Actually, I believe that used ebooks can sell for almost the same price as "new" ones. Unlike with physical books, there is literally no difference in reading experience between an ebook that has been sold a hundred times and an ebook that's new.
However, as someone who reads books and who would appreciate a right for resale for ebooks, I don't appreciate it for being able to make money from reselling it. I am more interested about the effects: that I have actual ownership over the ebook. That the place which sold me the ebook going bankrupt doesn't disrupt my abilities to read it. That I can lend it to a friend. etc.
Now, if you allowed resale, ebooks would have close to "new" resale values, and more importantly, resale values of ebooks which have been sold three or four times would stay the same. This would create the problem that people could buy an used ebook, read it, and then resell it afterwards for the same price, basically reading the ebook for free. Now libraries are doing something similar with physical books, but they are inconvenient to use. You need to get to the library, stand in queue, handle the books, think about bringing them back in time, etc. But ebooks don't have such limitations and you could build a super convenient solution around ebook lending. While it's great that people read books, it's sadly not really good for publishers or authors. I kinda understand them that they want to close this loophole. Still, you could allow for resale in some different fashion. E.g. a resale tax of 10% of the value or something. In my opinion that would be the optimum, and a solution that's fair to everyone.
If the author still got a cut of the resale price, this might actually increase sales.
There are tons of books I'd like to read but I felt were out of my monthly book budget.
If I could recoup a good portion of my costs I'd buy more books.
Historically, this idea hasn’t gone over well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine .
As is, we're essentially artificially creating disposable goods, for the primary purpose of enriching distributors at a cost to consumers.
I would be less annoyed by essentially consumable digital goods if I knew sometime down the road they would enter the public domain in a reasonable timeframe, and not well after the eventual death of the current generation of children.
I sincerely hope I haven't made you feel the way I felt when my gramdmother told me I had, in fact, not invented scrambled eggs.
IMO if buying ebooks were super easy many people would do it, I know Steam and the PS Store had that effect on me.
Books could be universally free and maybe I'd browse a bit more but I wouldn't really read more.
my library lends ebooks using an app, works great
I use the Chrome Instant Multi Search extension to search all the libraries+services – about 12 different sites at this point. Between them they have almost every book I want in e-book or audiobook, and by placing holds I can keep a steady queue of books going. Managed 125 books this year that way, the majority of them digital, and free.
It's worth pointing out that at least one big publisher doesn't use DRM: Tor.
Frankly, I don't get why the big publishers insist on DRM. All it really does is cement Amazon's dominance. Sell DRM-free formats and you aren't helping Amazon lock customers in to the Kindle ecosystem.
I keep very good books. Will re read sometimes. Reasons aren't important, just that a reread makes sense. Maybe the best reason is looking at a great story in a new light, different times.
Anyway, DRM free ebooks means I can keep them like my physical books and in a decade, read them again just like my physical books.
Love it. I gladly buy and pay full list. I want them to make their money because they are delivering great value.
I pretty much do not use Kindle. I prefer plain text, PDF, or an easily displayed and or converted pub, etc.
Bonus, I just dont need a kindle, or Amazon, or anything. If it can render text, or a PDF, reading happens just fine.
Just for fun, I have read some great fiction on my Apple Platinum. Honestly, it is kind of a cool experience. That task is a heavy lift for the machine, but it does it. The fonts, display, etc. take me to a different time. Fun. Frivolous.
Just as frivolous as say, reading on a beach, or something.
Tor is on a good path here.
All that said, I buy both ebook and print.
Also, samples. These are great. One can read enough to see if the book makes sense. Same as print, sans just being able to pick a section.
If they kill ebooks, I will buy fewer books. Both formats have their sweet spots.
That's a great point. If ebooks were killed , then I would simply be buying fewer books. I enjoy both formats, but I do end up reading the most on an e-ink Kindle.
Right now, 70 / 30 ebook here too.
8 bit 6502 Apple computer, 128kb RAM, 1mhz.
I did the ebook for fun. Had a space opera that I was chipping away at. The experience was nice. Just fire it up, settle in, read.
If you want your ebook on Amazon, then Amazon will take 70% (The 30% might be available to you if you plan on retailing at a low price and in mainstream markets, but an indie author serving niche topics will often want to set a higher price; Also you can't do public domain content on the 30% option).
70% commission strikes me as being extremely high. Compare that to bandcamp, which takes 15% for being an extremely well-known platform for indie music.
Competitors who try to eat at least a little of Amazon's lunch (like Rakuten's Kobo, or national book chains like Barnes & Noble's Nook in the U.S., Thalia's Tolino in Germany etc) are following Amazon on pricing. Only outsiders like Google & Apple offer better deals, but those platforms aren't all that interesting for e-books.
