Amazon vs. Book Publishers
Jan. 30th, 2010 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
riontelAmazon is taking on the publishing world. They stopped selling books published by Macmillan due to a dispute over e-book prices. $9.99 is apparently too cheap for a piece of DRMed, device dependent, non-transferable piece of content. I am obviously missing some fundamental truth about the world because I wouldn't pay even the $9.99 when for a $1 more I can purchase an actual physically tangible item that can be shared with my friends, requires no back up, and will not disappear if some content provider suddenly disapproves of my reading choices or the device maker goes out of business.
There is absolutely no argument a publishing company can put forth that would persuade me an e-book should be priced anywhere near the real thing. And if their claim that publishing an e-book only costs $2-3 less than a paper copy is true, then they've been ripping us off for years (which would surprise me not at all). I like an idea of e-books, I certainly read enough to be a perfect target audience and one day I will break down and buy myself an e-book reader. It won't be a Kindle, nor, most likely, an iPad (my inner 12-year-old is still sniggering over that name, btw), but one day somebody will come up with a device that will meet my requirements. When that day comes, I will still refuse to pay $15 for an e-book.
Publishers should get a clue and change their business model instead of whining about the unfair world. People who speak out against Amazon in this situation leave me as nonplussed as the 70% of Americans who supposedly support all the recent security innovations at our airports and border crossings. I keep wanting to ask into the void "Who are you people!?"
There is absolutely no argument a publishing company can put forth that would persuade me an e-book should be priced anywhere near the real thing. And if their claim that publishing an e-book only costs $2-3 less than a paper copy is true, then they've been ripping us off for years (which would surprise me not at all). I like an idea of e-books, I certainly read enough to be a perfect target audience and one day I will break down and buy myself an e-book reader. It won't be a Kindle, nor, most likely, an iPad (my inner 12-year-old is still sniggering over that name, btw), but one day somebody will come up with a device that will meet my requirements. When that day comes, I will still refuse to pay $15 for an e-book.
Publishers should get a clue and change their business model instead of whining about the unfair world. People who speak out against Amazon in this situation leave me as nonplussed as the 70% of Americans who supposedly support all the recent security innovations at our airports and border crossings. I keep wanting to ask into the void "Who are you people!?"
