Publishing giant Macmillan said late Saturday that Amazon.com has pulled its e-book titles from being sold for the Kindle in a price war apparently sparked by Apple Inc.’s new iPad.
Macmillan, a unit of Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, made the announcement in an advertisement on publishing industry Web site PublishersMarketplace.com.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced Wednesday that Macmillan was among a group of publishers that would sell their titles on the iBook site set up for the iPad.
Apple is allowing publishers to charge more than the $9.99 that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has set for titles sold for the Kindle, long a point of dispute with publishers.
Under the Apple arrangement, publishers set their own e-book prices, with Apple taking 30 percent of the revenue. This is expected to raise many e-book titles to $12.99 and $14.99. Instead of black and white, the iPad allows publishers to add multimedia and color to the offerings, as well.
Macmillan said Amazon pulled its titles for sale through all but third parties after CEO John Sargent visited Seattle on Thursday to discuss “new terms of sales for e-books.”
Caption this photo:
“Imagine the size of the vagina…”
#30,
I was gonna switch after I got my iPhone, but I found out that it runs just like that on Macs as well.
This story is not true. The CRUTAPE Letters sells for $11.99 on Kindle.
# 27 dodgema said, “Buying from 3rd parties screws the publisher,which doesn’t bother me, and the author, which does.”
I would not have agreed with you until today. MacMillan was selling ebooks thru Amazon at $10 a shot. At this price point they were, apparently, making a slim profit. Now they will sell the same books at $15 – a sudden 50% price rise in the middle of a recession. An interesting business model. I’m willing to bet the authors will not get a corresponding 50% increase in royalties. Interestingly, I suspect Amazon will also get an increased profit at no effort or damage to their reputation. Especially when the other publishers follow suit.
The only piece of Apple gear I own is the Airport and still they find a way to cost me money!
If the book publishers were smart. Which they aren’t. They would all get together and have one central database of ebooks and set the prices there. Whoever wants access to their e-books can pay them a chunk of change and then perform a resale operation.
There would have to be some over-site or transparency to ensure there was no price fixing, but overall this would allow a more true and open market to persist; prices would be decided by market demand. Not amazon or the almighty Steve Jobs. Whats wrong with the invisible hand ?
So! What is the difference between an emitted photon and a reflected photon?
I have an idea. Those that want a Kindle, buy one, those that want an iPad, buy one of them, those that do not, don’t.
So how are people getting this story on the Amazon Kindle price point being under $10?
If you have a Kindle, open it right now, and search for “CRUtape”, you will find a book about the ClimateGate e-mails selling for $11.99.
I’d like to be positive about this new Apple product, but….
It looks like it’s just another pay-for-content appliance. And is moving us toward a version of Cloud computing, that’s content based, rather than application based. And we’ll be subject to the pricing of huge media monopolies, who control the content price, use, and access. The iPad will only be a ticket to ride on this train. That charges you again and again, at every stop it makes. I’d be surprised if much “free” content is ever allowed on the thing. That would be like expecting to make free calls on the iPhone.
All these tablet readers are for, is a means to kill the public libraries. Who charge little or nothing, for you to borrow their books and music (even some DVDs are free). When these “more convenient” readers manage to close down your libraries (someday). Then you’ll see just how cheap their fees are.
I agree with Improbus (#5). Why should an ebook cost as much as a printed one? It’s not a permanent copy. Soon as you run out of storage space, you’ll probably discard it. You can’t sell the volume to someone else, or past on a copy of it, outside of your reader device. It’s like when CDs replaced LPs. They ended up costing just as much, if not more. But the material costs (album cover and disc) were maybe less than half of the LPs’.
Eventual flash ram will replace all optical discs. And you’ll need a “reader” just to see the jacket cover art and content list. Because something the size of a stick of gum, won’t have the room for it to be printed on. If the iPad could one day play these, then it will be something useful. But if it’s stuck being tied to the print media distribution monopolies. Then no, it won’t.
#40 Exactly. People are complaining because they expected a computer. And it’s not a computer, it’s a vending machine. Only instead of standing by a gas station, consumers are supposed to buy the machine and take it home so they can buy whatever the vending machine is supposed to vend.
“Vending machine …”
Nice description: short and direct.
Maybe the point of the iPad is to play movies, play games, share documents, do eBooks and web surfing.
If so, I can imagine it being quite successful despite the fact that most people are confusing it for a netbook.
The reason I’d bet on Steve Jobs is that he has a game plan of some sort, the way that everyone dismissed the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone at first.
This looks like a mere incremental market tool. Who really wants to watch videos on an iPhone? Or on an iPod? Or on your computer? Few people do.
But a portable media centric device is an entirely different story.
I admit that at first I had a difficult time disconnecting this device from the idea of a small laptop.
I want to limit my Apple exposure because I do not want my media stuck in the Apple universe.
Some day Jobs will die, and Apple needs Jobs to remain a viable company.
I don’t want to buy apps, books, TV shows, subscriptions, etc. that are stuck in the Apple universe.
I want reusability.
Oh come on people. It is not a vending machine. I assume it reads Kindle books anyway if you have the free Kindle app. Besides, you should expect to pay for books. I agree that the e-book market is overpriced, but that is why I buy paperbacks for most books. Authors do deserve to be paid when you buy their book.
Besides, I rather like Baen Publishing’s model for e-books. Most titles are $6.00. Some older titles are free or $4.00. Advanced Reader Copies are copies that come out before the hardcover. They are $15.00, but then a $6.00 copy becomes available to buy when the hard cover comes out. Or for $15 a month you can get the four books each month that are on that month’s publication schedule.
The iPad supports PDF and EPUB. The standard internet mime type for EPUB is ‘application/epub+zip’.
Actually I’m surprised about that because EPUB doesn’t support annotations so various vendors like Microsoft and Adobe extend it.
The Kindle supports mobi, text, topaz and their proprietary DRM format AZW.
I don’t know about you guys but I just lover Sony’s response to the max-Ipad. Not verbatim but you get the idea ^0^
We absolutely fcking love the Max-Ipad. When millions of dumb users buy it and find out it’s shtty and want a better portable system to do what Apple claims they’ll acome looking for our PSP. We love Apply and it’s millions of dumbasses followers.
That is a Sony statement of course.
John Scalzi on his Whatever Blog pretty much nails this story.
If publishers got their way, ebooks would be TWICE AS EXPENSIVE as their paper counterparts. And it wouldn’t be the profit they’d be after, either. If paper books are eventually and completely replaced by ebooks, publishing companies like MacMillan would become irrelevant and obsolete. Who’d need them? Any writer with a computer can produce and publish his own ebook.
So publishers really want sky-high ebook prices. It’s in their long-term interests for consumers to buy the paper books instead of the electronic ones.
#49 You’re right. The firmware upgrade in November fixed all clunkiness with Kindle PDF support.
True, any writer can produce and publish their own e-book. The problem then is: how do you know who is good? Publishers act as a gatekeeper. Crappy writers don’t get published, but they can still make their one e-books and sell it in the iTunes store as an app. Give me a good feedback system to know what is quality and what is crap and you replace the publishers with e-books.
# 48 KarmaBaby said, on February 1st, 2010 at 9:33 am
“If paper books are eventually and completely replaced by ebooks, publishing companies like MacMillan would become irrelevant and obsolete. Who’d need them? Any writer with a computer can produce and publish his own ebook.”
ipad is just giant iphone.. user dont know, user dont care