Because of this deal.

Amazon was on course to dominate 100% of publishing. This suit may clear the way.

Even if Saint Jobs was involved in it

That's ok.

Let Detroit Die!

Apple's Agreement with the Big Publishing companies stipulates that none of the eBooks can be sold for less than the price Apple was offering (Publisher price+ Apple's 30%) even if some company wanted to sell it lower.

This is clearly anti-competitive behavior!


I find that (most of the) Apple fans are the ONLY consumer group who are actually PROUD of being ripped off. They spout stuff like "But Apple is the most profitable company". Every-time I see such an argument I have a hard time deciding if I should cry(at their ignorance) or laugh. If a company is making Huge profits...especially when the Profits are based on large profit margins, it means only one thing. The Customer is getting ripped off. I'm yet to see any other large company's customer base feel happy about the extent of Ripoff they undergo.

Imagine us feeling happy that the Gas companies are making so many Billions every time we pump gas at the station? Impossible to imagine such a scenario right? Well, except for Apple fans.


As a recent study found..most Apple customers are more akin to a fundamentalist religious group than regular people

Not sure why the government is wasting time on this. Meanwhile, rampant financial fraud goes on unchecked.

Apple Author requires you to buy an ISBN before you are allowed to sell your book through them.

Go to r/writing on Reddit to hear good things about Direct Publishing, which, to the chagrin of the publishing monopolies, is the future.

Otherwise how can they make $$$ off the backs of hardworking writers?

Lots of authors are self-publishing via amazon and getting a LOT more money from sales than they were with their previous publisher.

Traditional book publishers- the buggy whip maker's trade association of this decade.

Direct publishing or one off editor-publishing (where someone edits your work for a fee and then it's directly published without a middle-man) is the future.

...this is one suit that I hope the DOJ is successful with...

The five publishers facing possible Justice Department action are Simon & Schuster Inc, a unit of CBS Corp; Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group; Pearson Plc's Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc, a unit of News Corp.

U.S. and European officials have been investigating whether publishers and Apple acted together to drive up prices in the booming electronic book industry, blocking rivals such as Amazon from offering cheaper e-books.

Antitrust rules forbid price-fixing agreements designed to shut out competitors or drive up what consumers pay.

E-book publishers adopted an "agency model" in 2010, around the time that Apple launched the iPad.

That model allowed publishers to set the price of e-books and in turn, Apple would take a 30 percent cut. The Apple agreements with publishers effectively barred them from allowing rival retailers to sell the same books at lower prices.

...

Apple's push for agency pricing was detailed in Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The book says that Jobs, who died in October, was aware of publishers' frustration with Amazon. It quotes Jobs as saying: "So we told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent and yes, the customer pays a little more but that's what you want anyway.' ... So they went to Amazon and said, 'You're going to sign an agency contract or we're not going to give you the books.'"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/08/ebooks-justice-department-apple_n_1329120.html

How about this instead - Amazon got a head start (like apple did with iPod/iPad/etc) over the industry and purchased (invested) in bulk e-books so that they could sell them cheaper. Maybe Apple should take some of their vast profits, invest in wholesale buying of e-books, and compete?

Why punish a company that had some foresight (and a good reader) AND the consumer when you have enough cash laying about to invest (and with all investments risk losing money) the same way your competitor did? The reason is - Apple does not want competition, they want control - and they want it in a way that won't make them take risks others were willing to take. Amazon gambled and won, Apple does not want to gamble.

And if you charge $18 for a music CD and $15 for what used to be a $5.99 paperback book, a lot of people will just end up getting the free versions instead. Maybe the DOJ is doing Apple a favor.

But the Issue here is that it seems Apple's agreement with he big publishing houses stipulates that no other vendor could sell the book for a price less than what Apple was offering.

Thus even if a vendor wanted to sell for 9.99 instead of 20...he cannot as he is liable to be sued by Apple/partners of the agreement.

