Baen Books figured it out ten years ago. They offer a monthly bundle of all the books in the upcoming month for $15. Individual books become available later at $6. All the books are DRM-free and available in multiple formats: HTML, Ebookwise/Rocket, Mobi/Palm/Kindle, EPUB/Stanza, Microsoft Reader, Sony, and RTF. Since the books are DRM-free, you can "roll your own" if you like. For example, I create a text+_italics_ copy from the Microsoft version, stuff it into my Palm, and read.
As for the supposed damage cheap eBooks do: Baen actually makes money off the electronic editions, in addition to having seen treeware sales go up. A while back, they started offering electronic Advance Reader Copies of yet-to-be-released books, and enthusiasm and sales exploded.
I suppose the moral of the story is that if you treat your readers as customers and not as wallets, the sales will be there.
We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me." -- George Orwell, "1984"
[sarcasm]Ah, yes, the "sales magic" of windowed releases.[/sarcasm]
If you take movies as the example, in another thread, somebody recommended a number of movies to me as "must see." I remember hearing really good things about "District 9" when it was in the theaters. Amazon says the DVD will be out "December 22".
a. just in time to miss being a Christmas gift
b. by now, I've pretty much lost interest, since I have other things on my mind (like the eARC of "Course of Empire" from Baen) and probably won't even bother redboxing the film, never mind buying it.
They're going to lose sales among people like me.
Unless it's Lois McMaster Bujold, I don't even bother with treeware, and HER next book's coming out from Baen, so I'll almost certainly be able to buy the eARC for $15, the Webscriptions copy as part of the bundle for that month, available two weeks before the hardcover hits the bricks, *and* an HC for the Berkeley Library, an HC for me, an HC for my pact brother, and an HC for my niece.
And they asked me how I did it, and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining a little in front o' the next!"
They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.
I recommend a treeware letter. I'm pretty sure that, since just *anybody* can dash off an email, the time and effort of actually putting a stamp on a letter probably generates more traction.
Hal Cleveland
Muvico Entertainment, L.L.C.
3101 N. Federal Highway, Sixth Floor
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306
I intend to write him a very polite letter congratulating his chain's customer service policies.
I mean, it's not everybody who gets a gift at their sister's birthday party. What gift, you ask? Why, a criminal record! A gift that keeps on giving. I'm sure Ms. Tumpach will remember this birthday every time she fills out a job application and gets to the "Have you ever been arrested or charged with a crime?" question.
THIS, people, is the kind of customer service that got me into theaters all of four times in the past year, and my wife only had to drag me for three of them.
America has a long tradition of replacing old, worn-out industries and methods with new and efficient ones. Cars replaced horse-and-buggy transport. The telephone replaced the telegraph which replaced messengers.
So join me in applauding Muvico's efforts to push another decaying industry into its twlight, so a new moon may arise.
Lack of exposure is still the Great Enemy of the creative. As an example, yesterday, Rachel Vincent's "Stray" showed up on the net. So I said to myself: "Worth posting, might be worth buying." and went over to fictionwise to buy a copy of the first book in what (so far) is a four book series. If I like it, (and the odds are likely to be good on that, since I like paranormal fantasy stories), the other books in the series will follow.
That's a sale gotten because until yesterday, I'd never even *heard* of the lady.
Like just about every major business in the world, he wants the government to guarantee he makes money, even if it means he's using the government to perform armed robbery on his customers(us).
The democracies of the world are plunging more and more into what has been called "reverse socialism," where the means of production own the people.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hollywood has bigger problems than "piracy."
Oops. Forgot to mention "Coraline," which was very badly paced. One of our kids is a big Gaiman fan and pushed us into catching it. Was not worth going to the theater for, and my wife agrees with that evaluation.
As for the others: We'll maybe catch the paperbacks from Netflix. It costs a lot less per month for the three adults in my immediate family than one theater visit for same. Plus I don't miss anything if I need a biobreak. And I get subtitles, which helps as my only working ear deteriorates.
