New Yorker piece on altruistic publishers and devil Bezos

This is an update to the earlier Amazon plays hardball to keep lower pricing option which gives a lot of details with sourcing of statements.

Today, FAIR (a media-watch organization established in 1986) comments on the New Yorker article by Ken Auletta titled "Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and Save the book business?"

That title will give a clue to the focus of the New Yorker Magazine's article (or maybe The New Yorker itself, which is sharing the financial plight of other publishing organizations).

"Can they... CAN they? "topple the Kindle" (Keep Hope Alive?) followed by, can they also "save" the book business - the two thoughts in tandem there.  But the idea of toppling another type of device came before the idea of saving the industry (or in connection with it).

  Already, many columnists have pointed out that the iPad and Kindle are two different animals -- one is a dedicated e-reader and the other has a multiple focus with an altogether different technology, dazzling for multimedia, but with an e-book reading display that many feel can fatigue the eyes in the long-form, serial reading area (from direct light to the eyes, not from refresh-rates), not to even mention the variance in Size and Cost.

 But these are factors raised by other authors when writing about the possibility of "toppling" another, altogether different device.

Note also that it's not even "Will they" (a fair question) but "Can they" as if that were a hoped for result.

  Even if the headline was done without thought, word-choices are often good indicators of underlying thoughts.

The New Yorker's Conclusions
I'll get on to fair.org's, as usual, informative and to-the-point commentary in a minute, but The New Yorker, as FAIR points out, gives a detailed history of the e-book pricing battles and then goes on to paint the publishers and Apple's Steve Jobs (even pulling in the cancer card of all things -- and as a survivor myself I think that was cheap) as rather saintly in their hopes to save publishing from Bezos.

  Apparently, from Auletta's telling, their main focus is to help authors, which is why they are pricing e-books 30-50% higher.  Well, there does have to be a way to try to justify the much higher pricing, which is causing e-book audiences to write in several device forums that they are not interested, thanks.

  The closing few paragraphs in the article actually quote mainly "Apple insiders" and they're quoted for the ending conclusions.

  As detailed by others and in my own (b)logged history of events ((1) Hardball and (2) Steve Jobs role), this is a rather rich, purple battle between 'ruthless' protagonists on all sides.

 They all want what's best for them (if it also benefits the consumer, that's appreciated by consumers).  That's what's missing from this article.

  But the story uses hearsay (no one named source) to paint only one of the three as "ruthless" while the others are just hoping to help authors and to 'survive.' They are of course victims doing their best.

WILL the Agency plan "save" publishing" ?
Let's ignore that raising prices that much in THIS economy will help no one survive.

  The key is 'selling' a book at all, and the current prices that the publishers and Steve Jobs have decided on will not be helpful.

Pricing Difference Example
  One example of what is going on here (and this is a repeat of the actual $-situation with regard to money going to publishers from which they are then able to pay authors -- although authors have had to take a percentage cut recently from some publishers):

' On a $26 publisher-set-list price book on a book that's currently a NY Times bestseller, the traditional wholesaler arrangement would have meant about $13 (approximately 50%) going to the publisher EVEN when the bookstore/retailer charges only $10 for the book as Amazon did, which treated bestsellers on the NYTimes list as loss-leaders.

As Steve Jobs inserted into his Agency agreements with the Big5 later, he later wanted, after all that, the ability to sell the 'hottest' books (apparently the first 10 of the NYT bestsellers) for only $10 and did get that. In other words, he did want to 'devalue' those (in the publishers' eyes, $10 was a devaluing) and got it.
  All bookstores would want guarantees from the publishers that if they went with Apple's agency plan (70% of bookstore selling price to publishers) other stores would not get the ability to sell lower.

So, now the Big5 publishers, on the $10 e-books, receive $7 with the Agency plan instead of the $13 that Amazon did pay them under the wholesaler arrangement, meaning there was MORE money for the authors from the older non-agency arrangement as they affected the most popular books.

 Control is the issue, of course, and the publishers hope Apple will always give them this, despite remembering history.  The latter needed to get a foothold in the e-books area and this way they did.  Who benefits or loses from this?  Probably consumers and authors.