They've been the culprits in this whole e-book business for years. I'm glad the publishers fought back (using Apple).

1 Some Ebooks(the ones using Apple's agency model) cost more than the hardcover versions!

2 No company is allowed to sell these Ebooks at a price less than the one Apple offers.


These are both anti-competitive and anti-customer behavior.
We customers get ripped off when companies price-fix....That's the reason there is the consumer protection agency

Because the ebooks I've purchased at Amazon and Apple are cheaper.

If you want book bargains, don't purchase new books. Publishers set the prices, they have always done so. Retailers have some leeway but not that much. I often go to the library or the used bookstore.

Nonetheless, will be quite happy to see this suit have some success. Especially against Harper Collins

The four Book paperback set(including case) costs 21$
29.99 for Kindle version

[IMG][/IMG]


I usually use the library extensively (also donate my old/used books to the library). However the eBook prices have definitely gone up after the Apple-publisher deal came into effect. Now most ebook/kindle prices are almost on par with printed versions or in some cases considerably higher.

At the onset, before this deal, the kindle prices used to hover around 50% of the printed price.

Why does it have to be one extreme or the other? I don't like Amazon lowering people's perception of a "fair" price by taking a loss to sell Kindles. At the same time, yes, ebooks cost less to produce, but if we're talking about an ebook vs a print book of the same title (so same work editing, marketing, designing layout, etc) the printing costs a few dollars. So if anything ebooks should be more like 10-20% cheaper than the print book, not 50%+ cheaper as Amazon would prefer.

...is one that reflects the brutal decrease in manufacturing, distribution, and storage costs.

There's simply no way in hell those are just about 10% of the final cost. No way. They're ripping people off for bigger margins, plain and simple. And when somebody doesn't play fair with you, you cease to feel a need to play fair with them. Just saying.

For large run books (think Harry Potter, etc.) the printing costs are actually a tiny fraction of the cost. For those books, royalties are almost always much higher than the unit print price (for a Harry Potter hardcover, printing shipping can be as low as $1/copy and royalties may be as high as $5/copy). Of course the volume also lowers the fixed cost/unit of editors, designers, proofreaders, marketing.
Staying with the big publishers, you simply can't take one book's P&L profile and apply it across the board. There are hundreds of titles that get published that aren't "successful". A much higher % of those book's gross must be put against the salaries of the professionals producing the book.
In the rest of the book publishing market (like an iceberg, the majority of the industry is "invisible" niche or specialty publishers) the numbers are very different, but the end result is still very much the same--the cost of paper printing isn't that significant when all factors are considered. I work in this segment and our print costs are obviously higher per unit than a NY Times bestseller, but more than balancing that is each book's need to carry a much higher percentage of the editing/proofing/design costs. The reality is that it doesn't matter whether a book sells 300,000 copies or 1500--it requires about the same level of production. For illustration, say a good acquisitions/development editor can turn a book every month and they "cost" the publisher $120K (including salary, benefits, office space, etc.) then each of those 12 books needs to generate $10,000 just to pay that one person. If you sell 100,000 copies, great, the acquisitions editor cost you a dime per book. If you sell 1000 copies, each single book cost you $10 just for 1 employee.
The point is that in almost every model, the cost of paper is a small fraction of the publisher's cost.

in book selling, for which it has never been taken to task.

http://www.thenation.com/article/37484/trouble-amazon

This is why publishers went to Apple. They were tired of the Mafia tactics.

Amazon takes another 30%.

So, you sell a book at market prices for $10 and Amazon takes 30% you get $7.

Or you sell a book at your own controlled prices for $20, Amazon takes 30% ($6) you have $14 before Apple takes 30% you get $9.80.

That's a whole 30% increase because you can control the price.

This is a monopoly in action, and I am being generous with those numbers because in reality an ebook should sell for $4-5.

Amazon was pioneering the Direct/Self Publishing model where Authors/writers can publish books directly through Amazon, without using the middlemen of the Established publishing houses which took a big chunk out of every sale.