Re: Re: Hollywood has bigger problems than "piracy."
No movies, with the exception of Pixar's. That is my considered opinion, expressed via my bank account and my behavior.
My wife and I have gone to exactly three movies in the past year, "Up", "Eagle Eye" and "Star Trek." I had to be dragged to the latter two by my wife, who insisted on seeing them in the theater.
Hollywood can try to control how I buy, what I buy, and when I buy. They cannot control if I buy.
I posted this over at Lohmann's column and am repeating it here:
Hollywood isn't just losing out with this "buy from us or else" attitude, but with sheer lousy product quality.
From my standpoint, with the sole exception of Pixar, nothing that's come out of Hollywood in the past three years has been worth going to a theater for, never mind renting in DVD. If it's worth DVD, my family calls it "Waiting for the paperback."
In the meantime, Netflix has come like manna from heaven, and we've found absolutely marvelous foreign films to be a bonanza of solid entertainment. Recent views have included "Twilight Samurai" (Japan), "In July" (Germany), "Bread and Tulips"(Italy), "Family Flaw" (Italy), and "O' Horten" (Norway). Plus others. And the ratio of good stuff to clunkers runs about ten or twelve to one.
So my question is fast becoming: Who the hell *needs* Hollywood?
1. Tor isn't cool. They're owned by some bunch of German pakhtash who wish the rest of us would sit down, STFU, and shovel money into buying tons of paper.
2. Baen IS cool and pays attention to their user base. They started offering electronic Advance Reader Copies a while back, and have done well there. Do I buy the treeware from them? Hell yes, and with a lot more enthusiasm than you can drag out of me for Tor or any other clueless publisher.
I'm afraid you haven't thought the matter through. While the direct cost of "one more electronic copy" is effectively zero, getting to that copy is not.
Consider an author's time and effort creating the book.
Let's take a book I'm reading in my PDA. It's 82 thousand words. One full-time writer has publicly said he gets about a thousand words a day of usable copy. That means a minimum of 80 days to write the book, possibly more. Call it three months to keep things simple. That's a quarter of a year just to write the book (while eating hot food, sleeping indoors, paying for electricity for the computer etc. etc.)
If an author gets 50 cents per sale of an eBook, he/she would need, in order to live at middle-class median income of $50,000/year, for each of those two books to sell 50,000 copies.
The *average* new book in the United States sells about 500 copies.
And it gets better. Books NEED editors and proofreaders. Writers (like everybody else) have blind spots, miss things in their own writing, or simply need friendly criticism and comment. Nor have I forgotten a book which got to first-pass proofreading stage with a continuity error so glaring that I almost dropped my teeth when I got to it.
And editors, if they work full time, need and deserve to make money from sales of the book. Proofreaders earn their keep, too, as they catch errors that the writer and copyeditor missed. A cold reading of a 400-page book can run about $140 for a first-pass reading, and that's a lowball estimate for a part-time worker who does NOT make his primary income from the work.
Distribution costs are nowhere near everything, which is why I never whimper about paying *paperback* prices for an eBook, while objecting violently to buying DRM-infested books at hardcover prices.
Its worse than that. To give an example, "Kushiel's Avatar" has a "regular" price of $20.95 for a DRM-infested eBook. The paperback's been out for years and Amazon lists it as $7.99.
If the book publishers go the "raise the barricades" route, the result will be entirely predictable: they'll be just as loved, honored and respected by their customers as the music and movie industries. [pause for sarcastic laughter]
I discovered Baen Books and their eBook side in early 2000, and promptly bought their backlist from the beginning and onward. In the years since, I've bought entire years from them in advance, back when that was possible, and automatically pre-order every new month as it becomes available.
