Torchwood

[bunn]

Not sure how I feel about our ludicrous one-sided extradition treaty with the USA now being a pop culture reference. Mind you if it is all down to aliens, that would at least be some sort of explanation for the damn thing.

On the other hand : Yay!  Rhossili beach!   I was going to post a photo of the hounds running there, but philmophlegm beat me to it with a photo with Gwen and Rhys's house in the background. 

This means that philmophlegm, despite his air of elaborate scorn for all things canine -  has posted, unprompted, a photo of a doggy. Bwahahahahahaha!

... and another thing, the Kindle version of A Dance with Dragons is 20p more expensive than the print copy.  Surely paper is more expensive than bandwidth? Or is it purely lack of competition?

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I've not done much digging yet either, due to the whole 'damnit why are none of the books I want available on this thing' problem.

My perception was that as a reader, ebooks seemed to be mostly cheaper (eg, I was tempted into buying a couple of Sutcliffs recently because they were only 99p, plus all the out-of-copyright free classics. ) Or are you including cost of hardware into 'readers pay more'?

This is the first time I've been tempted by a best-seller, and I was assuming that the justification for a pricetag of £11.99 would be based on the value of the product to the reader rather than production/management costs.

[purplecat]

I've been happily working through "out of copyright" so I speak with no authority here, but I think "bestsellers" are often a smidgen more expensive on ereaders, I guess back-catalog may well be discounted (though how that factors into the "but ebooks are actually more expensive for us to produce" argument I couldn't say).

Back-catalog, interestingly, may be cheaper because many publishers seem to be assuming they have the electronic rights to author back-catalogs without paying any royalties to the authors. This caused quite a furore in the romance publishing industry a few months back (and possibly elsewhere). It's apparently remarkably difficult to get Amazon to take down a kindle book a publisher has put on there, even if you, the author, say you have given the publisher no e-rights whatsoever.

The whole area seems to be hugely dynamic at the moment with agents trying to turn themselves into epublishers, authors trying to bypass agents or publishers (as in Rowling's case) or both, publishers arbitrarily changing their standard contract terms on an almost monthly basis, and ever shifting goal-posts over what can be considered a "successful" book. I've not followed in more detail than a kind of "sit back and eat popcorn" so I wouldn't want to say anything certain beyond that they are all clearly in a panic, and everyone is arguing their personal corner very vigorously.