sick of authors blogging from ignorance...
Feb. 3rd, 2010 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearThose ranting against amazon's price-fixing (not the dropping of the macmillan titles, which was stupid, but the $9.99 price point that amazon wanted rather than letting the publishers have full control over the prices) are totally missing one key point: if amazon can't offer a cost difference between what they offer and what iTunes offers, then the fight between kindle and ipad will be strictly on the technology, and THEY WILL LOSE.
As PotC clearly stated:
"You know, I could beat you in a fair fight."
"Well, then, that doesn't exactly give me an incentive to fight fair."
Amazon has money, and some good developers, but if technically its device is behind the ipad, then it can only compete by lowering prices on the whole user experience. If the kindle and the ipad and all these others were ubiquitous, that would be one thing, but at this early stage, just like moving console game machines, until there is a killer title that sets the REAL price point, then controlling the costs of the games and keeping them low was how you entered the market until you had a comparable share, then you let the publishers go back to the standard price point.
the publishing industry is looking only at their books and making price models comparable to paper. this is *backwards thinking*. This ignores the hardware itself which is too much of both the user experience, and more importantly, the company's ability to even move the titles in the first place. the publishers in the bigger picture don't care about ebooks because they still have a market without them.
but to amazon, bn, and apple, they are having to play this out just like atari, coleco, mattell (intellivision), the zillions of 6502 platforms of the 80s, and the modern console world of xbox, ps2/3, and wii. until you have a killer app, a killer title, or some serious value-add, you don't move consoles where other consoles already exist if your total user experience price point (for the first year or so) is comparable to what is already in the market.
so amazon is competing against paper and it is competing against the ipad which has SERIOUS value-add: color, a 2 year history of 3rd party apps, and The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. they only way to compete against that platform is to show a lower price for the user experience, and given that the kindle itself still has a minimum price point to make up for the r&d, that means cheaper titles.
this is what the publishing world, "the authors" don't get. They look at this like xbox/wii/ps3 AFTER the 3 years of competition and undercutting and who's got the killer app fights that got to this 30-30-30 world we have today, that got to the point of ubiquity. they think an ebook is an ebook because to them, it is. they see a game title run at the same price on all 3 platforms and think that's how they should control it.
they totally are ignoring history. the platform wars for ebooks are *just starting*. the devices aren't done, the market isn't anywhere close to having a set of ubiquitous platforms. controlling the prices is one key form of competition, especially where unlike SEGA in the early years, you can't really get away with exclusivity licensing contracts because the publisher always has that other outlet: paper.
authors know words. publishers know editing, books, and paper.
neither of them know a damn thing about the e-gadget world, and i'm getting sick of their rantings from ignorance.
As PotC clearly stated:
"You know, I could beat you in a fair fight."
"Well, then, that doesn't exactly give me an incentive to fight fair."
Amazon has money, and some good developers, but if technically its device is behind the ipad, then it can only compete by lowering prices on the whole user experience. If the kindle and the ipad and all these others were ubiquitous, that would be one thing, but at this early stage, just like moving console game machines, until there is a killer title that sets the REAL price point, then controlling the costs of the games and keeping them low was how you entered the market until you had a comparable share, then you let the publishers go back to the standard price point.
the publishing industry is looking only at their books and making price models comparable to paper. this is *backwards thinking*. This ignores the hardware itself which is too much of both the user experience, and more importantly, the company's ability to even move the titles in the first place. the publishers in the bigger picture don't care about ebooks because they still have a market without them.
but to amazon, bn, and apple, they are having to play this out just like atari, coleco, mattell (intellivision), the zillions of 6502 platforms of the 80s, and the modern console world of xbox, ps2/3, and wii. until you have a killer app, a killer title, or some serious value-add, you don't move consoles where other consoles already exist if your total user experience price point (for the first year or so) is comparable to what is already in the market.
so amazon is competing against paper and it is competing against the ipad which has SERIOUS value-add: color, a 2 year history of 3rd party apps, and The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. they only way to compete against that platform is to show a lower price for the user experience, and given that the kindle itself still has a minimum price point to make up for the r&d, that means cheaper titles.
this is what the publishing world, "the authors" don't get. They look at this like xbox/wii/ps3 AFTER the 3 years of competition and undercutting and who's got the killer app fights that got to this 30-30-30 world we have today, that got to the point of ubiquity. they think an ebook is an ebook because to them, it is. they see a game title run at the same price on all 3 platforms and think that's how they should control it.
they totally are ignoring history. the platform wars for ebooks are *just starting*. the devices aren't done, the market isn't anywhere close to having a set of ubiquitous platforms. controlling the prices is one key form of competition, especially where unlike SEGA in the early years, you can't really get away with exclusivity licensing contracts because the publisher always has that other outlet: paper.
authors know words. publishers know editing, books, and paper.
neither of them know a damn thing about the e-gadget world, and i'm getting sick of their rantings from ignorance.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 01:27 am (UTC)Time will tell. Flash may go out of style, or something else may come along that will eat its lunch.
A number of people are betting that is HTML5.
Doc
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 03:22 am (UTC)HTML5 has 2 things going against it:
1) how damn slow they are to actually nail the standard down.
2) Microsoft.
Considering how much crap they're getting with IE8 breaking a million sites, mostly because IE 8 breaks IE 7 (and 6 and 5.5, 'cause nothing ever changed for them for more than 7 years), AND it doesn't really implement the current standards as well as Firefox, if they also add html5 to the mix (and a partial implementation only, if past history is to be considered), they're just going to destroy the web forever.
seriously, I'd love to actually play with HTML5, but until the standard becomes real, the browsers are playing very careful on partial implementation, having learned the hard way how easy it is to break sites, are going to wait for really implementing it.
Flash has the problem of always getting to be ever so slightly too large for the platforms. It is a CPU hog (just as Java is a memory hog), and that's a battery burner in any portable platform.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 08:16 pm (UTC)Not saying that Flash will go away tomorrow, just that some people are betting that it will go away.
And I'm not sure that Microsoft really stands in the way of HTML5. More like HTML5 stands in the way of Microsoft regaining browser dominance. Despite IE's inertia, the IE8 fiasco is bringing more users over to Firefox. If you don't need sites that use Active X, there's no good reason NOT to switch to Firefox. The more frustrating it gets, the more people will move.
Doc
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 08:40 pm (UTC)So yes, IE really is a blocker to HTML5 because IE still dominates the business world that thinks having a big DJIA/NASDAQ corporate name behind something is better than actually having real developers out there really fixing things in a timely manner and making things better.