Today I read on Slashdot Apple is raising prices of ebooks sold via iTunes for its iBook application. This move by Apple puts them in line with the publishing industry’s demand for the Agency model of selling books. Unfortunately other ebook vendors are following suit as well and this is bad for consumers.
After reading the Slashdot article, here is my opinion:
Another reason why Apple getting in to the E-book trade is bad for consumers. If I recall correctly, Apple is the reason Amazon went to the Agency model as well. Above all else, the two companies, Apple and Amazon, are not wholly at fault here. The publishing industry has been strong arming the companies since day one of e-book readers and software hitting the market.
As consumers, stop and ponder this for longer than a second. How much does it cost to make a book, warehouse it, ship it, and sell it at vendors, then collect the profit? Ok, now think about this, how much does it cost to create a digitized version of said book, store the digitized copy, sell it via ecommerce sites such as Amazon, and collect the profits? A whole heck of a lot less than a dead tree version of the same book.
This is the music industry fighting to keep an out of date business model in use all over again, except this time it is the publishing industry. There is no way a digital version of a book should cost anywhere near the same amount as dead tree version. Yet the publishing industry would have consumers purchase digital versions of books at prices somewhere between the soft cover copy and the hard cover copy of a dead tree version.