The middlemen realized that they were soon becoming obsolete...and banded together in a cabal to fix the prices.

It's nice that publishers act as a filter. And since I only buy print books, well, those are pretty expensive to self publish so I pretty much need the publishers anyway. Sure, some books from big publishers aren't that good, but at least it weeds out most of the really, really bad ones. Plus I think anyone can benefit from a good editor and I doubt the writers selling 99 cent self published Kindle ebooks paid an editor.

To produce great and lasting books is not some hobby that can be done out of a basement with any consistency. Top quality editors, copy-editors, fact-checkers (for non-fiction), designers, and yes, PR people even, are needed. These are workers who need to be paid. They are professionals. (As an editor, I am one; and this notion that nothing needs to be edited has had a real effect .)

But that is not the issue: Amazon was using henchman tactics to sell books for under their real cost to promote their Kindle products. Their strong-arming of the publishing industry was and remains heinous. They have horrible labor practices and sweatshop warehouses, add no income to the states because they charge no sales taxes. It's a model we'll regret some day soon: random shitty books for the most part, an exploited labor force to ship them, and state governments starved of cash.

90% of the books I read are not even available as e-books. If it's a race to the bottom we want, we'll end up with a culture that will have no lasting value. And, oh yeah, one monopoly on our literary output. Since when do we embrace monopolies?

But it has been for decades with publishers putting you on long waiting lists and snubbing you if you weren't the best author in the world.

I'm sure you'd have the same argument for the recording execs who independent artists circumvented with companies like CDBaby and finally iTunes.

Well, they still are. But more than hardcover? Fuck that noise.

Amazon has a disclaimer "Price set by publisher" on such deals.

In my opinion the basic Kindle is the best e-book reader on the market while the Fire is better for apps and web browsing.

Many of us who own e-readers refuse to pay exorbitant prices for e-books. Often because of this price fixing scheme I find that often the e-book version costs much more than the paper or hardback version from Amazon. For example the paperback version of Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design will cost $8.10 at Amazon but will you will pay $13.99 for the Kindle version. This book is sold by Random House Digital, Inc and Amazon prints a disclaimer that the price was set by the publisher.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/055338466X/ref=s9_al_bw_g14_ir012?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_r=01HQ0W3Y7CBK3W61HZKF&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1360353902&pf_rd_i=549028

When you figure the cost to the environment of producing and shipping a dead tree book compared to downloading an e-book, you may conclude that for some publishers greed is far more important than green.

I rarely buy any e-book for more than $9.99 and often find excellent books for free or less than $3.00 on Amazon. Amazon runs a e-book daily deal. Today's deal (April 12) is a novel titled Dangerous Games by Michael Prescott for $0.99.

Since I bought my basic Kindle, I find that reading a dead tree book is not as enjoyable. The Kindle allows me to do a word search the book on that I am reading and if I want, I can do a search for a term in all the books I have on the device. At the current time I have over 300 books on this device which is the size of a short paperback book. The Kindle is advertised to be capable of holding 3500 books. Imagine how many book shelves I would need to hold this number of books and how long it would take to search for all the times that, for example, Abraham Lincoln was mentioned in a large collection. With my Kindle, I can find every instance that his name is mentioned in just a minute. With the collection that I currently have I found out in less than 5 seconds that 51 of my items mentioned Lincoln. His name appeared 82 times in The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days that Shook the Nation and 33 times in Lies My Teacher Told Me. I can review the text for every time that his name appears in a book with a simple click of a button.

I hate to say this but dead tree books may soon become as obsolete as a goose quill pen is for writing. They will continue to exist but their use will be limited.

...there is absolutely zero point in buying an e-book if the hard copy is cheaper, so I will wait until the price drops, or it goes on special. I will not pay more than $9.99 for an e-book.

If anything the Kindle and the Fire have made me buy MORE books than I would have done otherwise...so price-fixing irks me to no-end.