Of course you can try to sell e-books by offering downloads from your own store, but you'll have to work a lot harder and spend more on marketing, plus I'm not sure that, outside of specialist techie audiences, people would be willing to endure the friction around downloading an EPUB, connecting an ebook reader via USB, transferring the file etc.
It raises interesting questions about the definition of monopoly. Especially as Google gradually fades the distinction between ads and results and starts to take over categories like travel.
(not proposing anything, just making an observation)
OTOH, a customer certainly has a relationship with the car manufacturer, through advertising and mental image.
When you shop for a car you choose the make and model first, then find a dealership that will sell it to you. If you get your media from Amazon, you go to Amazon to see what they have and choose from that. Amazon controls the relationship in a way the dealer does not.
IIRC, this is basically why car dealerships exist and you can't just order a car out of a catalog.
There are many car dealerships. There are only a few car manufacturers. So the latter have forced the former into a bad deal.
Tesla, however, was in the unique position of having enough capital to open their own dealerships, which has caused a lot of friction with more traditional, "family-owned" dealerships.
Of course, historically an 90% commission on a print book would cover expenses like editing, printing, and marketing which Amazon doesn't provide; and the risk/cost of unsold copies, which ebooks don't have. Still, if you think your publisher wasn't putting much effort into the marketing anyway....
I've gone both the indie route and the traditional publisher route and I'm honestly not sure the publisher is worth the other tradeoffs. TBH, the biggest value of the publisher was that it still carries a certain (not entirely warranted) gravitas.
(I'd argue that if you're doing a book by yourself without a co-author, you pretty much have to hire at least a copy editor but that's pretty inexpensive.)
I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.
You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.
A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...
I bought and read a few self-published books on Amazon. The lesson I learned was that you should never, under any circumstances whatever, pay for a self-published book. The average quality of writing is atrocious.
Publishers may not do much direct improvement of your writing, but even if they perform a purely censorious function of printing good writing and refusing to print bad writing, they're adding a lot of value.
(And my understanding is that they do in fact work with you to improve your writing, but I have no experience in the field.)
30% is the norm from Amazon anyway, though I agree the terms are onerous and a world in which Amazon (or any other large corp.) dominates distribution would not be a pleasant one for authors. The nice thing above the that though is that the Internet means that monopoly on digital distribution can be broken relatively quickly by a superior solution.
You have a source on that? Everything I see and read shows amazon takes the "standard" 30% platform rate that Apple started years ago, I think 30% is way to high as well but I see nothing in any of Amazons documentation where they take 70% of revenue for selling an ebook
On the "70% royalty option" (=30% commission), the retail price of the ebook must not exceed $9.99
If you write a college textbook that normally retails at $80, that $9.99 will be a joke to you.
This way they keep prices down (at the author's cost), or when there is real profit opportunity on the table, take the lion's share.
The prices of TextBook has long been insane largely because they are "required" by the professors that write them or getting kickbacks from publishers
No Free Market will support $80 textbooks
I am sure we are not going to even come close to agreeing on this topic so....
as to 35% royalty, how do that compare to a standard publishing contract from a publisher? I have a feeling that is still more than what the Traditional Publishers give their Authors
Compare that to someone whose life's work is some academic area where their book has become the standard textbook. If it weren't for that person's work, there wouldn't be a product here. That person can choose between a handful of publishers, and whichever publisher they go with has a product, and the others don't have one. -- The recent backlash against Elsevier and the drive towards open journals is basically showing how different the economics are here.
But the fact is: There is a spectrum here, and the above are the two ends of the spectrum.
Amazon's model is basically encouraging the cookbook-stuff and being extremely hostile towards the latter kind of content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19273955
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996052
As you can see they are much loved with the HN crowd ;-D
Some of the highest ranked top-level comments start like
"Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also [...]"
"Elsevier is really, really bad. At this point, I think they are already seeing the end and investors are trying to [...]"
"Elsevier employees should just quit and work somewhere else. It's just [...]"
I'd be 110% in favor of mandating open source textbooks, where available, for any course taken by a student receiving government educational grants.
Essentially, you get to have (a) high textbook costs, or (b) monopolies over categories (e.g. one single mathematics textbook publisher).
Legacy / static topics (intro linear algebra) and evolving topics (intro biology) also have very different economic models.
When I was into sailing, I bought meteorology textbooks, because I reckon "What the heck, I pay $100 for a weekend on the water. For an extra $60 I might as well be able to read the skies and the synoptic charts for added pleasure." I recently bought the standard textbook on equine hoofcare, because a visit by the farrier costs $200 a pop, happens every 6 weeks, and I reckon "What the heck. For an extra $100, I want to be able to tell the difference between a good farrier and a bad farrier."
