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[victoriavictrix]

Well folks, unless you have been living under a rock, you are aware that Amazon has deleted about 1/6 of books published in English from their inventory.  I'm not going to get into the whole "he said, he said" crap that Macmillan (one of whose divisions is Tor, which publishes a nice big chunk of my titles) and Amazon have gotten into.  I'm just going to note this: an African proverb says "When elephants fight, the grass is what suffers."

Hello.  I write for a living.  I need to sell books to EAT.  Amazon and Macmillan are engaged in a phallus-swinging fight, but I (and other authors) are getting hurt.  Apparently, THE PEOPLE WHO ARE PUTTING THEM IN BUSINESS IN THE FIRST PLACE don't count.

The grass is suffering.   John Scalzi says it best: "If Amazon is willing to play chicken with my economic well-being -- and the economic well-being of many of my friends -- to lock up its little corner of the ebook field, well, that's its call to make. But, you know what, I remember people who are happy to trample my ass into the dirt as they're rushing to grab at cash."

Here are some people a lot more articulate than I am to tell you what is happening.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-pricing/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/all-the-many-ways-amazon-so-very-failed-the-weekend/

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazonmacmillan-other-perspect.html

[Crimson Tao]

The war is over. An armistice is in effect.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9715711

http://gizmodo.com/5460826/amazon-gives-in-will-sell-ebooks-on-macmillans-terms

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

[metalheadlawyer]

Isn't Apple's Ipad sort of the elephant in the room on the whole e-book pricing issue?  I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that the only way that Amazon's Kindle/E-book business can continue to grow is to be at a signficantly lower price point than Apple, because its just not as impressive a device compared to Apple's tablet.  Apple's stuff is traditionally expensive, but appealing, so they can charge more than a typical consumer would typically want to pay for the early adopter/chic factor. 

But with an IPad coming out at $400-$500, paying $250 for a black and white e-reader seems like highway robbery (I know that the e-ink thing is an advantage, but not enough to overlook all of the things a tablet computer can do that a kindle cannot).  So Amazon's only potential survival strategy seems to be to try to hit a price point below Apple, who is allegedly going to charge more for e-books than Amazon does.  Is Macmilan's position really about saying to Amazon, "we aren't going to give you a competitive advantage over other e-readers with a lower price point?"  If so, it might be very hard for Amazon to keep growing its e-book/kindle business - not sure what that would mean for e-publishing generally since I guess that would largely depend on how much IPad owners buy e-books.

[Dollhouse]

Along with the valid points Metalhead's making, I'd also add that Amazon themselves have provided an Apple-oriented competitor to the Kindle by releasing the Kindle iPhone app (which I have and like quite a bit).

I'd been watching this pissing match between Macmillan and Amazon, too, and I recall thinking that it was the authors who were going to suffer most (given Amazon's outsized chunk of the market). Sorry to hear thaqt notion was right.

FWIW, although I like my iPhone Kindle app and use it, I still do the majority of my reading with hardcopy books.  These I buy mostly from Powell's Books here in Portland. Living walking distance from what may be the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore in the world is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Except for my bank balance...

[Sister Jeanne]

Living walking distance from what may be the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore in the world is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Except for my bank balance...

QFT

While I will buy titles off Amazon, it's only if I can get them no other place, specifically the three bookstores by my house.

[Crimson Tao]

FWIW, although I like my iPhone Kindle app and use it, I still do the majority of my reading with hardcopy books.  These I buy mostly from Powell's Books here in Portland. Living walking distance from what may be the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore in the world is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Except for my bank balance...

I'm a fan of hardcopy over ebooks. In fact, besides technical manuals, quick references, and RPG materials, I don't really use ebooks much at all. Much prefer to curl up on the couch with a deadtree. That said, I still buy my books all-but-exclusively via Amazon. Brick-and-mortar only holds an appeal to me when they are having massive sales.

[Mandragora]

I'd like to bring some other things to the table, here - all information is second-hand (through a friend who works at one of the large chain brick-and-mortar stores), and so is very likely subject to the creep of opinions into information.

First off, the two big chain brick-and-mortar stores are suffering.  Stock prices have dropped pretty seriously (to the point of one of them almost being delisted from the NYSE), customers are going more and more to online retailers like Amazon, and the chain that pays him (it rhymes with Hoarders) allocates their "retail sales hours" based on store sales performance.  Quite frankly, he expects the location he works at to be closed by April or so.  Available hours for employees goes down, and therefore so does the customer service.  Personally, I see a vicious circle here.  And on top of this, the CEO and board of directors of said chain bookstore were regularly mocked in business publications due to their absolute unfamiliarity with book retail as compared with other types of retail.  (The CEO is no longer with the company, but that most likely won't help.)

Second, according to my friend, Amazon is not making a profit.  Their business model is not a healthy one, but they are still overwhelming brick-and-mortar stores.  Boiled down, a company that likely cannot sustain itself (without support from whoever owns it) is successfully driving major chain retailers out of business.  And while "smaller" stores (whether the Powell's model, or stores that only sell books from a specific range of genres / types) might possibly survive due to customer loyalty, employee knowledge, or other reasons, the larger ones may well not survive.

