they are interested in selling more Kindles (which run $259 for the 6" version and $489 for the 10" version) -- and having the books at $9.99 means more people will thus give the Kindle a serious look as a way to haul books around. But now the equation has changed: you have another 10" machine that sells for $10 more than the Kindle, but is also full color and does a hell of a lot more than any Kindle.... and looks like it was made in 2010 rather than 1985, and has a touchscreen interface. Oh, and its catalog of offerings looks like it might challenge amazon's too, since 5 of the 6 Big Sisters of publishing have signed on.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Assuming this bit of news from the NY Times is true, the reason they all went missing is that Macmillan insisted that amazon raise the price of its e-books. Amazon's response was essentially "to hell with you, and in fact, if that's what you want, we won't sell your books at all, so there. Nyah nyah nyah!." Two years ago, when amazon introduced the Kindle, it made itself the 800 pound gorilla of e-books, and it used that muscles to force publishers to do whatever it wanted. If publishers wanted their books available on the Kindle, they had to play ball with amazon and knuckle under.
The iPad, of course, fits in here because Apple is giving its book partners far more pricing control than amazon has allowed them, and far better terms. My understanding is that amazon takes 70% of the sale price for its e-books; on a $9.99 Kindle edition, that leaves $3.00 to be split between the publisher and the author while amazon takes $7.00. Apple is offering the publishers a higher percentage of the take, and the ability to price the e-book higher than $9.99.
(For those out there who believe $9.99 is already too much for an e-book because "e-books are so much cheaper to produce than print books," I have serious doubts that's actually the case if you examine all the costs attendant to getting a book into circulation. I'd be curious to see someone on the publishing side give a breakdown of costs...)
As a writer, I like Apple's stance far more: hey, I make a percentage of the sale price, and I have a mortgage and bills to pay, and frankly our finances could stand more input. And for those who argue "Yeah, but if e-book book prices are lower, you'll sell more books and ultimately make more money" I'd argue that selling twice as many books to make up the difference isn't likely to happen. My bet is that in the vast majority of cases, the author ends up making less money, not more.
For amazon, they're not so much interested in selling e-books as they are interested in selling more Kindles (which run $259 for the 6" version and $489 for the 10" version) -- and having the books at $9.99 means more people will thus give the Kindle a serious look as a way to haul books around. But now the equation has changed: you have another 10" machine that sells for $10 more than the Kindle, but is also full color and does a hell of a lot more than any Kindle.... and looks like it was made in 2010 rather than 1985, and has a touchscreen interface. Oh, and its catalog of offerings looks like it might challenge amazon's too, since 5 of the 6 Big Sisters of publishing have signed on.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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After Apple's announcement, I went to look at the ePub standard, and at a first glance it appears to be, at it's essence, html in a zip file. I'm not sure what overhead adding in the inevitable DRM will entail, but I'd think for an electronic manuscript that's already been proofed someone who knew what they were doing to could create an ePub package in a few hours.
I doubt that publishers will go for this, but it wouldn't surprise me to see someone like Cory Doctorow negotiate his next book contract so that he maintains his rights to create ebook version to sell via Apple's iBook store, should it prove to be a hit.