

Amazon Pulls Thousands of E-Books in Dispute - Cadsby
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/amazon-pulls-thousands-of-e-books-in-dispute/?ref=technology

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trotsky
Pretty poor reporting from the NYT. Amazon isn't "under pressure" from wall
street to up their margins, they actually enjoy quite a premium valuation. And
Amazon doesn't use cheap ebooks to drive sales of their kindles, it's the
exact opposite - cheap kindles to drive sales of the ebooks. With the story so
oddly slanted it makes me wonder who bought this placement.

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Turing_Machine
Also: "But in what might have been a sly message from Amazon, there was a
button to click to tell the publisher you would like to read the book on
Kindle."

That button is on every title that's not available on Kindle, for whatever
reason, and has been for ages. As you say, pretty poor reporting.

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Ryanmf
_“This should be a matter of concern and a cautionary tale for the smaller
presses whose licenses will come up for renewal,” said Andy Ross, an agent and
a former bookseller. “They are being offered a Hobson’s choice of accepting
Amazon’s terms, which are unsustainable, or losing the ability to sell Kindle
editions of their books, the format that constitutes about 60 percent of all
e-books.”_

followed by

 _Mr. Suchomel said the publishers were solidly behind I.P.G. “They were
almost unanimously positive, saying, ‘Don’t change your terms,’ ” he said._

First, if the publishers don't care, or if they would simply prefer not to
concede to Amazon, is this news?

Second, maybe I'm too young and too inclined to believe that technology may
cure all ills, or this is just my ignorance of the actual requirements of the
bookselling industry showing, but to me that "unsustainable" line reeks of
"we're not willing to optimize our processes, customers be damned." If I'm not
mistaken Amazon has singlehandedly propped up this industry in the last
decade, so unsustainable for whom? If the answer to that question is three
tiers of middlemen who are unwilling to take a hit on their profit margins due
to some combination of habit, entitlement, and spite, why should authors or
readers give a shit?

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feralchimp
Amazon follows a long line of huge-volume retailers into "not afraid to be the
asshole" territory.

Unless it's the case that it actually _costs Amazon money_ to offer books at
the prices that IPG wants, this is a pure power/spite/warning play. And I very
much doubt that it costs them money.

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a_a_r_o_n
Well, good. If this catches on, it might increase the likelihood that I'll be
able to buy ebooks from other than Amazon. I'd like to have that option into
the future.

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incongruity
Ditto that – but I feel like the only way that'll really happen is if some
publisher is gutsy enough to put out a format with little to no DRM – maybe a
print restricted PDF or something similar.

Only something that is able to be read on any platform, in any of hundreds of
apps will it be viable competition at this point.

It would genuinely be refreshing to see some sort of innovation come out of
the old-media content creation industries for once.

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a_a_r_o_n
"if some publisher is gutsy enough to put out a format with little to no DRM –
maybe a print restricted PDF or something similar."

Pakt <http://www.packtpub.com/> and O'Reilly <http://oreilly.com/> do exactly
that. Pakt's pdfs have your name and address printed on each page.

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incongruity
Excellent point – I should probably have said mainstream fiction or
general/non niche publishing house or something similar. Tech, while not a
_small_ market is specialized enough to not threaten entrenched publishers –
unless O'Reilly wants to branch out into fiction, etc.

Also, the simple idea of putting your name and address on each page is pretty
good low-tech copy deterrence, IMHO. I didn't know about that – thanks for the
insight.

Though

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a_a_r_o_n
Yeah, I think embarrassment is about the right level for DRM.

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incongruity
Embarrassment, indeed =)

Relatedly, it's about simply making people choose one of three options (at the
moment): 1) Don't copy it 2)Be okay with everyone knowing your name – i.e.:
take a stand and flaunt your disagreement with copyright law or 3) Do a lot of
manual work to scrub your name off (even harder if they're PW locked).

Regardless, I like it because it's simple _and_ it embraces the new realities
(and abilities) of digital distribution. They could never do that with mass-
market books 10 years ago, but now, it's trivial to do with on demand pdfs.

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tsotha
On the one hand I'm not thrilled about Amazon having so much power. But on the
other, I'm tired of being raped by the publishers when I buy ebooks. Those
things should cost less than physical books, dammit.

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salman89
Any chance these publishers can band together union style for better leverage?
I'd guess that the sheer number of publishers would make this not possible.

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jrockway
IPG is about to learn that one can publish an ebook without a distribution
middleman taking most of the money.

(Think about the authors here. Amazon takes 30% of the money that goes to the
distributor. The distributor takes 30% or more of that money. The publisher
takes 30% or more of that money. And finally, a few cents are left over for
the guy who wrote the book. How sorry I feel for IPG...)

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bwarp
Sounds like the recording industry as well!

Actually all middle-men!

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shareme
This reminds me of another industry under the same pressure credit card
industry via new disruptive payment systems.

