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It's not hard to see where the real costs are incurred by book publishers. You have trees to cultivate, chop, transport, mill, form into paper, transport again, inks to make, covers to design, writers-editors-publishers to pay and, at the end of all that, you still need to ship a heavy product across the world in order to take your money. Kindle must be cheaper. Surely. KitGuru gets a nasty surprise in bed on a cold Saturday morning.
Go back just one generation and the sure fire sign that a bloke had forgotten to buy his nearest and dearest something special for a holiday or other celebration, was all around you at the local petrol station. Cheap chocolates, dying flowers, rash-inducing perfume and a host of nasty novelty gifts were everywhere – every time you went to pay for your freshly pumped benzine products.
But you only noticed them when, in a blind panic, you realised it was Christmas or Valentines or her birthday and you had nothing.
In the modern era, we can look to Aria, eBuyer and Amazon for last minute gifts (with varying degrees of technology involved). Add in the Amazon Kindle and you are ‘in the zone' when it comes to buying presents. Download-city awaits your credit card details and a valid delivery address.
When it comes to books, Kindles have done away with the need for mass-tree-slaughter and all the oil/gas/chemicals that go into making hardbacks etc, so not only is the Kindle more convenient – it's also very much cheaper. So downloading a Kindle book will only be a fraction of the price of a paperback – and a hell of a lot less than a brand new hardback.
Or so you would think.
It's hard to see why a hardback version of a book would be almost 10% cheaper than its Kindle equivalent – but that is exactly the kind of profiteering we have seen this morning. We're going with the word profiteering, because there's no way on earth that the Kindle version being more expensive does anything more than penalise those who would prefer to be nice to the planet and have their product delivered quicker – direct to their reading device.
If you add in the fact that once you've read a book, it has a re-sale value, then the economics get even worse.
KitGuru says: That's just one example. There are others. We can't think of a single justification – can you?
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.
Its this kind of profiteering that makes people turn to torrent sites so not to be ripped off !
The justification is money – Amazon are in it for the money and will take as much as they can (and pay as little tax as they can) until someone stops them. But when you have an effective monopoly and govts. don’t wish to intervene, that’s unlikely.
They take 60% of the book price up front, they charge the publishers to post the books to them, they charge the publishers if books are damaged (even sometimes if Amazon damage them) – it works out that around 75% of the cover price goes straight into Amazon’s pockets for little or no work.
And then they enforce low pricing upon publishers, frequently meaning they have to sell at a loss. If the publisher refuses, then Amazon will pull the listings of every single title they hold from that publisher – as they done twice already, driving one major publisher out of business.
For authors – who make almost zero out of sales through Amazon – Kindles are a dream come true. Amazon only take 40% of the price, so it’s no surprise that we’ve seen the upsurge in self-publishing with 25% of the NYTimes best seller list now self-published. Amazon are ensuring the days of the publishing house are as numbered as the days of the record companies.
That’s not all bad news, publishers are not all virtuous, the books they hype are often not as good as the unhyped books that get overlooked. But the most obvious downside is the massive decline in editing standards we’ve seen in recent years, as that’s the first corner that publishers are cutting to save costs, and those that self-publish are not tough enough on themselves even if they hire third parties for advice).
Amazing how Amazon seems to be your friend when you’re a customer, but acts like cancer when dealing with suppliers. Is that why we love em so much? Cos they kill suppliers for our benefit?