So Amazon are finally opening a UK eBook store and launching 2 new eReaders. They say they will set the price of the eBooks for sale, which is a little typical of its approach in publishing. It is clear they wish to dominate and fully control the market. I wonder if they are going to allow UK based publishers who don’t have a US presence or bank account into their exclusive little club or if they are going to continue excluding publishers even to their official UK store. It will be interesting to watch what they are going to do. Apparently the new store will have 400,00+ titles on it. As a UK based publisher, today was the first I heard of the store, so I know our books are not (initially) going to be on it which is a shame. Our only route to getting onto the Kindle in the US is currently through Smashwords, maybe our books will be included through this route but its about time Amazon opened up to the fact that there is some pretty decent British based publishers out there who want their eBooks available through it store. It would also be nice if they allowed publishers to set their own prices. Our eBooks retail at £4.95 which we believe is a fair price against our paperback which retail at £7.99.
1 comment:
I realise that it might be commercially inconvenient to do, but what would help open up the floodgates for ebook publishing would be if publishers like yourselves came out and gave a breakdown of the actual cost of book publishing. At the moment you're effectively saying that for the substance of a physical book you charge us £3.04. It's very difficult to judge from this end how much the author gets from the £4.95 and whilst readers obviously accept that authors (and publishers) need to be paid, it's only rumours that we work with at the moment and they point towards it being pennies for the author which obviously contributes to the perception that it should be pennies for ebooks.
Also what would help loads is some mechanism to create a second hand book market for ebooks on a legit basis, something that would allow us to sell on or give away an ebook that we've bought in the same way that we can with "real" books ie we buy one copy and only one copy can exist at a time.
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