Dead tree books? Really? how insulting. Perhaps I should call your beloved ebooks fake books then. I love physical books and could never live without my collection of them. I have zero interest in buying or reading ebooks and I am very disappointed that my tax dollars are being wasted going after the publishers who publish the books I love so much. Why not go after Amazon instead for their unfair predatory pricing? You really think they are going to keep the low prices if they get what they want, which is control of the entire market? Or better yet go after the oil companies for the insane gas prices instead of making such a fuss over the price of a LUXURY ITEM.

but never buy a Kindle or another e-reader. If you do, you might just just realize that comparing a book to an e-reader is like comparing a Smith Corona typewriter to a modern laptop computer with a good word processing program.

I tried out an e-reader at the store. I simply prefer the feel of holding a real book and the look as well. I also like owning books and having my favorites on my shelves. I simply love books as physical objects and find them more enjoyable to read from as well. A book feels much better to hold than an e-reader. A physical book does everything I need it to do, and it looks/feels nicer. If you don't like printed books, you don't have to read them, but don't assume everyone that does enjoying reading printed books enjoys it out of ignorance and if they only tried one of your precious ebook readers would be "enlightened" about the one true best way of reading. How arrogant to assume you know better than me what I would find more enjoyable or useful! I've tried both, and printed books just work better for me, the end.

I use ebooks extensively...especially manuals and Datasheets. They are convenient and useful for work; when you have to quickly search for stuff. The same goes for leisure reading...I use my laptop (yes...I never bought into the tablet-fad as I had to carry around a laptop on a daily basis) when taking the light rail for commute.

However imho nothing beats reading a real paper-book. Is it a pain in the neck to carry around at times? yes. When im at home, I almost always read paper-books. I find that the experience of reading a "book" cannot yet be replicated by ebooks. But then again I'm sure there are some who find the opposite to be true.

I'd love it if every book was available in both print and e-book and people could just buy whichever is more enjoyable to them. But I don't like retailers underpricing e-books and taking a loss on them just to sell more of the expensive e-readers. Would be nice if there was just one format that worked on all e-readers and devices, then maybe we wouldn't have companies like Amazon taking losses to try and get a monopoly with the Kindle and potentially screwing up the book industry as a result.

And for what it's worth, technically an ebook should be a bit cheaper than a printed book, but not a mere fraction of the price of a printed book like many people who love ebooks insist should be the case. You can argue over whether it's greedy to charge x more than production costs in order to make a profit, but in the end, the costs of producing and shipping the physical book do not account for most of the price: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57412587-93/why-e-books-cost-so-much/

So in reality, ebooks should cost a few dollars less. Not 50 or 60 or 70 or 80% less.

Some of them might not 'officially" work, but there are ways to make them work using 3rd party software.

Also Kindle books can now be read in PC's too. So those who own a laptop/use it daily can skip buying a kindle reader.



I also digitize some old books (which are not available as ebooks/pdf's byt he publisher) so i can read them as pdf in my laptop. A simple scanner allows a person to convert any book into a ebook/pdf if they so wish.

I've no interest in paying for ebooks since as I said I prefer holding/reading a physical book. But if there's a free short story by an author I like and I can't get it in print, I read on the computer. I was speaking more in general terms - to prevent one company like Amazon from getting a stranglehold on the market. After all, Amazon doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly on the print market because print books don't have that compatability issue. But Amazon gets people to buy Kindles with the promises of cheap books, then people can't buy books from elsewhere, or if they do it's hard to get them to work on the Kindle.

I'm sure that some people still prefer to use an old typewriter to compose literature. Others write personal mail in long hand and send it by snail mail. People differ.

If you love a large collection of musty old books cluttering up your house and collecting dust, that is your right. I have merely explained some of the advantages of e-books to those who might be interested in such devices.

Your argument reminds me of the time in our history when horseless carriages or automobiles first came on the scene. Many people disliked them intensely and said that they were loud and ugly and were a passing fad.

