kindle2 - some thoughts on ebook reading

[Baldrake]

What do you mean by "doing it manually"? Specifically, what is the "it"?

[caladein]

Copying over the .mobi(.noimages) files to the documents folder on the Kindle.  I didn't know if it would stick them somewhere obscure if they were sideloaded like that, but it just puts them in the Home screen list like everything else she bought so it's all good.

[Numtini]

It won't make a difference, it just moves them to the device. You can do a lot of massaging of the files and their titles and such in calibre though.

[JWIV]

Calibre is awesome and dangerous - I'm a daily newspaper reader, and at this point, I prefer reading the daily paper on my kindle than the deadtree version.   Not only does it show up on my kindle at 7am every morning, but it includes all of the various web-only blogs (with the commentary deleted which is a good thing for my blood pressure).  

[Gets]

I got banned from Slashdot for trying to feed it to my Sony PRS-700 using Calibre.

[Vaiti]

Serves you right for reading Slashdot.

[bhodi]

Headlines are fine, just don't read the comments on anything but >3

[WayAbvPar]

My wife is out procuring a Kindle 3 for my birthday as I type this. Very excited!

[Brolan]

My wife is out procuring a Kindle 3 for my birthday as I type this. Very excited!

I have the Kindle 2 and bought my wife the Kindle 3 for Xmas.  I'm now majorly jealous of her high contrast screen, slimmer form factor, and better web browser.  Am I wrong to hope she gets bored with so it becomes mine, mine, mine?

[JWIV]

I just got the 3.1 software update and the new sections/article handling is really slick.

[WayAbvPar]

No longer quite so enamored of my new Kindle. Went to buy another book (finally slogged my way through book 6 of Malazan, and I am taking a break from the series...god it just DRAGS), so I hit Amazon and started going through my Wish list and recommended titles. Nearly every title I have found so far is MORE EXPENSIVE ON THE KINDLE than a fucking paperback. Can someone please explain this to me? I understand that publishers and authors get their piece of the pie. I have resigned myself to the fact that I pay the same price as the paperbacks, even though there is exactly zero cost to the publisher for printing, binding, art, and shipping. But I will be godfuckingdamned if I will pay MORE for an e-version than a paperback. This is exactly the kind of shit that turns honest customers into dirty pirates.

[Johny Cee]

Posting this here rather than the book thread:


While checking the release date for the new Steven Brust "Vlad" novel, it seems Amazon is selling this for $1:

The Desecrator


Though it appears you can read it for free here:  http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/03/the-desecrator

[HaemishM]

No longer quite so enamored of my new Kindle. Went to buy another book (finally slogged my way through book 6 of Malazan, and I am taking a break from the series...god it just DRAGS), so I hit Amazon and started going through my Wish list and recommended titles. Nearly every title I have found so far is MORE EXPENSIVE ON THE KINDLE than a fucking paperback. Can someone please explain this to me?

Take my comments with the filter that I am a self-published author who intentionally prices my eBook versions way below paperback prices (single book $2.99, compilation books vary and my first novel is $.99).

The explanation is that publishers are trying to protect their revenue. Hardback sales are in the toilet for all but the best sellers. The publishers either don't have the expertise to convert their digital files into proper eBook format (and there are at least 5 or 6 different fucking standards for eBook formatting) or they do and they need to charge someone for it. They can't charge the authors (though some do) so they charge the customers. They don't want to cannibalize their hardback and paperback big releases by offering a product that is so much of a value that people wonder "Why am I paying $25 for a hardback when I can have the same content for $5?" Oh and the publishers don't want the authors to have control over the pricing of their eBooks either. Hell, most authors probably don't even have any control over whether their books are put out in eBook format or not.

It's the same argument Wizards of the Coast uses to price their virtual MTG cards the same price as their physical ones. There's very little actual justification for it other than protecting their normal revenue stream.

And the more that shit happens, the more I am happy I self-publish as opposed to trying to suck up to a publisher.

[Arrrgh]

Interesting piece on ebook pricing...