The ease and convenience of downloading the books and stuffing them into my Palm got me back into reading science fiction (and other eBooks) after a drought of several years. It's gotten to the point where I regularly have anywhere between five and seven full-length novels in my PDA, along with the occasional magazine or short story purchased from Fictionwise.
But I get only open formats. By open, I mean that either there is no DRM, or there are can openers available. Today's On the Fastrack cartoon, from the great Bill Holbrook, shows why.
DRM means that I must trust the publishers always (for a value of always greater than or equal to my lifespan) to have the materials I have nominally purchased to be available for re-download/replacement in case I have a systems failure. That trust is simply not possible, as the Fictionwise versus lightsource disaster of a couple of years ago proved. There are "purchased" DRM-infested books that still haven't been replaced with accessible copies.
I hope the publishers will follow the Baen model of fair dealing with the customers and zero-DRM before they find their customers have quit buying jewels packaged in DRM crap.
Apple basically got started against IBM, and borrowed their business model of owning the user from cradle to grave. Everything proprietary and "mine, mine, mine." And IBM, perhaps unintentionally, gave the PC design away, effectively "crowdsourcing" the PC market with lots and lots of innovators and competitors.
The result, the PC tsunami ended up swamping Apple into being a niche for highly graphics-oriented stuff while the rest of the world pretty much ignored them.
Apple still hasn't learned their lesson that openness and being the "standards-bearer" (Here are the specs. Make your stuff compatible. Thank you, that will be one dollar.) is a much better role.
Proprietary control-freakism may be a way of life for some firms, but it's NOT a viable business model in the long run.
On the post: Sony Ebook Boss: DRM Needs To Stay And Ebooks Should Cost More Than $10
ONE publisher HAS figured it out
Baen Books figured it out ten years ago. They offer a monthly bundle of all the books in the upcoming month for $15. Individual books become available later at $6. All the books are DRM-free and available in multiple formats: HTML, Ebookwise/Rocket, Mobi/Palm/Kindle, EPUB/Stanza, Microsoft Reader, Sony, and RTF. Since the books are DRM-free, you can "roll your own" if you like. For example, I create a text+_italics_ copy from the Microsoft version, stuff it into my Palm, and read.
As for the supposed damage cheap eBooks do: Baen actually makes money off the electronic editions, in addition to having seen treeware sales go up. A while back, they started offering electronic Advance Reader Copies of yet-to-be-released books, and enthusiasm and sales exploded.
I suppose the moral of the story is that if you treat your readers as customers and not as wallets, the sales will be there.
On the post: Prosecutors Come To Their Senses; Drop Charges Against Girl Arrested For Incidental 'New Moon' Filming
Re: laws for laws sake
And so: the object of law is law
On the post: Prosecutors Come To Their Senses; Drop Charges Against Girl Arrested For Incidental 'New Moon' Filming
So prosecutors have more sense than theater chains?
On the post: Book Publishers Starting To Delay eBook Releases -- Taking Bad Ideas From Hollywood
Re: Another reason why this is stupid...
If you take movies as the example, in another thread, somebody recommended a number of movies to me as "must see." I remember hearing really good things about "District 9" when it was in the theaters. Amazon says the DVD will be out "December 22".
a. just in time to miss being a Christmas gift
b. by now, I've pretty much lost interest, since I have other things on my mind (like the eARC of "Course of Empire" from Baen) and probably won't even bother redboxing the film, never mind buying it.
They're going to lose sales among people like me.
Unless it's Lois McMaster Bujold, I don't even bother with treeware, and HER next book's coming out from Baen, so I'll almost certainly be able to buy the eARC for $15, the Webscriptions copy as part of the bundle for that month, available two weeks before the hardcover hits the bricks, *and* an HC for the Berkeley Library, an HC for me, an HC for my pact brother, and an HC for my niece.
Where's yer windowed releases the noo?
