2.01.2010

Fighting over Gold

As someone watching from the bottom of the beanstalk, it's been interesting staring up at the battle of the publishing industry giants this weekend. If you haven't heard, Amazon temporarily pulled all Macmillan books from their site when Macmillan wanted the Kindle pricing setup to look like the brand-new iPad's.

A couple of the literary agents I read have posted their thoughts:

Rachelle Gardner: Publishing Smackdown: Let the Games Begin

Nathan Bransford: The Kindle Missile Crisis

Thus far, having not yet bought an e-book device, I am not sure how I feel about this. Competition among companies is healthy for all of us, so I favor the iPad and Kindle duking it out a little.

The converse is that an e-book has certain disadvantages against the three-dimensional copy, which is why I haven't taken a lot of interest in e-book readers yet. I don't think I'd pay $15 (on the current economic scale) for something I couldn't loan out and that doesn't make my house look more like a library. But that's me.

2 comments:

  1. I was very surprised when I heard about this story at this site: http://chipmacgregor.com/ The section about Amazon/MacMillian is in the second half of the article. And here's a discussion about the issue by a group of authors: http://christianwriters.com/showthread.php?t=29754 Most people (all?) are siding with MacMillian it seems.

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  2. Thanks for the links! It was especially interesting to read Chip Macgregor's thoughts. He made a lot of sense.

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