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/03/amanda-hocking-and-99-cent-kindle.html

[HaemishM]

Good article. And it's spot on. I probably make more on a $2.99 eBook than an author with a traditional publisher does on a $9.99 eBook. The difference is that the author with the publisher has people to do his/her editing, marketing (though publishers are foisting that off on most authors these days too) while I have to do all that shit myself. Oh and I don't really get the benefit of big retailers like Amazon spotlighting my book in email campaigns or on the front page of any of their promo efforts.

An established author who doesn't try to get control of his own eBook publishing is either making enough money doing in the old way (and thus has no reason to change and probably no ability to affect his eBook prices) or is too afraid of the self-publishing stigma or is technophobic about the internetz. Or is a complete idiot. 

[Morat20]

I've read some established authors bitching about it -- from having no say in pricing to having no say if there even IS an ebook version. (Charles Stross, to name a recent example, mentioning that every book but one of his Merchant Princes series was available on Kindle, and he had no idea when the one book -- like book 4 -- would be).

I've seen a lot of big batch releases of older novels for ebook in the last year, though, so it appears publishers are biting the bullet on converting even if they're being dickholes on prices. (Modesitt's entire collection seems to have transitioned, including some older difficult to find books).

Baen books has a very nice, very cheap ebook selection -- only Sci-Fi, sadly -- but they tend to charge 5 bucks a pop, have tons of books available free (I picked up 1632 and 1633 by Eric Flint for free, just to see if they were any good), and even their new releases aren't priced badly -- much less than the paperbacks.

Heck, they have an ARC version of upcoming new releases -- 15 bucks, and you get the author release copy well before the book is actually published, if you just can't wait for whomever's newest novel.

[WayAbvPar]

No longer quite so enamored of my new Kindle. Went to buy another book (finally slogged my way through book 6 of Malazan, and I am taking a break from the series...god it just DRAGS), so I hit Amazon and started going through my Wish list and recommended titles. Nearly every title I have found so far is MORE EXPENSIVE ON THE KINDLE than a fucking paperback. Can someone please explain this to me?

Take my comments with the filter that I am a self-published author who intentionally prices my eBook versions way below paperback prices (single book $2.99, compilation books vary and my first novel is $.99).

The explanation is that publishers are trying to protect their revenue. Hardback sales are in the toilet for all but the best sellers. The publishers either don't have the expertise to convert their digital files into proper eBook format (and there are at least 5 or 6 different fucking standards for eBook formatting) or they do and they need to charge someone for it. They can't charge the authors (though some do) so they charge the customers. They don't want to cannibalize their hardback and paperback big releases by offering a product that is so much of a value that people wonder "Why am I paying $25 for a hardback when I can have the same content for $5?" Oh and the publishers don't want the authors to have control over the pricing of their eBooks either. Hell, most authors probably don't even have any control over whether their books are put out in eBook format or not.

It's the same argument Wizards of the Coast uses to price their virtual MTG cards the same price as their physical ones. There's very little actual justification for it other than protecting their normal revenue stream.

And the more that shit happens, the more I am happy I self-publish as opposed to trying to suck up to a publisher.

I get that part- it is the part where the e-book is more expensive than the paperback (and in some cases of older books, the hardback) that I don't get. Why doesn't that price point drop as the others do? I  can see paying $10 for a book when the paperback is the same price, or $12-15 when the hardback is $20. I refuse to pay those prices when I can get a physical copy of the book cheaper. I emailed Amazon and told them that I would be walking in to B&N to buy those books instead of buying the more expensive e-version from Amazon. I am sure they really tremble at losing my $200 a year in sales.

I ended up picking up The Know Circuit  

[naum]

Pricing has put a damper on my Kindle purchasing -- and just when I got used to shelling out $9.99 for new non-fiction releases, prices now are now approaching $15. Wrong direction. Prices should be no more than a large coffee at Starbucks -- and at that price, they would sell a whole lot more ebooks -- I believe every experiment and study has borne this out.

But a much bigger annoyance to me, is the formatting and typo glitches -- it enrages me to pay money and then get a book that is missing the Table of Contents hyperlinks and footnote links, or worse, littered with extraneous hyphens (i.e., book converted from print manuscript, has a bunch of hy-phens inter-spersed through-out be-cause words at end of line in doc-ument now show like that in the middle of the sent-ence, or even more annoying, wordsare smashedtogether as spaces are squashedbetween words on end of line and start of nextline).

