As things come to a head between publishers and providers, and as Barnes & Noble(NYSE:BKS) and Amazon(NASDAQ:AMZN) compete over the digital self-publishing market, Amazon is attempting to place themselves firmly in the forefront of publisher attention by offering the potential for doubled royalties to users of their DTP self-publishing platform. The gist of the announcement is simple; If you publish a book through their service and the digital copy is at least 20% cheaper than the print copy, listed between $2.99 and $9.99, and have Text-to-Speech enabled, you will get 70% royalties on all your eBook sales instead of the standard 35%.
Let’s face it, this gives Amazon a huge advantage when it comes to providing content for the Kindle and all related software readers. As much as the traditional publishing industry balks at the concept, independents are coming out of the woodwork these days and some of them are making big names for themselves in the eBook marketplace(J.A. Konrath makes a good example). By keeping them happy and coming back for more, money in this case, Amazon has a chance to gain fairly exclusive rights to loads of great talent. It’ll be interesting to see what the response is both from the industry and the competition!
I recently emailed Randy White and asked him if he knew that his book, on amazon, cost more to the consumer as an ebook than the paper, and this was the response that I got back from his assistant:
“Save your money, Brian. Two cents more? I suggest you take a public bus to a public library. Why should you pay and artist for his or her work? Steve Grendon
Assistant to Randy Wayne White “
it seems to me that perhaps established authors who are used to book advances, etc. might be a bit scared of the self published author.
Needless to say, the response I got back from Randy White’s representative turned me off of wanting to purchase his books. Purchasing from the self-published author so that more of the revenue goes to the content creator is the way to go!
How do you think this whole pricing issue relates to electronic textbooks? It seems like self-publishing is a lot less likely there. Currently, it looks like discounts for Kindle textbook titles (relative to the physical editions) is only about 10-20% with a few exceptions. Prices will have to be much lower (or e-books offered jointly with physical textbooks) if students are going to rely on their Kindle or iPad for textbook material.