While many people at that time loved the beauty of horses and enjoyed traveling in horse drawn carriages, over the years they discovered the advantages of automobiles. Still yet today some people such as the Amish prefer the older life style and find it very worthwhile and rewarding. I have no problem with this as I grew up in Ohio near the areas that the Amish lived in, and while I would not wish to live as they do that is their choice as it should be in a free nation. My experiences with the Amish have been very positive and I feel they are good people who live in a tightly knit community, are very productive and live peacefully. They also prepare some really tasty home cooked meals, pies and cookies.



I grew up in the fifties and sixties and I was quite good at adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing numbers using paper and pencil. I learned how to be efficient and accurate when calculating the square root or even the cube root of a number. Today I use an electronic calculator or a computer to do such tasks. If you believed today that you enjoyed using paper and pencil or a slide rule far better, I would merely point out the advantages of a calculator. If you were to chose to ignore my advice, I wouldn't consider you ignorant by any means.

You do strike me as very defensive about your choice to prefer dead tree books. I'm sure that they will remain around for many years but will gradually be replaced. Even then some people will still have large libraries filled with books and their friends who visit will be impressed with the beauty of these old manuscripts just as many people today find a vintage automobile to be far more attractive than a modern vehicle.





I find it somewhat sad that you feel that I am insulting you. That was not my objective. If I explain the advantages of an e-book in a post and a few people decide to buy one and find it worthwhile, then I have will have made their lives a little more worthwhile and enjoyable. Of course some who do may find they still prefer dead tree books, but since the e-book readers are selling like hotcakes, I suspect many people will agree that they offer significant advantages.

Interestingly enough in the news, I recently read an article that may break your heart.



But it's fairly late and I plan to retire to my bedroom and continue to read a 400 page novel on my Kindle in bed. It's far lighter and less awkward to hold then a paper or hardback book of the same size. If I have any problems remembering who some obscure character is, I will just do a quick search and find out. It's far easily than searching page by page through the book.

Enjoy your dead tree books. I have absolutely no problem with that.

"Dead tree book" has a very negative and insulting tone to it. What's wrong with using a neutral term like physical books or printed books? And sure I'm defensive, when my tax dollars are wasted on this garbage instead of going after companies that price gouge on necessities, like the oil companies.

But sure, go ahead and enjoy your fake book. I'll show you the same respect you show to me.

and sat on your front porch watching log truck after log truck after log truck ROAR past your home delivering dead trees to the factories in Georgia that turn the logs into cardboard and paper, you might have a different view about the use of the term "dead tree books".



When I wake up in the morning and walk outside I often smell the stench from the paper mills in Georgia.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.365676!/img/httpImage/image.jpg

Yes, my use of the term "dead paper books" might be politically incorrect and insulting to you, but it is unfortunately accurate.

is that the paper doesn't last. I have paper books printed in the last twenty years that are almost unreadable now due to excessive yellowing. In another twenty, I expect them to become brittle and really deteriorate, if I still own them. I have some science fiction books from the 1940s that really are falling apart because they became brittle.

The reason for the paper to do this is because it's from dead trees. That is, wood pulp cellulose must be broken down with sulfuric acid in order for it to be turned into usable paper. That acid has a lasting effect on the paper, as noted above. Now, for books printed on "non-acid" paper, none of these issues are a problem. However, they are usually much more expensive, too. The other stable alternatives to wood-pulp paper are those made with cotton ("100% rag content" is the standard term) or hemp. Hemp makes a superior paper to that of wood-pulp, and can be a less expensive process. It's not common, though, due to the stranglehold wood-pulp companies have on that market, not to mention that it's still illegal to grow hemp in the US.