Mind you, this applies primarily to treeware, a.k.a. hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback books.  Despite Apple's rather unfortunately named tablet (didn't they have any women on the marketing team who could have warned them?), e-readers are not really at a point of feasibility for most people who could go into a brick-and-mortar store and browse books to decide if they want something; that feasibility thing could be price related, format related or even visibility related.  I know that I can spend (and have) about $40 on four to five mass market books, but I certainly can't afford a Kindle or Sony or whatever, plus the cost of ordering the book in that format.  And let's not go into my rage at how Amazon forces you into their format for e-books.

Once again, Amazon mishandled the situation in a particularly stunning way.  I guess at this point I'll have to resign myself to trips of thirty to forty miles to get to a store where I like going in and browsing books; I'm very disinclined at this point to use Amazon any more.

[Black Bowman]

I have never used, nor will I ever use Amazon.com to buy books.  There's a reason.

Sure, I could sit on my ass and click a bunch of buttons, but I really like travelling the hour to Saskatoon to get into either Coles, or MacNally Robinson or Indigo and buy books.  It's like an adventure (particularly when Highway 219 has the largest number of deer crossings in the province).  I like to read books in hard cover or paper back because... well... I like the smell.  It's comforting.  And adds to the reading experience for me, which brings about a lot more enjoyment (except Tom Clancy novels, never before have I ever felt like I was reading a spy thriller combined with a technical manual before).

From the articles posted and from Misty's comments, it does appear to be a big cash grab.  Macmilan doesn't care about whether the Kindle out performs the iPad (which, that name is just so wrong on so many levels) in sales.  They just want the money.  And as was stated, the ones who get hurt the most are the ones who write the books in the first place.

I'll stick with my dead trees. *goes off to buy more books, at a bookstore made of brick and mortar*

[SovietBear]

First off, the two big chain brick-and-mortar stores are suffering.  Stock prices have dropped pretty seriously (to the point of one of them almost being delisted from the NYSE), customers are going more and more to online retailers like Amazon, and the chain that pays him (it rhymes with Hoarders) allocates their "retail sales hours" based on store sales performance.  Quite frankly, he expects the location he works at to be closed by April or so.  Available hours for employees goes down, and therefore so does the customer service.  Personally, I see a vicious circle here.  And on top of this, the CEO and board of directors of said chain bookstore were regularly mocked in business publications due to their absolute unfamiliarity with book retail as compared with other types of retail.  (The CEO is no longer with the company, but that most likely won't help.)

I've been on Border's Death Watch for three years now. They have an overwhelming amount of debt and need decades of record sales to please their shareholders. The real tragedy is that the big box retailers ran at a loss to drive the (marginally) profitable small and independent bookstores out of business, and now they will face the axe to Amazon (who has been running at a loss/making small profits for over a decade).

As for the name iPad... It's a sad day when all the sophomoric jokes were exhausted before I could even get one out. Still, it's not as bad as my all time favorite poorly named product.

[Lady Darkswan]

If one needs more proof of the death of some of the brick and mortar... my home town's mall finally closed its last bookstore. I was sad, and the city I live in now doesn't even have a bookstore in the mall, there are two Barnes and Nobles though...

At least there are a few used book stores I can go to if I wanted. Honestly, I don't do alot of book buying lately,  don't have much time to read for enjoyment right now.

I think this kind of kills my want for a Kindle now though.

[victoriavictrix]

Amazon's response was posted on the Amazon Kindle Forum on Amazon's site, apparently by someone who has absolutely no grasp of how publishing--or anything else--works.  OF COURSE Macmillan "has a monopoly on its own titles," you moron!  And Nabisco "has a monopoly on Oreos" and Ford "has a monopoly" on Mustangs and Shelby Cobras!*

The book business in general is tanking.  How bad?  Bad enough that almost everyone I know saw their royalty checks plummet to 50% last year, some going down to 10%.  Well duh, you can't buy books when you don't have a job.  (I am often forced to roll my eyes when I tell people that and they look at me bewildered and say "But I see tons of people in the bookstore when I go, how can that be?"  I have to explain patiently that "Tons of people in the store does NOT equate to sales.")

Amazon has the publishers by the short and curlies.  Unlike traditional bookstores, the One Ton Gorilla can demand a discount of 50% on the cover price and get it (as opposed to the chain-store's 30%).  This is why a new HC, with a cover price of $25 is Amazon Priced at $15.  And this is why the price of books as gone up, so publishers can keep their very slim profit margin.  (And believe me, it is slim).

Macmillan's desired pricing model is not as draconian as it seems.  They want $15 for the e-copy of a Hot New Bestseller--same as the heavily-discounted price of the dead tree copy, so that the e-copy does not compete with the same book in dead tree, and Macmillan can recoup their substantial investment in the book.  This does NOT mean that MY new book in e-copy would be $15.  Mine would likely be, oh, $12.  And Joe Scmoe's would be--you got it--$9.99.  Plus, in Macmillan's model, over time that $15 per e-copy would start going down.  In 6 months, say, it would be $9.99.  And in two years?  Probably $4.99, same as a paperback. 