On the post: Dilbert Explains Why Just Copying Others Is A Dumb Business Model
Rudyard Kipling said it in 1896
On the post: Woman Filming Parts Of Sister's Birthday Party At Theater, Charged With Felony Movie Copying
Re:
http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20091203/1531507185#c457
I recommend a treeware letter. I'm pretty sure that, since just *anybody* can dash off an email, the time and effort of actually putting a stamp on a letter probably generates more traction.
On the post: Woman Filming Parts Of Sister's Birthday Party At Theater, Charged With Felony Movie Copying
FYI
Hal Cleveland
Muvico Entertainment, L.L.C.
3101 N. Federal Highway, Sixth Floor
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306
I intend to write him a very polite letter congratulating his chain's customer service policies.
I mean, it's not everybody who gets a gift at their sister's birthday party. What gift, you ask? Why, a criminal record! A gift that keeps on giving. I'm sure Ms. Tumpach will remember this birthday every time she fills out a job application and gets to the "Have you ever been arrested or charged with a crime?" question.
THIS, people, is the kind of customer service that got me into theaters all of four times in the past year, and my wife only had to drag me for three of them.
America has a long tradition of replacing old, worn-out industries and methods with new and efficient ones. Cars replaced horse-and-buggy transport. The telephone replaced the telegraph which replaced messengers.
So join me in applauding Muvico's efforts to push another decaying industry into its twlight, so a new moon may arise.
On the post: Author Sherman Alexie's Rants On Colbert Against Ebooks, Piracy And 'Open Source Culture'
Eric Flint Still Has It Right
That's a sale gotten because until yesterday, I'd never even *heard* of the lady.
On the post: Rupert Murdoch: Feds Should Stay Out Of News Business, Except, Of Course To Smack Down Google For Sending Me Traffic
What Rupert Murdoch *really* wants
The democracies of the world are plunging more and more into what has been called "reverse socialism," where the means of production own the people.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hollywood has bigger problems than "piracy."
Oops. Forgot to mention "Coraline," which was very badly paced. One of our kids is a big Gaiman fan and pushed us into catching it. Was not worth going to the theater for, and my wife agrees with that evaluation.
As for the others: We'll maybe catch the paperbacks from Netflix. It costs a lot less per month for the three adults in my immediate family than one theater visit for same. Plus I don't miss anything if I need a biobreak. And I get subtitles, which helps as my only working ear deteriorates.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re: Re: Hollywood has bigger problems than "piracy."
No movies, with the exception of Pixar's. That is my considered opinion, expressed via my bank account and my behavior.
My wife and I have gone to exactly three movies in the past year, "Up", "Eagle Eye" and "Star Trek." I had to be dragged to the latter two by my wife, who insisted on seeing them in the theater.
Hollywood can try to control how I buy, what I buy, and when I buy. They cannot control if I buy.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re: Yep, Hollywood is leaving a LOT of money on the table
Brand loyalty is something marketing people will sacrifice their firstborn children for, and meanwhile, the Big H is busy micturating it away.
"What fools these mortals be!"
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Hollywood has bigger problems than "piracy."
Hollywood isn't just losing out with this "buy from us or else" attitude, but with sheer lousy product quality.
From my standpoint, with the sole exception of Pixar, nothing that's come out of Hollywood in the past three years has been worth going to a theater for, never mind renting in DVD. If it's worth DVD, my family calls it "Waiting for the paperback."
In the meantime, Netflix has come like manna from heaven, and we've found absolutely marvelous foreign films to be a bonanza of solid entertainment. Recent views have included "Twilight Samurai" (Japan), "In July" (Germany), "Bread and Tulips"(Italy), "Family Flaw" (Italy), and "O' Horten" (Norway). Plus others. And the ratio of good stuff to clunkers runs about ten or twelve to one.
So my question is fast becoming: Who the hell *needs* Hollywood?