[KallDrexx]

Pricing has put a damper on my Kindle purchasing -- and just when I got used to shelling out $9.99 for new non-fiction releases, prices now are now approaching $15. Wrong direction. Prices should be no more than a large coffee at Starbucks -- and at that price, they would sell a whole lot more ebooks -- I believe every experiment and study has borne this out.

I fear this will only get worse now that Amazon has gone public about how eBooks are selling faster than regular books.

[Morat20]

I get that part- it is the part where the e-book is more expensive than the paperback (and in some cases of older books, the hardback) that I don't get. Why doesn't that price point drop as the others do? I  can see paying $10 for a book when the paperback is the same price, or $12-15 when the hardback is $20. I refuse to pay those prices when I can get a physical copy of the book cheaper. I emailed Amazon and told them that I would be walking in to B&N to buy those books instead of buying the more expensive e-version from Amazon. I am sure they really tremble at losing my $200 a year in sales.

Not to mention, you emailed the wrong people. Publishers set the price, not Amazon.

But yeah, 12 to 15 for a new book AND it's filled with conversion errors? If you're going to claim you need to charge that much because of 'overhead' like editing and publishing, you should show some indication it was edited and published properly.

[WayAbvPar]

I realize Amazon doesn't set the prices. They also don't have to sell the e-books of the publishers who are trying to rape Amazon's customers (since the Kindle is their baby, and I assume they want to sell more of them). All Amazon needs to do is tell publishers that e-book prices have to be at or lower than the lowest price point of a physical book or they don't get sold through Amazon. Pretty simple. I can't imagine there are too many publishers that would want to cross Amazon at this point.

[Morat20]

I realize Amazon doesn't set the prices. They also don't have to sell the e-books of the publishers who are trying to rape Amazon's customers (since the Kindle is their baby, and I assume they want to sell more of them). All Amazon needs to do is tell publishers that e-book prices have to be at or lower than the lowest price point of a physical book or they don't get sold through Amazon. Pretty simple. I can't imagine there are too many publishers that would want to cross Amazon at this point.

Hmm. I think they tried that. Which was why Jim Butcher's books -- all of Penguin Press, IIRC, weren't available on Amazon for months.

Sadly, the leverage is on the publisher's side -- after all, ebooks aren't as profitable as hardback books, especially not the mass discount ones they sell to Amazon. Amazon blacklisting their press would result in higher per-unit revenues, and frankly the bigger presses can always count on the fans of their big-name authors (the ones that really make their profit) to trudge down to a brick and mortar store.

[HaemishM]

Yeah, Amazon tried that shit, got a few concessions from the big 5 pubs and quickly backed down. It's a mutually symbiotic relationship. Amazon needs those big name authors to be on the Kindle. So far, the publishers don't think they need those big name authors on the Kindle. The balance will change rapidly.

[Quinton]

It's unclear to me that "ebooks aren't as profitable as hardcover books."

I think that if we aren't there already, we're very near the point where that statement is untrue, especially if publishers were interested in obtaining the best profits for books instead of propping up traditional paper books as their primary distribution model.

The publishers are basically betting on printing and distribution remaining the dominant medium and I think they're making the wrong bet.  I doubt print books are going to vanish completely, but I suspect within the next decade things are going to invert and ebooks will become dominant with print as an important niche.

(If ebooks are the CD or MP3, I think print is more like vinyl than the 8-track).

[Ingmar]

I've always kind of wondered how much it costs Amazon to do the free Whispernet thing, but I guess since they aren't actually even setting the prices themselves that doesn't have a big impact on book pricing.

[Quinton]

I'd bet it's on the order of pennies ($0.05-0.10) per download (similar to what they charge you for sending your own documents), when you consider that they probably pay some bulk rate for all their data usage and the costs they incur for "free" data usage (like browsing their store from the kindle) are defrayed by costs they factor into the part of the cut they take per-book.

