Bill Crider Texas Vigilante; Everything you need to know about the great e-book price war

Ed here: As you know Bill Crider is one of my favorite writers 
of every kind. His skills and range amaze me. In fact one time
when I got so sick I had to go into the hospital I asked him to
write the second half of my adventure novel. He did a 
tremendous job. As always. I just ordered Texas Vigilante.
You should, too.

Finally Available for your Kindle!

Amazon.com: Texas Vigilante (Ellie Taine) eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store: In the western tradition of 
Louis L'Amour and Elmer Kelton, 
it's the action-packed sequel to 
OUTRAGE AT BLANCO. The men broke out 
of the toughest prison in Texas.
They kidnapped a child. 
They thought they'd get away with it. 
They didn't reckon on Ellie Taine. 
That was their mistake.

MONDAY, JUL 1, 2013 12:02 PM CDT
SALON

Everything you need to know about the great e-book price war

How the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the Big Six book publishers will affect the business of lit

BY LAURa MILLER 

• 
  

TOPICS: BOOKS, E-BOOKS, APPLE, AMAZON.COM, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, PUBLISHING NEWS,ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

Jeff Bezos (Credit: AP/Reed Saxon)

Closing arguments for the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple concluded last week, although U.S. District Judge Denise Cote is not expected to reach a decision for another couple of months. If you’ve found the case difficult to follow, you’re not alone. Still it’s worth getting a handle on the basics because the suit — or, more precisely, the business deals behind it — have changed book publishing in significant ways. Furthermore, Judge Cote’s decision could have impact well beyond the book industry.

Apple was charged with colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices. At the root of the dispute lie two different ways that publishers can sell books to retailers.

First, there’s the wholesale model, the way that book publishers have sold printed books to bookstores and other outlets for years. The publisher sets a cover price for a book, sells it to a retailer at a discount (typically 50 percent) and then the retailer can sell the book to consumers for whatever price it chooses.

The other method of selling books is via the agency model, which means, essentially, on commission. The retailer offers the book to consumers at a price the publisher sets and gets a percentage of whatever sales are made. It’s rare for print books to be sold in this way, but it’s the method Apple uses to sell content like music and apps in its iTunes store.

Until 2010 — as Albert Albanese explains in his admirably lucid “The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon and the ‘Big Six’ Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight,” a new “e-single” published by Publishers Weekly — book publishers had been selling e-books to Amazon using the wholesale model. They’d simply adapted the system they were already using to sell print books to the online retailer. This, they would soon realize, was a big mistake.

The wholesale model is widely seen as an odd way to sell e-books, since what the purchaser buys is “licensed access” to a digital file, rather than a physical object like a book. But what would torment publishers most about this arrangement was the freedom the wholesale model gave to Amazon to set the prices of e-books.

---

---

With the launch of the Kindle, Amazon promoted a low baseline price of $9.99 for most e-books. That meant that Amazon was selling virtually all newly published e-books at a loss.For example: A new book with a hardcover list price of $29.95 would be given an e-book price of $23.95 — 20 percent less to account for the publisher’s savings in printing, binding and distribution. The publisher would sell that e-book to Amazon for $12, and Amazon would retail it for $9.99, taking a $2 loss.

Why would Amazon do this? Observers have proposed several motives. Perhaps Amazon aimed to entice heavy readers to the newfangled Kindle; the customer could tell herself she’d make up the cost of the device in savings on the books themselves. Others have suggested that cheap e-books were loss leaders that drew customers back to Amazon over and over again, presumably so they’d go on to purchase high-margin items like TVs.

The most popular theory by far holds that Amazon intended from the start to totally dominate the e-book marketplace. By using its wealth to subsidize the sale of e-books at a loss, it could drive any competitors out of the market. Bricks-and-mortar chains like Barnes and Noble and online start-ups like Kobo (both of which would introduce their own e-reader devices) or device-neutral rivals like Google would simply not be willing or able to bleed cash as long as Amazon could. And because the Kindle is a “closed platform” — Kindle e-books can only be read on Kindle devices or apps — the more Kindle e-books a customer owned, the more reluctant she’d be to switch to a different device.

Obviously, however deep its pockets, Amazon would not be able to go on selling e-books at a loss indefinitely. But once Amazon was cemented in place as the uncontested sovereign of e-book retail, it could do whatever it wanted: force publishers to reduce their own prices, and/or raise prices on consumers.

If this was the retailer’s strategy, it was initially an effective one. By the end of 2009, Amazon owned 90 percent of the robustly growing e-book market. Even though e-books still made up a small percentage of overall book sales, publishers finally saw the writing on the wall. Amazon had a near-monopoly and was furthermore devaluing books in the eyes of consumers — they began to think of books as worth $9.99, not $23.95. Book publishing is a low-margin business to begin with, and the mammoth retailer seemed poised to scrape even those minimal profits away.

At that point, Apple entered the scene with a hotly anticipated new device, the iPad, and plans to open its own e-book store. Needless to say, the nation’s largest book publishers looked upon this rich new Amazon competitor with keen interest. The trial at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York this month has provided a record of what happened next.

As narrated by Albanese and other observers of the trial, Apple approached book publishers about making their titles available in the iBookstore. Apple felt that it needed at least four of the “Big Six” publishers to launch the store, and it entered into discussions with all six. Initially, Apple’s primary negotiator, Eddy Cue, assumed they’d purchase e-books via the wholesale model. A couple of the publishers he spoke with proposed the agency model for e-books, an idea that had been kicking around the book world for a few months.

Apple liked the idea. So did the publishers — they would make less money per e-book this way than they did by selling wholesale to Amazon, but they could live with that. What Amazon was doing wasn’t sustainable anyway. Under agency terms, publishers could control the pricing of their books and assert that $12.99 to $14.99 was a fair market value for most new titles. Although authors would also receive less in royalties from agency sales, the Authors’ Guild endorsed the move as the only alternative to watching “Amazon destroy the physical distribution chain” — that is, brick-and-mortar bookstores — in the words of Guild president Scott Turow. (If you want to know why bookstores are especially important to authors, read this.)

However, Apple needed a critical mass of publishers to participate. Otherwise their store would have too few desirable titles. And none of the publishers wanted to be the first to go out on a limb and risk being the only one selling their titles for three to five bucks more than everyone else. Last but not least, Apple knew it couldn’t make the iBookstore a success if it sold the most in-demand titles for dollars more than Amazon did.

By early April 2010, when the iPad and the iBookstore officially launched, five of the Big Six publishers had entered into agency deals with Apple. Each of those publishers had also informed Amazon that if the retailer wanted to continue selling their e-books, it would have to buy them on agency terms as well. As the publishers saw it, they’d stood up to a “bully.”

for the rest go here:
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/everything_
you_need_to_know_about_the_great_e_book
_price_war/