A few months ago, the top publishing companies with the world, like Hachette Book Group (owned by Lagardere) , Harper Collins Publishers (owned by News Corp) and Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS) took a gamble. They struck a deal with Amazon. This is where the e-book backfire begins.
They struck this deal to control their own titles, set their own prices, and avoid deep discounts Amazon usually requires. Sounds like a winner, right? Wrong! Partially because of this deal, e-book sales this year took a drastic decline. Maybe it’s because Amazon Kindle e-books from big publishers cost more than double of what other e-books cost. In some of these cases, it would be better off for customers to buy an old fashioned paper book. For example, Jonathan Franzen’s novel ‘Purity’, has a $15.10 price tag. That’s for a hardcover book. The e-book sales for $14.99, just 11 cents less. This is before the sales tax. We can thank Macmillan Publishers for this mess of a price. Last year, James Patterson’s ‘Invincible’ was sold on Amazon Kindle for $8.99. This year, thanks to this backroom deal with Amazon, James Patterson’s newest masterpiece ‘Alert’ will run you $14.99 on Amazon. Doesn’t sound much better than the paperback book, does it? Thank you, Hachette Book Group (in my sarcastic tone).
This should be a lesson to every corporation involved here: Listen to your customers! But no…because of their own greed, the major publishing companies upped the price and Amazon let them. Now everybody’s suffering. You could say, “They’re just looking out for the author/artist”. No they’re not. The author is suffering too. He’s missing out on royalties that could have been easily collected if they kept the prices lower. Consumers aren’t dumb. They know when they’re getting the run around. Today, we have more choices than ever. What’s stopping us from going to the competitor? Shouldn’t the publishing companies and Amazon have left well enough alone?
We at Computer Geeks want to wish everyone a happy and safe Labor Day.