EDIT: grammar

[HaemishM]

The current printing model is seriously outdated and straining. In terms of efficiencies, bookstores themselves are outdated. With the rapid development of print-on-demand technologies, there is no need for centralized book printing and shipping/distribution. Book stores should be print-on-demand hubs that only carry a handful of physical products on hand. The rest should be in a database, to be printed out when someone comes into the store and wants a print version of a book. That 50% that the brick and mortar retailer gets? It's actually a lot less than that.

My paperbacks are available through expanded distribution, which means any bookstore that uses Ingram Book Distributing can order a copy. Now, before that book ever gets to the retailer, the distributor has gotten a 50% discount. If my book is $10, they pay $5. The bookstore probably pays something like $8, so their margins are pretty thin. Now my printer gets another 20% of the list price, so between them and the distributor, I make less than $2 off a $10 paperback. If it's sold through Amazon (who gets 40% of the list), I make about $3.20 off a print-on-demand book that costs $10. To get that royalty rate, I paid a one-time fee of $40.

My eBook is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a shitload of other places through Smashwords. Depending on how I price the book, I make between 35% (if the eBook is less than $2.99 list price) and 70% of the list price, minus the vendor's cut which is variable based on the size of the download file but usually no more than $.10 cents. It costs me nothing but the time and effort required to prepare the file properly and upload it. The majority of my sales are eBook these days, and I attribute that mainly to prices. $.99 cents for one book, $2.99 for the other (and a compilation of the two for $3.50), something like 25 times more eBook sales than paperbacks. That's with the same amount of marketing done to both, and less eBook readers out there than paperback readers. On a per unit basis, yes, the paperbacks are more profitable, but I will never sell as many without big time marketing support because I can't price them low enough to move. I'd be crazy not to concentrate on eBook sales.

A guy like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling or William Gibson could go eBook only and KILL. Why they don't I can't understand.

[WayAbvPar]

Gibson's latest was the first one I looked at when I started shopping. His publisher is part of the problem. I wonder if he knows/cares?

[Ingmar]

A guy like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling or William Gibson could go eBook only and KILL. Why they don't I can't understand.

They probably lose out on the marketing machine pushing their books, for one thing. I'm guessing the major book reviewers don't give a high priority to ebook-only publications.

[MahrinSkel]

There is one legitimate reason for authors to dislike eBooks that I've seen: Generally an author can "claw back" his rights to something if it's out of print, if the publisher has let it drop out of the catalog and has no copies to distribute.  They can take the rights to it back and find another publisher.  Some authors have tried to use this provision and been denied because there's an eBook version available on some obscure format.

--Dave

[Morat20]

A guy like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling or William Gibson could go eBook only and KILL. Why they don't I can't understand.

They probably lose out on the marketing machine pushing their books, for one thing. I'm guessing the major book reviewers don't give a high priority to ebook-only publications.

Contractual obligations would be one reason -- big names might be obligated for several more books. There's also losing out on the editing end, and Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind are excellent reasons to "want to hire a real editor".

[Chimpy]

Pish, TOR doesn't have editors.

(Both of them are published by "our paperbacks are more durable than our hardcovers, you can actually read them TWICE before they start to fall apart" land)

[Johny Cee]

 

[Quinton]

Obviously if you're serious about it you're probably going to end up paying somebody for editing, cover design, etc.  But that's a solved problem -- it sounds like publishers already often outsource that work anyway.   At least if you're paying somebody to design you a cover you probably have better odds of getting art/design you like rather than some random crap picked by your publisher.

[HaemishM]

A guy like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling or William Gibson could go eBook only and KILL. Why they don't I can't understand.

They probably lose out on the marketing machine pushing their books, for one thing. I'm guessing the major book reviewers don't give a high priority to ebook-only publications.

Try absolutely fuckall priority to eBook only publishing... unless it's from a big name. My point with listing those particular guys is that at this point, they really don't need the big marketing machines. They have built-in fanbases that will do a lot of the marketing for them.

EDIT: As for proofreading, editing, cover art, hell even PR, there are tons of good freelances and/or services out there that provide these things without needing to go through a publisher.

Love the E-Pub Bingo graphic.