Time to empty your Amazon shopping cart for ever?

[purpletigron]

Remember when Amazon delisted a tranche of books by openly non-str8 authors?

Now they've delisted an entire publisher:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/29/macmillan-books-gone-missing-from-amazon/

Comments

Soft bigotry of low expectations

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I buy from Barnes & Noble because they're not grossly stupid.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Clicking through from the article the reason seems to be a spat with Macmillan wanting to raise its ebook prices from $10 to $15. I don't think we should have a go at Amazon for resisting price gouging.

[d-h.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a little bit more complex that that (since there are plenty of ebooks on Amazon for prices other than $10).

Broadly speaking:
Amazon wants ebook prices to be as low as possible, since their product is the Kindle, and cheaper books will encourage people to by their reader with competition on the way (Nook, iPad).
Publishers want to charge as much as they think the market will bear, as thatʻs where they think they will make their profit.
And the Reader? Well theirʻs is a sustainability issue here. Most reading commentators say they want the ebook version to be as cheap as possible (the even $10 is too high argument). But in a long term view, readers want books to be as cheap as possible but still reward the authors enough to keep writing.
Writers without other day jobs (of which my mother is one) are in a similar position to readers, but with less power (a reader can wait for cheaper editions, there is normally a limited range of potential publishers).

In this particular case, Amazon, at the peak of its ebook power is trying to set the playing field for the next few years.

Just like music sales, it is going to take some time for the existing distribution networks to finally settle on a ʻcheap without DRMʻ ultimate balancing.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

We all want authors to get more. Amazon wanted to move from a 50% publisher take to a 70% one if the sale price remained under $10. The publisher might feel $7 is not enough but what fraction of their costs are they eliminating by skipping paper.

Until things settle down I'm keeping with the library service, and the poor author just gets 6p.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I found this article which gives a breakdown of the costs. It suggests the physical item is not that expensive which is why pagecounts have ballooned :-(