What does all this mean? It means by the ancient rights of the Internets I get to step up on my soapbox and unleash a diatribe of my choosing. [OK, I made that part up ... but it sounds good doesn't it?]

But I do, however, feel like I might have some perspective on the whole e-books pricing issue both as a consumer and as someone with philosophical opinions on the matter.

So let us use this handy-dandy notebook! New York Times article on the subject as a jumping off point shall we? If you are game, see below.

First off let me just say that I will try to avoid the grand moralizing that seems to invade a few too many opinions on this matter. For example, I don’t think the Amazon v. Macmillan clash is about morality or ethics or anti-trust law or jerkiness (sorry to get into the technical terms here) but rather is simply two very large companies trying to establish a foundation for future profit and market share.

Now I am a big fan of Amazon in general and both shop there and use their affiliate programs (to be fair I also shop at Barnes & Noble, Borders and any other book store I stumble upon).  But in this case I am largely in favor of the system that Macmillan outlined.

But first, let’s establish that both consumers and authors/publishers are not particularly familiar with how prices actually work. One of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to economics and pricing is that pricing should be tied to cost (particularly marginal costs).  Far too many consumers insist that prices be tied to what it costs to produce something and frequently very poor ideas about that cost.

Example:

“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”

This short paragraph is filled with confusion. First, you aren’t being extorted you are being exposed to the book market. The place where one group of people decide what to charge and other people decide what to pay. Ring a bell?  Also note the complete lack of aknowledgement that a book might be more than the paper it is printed on – as if digital = free. Note to Josh and others: Kindle formatting costs money too as do a gazillion other things involved.

But wait, authors can be just as moralistic and ill informed:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, it is the consumer who has the sense of entitlement! Yes, lord forbid publishers try the Wal-Mart mentality of making gobs of money by giving consumers what they want! Outrageous that consumers demand lower prices.

Um, Mr. Preston, there are no “real” prices there are is only what the market will bear or what someone wants to charge.  Now, you might want to use the cost and value of books to convince consumers to pay more than they otherwise might but there is no “real” price involved in this debate.

So let’s review:

• Everyone want to make more money; be charged less and keep more (either in the short or the long term).
• Prices ultimately are what the market will bear; they are how buyers and sellers decide what something is worth at a particular moment given a set of circumstances. Over a mind-boggling number of transactions eventually the market sets a price that reflects what people are willing to pay (all things being equal).
• Nothing says that prices have to be tied to marginal cost (the cost of the next widget) although that clearly plays a role in how prices are usually set.

Now that I have laid out my own snark filled condescension let me just say that I don’t know enough about Amazon or MacMillian to say what is best for either company in terms of pricing for a sustainable business model but I will assume they are both acting in what they see as their best interest.

Now back to the agency model that seems to have prevailed in this dispute – at least for now. The reason I support it is because it makes the most sense to me as to how pricing would work where consumers have useful price points to make decisions.

In this model books are most expensive when first released – and are assumed to have the most leverage – and get cheaper over time. A book by your favorite author – or on an important topic – comes out and you simply have to have it? Well, you will pay more for it.  The positive back end of this also applies. After a book goes into paperback and ultimately into the backlist then it should be cheaper - hopefully much cheaper.

The publisher will try to maximize profits when a book is hot but can also look to a long-tail effect where people are a still buying the backlist. In the long term I envision a world where books don’t go out of print.

To me this is about access to the most books possible. I don’t want the fear over the $9.99 price point to keep a publisher from offering an e-book version of a just released book. I want to the choice to pay more for it and I would like the choice later to pay a lot less. If we can start down a path where we experiment with these price points I think the system will work better.

This all takes place in a world where hardbacks and paperbacks are still the way the vast majority of people read books.  Now I understand that as time passes and things change this will not be the case. And I can see where there might be wisdom in moving to a high volume lower price type structure for ebooks. But for right now I just don’t see the industry set up that way and expecting it morph into that quickly is asking too much.

Let me reiterate: this is just the system that makes sense to me and makes things convenient for me as a consumer. I am not saying it is the moral way or the only way that makes sense economically or anything else. I just favor this system because it seems to allow consumers a variety of choices.

Now, if all the people ranting and complaining about books priced above $9.99 are the majority – or a powerful minority – then we are likely to see publishers react to that either by marketing, outreach and education or by lowering prices – most likely a combination of both. Again, that is how it works – buyers and sellers act in their interest and prices eventually reflect what people are willing to pay.

This endeth the rant.

What do you think?

Hearing that the Amazon Kindle had been compared to an eight-track player Alan Kaufman decided he needed a real attention grabber analogy if he was to gather the eyeballs necessary to get Huntington Post readers to click away from pictures of the latest porn actress claiming to be Tiger Wood’s mistress.

Not content for hyperbole he went straight for ridiculous and offensive. That’s right, Kaufman decided to use the Holocaust to make his point:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

I believe my reaction is best expressed in the language of teenager texters everywhere: WTF?

