On the Dark Matter of the Publishing Industry
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> AAP Reports Own Shrinking Market Share, Media Mistakes It for Flat US Ebook Market [1]
Aside from that, this is pretty badly written and
*overuses* *emphasis* *poorly*.
The contract negotiations with Amazon were supposedly about price control for publishers, but combined with the way they're spinning new E-Book numbers it appears that they actually want E-Books to fail.
The impact of the Amazon KDP self-publishing program needs to be considered:
* It fills Amazon’s store with hundreds of thousands of new titles every year
* It practically requires authors to price between $2.99 and $9.99 (in order to get the 70% royalty, otherwise it’s 35%)
* In order to take advantage of various promotional options that allow authors to price the books for free (or offer them for free via the Kindle Unlimited subscription plan) authors have offer the books exclusively through Amazon (no Google Play, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, etc.)
The net effect is the trad publishers (and many indies) are competing with a huge mass of cheap or free content on the largest ebook platform. Many readers turn up their nose at free ebooks, but many others love to download them and there are some good titles available. I believe it is cutting into the sales of >$10 ebooks offered by the traditional publishers in a big way.
Regarding the other platforms: I don’t like having an Amazon monopoly, but some of the blame should be assigned to the erstwhile competitors who can’t seem to get it together. Apple, which has a great hardware platform (iPad/iPad mini), buckets of cash, and huge marketing muscle, doesn’t seem to be forging ahead in the ebooks space. iBooks is a fine tool for reading, but iBookstore/iTunes has a poor UX. As for iBooks Author, it is a great tool, but it’s exclusive to Apple … and not many authors/publishers want to go exclusive with the #2 or #3 platform. I’d like to think that Google could be up for the task, but it has its own issues to work through — for instance it shut down new account creation for Google Play Books in the spring, and the last time I looked (last week) new publishers still can’t get on.
It’s too bad, because this industry clearly needs competitors who can give alternatives to readers, authors, publishers, and other players in the ecosystem.
What authors get from KDP is a larger cut of revenue, opportunities to list on Kindle Unlimited, and an easier time overall selling ebooks on Amazon. Plenty of authors are 'internalizing their oppression' all the way to the bank. Because DRM ebooks from Amazon tend to be delivered in an incrementally more convenient way, and it's incrementally easier for the average user to sync their library across devices when they buy that way.
This sort of ideological rhetoric around DRM probably alienates more people than it converts.
I'm not sure how DRM factors into this. I buy ebooks through Google all the time, and only a minority of them are DRM-protected. Yes as far as I can see, the distribution mechanism is identical whether DRM is in place or not. My understanding is that "put DRM on this book" is nothing more than a checkbox that the author chooses for the book.