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serynI am pleased about the DMCA revisions. However, I would like all DRM-stripping for personal use to be explicitly legal instead of just the physical DVD media kind. Mostly I want to be able to read the free Amazon e-books on my phone instead of just the PC software
(I wouldn't mind having a Kindle, but I'm not paying $389 for one. (I only like the big ones, which are also more awkward for use.) It kind of seems like a bad deal to spend that kind of money in order to have a proprietary format for book rentals. (If it's got DRM, you don't own it.))
Or Amazon could make Kindle for Palm software. It can't be that hard to port their craptastic featureless reader software (I've only used the PC version, which is free.) and they've already done it for iPhone and are touting the forthcoming Android version. The e-book app I have for my phone (free) says it will handle the filetypes but actually it doesn't because it can't deal with the DRM.
E-books ought to be a LOT cheaper than they are. I lived through the 80s when book prices skyrocketed because paper got so much more expensive. Then the 90s when shipping got more costly--- and so they stopped having midlist authors at all. Then the 2000s when they added middlemen for no reason. The price of books went up about a buck each time they had an excuse. Some of that is inflation, of course.
Authors talk about what they get paid and they're not making any more money than they were in the 1980s. Sometimes literally not just cost-adjusted. So the authors aren't getting any more money. The shipping costs on e-books are nil. There are no remaindered books. There's no paper or ink or cover stock.
Sure they still have to have layout people (and probably people who do layout for each type of e-book file). There's still cover art to produce. And books are theoretically edited professionally (though there's almost no evidence of that). So it's not free to make an e-book, but publishers whined for decades that the physical costs were so expensive that they couldn't afford to pay the authors decently, couldn't afford the wide selection of authors they'd had in the past (only wanted best sellers), and had to raise the cover price just to break even.
Well, guess what. The cover prices are the same, the authors still get paid shit, and the publishers have no physical expenses. So where's the money going? It's not going to subsidize e-readers. (And don't tell me e-books are discounted. It's like 10% for most paperbacks but Amazon has a continual 4-for-3 sale on physical books, most other stores have sales or promotions, and there are discounts like Walmart pricing. Buying the e-book is actually more expensive than buying the physical book.)
(I wouldn't mind having a Kindle, but I'm not paying $389 for one. (I only like the big ones, which are also more awkward for use.) It kind of seems like a bad deal to spend that kind of money in order to have a proprietary format for book rentals. (If it's got DRM, you don't own it.))
Or Amazon could make Kindle for Palm software. It can't be that hard to port their craptastic featureless reader software (I've only used the PC version, which is free.) and they've already done it for iPhone and are touting the forthcoming Android version. The e-book app I have for my phone (free) says it will handle the filetypes but actually it doesn't because it can't deal with the DRM.
E-books ought to be a LOT cheaper than they are. I lived through the 80s when book prices skyrocketed because paper got so much more expensive. Then the 90s when shipping got more costly--- and so they stopped having midlist authors at all. Then the 2000s when they added middlemen for no reason. The price of books went up about a buck each time they had an excuse. Some of that is inflation, of course.
Authors talk about what they get paid and they're not making any more money than they were in the 1980s. Sometimes literally not just cost-adjusted. So the authors aren't getting any more money. The shipping costs on e-books are nil. There are no remaindered books. There's no paper or ink or cover stock.
Sure they still have to have layout people (and probably people who do layout for each type of e-book file). There's still cover art to produce. And books are theoretically edited professionally (though there's almost no evidence of that). So it's not free to make an e-book, but publishers whined for decades that the physical costs were so expensive that they couldn't afford to pay the authors decently, couldn't afford the wide selection of authors they'd had in the past (only wanted best sellers), and had to raise the cover price just to break even.
Well, guess what. The cover prices are the same, the authors still get paid shit, and the publishers have no physical expenses. So where's the money going? It's not going to subsidize e-readers. (And don't tell me e-books are discounted. It's like 10% for most paperbacks but Amazon has a continual 4-for-3 sale on physical books, most other stores have sales or promotions, and there are discounts like Walmart pricing. Buying the e-book is actually more expensive than buying the physical book.)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 03:58 pm (UTC)The Kindle for Android app has been available for . . . at least a month? Can't remember. Its UI is better than that of the physical Kindle.
Buying the e-book is actually more expensive than buying the physical book.
Not for anything I've read so far! :) The pricing issue is considerably more complex than you suggest here--I keep an eye on it for dayjob reasons, though it's not our market. Part of the problem is that the situation changes every six months, if not more quickly, which means that some corporations stand firm for no reason and some experiment wildly for little reason; extrapolating from what one can see as a consumer is wildly inaccurate as a result.