Hasn't everyone, at one time or another, bought a book from Amazon? You figured on owning it for life, yours to keep forever and forever, to sit on a shelf or make the rounds of your friends, at your choosing.
Due to the current disagreement between Amazon and Macmillan, some chapters of Macmillan books that were downloaded from Amazon have disappeared. As in, Amazon is feuding with Macmillan so you, who wanted to read those chapters, are out of luck.
What you download to your fancy, expensive Kindle isn't yours at all. That $9.99 you paid for a novel? It's not to buy the book. That's the price Amazon charged you for the privilege of reading the words on a device that you spent a small fortune to obtain.
The books on your shelf that you bought from Amazon? They can't take those back.
Jeff Bezos can't waltz into your home and lift hard copies. No matter what war may wage between Amazon and Macmillan over fair pricing for e-books, Mr. Bezos can't push a button and make your real books disappear.
Good news here for Apple's new iPad. The suits at Apple worked out deals with five of the six major publishing houses, avoiding the "my way or the highway" scenario that's come to a nasty impasse. Go out and buy your iPad. You can get all the Macmillan books available, and Amazon can either give in or face mounting competition.
Better yet, go to your local independent book seller and browse the shelves. Touch a real hard-bound book, smell the pages of a freshly printed copy. Read the opening paragraphs. Study the author's portrait and biography. Peruse the acknowledgements. Check out any page you like. Any one at all.
Buy that book and it's yours. Download it and know that your possession is temporary, until someone at Amazon decides you can't have it anymore.
5 comments:
What are you blaming Amazon for exactly? They are battling the disgusting idiots at Macmillan who want to charge hardcover prices for e-books. If anybody should be blamed, it's Macmillan.
I am happy for Amazon to remove every single page by this nasty publishing house because I don't want it anyway. I'm also boycotting Macmillan by refusing to use their books in my classes.
Blaming Amazon in this situation is extremely near-sighted. Do you want Macmillan to win and end up imposing their outdated and unrealistic vision of charging insane prices for e-books?
Don't you see that's sometimes one needs to sacrifice a couple of pages to win the actual battle?
Yeah, you can get all those wonderful Macmillan books in IPad. For $15 MINIMUM. Great deal, huh?
Macmillan wants to turn a profit. The authors they publish want to make a decent amount of money. Amazon is looking to corner the market and charge what they please, to the detriment of many.
$9.99 isn't sustainable because the fixed costs don't change, hence the major houses have decided not to release new books direct to e-format. They'll hold off, just like they do with the cheaper paperback versions.
iPad has agreed to a higher price and the publishers have agreed to release e-book and hard-copy at the same time to Apple's format.
It's the Wal-Mart business model, driving out competition with predatory pricing. With the iPad, Sony reader & Nook making some noise, however, Amazon may not be able to control the market and that's always to the benefit of the consumer.
In the end, I'm all for buying a physical copy of the book you want. The fact that Amazon can delete books from your Kindle, sitting quietly in the safety of your own home, is troublesome.
There are reasons why people don't buy physical copies of books. They take up tons of space, it becomes a major problem when you travel or move, it destroys forests. What Amazon is doing is fantastic. Macmillan is going the way of the music industry that tried pathetically and uselessly to combat the spread of new technologies.
The publishing houses that can't adapt to the changing realities will go bust. Just like the print media. And that's fantastic.
But Amazon can't delete hard-bound books from your library.
The publishing industry does need to change to survive, but physical books never need charging, which requires electricity generated by burning coal or splitting atoms. At least the forest can be replanted.
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