Bezos defends model of keeping 65% of (kindle) book revenue

Bezos: "I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

New York Times: "What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?

Bezos: "If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know."

A good interview for giving a glimpse into the personality of an entrepreneur.

Interestingly books are perfect for online sales for other reasons, they have a high markup and a high price to weight ratio. The former made them easy to discount beyond B&M bookstores (who, by the way, would happily order you any book they don't have in stock and get it rather quickly, even in 1994) and the latter made the cost of shipping not untenable.

Books in 1994 (and even today) were one of the few things you could sell for 30% less than the chains, add in $2 for shipping, and still both make a profit and decrease the cost for the consumer. There really aren't many things that fit that description, and I think it's why they were online shopping's first killer app.

Right now they don't have to, but as competition heats up for e-books, it wouldn't be surprising if royalties went up (unless there's a cartel situation).

I have used the service a few times for short runs of things that needed a professional look but only a small number of copies, and the quality is good. There's an adjustable pricing scale whereby the printing/duplication cost is fixed and then Amazon takes their large percentage based on the profit above that, so it's less good value than having your copies pre-printed and selling them yourself (eg CDs if you are in a band), but being able to offload all your fulfillment and distribution to a retailer with very high brand integrity (ie that so many people trust with their payment info) is worth it in my view. If you have a niche market and know how to reach it, it may be a better deal than trying to interest a publishing company.

Incidentally, it's also a handy thing for cheap specialist printing, eg documentation or a pile of disparate research material that you'd like to have in book form but may not need that many copies of, for which a regular printing company would charge a ton in setup costs.

With electronic publishing, you just let the crowd do the selection. And it costs virtually nothing to store each additional book.

I hope we move to a web-like world for e-books where an author can publish and charge for a book after eliminating the middleman.

Think about it: without the "Amazon tax", e-books would cost only 33% of what they do now (eliminating Amazon's cut).

Also the percentage-based commission makes no sense. It costs Amazon the same to store/tranfer a book that costs $100 and a book that costs $10. A $1/book "shipping fee" would be more reasonable.

The situation is ripe for an execution-oriented company like Google to move in and kick Amazon.

It's better to wait till more books are sold in electronic form than dead-tree form and then dictate your own conditions to publishers.

At least that's what I want to think, Bezos seems like a nice fellow so I feel like finding a good reason for him keeping 65%.

I think it'd be incredible to allow more authors to self-publish on an entirely open e-book platform. We've started to see this move in the music industry (e.g. - Nine Inch Nails grossing $750k from their own music sales - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080304/162842435.shtml ) and I think it could be coming to publishing too.