On the post: Publishers Getting The Wrong Message Over eBook Piracy
Re: Re: Re: Who is the pirate
2. Baen IS cool and pays attention to their user base. They started offering electronic Advance Reader Copies a while back, and have done well there. Do I buy the treeware from them? Hell yes, and with a lot more enthusiasm than you can drag out of me for Tor or any other clueless publisher.
On the post: Publishers Getting The Wrong Message Over eBook Piracy
Re: Best way to beat piracy
Consider an author's time and effort creating the book.
Let's take a book I'm reading in my PDA. It's 82 thousand words. One full-time writer has publicly said he gets about a thousand words a day of usable copy. That means a minimum of 80 days to write the book, possibly more. Call it three months to keep things simple. That's a quarter of a year just to write the book (while eating hot food, sleeping indoors, paying for electricity for the computer etc. etc.)
If an author gets 50 cents per sale of an eBook, he/she would need, in order to live at middle-class median income of $50,000/year, for each of those two books to sell 50,000 copies.
The *average* new book in the United States sells about 500 copies.
And it gets better. Books NEED editors and proofreaders. Writers (like everybody else) have blind spots, miss things in their own writing, or simply need friendly criticism and comment. Nor have I forgotten a book which got to first-pass proofreading stage with a continuity error so glaring that I almost dropped my teeth when I got to it.
And editors, if they work full time, need and deserve to make money from sales of the book. Proofreaders earn their keep, too, as they catch errors that the writer and copyeditor missed. A cold reading of a 400-page book can run about $140 for a first-pass reading, and that's a lowball estimate for a part-time worker who does NOT make his primary income from the work.
Distribution costs are nowhere near everything, which is why I never whimper about paying *paperback* prices for an eBook, while objecting violently to buying DRM-infested books at hardcover prices.
On the post: Publishers Getting The Wrong Message Over eBook Piracy
Re: Who is the pirate
On the post: Publishers Getting The Wrong Message Over eBook Piracy
Baen: Doing It Right For a Decade
If the book publishers go the "raise the barricades" route, the result will be entirely predictable: they'll be just as loved, honored and respected by their customers as the music and movie industries. [pause for sarcastic laughter]
I discovered Baen Books and their eBook side in early 2000, and promptly bought their backlist from the beginning and onward. In the years since, I've bought entire years from them in advance, back when that was possible, and automatically pre-order every new month as it becomes available.
The ease and convenience of downloading the books and stuffing them into my Palm got me back into reading science fiction (and other eBooks) after a drought of several years. It's gotten to the point where I regularly have anywhere between five and seven full-length novels in my PDA, along with the occasional magazine or short story purchased from Fictionwise.
But I get only open formats. By open, I mean that either there is no DRM, or there are can openers available. Today's On the Fastrack cartoon, from the great Bill Holbrook, shows why. DRM means that I must trust the publishers always (for a value of always greater than or equal to my lifespan) to have the materials I have nominally purchased to be available for re-download/replacement in case I have a systems failure. That trust is simply not possible, as the Fictionwise versus lightsource disaster of a couple of years ago proved. There are "purchased" DRM-infested books that still haven't been replaced with accessible copies.
I hope the publishers will follow the Baen model of fair dealing with the customers and zero-DRM before they find their customers have quit buying jewels packaged in DRM crap.
On the post: Calling For An Independent Invention Defense In Patents
Most of the people in Congress are lawyers
On the post: iPhone App Developer Backlash Growing
And how is this new?
The result, the PC tsunami ended up swamping Apple into being a niche for highly graphics-oriented stuff while the rest of the world pretty much ignored them.
Apple still hasn't learned their lesson that openness and being the "standards-bearer" (Here are the specs. Make your stuff compatible. Thank you, that will be one dollar.) is a much better role.
Proprietary control-freakism may be a way of life for some firms, but it's NOT a viable business model in the long run.
On the post: Would Top Sites Really Opt-Out Of Google Based On A Microsoft Bribe?
Joining Micro$oft might be hazardous to your rep.
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