I think college textbooks provide extremely good value for money. Working though one attentively, including doing exercises and checking the answers etc is pretty much as good value as actually doing the course at university (if it's a theoretical subject; obviously you can't learn surgery that way). This is also reflected in the way that they are now routinely being up-sold from mere books into online courses. The market for online courses hasn't quite equilibriated yet. But it's not uncommon for authors of textbooks to recycle the book into a slideset, play the slides on video at the same time as reading the book into the audio track. Throw in a meaningless certificate, and, bang, your $100 textbook is now a $1000 online course. People pay it because, often times, it's actually still worth it. (Although I prefer the bang-per-buck ratio of textbooks to online courses).
Examples? What you’re describing does not jibe with my experience doing MOOCs. Even the better ones cover a lot less ground than a textbook on the same topic, for the same reason a lecture course does.
For my Newtonian Physics class, the textbook we were using was on its 14th edition and cost more than $100 new. I was fortunate that my professor asked us to use the 13th at the latest, and gave the mappings to the 12th edition problems (because the only difference between 12th and 13th was which order the problems were in). This for a subject that's been essentially the same for centuries.
Meanwhile my Computer Science classes all had $40 textbooks that were in at most the 2nd edition.
Inclusive of: (1) altering problem sets or numbering, (2) reordering chapters, (3) organizing chapters.
Where if any of the above are done, a free mapping must be available on the internet.
I presume there are actual university guidelines prohibiting using older editions (i.e. ones the official college bookstore couldn't buy in bulk), but most professors just didn't seem to care (in between everything else they were juggling).
But selling low cost goods as an occasional thing is incredibly time consuming for the return. In the past I sold on Ebay every now and then and basically came to the conclusion that unless I was making $50+ on a transaction it just wasn't worth the hassle. Books are easier in general but they also are usually a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.
I heard a different explanation in the early days of ebooks: that publishers were afraid ebook pricing and lack of physicality would diminish the perceived value of print books. This from a few in the print publishing industry, but I don't know how widespread it was or is.
There was definitely some truth in that. When eBooks were relatively new there was a widespread trope that they "should" be a lot cheaper than physical books because they didn't have all the printing/distribution/return/etc. costs associated with dead tree versions. In fact, these costs were pretty trivial (maybe $2/copy as I recall).
And pre-Amazon, in 1990s dollars, B&N 25% discounts on bestsellers was a big deal when non-discounted $25 hardcovers was the norm. (Mainstream eBooks came a bit later of course but the basic point that the cost of providing a physical book was a lot less of the cover price than most people assumed it was.)
The weird part about that is that, back in the 80s-90s, book prices took a big hike and the publishers blamed paper prices.
Their reasoning is amazingly flexible.
Also note that all of the non-printing, etc., costs are one time affairs. Except for the distribution channels, which take ~50% of the cover price (and which don't apply to e-books).
Braille and large print books exist, but only sometimes will you find the book you want in those formats. And those traditional accessible formats aren't nearly as flexible as an ebook. Depending on the individual, a particular level of contrast, certain colors, or font may make a big difference, particularly for people who are legally blind but still have some limited sight. There is little chance of finding a print book with precisely the right formatting for you, but with ebooks the problem evaporates.
They are easy to ship overseas.
My interpretation is slightly different. They don't line it because of the commitment it creates.
1) From a legal perspective, it's only a matter of time before someone says, "You sold me this book. What do you mean I can't access it any more? I want my money back." What call action lawyer wouldn't love that opportunity?
2) The upfront cost of the ebook might be cheaper, but again, there's the ongoing infrastructure, etc. Those costs over time add up. Vs print the book once and be done with it.
Those ebooks don't create and maintain themselves. Print is finite. Digital is forever.
As mentioned above: Books are finite. Ebooks are forever.
Somebody is paying to run that.
It's reasonable to assume that they'll stop paying the second it stops making money for them.
Microsoft had their “plays for sure” DRM. No one thought Microsoft would get out of the music game. They did. “Plays for sure” no longer works. Does not play.
In the world of ebooks, indies actually have the upper hand. For one, we don't have the overhead of big publishers, so we can sell ebooks at more reasonable prices (while pocketing more than authors with traditional contracts). We have the ability to move more quickly and thus take advantage of new features (like Amazon's ad platform) earlier. We can sell worldwide with a click, instead of negotiating messy contracts.
With print on demand, we can also have our books in print. But publishers definitely have the upper hand there and, I presume, always will.
Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free.
Personally, I _like_ ebooks, especially for fiction. They weigh nothing. They have search. My highlights can get aggregated together. I can switch devices and even switch between ebook and audiobook. Further, I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.