One Stray Word

You’re probably not aware of this but there’s a war going on. You see, like the music industry before it, the print industry is going through some painful changes.

Ebooks have been around for a while. And there have been many ebook readers over the years as well. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the ebook reader began to be legitimatized with the Sony eReader in 2006. It helped that Sony launched with it’s own ebook store. Unfortunately, the ebook prices were the same as the physical book prices. Why buy a digital file if I can buy the physical thing for the same price? There was just no real incentive.

Then Amazon got in on it. The Kindle came out almost a year later. Technically speaking, it wasn’t really any different than the Sony eReader. Reading a book is fairly simple, there’s not many different ways it can revolutionize the concept. But what Amazon had that Sony didn’t was competitive pricing. NYT Bestsellers were listed at $9.99. Yes, there were still a few books that slipped through with hardback pricing, but more often than not, it was $9.99 or less. Plus, Amazon’s DTP problem was very self-publisher friendly.

A few weeks ago Amazon announced an initiative in which all Kindle books wouldn’t be priced higher than $9.99 and there would be higher royalty rates. This caused rumblings within the publishing community and with the arrival of Apple’s iPad it’s turned into an all out war.

At first glance it appears that Apple’s going to be imposing less stringent guidelines for book pricing in their iBook Store. This means publishers can charge whatever they want for their book(which, in all fairness, is their right as publishers). So now the publishers are turning to Amazon and telling them they don’t like their $9.99 model. Amazon responded by pulling an entire publishers catalog(books both digital and print) from theirsite. For about a week you couldn’t buy anything published by MacMillian Books. MacMillian publishes these imprints:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FSG Hardcovers

FSG Paperbacks

Hill & Wang

Faber & Faber

First Second

Henry Holt & Co.

Henry Holt Hardcovers

Henry Holt Paperbacks

Metropolitan Books

Times Books

Macmillan Audio

Behind the Wheel

Nature Publishing Group

Palgrave Macmillan

Picador

Quick and Dirty Tips

Scientific American

St. Martin’s Press

Minotaur Books

Thomas Dunne Books

Tor/Forge

Tor Books

Forge Books

Orb Books

Tor/Seven Seas

Bedford, Freeman and Worth

Bedford/St. Martin’s

W.H. Freeman

Worth Publishers

BFW High School

iclicker

Hayden-McNeil

Palgrave Macmillan

Trade Books For Courses

FSG Books for Young Readers

Feiwel & Friends

Holt Books for Young Readers

Kingfisher

Roaring Brook

Priddy Books

Starscape/Tor Teen

Square Fish

Young Listeners

Macmillan Kids

That’s a lot of books. And, like the publishers, Amazon is well within their right to have done this. They are a private business and if they don’t want to do business with you they don’t have to.

Ultimately, though, Amazon caved and told MacMillian they could price their ebooks at whatever they want.

Now the other publishers have seen that  Amazon won’t hold too strongly to their convictions and they’re expressing their displeasure over Amazon’s new pricing model.

As an author and a reader, I like the idea of low prices for ebooks. It doesn’t make sense to spend $15 on a digital file when I can go spend $15 on the same product in physical form. In fact, I think $9.99 is still a little too much, but it’s better than the alternative. Personally, I think ebooks should max out at paperback prices. $5.99 or less. That seems reasonable to me.

Of course, the publishing industry is very reluctant to enter the digital age and honestly, I don’t know why. It’s cheaper to produce an ebook than it is to produce a printed book. At the very least this should appeal to them, but it doesn’t. Or maybe it does and that’s why they want to keep charging so much: more profits on higher profit margins. So, they’re just being greedy?

Or maybe they just don’t like change.

And now authors are getting into the fight, reminding everyone that they’re the real victims here. I hate it when people play the victim card. Here’s my problem with this: in this day and age you don’t have to be beholden to a publisher anymore. There are too many people out there writing books, making comics and making money and none of them are tied to a publisher. Authors don’t like it when their publisher fights with a distributor? Then stop working with the publisher. Learn how to market yourself, hire an editor and self-publish. It gets easier to do every day. I know we’d all like to live in the perfect world where all we have to do is worry about writing and not the business of writing. But it’s not a perfect world. Stop whining and get off your lazy butt. It’s not going to kill you to have to format your own book for a change.

Of course, there is the question of whether or not Apple’s iBook Store is going to be self publisher friendly. iTunes certainly isn’t. As I understand it if you’re an independent musician you can’t get into iTunes. Am I wrong on this?

It does seem to be a bit of a quandary. What’s going to happen, I wonder? Are the old school big time publishers going to win out and maintain their ironclad grip on the publishing industry? Or will they slowly die off, kicking and screaming the whole way, but ultimately leaving the industry open for people like me?

And speaking of me…

While everyone else’s ebook prices may skyrocket back up, mine are still under $3. You can get them for your Kindle, your iPhone/iPod Touch/maybe even iPad and everything else in-between.