I assume this will also increase the price of ebooks, as well? Shouldn't we expect the ebook price to track with the price of the TPB?
To an extent — the three Discovery TPBs were $16 list in dead tree format, and $12 as e-books. MMPBs were $7.99 list in both formats.
Thanks! I had forgotten what the Discovery ebook prices were, just remembered they were higher. Not sure how much the 50% price increase over MMPBs will be a sticking point for me, month in and month out...
In the uk the prices vary on the novels in different places so I don’t really pay attention to the type of book. To me there are paperbacks and hardbacks. I prefer hardbacks myself.
Prices vary widely on backlist ebook titles, based on marketing. At this point, most of the MMPB originals are considered backlist. But when they were new releases, I think most of them were $7.99, when the dead tree books were $7.99. There may have been some at a different price point, as S&S experimented a bit with pricing, but they were almost always priced at the MMPB list price. Which meant that the MMPB was usually cheaper than the ebook, because Amazon discounts books. But since you’re buying your ebook directly from S&S (even if you’re buying it through the Amazon storefront) you usually pay full list price. Well, of course you aren’t really buying your ebook, you’re buying a license to use it on your devices for as long as Amazon and S&S choose to honor that license. You don’t actually own it. If you did, you could sell it on when you were done reading it, as you can with a dead tree book.
Even with physical books, you don’t really “own” the book. You just “own” the paper it’s printed on. The text is still licensed and if the licensor wanted you to recycle the paper before selling it, so the text was removed, then you would have to. It’s like in the VHS days, people would say the owned a movie but in reality all they “owned” was the plastic shell and tape and they had a license for home use of the movie that was on the tape. If they wanted to use the tape to record other stuff on it, the person could and would break their home use license as the movie would no longer be on that tape.
That's arrant nonsense. It's not how First Sale Doctrine works. You can do whatever you want with a physical book once you buy it; the copyright holder's interest in the your copy of the book ends the moment the book is sold to you. You can resell the book. You can give the book away. You can use the book for kindling. The publisher can't tell you otherwise, and the publisher can't make you do anything with the book that you don't want to do. Pocket could tell you to erase the pages in your trade paperback Discovery novels, and you could laugh in their faces in response, because they have no right to your copy of the book any longer. An ebook, yes. All you're buying a license to use a file that can be revoked by the publisher at any time with no compensation to you.
Thanks Allyn! I own better than 20,000 hard-copy books, and every one of them is still readable (and many are 50-100 years old). As long as I exercise care in how I treat them, they will still be readable long after I'm gone. Any ebook in my library can be rendered unreadable by the licensor (Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Google Play, etc.) at a moment's notice. In fact, I expect my Nook books to stop working any time now, when B&N finally goes under. I can give my dead-tree books to a friend, or loan them to a coworker, or sell them on, and it's perfectly legal. This is decidedly NOT the case with an ebook. Can't sell, can't give, can't loan (with a few exceptions -- some ebook storefronts allow a limited lending service, to other customers of that storefront's ecosystem, but that's not the same thing. I can loan my dead-tree books to anyone, anywhere, at any time.) We're 15+ years into the ebook "revolution" and I'm amazed how many readers don't understand the fundamental legal difference between buying a book, and licensing a file. Early on, I "bought" a bunch of SCE titles in some format that stopped being supported by the format's creator (it was some kind of .pdf format.) When Adobe decided they weren't making enough money from their format, they shut down the licensing servers, and my books were permanently rendered unreadable. That chased me out of the ebook market for the better part of a decade, until I learned ways to protect my investment in ebooks.
I'm wondering if what tomswift is partly referring to is the story itself, as in the licensed work. You own it as a product and can do what you want with it as both of you suggest. But what you can't do is reprint, copy or use the story without licensing from the rights holder. I do agree that the publisher can't make you scrub it basically before selling it, I'm not sure where he's getting that from. But I think part of what he is saying is that you don't own the story. But all that is one reason I prefer hardcopies wherever possible, books, movies, TV shows. We've all heard about people who bought something from streaming services and then lost it when there was some licensing change. It's not like you get your money back. If you bought a streaming show and for some reason didn't get around to watching it before the licensing changed, you're out of luck. But if you own the DVD/Blu-Ray, or hardcopy book, you can watch/read it anytime you want, as many times as you want. And you could recoup some money (though admittedly a small fraction) by selling it used if you decide you don't want it anymore. When it comes to books, the only e-books I buy is if those are the only media they are available in.
Some of the brand new books have come up on the Google Play for $6.99 on the day of their release. It's only a $1 off, but it is still technically not full price. I remember because I was shocked to see any kind of a markdown, even one that small, on brand new books. Would downloading the book onto the device protect it from being pulled off of it? With most of the ones I've used they seem to let you keep it once you buy it no matter what. I know Comixology does for sure, because there are several comics I bought on there that are no longer available, but they are still in my library, including the first half of the Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover, which was pulled once IDW lost the DW license. I'm not completely positive, but I think the same thing has happened with some e-books I got too. I think at this point most of the people who make these kind of decisions realize that it's not worth pissing people off by taking their digital content away from them. I know there was some incident with where an e- book was pulled from people's devices a few years ago, and everyone was furious and it even made the news headlines. I can't really see them wanting a repeat of that.
It was Orwell's 1984 that was deleted. I know of 1 ebook I bought from Amazon that no longer appears in my collection or any of my devices. I don't remember the title of the ebook, but it was a piece of fanfic that slipped through, billed as a parody. It was a retelling of Alien from Jonesy's perspective. It's more common with iTunes. There's music I know I bought (because I burned it to CD) that's now gone and can't be downloaded anymore.
Not quite. The retail price for ebooks is set entirely and completely by the publisher (at least for the Big Five publishers, which include S&S.) If the ebook was $6.99 when the list price for the MMPB was $7.99, that’s just the publisher experimenting with pricing, it’s NOT Google Play discounting the book. Despite what you may think, you didn’t buy that ebook from Google Play. You bought it from S&S, who used Google’s storefront to make the transaction. Kinda like buying from Amazon Marketplace or eBay; the storefront handles the sale, for which they collect a commission, but you’re actually purchasing from someone else. This is fundamentally different than how sales work for “dead tree” books. For those books, the bookstore (online or brick & mortar) purchases the book from the publisher at a steep discount (up to 50% off) and then sells it to the customer at whatever price they want. The ebook “agency model” used by the publishing companies is really unfair restraint of trade, but those arguments are not compelling to the courts, given the current pro-corporate attitude of the legal system.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but according to Amazon Greg Cox's Antares Maelstrom has slipped to August.
I didn't know that, I just assumed it worked the same way as the brick and mortar stores. I guess it does explain why it says "sold by" on the books' pages, I had just assumed that just meant that was the publisher.
Interestingly the audiobook is still scheduled for March. I hope this doesn't mean another gap in the schedule.