I've got hundreds if not thousands of books. Other than some coffee-table-type art-books, I'd like to have digital copies of all of them, keeping only the literal handful of old and/or signed books I own. I'd give the rest to the libraries

I have all formats and prefer each for different reasons. When I need to get serious work done, I'll use a "dead tree" book every time because digital readers are not conducive to long attention spans, nor do they offer the visual cues I use to quickly find data or formulas (I can do this faster than using a search function). Also, no digital reader offers the aesthetic and tactile qualities of a beautiful full format art book or an early edition work of literature.

What exactly is a long attention span? I often go to bed at 11pm and read my Kindle until 5 or 6am before finally deciding to sleep.

I normally do not search a book for a formula but I do search a novel to find who an obscure character is. I would be willing to bet you $10,000 dollars (although I am not Mitt Romney) that I can find that information far faster than you can searching through a dead tree book. I don't happen to have $10,000 dollars laying around, but since I would win that's irrelevant.

For example how long do you believe that it would take you to find out who Perth is in the novel Moby Dick? On my Kindle it took 15 seconds to find the 36 times his name appears and that includes the time that I used in going to the menu, picking the search function and typing his name in the box. (Perth was "the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith" on the Pequod.)

I will agree that e-readers offer less "aesthetic and tactile qualities of a beautiful full format art book or an early edition work of literature." They are also lighter and more convenient and I don't have to worry about damaging the spine of the book or damaging a page by accident.

Am I a walking advertisement for e-books? Yes.The best advertisement for any product is a happy customer. I qualify, however I am retired and my endorsement of e-books will gain me no profit.

If some old fart like me who is 65 years old finds some significant advantage to a very new piece of new technology and endorses it with enthusiasm, then maybe a much younger person might be wise to consider trying it.

You say that you have used different formats and you find advantages to each. That's fair as people differ. For my use I'll chose my Kindle or Kindle Fire for 99.9 percent of my reading.

I would also chose my cell phone over the black rotary dial phone that was the only choice when I was growing up.

seems to blunt their ability to think that much more. Calculators these days make actually understanding the math unnecessary for many students taking an engineering math sequence. I can no longer count the number of times I ask a student to take a cross product of two vectors ALONG THE UNIT AXES and out come the calculators. I don't even try to stop them any more -- many cannot simply visualize what the vectors are doing like us old fogies HAD to learn. Multiplication in your head is a DEAD skill among these kids. Yet I find white paper after white paper (usually written by calculator manufacturers, natch) talking about how their devices have allowed some kind of "deeper" level of understanding.

That is simply disproven every time I give a "no calculator" quiz or even a conceptual quiz on the math.

I can't prove this yet, but I will eventually be able to: eTextbooks will do the same thing. Too many big players spending too much money to make it happen.

Even in recreational reading, you've described why mysteries will soon become obsolete. Have a suspect? Just search on their name, reread each relevant passage and there ya have it, a report on that person's role usually reserved for the investigator's smug conclusion. The genre will have to resort to "offpage" clues which of course are a joke because you CAN'T figure out whodunnit if no hints are given.

Not saying it isn't nice in some cases, but technology replaces imagination and crtiical thought.

I agree that in many ways it is bad, because it makes us non-thinking, but in other ways we still have to build pattern recognition and logic skills to derive the right answer from what a computer is telling us. For a book project schools could always disable search in a book though, but then, there would be an argument that you should also disable in-line bookmarking or note making. If a student wants to use notes in an electronic book it wouldn't more difficult than if they wrote on the margins of a real book (or wrote in a note pad). But it would certainty facilitate their researching abilities and give them an edge over students who weren't allowed to take notes. So it's a delicate balance, I think.

Meanwhile I have taught a lot of newbies (kids or young adults or older peeps with no knowledge) about vectors by sending them to this tutorial: http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/vectors/start.html

If you actually follow the tutorial (on a Flash enabled browser) it helps you visualize the vectors and how they work in the end (and this is just more than orientation but also magnitude). I've had enormous success with this when telling them to read a text book or sending them to a non-visual math-oriented tutorial falls short of giving them the understanding that they need. I think intrinsically people are visual beings, and we need that extra bit of visual cue to help us understand quicker and easier. You go and look at something like The Mechanical Universe and you can see copious amounts of visual aids, explaining the real world in terms of simple to understand diagrams. The Great Courses has, to my observation, turned to that type of teaching environment, rather than lectures outright (not all studies benefit from this of course!).

