dagblog - Comments for "Amazon caves to Macmillan "

Well, that's the pure,

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:15:35 +0000

In reply to My point is that they were

Well, that's the pure, perfectly efficient cost, which doesn't happen in the real world. In actual movie theaters, there's spillage, waste (syrup that never gets sold), and inevitable labor inefficency (the kid who doesn't make any sodas for forty minutes because no one orders a soda). There's still a humongous profit on the sugar water.

The unit cost of a book is quite favorable to publishers, if every book gets sold. But they don't. There are a whole bunch that get printed, shipped, left unsold and eventually shipped back to the publisher at the publisher's cost, which eats into the profits from the books that do get sold. And for paperbacks, there are books that get printed and then destroyed by the booksellers when they don't sell (so the publihsers don't have to pay for return shipping).

You never print extra wasted copies of an e-book (although you do buy server space for books that sell extremely slowly).

My point is that they were

Nebton — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:59:00 +0000

In reply to Nice try, but the author

My point is that they were already making a fortune with the print. It's not that expensive, either.

By way of an analogy where I do have more experience (but this is purely hypothetical): Let's say that the cost to make a 32 oz soda is 15 cents (5 cents for syrup and carbonated water and 10 cents labor), and a movie theater sells it for $3.95. They make $3.80 in profit. Now, imagine that someone finds a way to drop that cost down to 2 cents (magic syrup and solar powered robotic labor). Is it really helping the movie theater that much to do so?

Nice try, but the author

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:40:39 +0000

In reply to I'm not even close to

Nice try, but the author writes that Gardners charges 50% of the retail price for eBooks and print. If they're charging $5 or more per eBook, they must be making a fortune. I should get into that business.

I'm not even close to

Nebton — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:54:16 +0000

In reply to D, it's a pleasure to read

I'm not even close to knowledgable in the field, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but I think the reason that e-warehousing costs about the same as warehousing isn't because of the expense in e-warehousing (cf. your mp3 example), but because of how cheap it is to warehouse paper books. That is, there's been significant added costs in physical warehousing for quite some time, and moving to digital books without including those added costs would eat into the warehouses profits significantly.

Good point, Genghis. My

acanuck — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:12:20 +0000

In reply to I hazard to guess that your

Good point, Genghis. My brother-in-law did the legwork of trudging through the online medical literature and, because he was off work on sick leave, he had plenty of time and motivation to do a thorough job. Not even the most dedicated specialist knows -- much less has time to research from scratch -- all the ways a disease can manifest itself in different individuals.

The key to his successful self-diagnosis was that he then turned to the medical community for confirmation and treatment. When he did, he'd already researched online the various treatment centers throughout North America with expertise in his form of the disease. So his cure resulted from collaboration with established medical practitioners, not circumvention. This wasn't so much a case of cutting out the middleman as redefining his role for him.

Sorry about your grandmother. Alternative medicine has more than its share of quacks. My daughter is a certified acupuncturist, but she has a good working relationship with several medical specialists, who often direct patients to her. And vice-versa. She has had people come in for acupuncture whom she has immediately sent to the nearest ER for life-saving treatment.

The explosion of e-knowledge is a good thing -- a great thing, actually, with vast implications for improving the lot of mankind. The problem, with access to so much information, is that most people don't understand the limits of their own knowledge. They lack the critical faculty to distinguish what they know from what they think they know. That's always been the case; it's just way more important a skill today. I believe people can learn it.

Thanks. She was a very old

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:05:10 +0000

In reply to Man, that's a terrible story.

Thanks. She was a very old woman of 95 when she died. It's still a sad story but perhaps not quite as tragic given her advanced age.

Great post, Deadman. But

Doctor Cleveland — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:20:20 +0000

In reply to Amazon caves to Macmillan

Great post, Deadman. But while I think you're dead right about the price hike being a mistake, I'm totally okay with publishers setting the price for their own e-books, instead of Amazon setting the price unilaterally. I might prefer Amazon's price to MacMillan's in this case, but the principle that publishers set their own prices is a very reasonable one. Look, if you're right (and I think you are) that MacMillan set its price point wrong, then market forces will correct that, and possibly lead them (or their competitors) to sell books for $8.99 or $6.99 or whatever. But the idea that Amazon, through a monopoly on distribution, can dictate the prices, is scary. At the moment, Amazon decrees that the price for every single e-book is relatively low, but that's part of their struggle to get monopolistic reach for the Kindle. Once that monopoly seems safe from any threat of competition, they'll be free to set the prices as high as they like. So I'm not eager for any company to have a chokehold on e-book technology. And the idea that a single retailer will dictate the price point to publishers (and by extension to authors) is a terrible idea.

Man, that's a terrible story.

Doctor Cleveland — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:53:07 +0000

In reply to I hazard to guess that your

Man, that's a terrible story. I'm sorry to hear it.

I hazard to guess that your

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:20:41 +0000

In reply to All the old models of selling

I hazard to guess that your brother-in-law is part of a small percentage of effective self-diagnosers. The majority likely blame vaccines, artificial preservatives, fluoridated water, and UFOs. My grandmother succumbed to cancer some years ago after her homeopathic doctor warned her that the anti-cancer drugs that had kept her in remission were actually causing the cancer.

Not that doctors are omnipotent saints. Just sayin--democracy has its warts.

Instead, not surprisingly but

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:11:09 +0000

In reply to the idea that the cost of an

Instead, not surprisingly but still disappointingly, most of the players are living in the past and clinging to outdated business models.

Surely that's not fair. Practical e-book readers only came out about a year ago, and you can already get most new books online. Could they embrace the technology more aggressively? Sure, but this nothing like the music industry, which spent a decade battling digital music after mp3s became popular. (Also keep in mind that publishing is a very old, slow-moving industry. On the subway, a woman who turned out to run a small publishing house asked me about my kindle. She was concerned that readers would miss the sensations associations with paper and ink.)