Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Amazon, Macmillan, E-Books and Lube

You can’t possibly have missed it. It’s had twitters all a-twitter, readers and writers alike chiming in with their two cents. A regular literary Battle Royale.

Basically, Amazon won’t be asking Macmillan to prom this year. In fact, Macmillan will be lucky if Amazon wants to feel them up in the back seat.

Fifteen dollars for an e-book. Really? No…really?

I’m asking because surely I heard wrong. Surely a company like Macmillan wouldn’t ask me to pay fifteen bucks for a book that isn’t even mine after I buy it-- that I can’t transfer from one reader to another.

I’m not, generally speaking, interested in being screwed by the man. Or any man, but that’s another issue. The Man in question here is a sweaty-fisted, red-faced tyrant trying to push people around. Wait, let me bend over the coffee table for you and make your job easier, man.

Perhaps you'd be so kind to lube up before sticking it to me?

Whatever happened to not negotiating with terrorists? Amazon’s big American ‘A’ just went a bit flaccid.

Fifteen bucks for an e-book. Seriously?

Macmillan, here’s a Haiku for U:

mushroom cloud of threat
bully cartel on e-lit
surrender to greed

I’m a writer, so from that perspective, if I had e-books out there, you’d think I’d be all for the higher price. Not so, gentle reader, and that is because I know I wouldn’t buy an e-book for that price, so I’m guessing lots of other people will be turned off as well.

But, hey, if that’s the case, it might have a positive effect. The e-book fad will go the way of the pet rock and Rubix Cube and the publishing world can be taken off their collective Xanax suppositories.

One can dream…

3 comments:

  1. I won't spend more than ten dollars for a book I can't hold in my hand and that disappears when my computer crashes.

    But, I'm all for books on the web.

    ann

    ReplyDelete
  2. What is worse is that they wanted Amazon to agree to agency pricing. Which means that Macmillan would set the final person price for their books sold by Amazon.

    Amazon would lose their ability to discount which is one of the big features of Amazon.

    The reason McMillan is pushing this so hard is that they got agency pricing with JOBS and the iPad.

    So if they can't get Amazon's price down, then the iPad is at a disadvantage. And they are hoping the iPad will be the Kindle killer.

    Why would Amazon help them destroy their business?

    And 15 bucks is ridiculous for an ebook.

    Tirz

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm dreamin' with ya, baby! I wish ebooks would go away. I don't want them to murder my precious paper books.

    ReplyDelete