 Yet the publishers carry on about wanting the authors to get more.

FAIR.Org's Commentary
FAIR's headline is (deservedly so) even more scathing than my words.
"Unlike Amazon, Publishers Understand Authors--and How to Rip Them Off"

  Jim Naureckas recently analyzed the New York Times article about a "threatening" Amazon in his piece NYT Exposes Amazon's Fiendish Plot to Sell Books for Less Money.

  In the current article, Fair.org's Naurecka writes:

' Amazon is depicted as controlling and mercenary... [with examples]

  Publishers, on the other hand, are remarkably altruistic: "Publishers' real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy [brick and morter] bookstores, which are their primary customers," Auletta writes. But they're equally concerned about the well-being of authors '

However, Auletta's piece is, as I said, a nicely-detailed one, but the closing paragraphs, practically written by "Apple insiders," paints Bezos as wanting to destroy publishing altogether and take it all over by himself and Steve Jobs is just wanting a 'win-win' situation, because now he is aware mainly of his 'legacy' and his 'vision.'  However, as magazine negotiation reports have mentioned, publishers are trying to get Jobs to 'win' less now that they're talking details.

Auletta does end, after all that publisher/Jobs image polishing, with the words from a "skeptical literary agent"

' Asked about publishers’ efforts to raise prices, a skeptical literary agent said, “You can try to put on wings and defy gravity, but eventually you will be pulled down.” '

Nicely put, just as long as those are not painted as angel wings.

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1. See later follow-up article on Auletta's Live Chat about his New Yorker article.

2. A discussion of the New Yorker Article and the pricing wars, on Stacey Cochran's Book Chatter,
with Fair.Org's Jim Naureckas and Kindle author Bufo Calvin.

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Reminder: the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
  Check often: Latest free non-classics, shortcut http://bit.ly/latestfreenonclassics .)

Random House OK w/ $9.99 books. What are Penny Dreadfuls?

RANDOM HOUSE SIDES WITH AMAZON AND KINDLE CUSTOMERS ON PRICING
Daithi, posted a report at MobileRead forums on statements by Madeline McIntosh, President of Sales, Operations and Digital for Random House, at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute meeting Feb 5.

On the subject of the Macmillan/Amazon conflict, she said that publishers "have no real experience at setting retail prices."  Daithi writes that she also revealed that one of the reasons Random House did not participate in the iPad iBookstore had to do with the pricing issues.

Daithi reported further that:

' In regards to delayed releasing of ebooks, McIntosh said, "Our current policy is we release e-books at the same time as physical books," followed by "I haven't been convinced that it's good for the author or consumer to delay the release. My fear is that the consumer who has fully embraced the technology will buy another e-book that is available or lose interest altogether. What if I train the consumer that the best scenario is to get it free?" '

He adds that McIntosh had worked for Random House for 18 years, left to work for Amazon less than 2 years ago as their Director of Kindle Content Acquisition for Europe, and Random House hired her back last year as President of Sales, Operations, and Digital.  While she may have had personal empathy with Amazon's position, Random House apparently agrees with her take.
  If only they were not usually choosing to disable the Kindle's impersonal-sounding text-to-speech feature, an action which is unfair to the vision-impaired.

E-BOOK PRICING:  IS LESS MORE?
In an interesting piece on how, to his "surprise," the Kindle became his "preferred reading mechanism for both periodicals and books" Robert Robb, a columnist for Arizona Republic, writes that he has doubts that the book publishers are reading the market and the potential of e-books correctly.  In his experience, at $10 a book, he's become "much more of an impulse buyer of books" and buys new books he has an interest in, at $10 but not at the list prices. In closing, Robb dispassionately (as opposed to vociferous forum discussions) describes a decision most of us have made and will be choosing more often after March:

' However, the difference between $10 and $15 seems to make the difference between an impulse buy by me and skipping it. I recently read a reference to a history of financial crises. It sounded interesting so I immediately went to the Kindle shop to see if it was available.  It was, but at $15.  At $10, I would have bought it.  At $15, I gave it a pass.

