Laura Miller at Salon has a good backstory on Amazon’s Kindle and the Apple iPad eBook reader.<\/p>\n
Laura Miller – Salon.com<\/a>: “This dust-up is the culmination of a long-standing feud between Amazon and book publishers. What triggered it, however, is something new: the introduction of Apple’s iPad.”<\/p>\n <\/a>Note Miller\u00a0comments about publishers’ fear of Amazon’s attempt to control the market, and this:<\/p>\n Apple has agreed to sell e-books through its forthcoming iBooks store according to what’s known as an “agency model,” much like selling on commission<\/span>. Publishers will get to set the price of books — from $5.99 to $14.99, with new “hardcover” releases ranging from $12.99 to $14.99 — and the retailer will take 30 percent. Under this arrangement, as John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, pointed out in a statement,<\/a> the retailer stands to make more<\/em> money off the sale of an e-book than Amazon is making now, and the publisher makes less.<\/em> Book publishers are willing to accept — no, advocate<\/em> for<\/em> — this for a couple of reasons: They want more control over the value of their product and the prospect of an Amazon lock on the e-book market makes them very, very nervous.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It sounds like Amazon’s fight with Macmillan (described in her article) was nasty enough that other publishers are worried.<\/p>\n And then the production sort of stuff that I love, on pricing:<\/p>\n only about 20 percent of the cover price of a new hardcover goes to those [production] costs:<\/span><\/a>about $5 out of $25. Retailers take from 40 to 50 percent, and after that, the majority of the cost of a new book goes to author royalties, editing, design, marketing, publicity, overhead and so on. But these elements aren’t material or tangible, and as a result, consumers seem to be skeptical about their true worth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Terry Belanger once told me that in the 18th C, books were priced according to a “Rule of 3s” meaning that the cost of production was about one-third the cost of the final book. Post-1980 printers told me that about one-sixth of the cost of the book went to production–and that’s pretty darn close to 20%.<\/p>\n (h\/t Jeremy Dibell at Philobiblos<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Laura Miller at Salon has a good backstory on Amazon’s Kindle and the Apple iPad eBook reader. Laura Miller – Salon.com: “This dust-up is the culmination of a long-standing feud between Amazon and book publishers. What triggered it, however, is something new: the introduction of Apple’s iPad.” Note Miller\u00a0comments about publishers’ fear of Amazon’s attempt… Continue reading Laura Miller on Kindle vs eBook<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,184],"tags":[4,327,291,376,379,401,408],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-books","category-publishing","tag-amazon","tag-apple","tag-e-books-2","tag-ipad","tag-kindle","tag-pricing","tag-publishing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":405,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bibliowonk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}