In the end I don't think all is lost, as I said, there's a delicate balance to be had there, and in some situations we may be better off accepting computer integration into human psyche.

The e-ink screens make reading a pleasure vs backlit ones (just tossing that out that for those who don't have one and are not sure in the diff between ipda/fire/etc and readers).

I have found enough free e-books online to last me a really long time. I have bought a few books (including one from a e-book published by a DU'er) on Amazon and noticed over time the prices of 'regular' E-books were going crazy.

Think of it this way: On Amazon I can self publish and 70% of purchase price goes to me. I can set my book to $2 if I want, $1, or $20 - etc.

Now Imagine a few people, Apple being one of several (others settled the case, Apple decided not to), come along and say "Hey, I don't want to have to compete with your lower prices so you have to charge people what I want you to charge them." (yes, this is not a full 1 to 1 mapping of the situation, but it captures the essence of it). Then all the prices would go up across the board and authors that had a chance to get their foot in the door won't be getting as many readers to build a fan base. Someone else is now controlling your ability to price things and make money (Not big govt either, big companies - which seems oddly OK to RW'ers....)

While this didn't affect self publishing, the idea is sort of the same.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

then when I saw the book prices, I said, "No thank you!"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/0c7d3aa0-83e9-11e1-82ca-00144feab49a.pdf

Pretty overwhelming evidence of price collusion.

Joe Konrath mentioned that this was going to happen recently on his blog (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/). I highly recommend his blog to anyone interested in this issue, as he knows it well

Whenever I'm able to self-publish, it will be through Amazon and only in eBook format. Who can argue with a 70% royalty return for authors?

About to self-publish, myself, and it's interesting times ahead for sure! Be sure to check out the LBN thread on this, too. Good discussions all around!

with post #101

I hope I got my point across to some of the naysayers...

I have friends that will likely publish the legacy-route, though most of them are saying that they can see that the future is with eBooks and will go with that once they've tried the legacy model. I'd rather bypass all of that unnecessary hassle myself.

how about going after speculators and oil companies about oil and gas prices...you know that stuff that transports things we EAT to our tables?

We need a completely new paradigm in publishing.

I despise the collusion and price fixing of publishers (not to mention that the traditional model is -- like everything else in our uber capitalistic society -- only benefiting very few).

I also despise the Goliath role Amazon has frequently embraced, controlling so many aspects of the publishing industry in the last 10 years.

We need a new alternative altogether.

How about a worker- and member-owned publishing venture?

It's on my list to explore in earnest in the near future.

I've been involved in both traditional publishing and self-publishing (not vanity publishing). While I am a huge proponent of self-publishing, it's nearly a must to be listed on Amazon now and I can't, in good conscience, advise anyone to be part of Amazon with some of their monopolistic activities of the last few years.

It's a mess.

OPDS is already a system in which people (illegally or legally) distribute books through client software like Calibre.

The single most important reason people use Amazon and iTunes and other hegemonic systems is they want to be recompensed for their work. They're the two main companies who have done it "right" so far.

I would encourage you to self-publish your works with Amazon if you can, and ignore any purity tests that exist. In the future there won't be an Amazon, I fervently believe that. Authors just have to be able to get paid and Amazon is the one way to get it.

People have to survive, and we often have to compromise to do that.

And I agree about the setup we'll likely have in the future.

I'm still leery of having Amazon be the publisher versus self-publishing separate from them and simply using their distribution platform.

