My Books Available On Amazon.Fr

Well, via Kindle...  so Amazon.com serves Kindle versions into France, Belgium, and Monaco, wherein people there can buy and download the books, but I am compensated via US$ remittances.  I priced Perish Your Publisher at the lowest possible ($2.99) and How Small Business Trades Worldwide at the regular $9.99, to see how they each do at those price points.

Not Uncommon Sentiment

Hi John,   Thanks a lot for your quick reply.  I read the chapter 8 online, but I want to read the real book.  For some reason, I understand the content much better if I read on paper.  I will email you after reading.  It was so encouraging to hear that you could help me develop a practical strategy.   I really appreciate your help!   Best wishes,   Jing

Kindle Gets Competition

Just in time for Christmas, Googlebooks opens up.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS reports

Google... opened its long-awaited electronic book store Monday, competing against Amazon.com Inc. and further accelerating the shift of book distribution from brick-and-mortar stores to the Web.

***Another theatre just shut down up the street from me.  This is not because fewer people are finding moving pictures entertaining, it is just more people are finding alternates to the mass viewing theatre.  There will always be theatres.  There will always be books.  The issue will be standards that meet customer expectations.***

Over the past decade, the number of independent stores operated by the ABA's membership has fallen from 3,000 to 1,700, the ABA said. McQuivey expects hundreds more to close during the next decade.

The upheaval will occur as sales of e-readers, tablets and electronic books steadily rise during the next five years.

...

Even larger book retailers are feeling the pressure to shake things up.

Activist investor William Ackman on Monday offered to finance a $963 million bid by Borders Group to buy rival Barnes & Noble Inc. Combined, the two retailers operate about 1,400 stores, many of which would presumably be closed if they were to combine forces.

Although most analysts doubted a deal would come together, the proposal underscores the challenges facing traditional book retailers as they look for ways to lower their costs.

...

Google's electronic book store, in the works for more than a year, draws upon a portion of the 15 million printed books that the Mountain View-based company has scanned into its computers since 2004.

About 4,000 publishers, including CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., Random House Inc. and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group, are also allowing Google to carry many of their recently released books in the new store.

Those publishing deals will ensure that most of the current best sellers are available in Google's store, said Amanda Edmonds, who oversaw the company's partnerships.

...

Google's e-books will work on the Nook, Sony Corp.'s Reader devices and practically every other e-reading device except the Kindle. Google achieves this with the help of Adobe Inc.'s copy-protection system for e-books.

...

Google plans to offer sharp discounts on many of its e-books but it will still pay publishers 52 percent of the list price for sales made on its site, unless another arrangement has been negotiated with an outside agency.

The formula means that even if Google elects to sell a book with a $10 list price for $6, the publisher would still get $5.20.

The revenue-sharing formula changes slightly when the electronic sales occur through one of the independent book merchants or other partners Google hopes to recruit. Google didn't disclose the precise split of these arrangements.

***All of this is inevitable, and will lead to the best all-round deal for all concerned.  The best part of this is with digitl books, there is a no return policy.***

"In the long run, I don't think Google has a strong appetite to make it easier for book sellers to stay alive," McQuivey said.

———

***Right, it is the booksellers job to keep themselves viable, by serving customers.***

FuturBooks

Had a conversation at a party last night with a web-designer who had just been hired a few months ago at Amazon.com.  Given his youth he wondered if books would disappear given the rise of Kindle and other readers.  I thought not since books, that is a library, is still one of the top five design themes for interior decoration.  Also, the coffee table books as an accent will never go away.  We'd always have books.  Another young woman, too a web designer, offered that what books we'll have in the future will be beautifully bound, as keepers.  (I think that has been done, but who knows, maybe it will come back.)  I offered that to this day when confounded I will grab a dictionary or a thesaurus off the shelf to consult, since that is faster than a computer.  I might as well have said I still use an abacus, for the looks I got.

Seth Godin Is Done With Traditional Publishing

Quick, someone tell Godin about Seattle Teachers College Press!

Jeff Rivera has an exclusive he'll be reporting on:

Godin says, "I've decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I'm done. I like the people, but I can't abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don't usually visit to buy something they don't usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that's hard to spread ... I really don't think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically. No, it's not 'better', but it's different. So while I'm not sure what format my writing will take, I'm not planning on it being the 1907 version of hardcover publishing any longer."


Even better than this news are the 88 comments below the article... writers can be hilarious.

Just Do Not Know What They Are Doing

Penguin Paperback, the classics republishers, just had their 70th birthday party.  it was 70 years ago that the publisher was started to reprint classics in a new font, with interesting cover, and commentary back and front, and sometimes a new translation.  This was enough to earn the right to copyright say the Aeneid or Last of the Mohicans.  A business is born.

The article to which I link is about royalties on ebooks, and how an agent named Wylie is shaking the publishing world up, but I would like to point out something else.

Since absolutely anyone can reprint the classics (either never copyrighted or out of copyright) what is it that Penguin does that makes is successful?  It cannot be a mwre copyright, which anyone can do, and the results are exactly the same: monopoly. It packages nicely, to be sure, but the Penguin success is based on marketing, not monopoly.

It is a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: "it must be our monopoly, not our marketing" since gaining monopoly precedes the marketing.

There are others that reprint the classics and also get a monopoly.  Their translators are as good as anyone working for Penguin.  The difference again is marketing.

Copyrights are a downward spiral: believing in, and relying on, copyright monopoly, less effort is made in marketing, and so less returns means concentrating on what is believed to the the strength, that is monopoly, and so down it goes, like newspapers suing their readers.

But anyone could then print a penguin classic and sell it!

No they could not "and sell it..."  To whom?  Penguins customers?  At what price?  The same?  No, necessarily lower... and what did these books cost?  More, because the pirates print fewer.  Where did they print?  With second tier printers...  The entire materials sourcing, distribution, manufacturing, and distribution chain costs more and is less service oriented to pirates, even in a market free of copyrights.  The problem with the premise is it is ahistorical: there are no instances in the history of mankind where the posed problem ever occurred.  On the other hand, Penguin itself, is a great example of "marketing matters, copyrights do not..."

But copyrights protect consumers!  Nonsense.  Consumers protect themselves. Once consumer find they have a shoddy product, they exact revenge on the vendors at the head of the system that burned them.  It does not take long.

Amazon eBooks Outsell Hardcovers!

Which isn't really saying much, since hardcover sales are not huge anyway, and we already knew ebook sales were rising.  Amazon will only speak in percentages, not in hard numbers, so this "news" is hard to quantify, but it tracks what we see with every other tech advancement.  When it is cheaper and easier to acquire and use, a given item will be acquired and used more.
Christmas day Kindle books outsold real books on Amazon.  This too was no big deal, since nobody buys books on Christmas day, but everyone who got a Kindle tried it out (with a likely free or heavily discounted book) as soon as they unwrapped their neato new toy.
An eBook version of a given book is de riguer if you wish to publish, but eBooks will neither supplant printed books nor reduce market for all books.