Amazon - One Kindle to Rule them All
In fact it's now getting so bad that you can now buy software packages that automate the process to the extent of producing anything up to 20 of these 'books' a day! My advice? Stay clear of the Kindle Store. it sucks. Actually, there's more to it than that. The manager of the computer section of a large UK chain of academic bookshops explained to me a year or two ago that Amazon were routinely selling books for less than he could buy them wholesale from the publisher. Having driven a large number of bricks and mortar retailers out of business, Amazon now seem to be engaged in a massive destocking exercise. To give you some idea of the scale, I usually have a wish list on Amazon of several hundred books and CDs - I didn't realize it was so many until I just looked - and over the past few months Amazon have ceased to sell something like 20% of those titles. Most of them are still available from Amazon partners, but, of course, they're much more expensive, because you have to pay postage on them. That in itself would be interesting, but take a look at the URL (below) for William Rosen's book 'Justinian's Flea'. I'd had this book on my list for a while, and it is one of the books that Amazon have suddenly stopped selling in paperback. It's still available in hardback from Amazon, and in a Kindle version. But look at the pricing - the Kindle version is 25% more expensive than the paperback version bought new from an Amazon partner. Fascinating, isn't it. There are virtually no production costs associated with producing a Kindle edition - electrons are remarkably cheap in the quantities used - and yet the Kindle edition costs more - quite a lot more. While this isn't universal, if you look through the Amazon Store, you will find that on average Kindle versions of books cost nearly as much as their paper counterparts. Last time I looked into buying a Kindle I figured out that I would have to buy over 100 reasonably expensive books to break even! So what's it all about? Clearly Amazon have already established a massive dominance over the retail book trade. But the retail trade is only part of the equation. The full cycle is author->publisher->retailer. Amazon obviously consider they are, to all intents and purposes, at the author->publisher->Amazon stage, and are ready to move further up the chain. Like anyone in the book trade, Amazon are aware that the real money in books is made not by the authors or bookshops, but by the publishers, and that's what they really want to break into. The ideal cycle for them is author->Amazon->Amazon. Kindle is, of course an essential part of this strategy. If they can get the publisher's share of the loot then they can give a small portion of it to the suitably grateful authors and keep the lion's share for themselves. I leave it to readers to figure out just how Amazon are likely to adjust the split between themselves and the authors when they are the only 'publisher' left. So, is this likely to happen? Possibly, though it will take some time to reduce the publishers to the level to which the retailers have sunk. The publishers are bigger and have more resources than even high street bookshop chains, let alone small independents. Also, though many writers don't like their publishers, they are not unaware of the ultimate cost of Amazon dominance in the publishing market. I suspect that as the publishers' stars fade then we will possibly see the rise of author co-operative ventures. After all, the web is out there and available to everyone who wants to use it for a darn sight less than it costs to publish a paper book!
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