If people strictly want to do e-books, Amazon is definitely the logical way to go and, without a doubt, they have the best platform and furthest reach AND best royalty rate. But for those who also plan to offer print books, it's a mess out there! I don't have time to find the links, but maybe you're familiar with the recent brouhaha where Amazon wasn't listing books from other publishers, and Barnes & Noble wouldn't stock books published through Amazon.

Egads, what a mess!!!

They're all either already dominate (in the case of iTunes at least) or getting there. Netflix as it stands now does not have a distribution mechanism for self-made videos, so YouTube may be a better metric to use there. YouTube "personalities" tend to be the largest content creators there, though, commentators, reality show types or people who make comedy. They all get paid relatively well in all spheres. They all have a 70/30 royalty breakdown (it appears to be the norm though I think 99/1 would be more fair or 100:0 if we're in a rational world where the net is free). Actually that's not necessarily true in the case of YouTube because they don't have a per-view payment type thing. For video let's just skip that for now, because it's going to come eventually.

I mean you look at Blender open projects and can see a lot of people working together for something to create for society as a whole. I think that video is lagging behind music and authorship and probably even games because it's just so daunting to get into that sphere of artistry. You need expensive digital cameras, you need a crew (and have to pay that crew, too, even on a hobby level if people aren't all getting paid it can go sour for a group of friends). Once we have the toolsets to actually provide good realistic video (and if you look at the progress Blender is making with their Cycles engine I don't think it's too far off), we'll have people creating toolsets that allow them to make arbitrary films with ease. At that point the whole sphere of influence will change. We can already make highly complex musical pieces without much human interaction (I'm writing a proper front end, so watch that space, you'll be able to make any musical piece that you can conceive and it will be as easy as moving some sliders around, right now it's in a developmental state but still quite usable). Once that happens with video, that is, you sit down, imagine an environment, put in some variables, and pow the toolsets create the environment you thought of, it's all over but the crying for the hollywood movie industry.

Yes, in the end it does suck, and maybe the end of paper will suck for you, I don't know for sure, because you do say you want to offer print, but I think it's the way everything is heading, and this hegemony on media will be over for it.

I can imagine in the end that we'll have an open, free, distribution network where you can subscribe to media that people make, the makers will get paid 99% of what is paid, and everyone will benefit. And that means that in the end a show with 100k viewers or a musical piece with 100k listeners, each person pays a buck and pow, those involved get $100k per unique deliverable (TV show, musical piece, etc). It's grand, I think. Truly grand where things are heading.

Of course, I am going on a really crazy tangent here so I'll shut up now.

I'm not personally married to print books (though there are some -- like children's books -- that seem as though a print version should always be available). I agree everything is moving in the direction of digital, which I think is mostly a very good thing, especially environmentally.

Anyway, I like this vision.

Yes, I do have amassed quite a few hard backs in my library.
I really think that they should give the option of downloading a free digital copy of the book if you buy the hard cover or paper back novel.

I love my hard back novels, but it would be nice to not have to buy the digital copies also for my reader.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/51500-turow-apple-worry-about-amazon-monopoly.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+PW+Daily&utm_campaign=978bd8acf9-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email

After keeping silent immediately following the Department of Justice's lawsuit on Wednesday both Apple and the Authors Guild reacted to the actions Thursday. Apple denied the charges and said the launch of the iBookstore helped to break “Amazon's monopolistic grip on the publishing industry" a company spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

Authors Guild president Scott Turow also used the word monopoly in his response, saying that low Kindle book prices “will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly. It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.”

Turow, who in March wrote a much touted essay on why possible DOJ action against the publishers and Apple would be "grim news" went on: “by allowing Amazon to resume selling most titles at a loss, the Department of Justice will basically prevent traditional bookstores from trying to enter the e-book market, at the same time it drives trade out of those stores and into the proprietary world of the Kindle. The settlement provides a gigantic obstacle to Amazon’s competitors in the e-book business by allowing Amazon to function without making a profit, something that leaves that market forbidding to anyone else who might think of entering, and a bad business for those already there."