Kindle vs. The iPad: Round 1
January 31st, 2010, 4:03pm by Jake
The first casualty in the Kindle vs. iPad war has been recorded, as all MacMillan books, electronic and physical, are no longer available on Amazon. Now, if you own a Kindle, you can’t buy any more books from one of the Big Six publishers. And if you want to change platforms as a result, you’re stuck leaving your old books behind. I don’t think this will last very long. More than anything, I think it demonstrates the problems that DRM can create in the digital media world, as each platform becomes its own island. That there are at least 3 mutually incompatible DRM systems (4 if you count the format Sony recently left behind), further complicates matters.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Amazon capitulated to the new pricing demands pretty quickly. So now you can look forward to paying more money for ebooks. It’s really quite mind-boggling– the marginal costs of producing ebooks is about $0, compared to probably $%-10 for hardcover books.
You’d think that smart publishers would lower the price and increase volume– it’s worked in every other industry known to man. Yet the publishers seem to be headed down the same dead-end path of Big Time record labels, and will likely give rise to independent publishers that are more nimble and adaptive. In 5 years, we’ll look back at this as the moment when publishers sealed their fates.
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I think the bigger problem is that people don’t read books any more. Seriously, how low would they have to drop the price before you’d start buying them? Even if one reads books, it’s hard to beat free at the library. Even though I read (very occasionally these days), I have to admit that I think books are much cooler now that it can involve a gadget other than the Itty Bitty Book Light. That’s what it takes to get me to put down my computer and stop reading all that stuff on the internet.
It’s a reflection of our MTV-sound bite-news cycle-ADD society that people don’t sit down and read books as much anymore — if they’re any good, we can just wait for the movie, right? Publishers are in deep trouble regardless of what they do, and simply changing their prices, up or down, isn’t going to save them.
The issue of the music industry seems very different — at least people still listen to music. I’d venture that, actually, many more people listen to music now, because of MP3 players, than they did before. And I’d also venture that most people would say that there’s a fair price that could be paid for music (like, maybe, $10 per album). This of course is much higher than the marginal cost of creating MP3s, but that’s the wrong way to think about pricing.
Publishers are in much worse shape than the record labels, in my opinion. They face the same pressures based on technology changing their field irreversibly and quickly, but I think they’re also facing a cultural shift that will make them increasingly irrelevant.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:14 pm
All that being said, Lifehacker is running a poll asking “How much would you pay for an eBook?” My answer was $5 to $10. I think paying used paperback prices is, for me, about the right amount to offset the minor inconveniences associated with shuttling books to and from the library.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Sucks that each eBook displayer is locked into a single store, but I think that’s well understood upfront. That’s why having a brand like Amazon behind a product like the Kindle is valuable. It will be nice if a day comes when you can swap your digital book for a digital book of another format if you want to use another device. That’s not really a DRM/technology issue as it is a policy issue. Publishers will need to come around to a different way of thinking. Heck, they should also let you trade your hardcover for a digital copy– I’d rather read on a Kindle anyday!