Is Kaufman really insinuating that e-readers are akin to racial genocide? Even for the Huntington Post this is absurd (but its lack of logic is par for the course I am afraid).

Kaufman tendentiously connects Nazi policies with new technology and the process of putting books into digital form and decides that a literary holocaust is upon us.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

But his argument is made up of nothing more than his own lack of shame in using the Holocaust to comment on the Kindle and some stream of consciousness paragraphs about the history of the Holocaust, Nazi attitudes about technology and books and a tacked on conclusion that links this all to the Kindle.

I hesitate to even try and counter this argument for fear of giving it more readers.  But allow me to point out a few things that should have been obvious:

1. Considering that no actual human lives are involved, the use of the Holocaust in this column is senseless and borderline offensive.
2. Given that e-readers are owned by a tiny fraction of the populace and the prevalence of physical books – not to mention the continued dominance of their sales as a part of the publishing industry business model – the argument is a stretch of epic proportions.  The mere possibility of digital libraries means authoritarian control and the destruction of literature at the flick of a switch? Huh?
3. And what exactly would happen to all of the physical books still around and being published in droves these days?  So in addition to a entity powerful enough to erase all copies of e-books we need to worry about a sudden urge on the part of the world to burn all existing physical books. Not real likely, no?
4. Finally, most of the post actually has nothing to do with Kindle or e-readers so the whole column is a giant non sequitur and therefor see #1.

Godwin’s Law has perhaps jumped the shark – to combine slang and cliches – but I think Kaufman would have so very much better off had he at least understood the spirit of this internet rule. If you feel you have to use the Holocaust to make your point, please stop a moment and question whether what you have to say has anything to do with the actual historical event or ideas directly connected to it.  And err on the side of not bringing it up.

Of course, it is hard to take anything seriously from a site that makes money by not paying writers, stealing content, and posting porn-like pictures …

The Wall Street Journal ponders this question:

Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment.

While e-reading devices were once considered a hobby for early adopters, Justin Timberlake is now pitching one on prime-time TV commercials for Sony Corp. Meanwhile, Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-reading device has become its top-selling product of any kind. Forrester Research estimates 900,000 e-readers will sell in the U.S. in November and December.

But e-reader buyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. While the shiny glass-and-metal reading gadgets offer some whiz-bang features like wirelessly downloading thousands of books, many also restrict the book-reading experience in ways that trusty paperbacks haven’t, such as limiting lending to a friend. E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.

Yes, the WSJ brings us the hard hitting journalism that tells us that if you don’t have disposable income and/or aren’t a gadget person you may not want to spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated e-reader!

“If you have the disposable income and love technology—not books—you should get a dedicated e-reader,” says Bob LiVolsi, the founder of BooksOnBoard, the largest independent e-book store. But other people might be better-off repurposing an old laptop or spending $300 on a cheap laptop known as a netbook to use for reading. “It will give you a lot more functionality, and better leverages the family income,” he says.

Wow! I never would have figured that out myself. To be fair, the article does go on to offer some contrasting opinions on the pros and cons of various devices.

But I find this debate tiresome in some ways.

As I have sad on numerous occasions there are a number of reasons why e-books are here to stay:

• If you read a lot of books and are on the go a e-reader is an incredible convenience.  hundreds of books – and access to more books in seconds – with only the size and weight of a trade paperback.  This is a no turning back type of luxary.
• Those without the space for a vast library will appreciate having a book collection without the space issues.
• Being able to access a book in 60 seconds is pretty sweet, BTW. Find out about a book you want to read? No more ordering and waiting or driving to the book store.  Click and you are reading it.

These seem like obvious reasons why people will want e-books and e-readers. Does this mean that the Kindle or the Sony or the longed for Apple Tablet will be around forever in the same form they are today? Of course not.

Is the price point too high for many people? Sure.  But given what people spend on phones and other accessories it is not ridiculously so. Are there features that consumers want and are not currently available? Yes.

I fail to see how any of this makes e-readers akin to the eight-track tape players (and even if they are is that so bad?).  Technology evolves a little fast these days and people have adapted accordingly. I am sure the format and feature battles will shake out with winners and losers and some early adapters might regret their choices – this is neither unexpected nor a tragedy.

Netbook computers are cheap and widely available to be sure.  But I don’t see myself using one to read books. For me, and many readers I would guess, there is something important about just reading the text in a “book-like” way – the dedicated aspect of it appeals to me.

I have enjoyed my Kindle(1) immesely (it was a Christmas gift) and don’t feel like I was giving technology that is on the verge of being obsolete. If cirsumstances change maybe I will updgrade or buy a device that isn’t even available right now.  But in the meantime I will continue to enjoy my e-reader for the reasons listed above. And as noted years worth of enjoyment is not a wasted investment in a failed or superseded technology.

If the business and publishing folks want to freak out about how this whole thing will sort out, fine. But can we quite pretending that these e-readers are anything but a great development for readers who want and need them?