New Yorker article - iPad and Kindle

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New Yorker article - iPad and Kindle

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1auntmarge64
Apr. 20, 2010, 5:00 pm

Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? by Ken Auletta
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta

An interesting article, with lots about publisher vs. ebook maneuverings and the differences in approaches being taken by Amazon, Apple, and Google. And, although Auletta talks about Amazon's policy of not making statistics available, he estimates there are 3 million Kindles in circulation.

Also, Auletta is having an online chat about the article on the 22nd:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2010/04/questions-for-auletta.html

2krolik
Apr. 20, 2010, 5:32 pm

For another version, here's a partial take from Publishers' Lunch. Since it's a subscription source I won't quote the whole thing, but here's a taste:

Ken Auletta dramatically "reports" a portion of that which already happened--the emergence of Apple as a seller of ebooks and the introduction of the agency model--and he and the magazine's vaunted fact-checking department join the ranks of those who misconstrue the economics of publishing.

This one is a whopper, erasing all the margin in hardcover publishing by misunderstanding how returns work: "Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book--leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book."

That miscalculation may help explain why the piece also indulges in the cliched storyline that "the industry was desperate for a savior" because sales were up (yes, up) only slightly between 2002 and 2008. Ignoring the statistics from Bowker, which if nothing else show more books coming to market than ever before, "like other struggling businesses, publishers had slashed expenditures, laying off editors and publicists and taking fewer chances on unknown writers."

(snip snip)

Also, Auletta mashes together Google's in-development initiative to sell in-print books from publishers with what they might do to sell older titles as a result of the Google Books Settlement if approved by a judgement."


And yadda yadda.

On the other hand, if the writer of this piece finds the Bowker info as a silver lining, then it seems lacking in nuance to me, if not dumbed down. What kind of books?

3auntmarge64
Apr. 20, 2010, 9:24 pm

> What kind of books.

Yup, exactly what I was thinking when I read that line.

On the KindleBoards today someone said they'd read that the number of Kindles was probably closer to 5 million. Either way, I was stunned the estimates are so high.

4alans
Mai 26, 2010, 2:48 pm

Very interesting article on the difference between the kindle and the ipad in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.