So if you JUST CAN'T WAIT--you pay a premium.  Same as with any other product.

* Now here is some irony.  Amazon is claiming to be a publisher when it comes to obtaining exclusive rights to e-copies of books.  Yet not that long ago I actually approached them to write Kindle-exclusive content.  I wanted the same terms I would get from any of my other publishers; advance against royalties, half on signing, half on publication.  I was told then, in exactly these words, "Amazon is not a publisher." (But of course I "should feel free to write the content and publish it via the Kindle platform at their generous terms of 30% royalty"**). 

So.....three months ago, they WEREN'T a publisher.  Now they suddenly are.  Oh, except when it comes to treating an author like a professional.

** Lest you wonder why I didn't take advantage of such GENEROUS TERMS, another author ran the numbers for a series of his that was abandoned and discovered rather quickly that he would be making less money than a first-time writer.

[Arashi]

I have to admit, I am/was a pretty regular shopper at Amazon. Of course, when you're floating miles from land (or thousands from one that is English dominate) for half a year (give or take a few months) you either become very familiar with e-shopping or make lists and wait for when the 'trip' to get over. I opted for shopping (and trust me, the wait time for the graphic intense Amazon sites on a bandwidth effectively half that of a 56k phone modem with similar d/cs... you learn patience either way.) Even then and afterward, I typically only got DVDs/software from them. Books were pretty well always from bookstores. (yes, chain ones largely, though some used stores near my parents got buisiness during my leaves back home.)

Recently however, I've been loosing satisfaction with Amazon as a whole, they don't seem to like shipping to Hawaii very much, and their 'big score' in the Kendle didn't even rate a blip on my radar after finding it could only display amazon bought e-books. I had several MBs of text files of stories I gather from online that I like and are not, technically, books and thus available to be transfered (unless the writer 'publishes' it and I buy what I already have). Product Fail. Even worse for it, browsing the lists of Kendle books, I see absolutly nonthing I'm interested in. I generally don't care for NYT Best Seller books or the Wall Street Journal.

In general, I'm a bookshelf broswer and like to have a book in my hands before I buy it. That the book industry seems to be falling all over is very sad, but like others, I can't really afford to do my part to shore it up any. :/

[Petrograd]

I'm never really a fan of corporate dick-waving, although I completely agree with Macmilan's standpoint, as put forward by Misty. Companies that get as big as Amazon always seem to develop superiority complexes about what they can get away with, and the worst part is that they're often right. I'm not really their target, though; not a fan of NYTimes Best-sellers, and I'll diligently wait two years for a book to come to paperback, no matter how hard I am into a series.

As far as the Kindle goes, what most users will probably never realize is that you're not paying for the hardware. Sure, e-ink is nifty and the battery life is superb, but in a shop window, the tech in a Kindle is only worth about $100-$150. The largest component of the Kindle's cost is a limitless lifetime cell-phone data plan from Sprint or AT&T. They wanted to include access from just about anywhere in the US, and the dream of universal wifi kind of hit a wall in the last 5 years.

Thats not to say its for me. Like Mandy was saying, even if I liked ebooks, I still couldn't scrape up $250 for the thing. Hell, I don't even pay the $20 for a Barnes and Noble discount thing, and I shop there all the time. I mean, if, one day, they can make a Kindle the size and shape of a paperback that's not a complete pain in the ass to read and is within my budget, I'll consider it. But, you know, <<bibliophile.

iPad (not ranty, spoilered for tl;dr)

Spoiler (hover to show)

The iPad is a strange fish by nature. Over the last few years, as the smartphone market has boomed (largely due to the iPhone), there's been a lot of weird cross-breeding going on between the laptop and cell-phone markets. I watched Steve Jobs's unveiling, and I like a quote I heard later: "No one under 40 was impressed." This does not mean it's not going to succeed. It's Apple, so whatever they want it to do, it will work well, and be very easy to use.

I don't really see the iPad as a Kindle-killer, or aimed in that direction; that's one of those things that only become clear when the dust settles.  Apple is basically inventing a market here, or at least trying to squeeze out the mid/netbook/tablet PC market, and they've probably got the market force to do it.
--It's gonna be a while, and hopefully some competition stirring up, before I jump in. I just bought a netbook, and immediately put Windows 7 on it, so, you know, I'm good.

We don't have them thar Borders down here in Dixie. We had us a Waldenbooks in the mall (Borders affiliate), but that tanked and within a month was replaced by a remaindered book store. They didn't even change the tags on the shelving.

Now I pretty much shop Barnes & Noble and Booklegger (second-hand), because B&N is pleasant inside and Books-a-Million has shitty selection unless you're looking for inspirational Christian crap. I don't order books from Amazon. If I started doing that, I would rapidly die of starvation.

[victoriavictrix]

And it just gets better.

Sunday they swore they were putting the Macmillan books back up.

It is Tuesday 2 am.   And guess what?

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/seriously-now-theyre-just-being-dicks/#comment-190066

Not only are 90% of my (and John Scalzi's) titles STILL not available, but the only ones that ARE available are used.  So no one makes money except Amazon.

Isn't that special?