As a quantitative guy, I don't believe in reading much into anecdotal experience, even my own.  But I doubt that I'm alone.  The primary effect of e-books, if the pricing is gotten right, might be to substantially expand book sales, rather than shifting them between formats.

PENNY DREADFULS - WHAT ARE THEY?
Asked this the other day, I looked it up, having only a vague idea myself, and tweeted back "penny dreadfuls" were "dreadful," often "salacious" books priced low & quite popular. [For a fuller, more colorful description, see http://bit.ly/pdreadfuls]."

 These are books that will be offered by The British Library to Kindle owners, for free, along with the historically-accurate digital representations of first editions of more 'classic' books.  The Seattle PI newspaper has a long, detailed report by Nancy Mattoon on the penny dreadfuls, with sample books. Excerpts:

' Happily, along with the high class fiction, the UK library's freebies will also include the world's finest collection of cheap, tawdry, lowdown, lowbrow, Victorian trash. Get ready to heat up your cold Kindle with a torrid "Penny Dreadful."
. . .
If horror-master Stephen King fathered a child with "true crime" queen Ann Rule, and the kid became a comic book illustrator, you'd end up with a Penny Dreadful. The British version of a dime novel, these serialized stories were originally aimed at working class readers who couldn't afford the one shilling freight for mainstream monthly fiction produced by authors like Dickens. Instead of costing the equivalent of 12 pennies a month, these weekly cheapies gave avid readers of lurid tales a taste of their drug of choice for a penny a pop.
. . .
The most popular of the dreadfuls included highly glamorized sagas of real-life criminals like highwayman Dick Turpin, take-offs on folk heroes like Robin Hood, and horror variants like Varney the Vampire, an English version of Count Dracula.  The original Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was a character in one of Edward Lloyd's most successful weeklies, The String of Pearls. Another popular anti-hero was based on a London urban legend. "Spring Heeled Jack" was half-man, half-devil, with superhuman strength, and like a later pop culture icon, the "ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound." '

There's a lot more in the article, so if intrigued be sure to follow the link to the Seattle PI story.

Inkmesh: search ebooks across the web

I've come across a company with an interesting service for those who are now reading e-books, whether with Kindles, Sonys, Nooks (well, soon), Astaks, or other flexible e-readers.

Inkmesh.com is a new search engine for hunting ebooks across the web, a process which includes searches of
  1.  retailers like Amazon.com,
  2.  self-publishing sites like Smashword
  3.  free sites like Project Gutenberg and many others
        listed at the Inkmesh site.

  They are looking for feedback on how Inkmesh can improve its offering, so this is not only useful to owners of e-readers but also gives a chance to help improve a service during its development phase.

  My feedback not long ago was that there were too many results and that I wanted the ability to search for only words that are part of a title or for a specific author.  At the time I tried this, they were, they said, working on the Advanced Search capability.

  It turns out they already have the capability I wanted, and outside of the special easy-to-use interface, a search could be done using the following link, which is for a query to search for 'Jane Austen' in the title:

  http://inkmesh.com/search/?qs=title%3A%22Jane+Austen%22&btnE=Find+Ebooks

  To avoid our having to figure out how to put that together, Inkmesh is integrating this into the regular user interface as a look-up option.

E-Book Pricing Comparison
Also, tireless researcher/podcaster Len Edgerly, at The Kindle Chronicles points us to Inkmesh's very interesting Amazon, B&N and Sony Price Comparison posted November 30 to their site.

They focused on 11,604 top-selling titles available at all three vendors and ran their numbers on that set.  They also included prices for these ebooks from the other sites they index, including Lulu, Fictionwise and HarperCollins.  Here's what they found, for prices during this one week:

' Amazon had the best prices on 8,592 (or 74%) of the top-selling ebooks in circulation today.  And the price difference wasn’t insignificant either – for ebooks that were cheapest at Amazon, Kindle prices were lower than the next best price by 15% on average.
  Barnes and Noble was a clear (and distant) number two ... '

  The article has a lot of detail and you can read where B&N's strengths were and how Sony fared, at the Inkmesh site.

Let them know how they're doing with the search engine and give them some feedback on what you read in their analysis, from whatever angle.