HarperCollins e-Books will no Longer be Available on Amazon

Will prices be really attractive? Typically publishers keep the eBook prices equivalent to their print versions rather than being competitive.

their MOBI files can be read on Amazon, they have digital watermarks, so you can sideload them on. Any other format and you need the HC e-Reading app for ios or android.

Awesome! I never buy from Amazon if I can help it so this is great.

While it’s great that there will be more competition in the market, what does this mean for the authors while HC struggles to find its footing? It means that we’ll lose more than half our income.

I don’t know how many of me there are but I impulse bought a few Harper backlist ebooks last year solely because I found them quickly and easily on Amazon. I did not care enough about any of them to bother looking elsewhere and certainly not on an unfamiliar publisher shopping site where my credit card is not already set up. I even bought one for which I had a paperback copy but not with me. I hope this is just contract posturing as Harper has struck me as ahead of most publishers with digital strategies that seem to make sense.

I find this a bit disconcerting. It seems like it really is just all about money and less about getting the books in the hands of the readers. I know many that will just not read titles by this publisher if they are no longer available on Amazon, so it may become counter-productive.

What HC is really saying, “We want you to pirate our books because we’re too stupid to know that people don’t like jumping through unnecessary hoops.”

The MOBI files have to be DRM-free because if you want to read them on a Kindle or in the Kindle app they have to be sent to Amazon for conversion. Apparently, the irony of that hasn’t hit them yet. And considering I already have five reader apps on my various gadgets, I don’t see much incentive to installing another one just so a single publisher can keep the cost of the ebooks high.

Actually it probably means more than that. I don’t know that I’d want to install an app JUST for the books from one publisher.

Its important to note that not all e-books sold by HC on their website have the MOBI format. I looked into this last night and I found less than 20% are sold in MOBI.

I am old enough and have worked in enough different industries where manufacturers have tried to sell direct and seen over and over again that the investment does not pay back for the simple reason not enough consumer transactions occur for the consumer to grow accustomed to shopping “there” — whichever there we are talking about. I simply cannot see a publisher of books (such a niche in the world of all goods purchased) ever making this work as a replacement for the major reseller channels with the complete product assortments they offer with simple shopping systems. Even Murdoch’s original bookshop chain in Australia had to be closed, Angus & Robertson, a publisher acting also as reseller. We have unique talents in forgetting past lessons and repeating them, which is how I see this. As corporate hubris. Gorilla ego fights with a lot of collateral damage. Harper will come to terms with Amazon.

Did you miss the DRM free part of that?

Publishers today just aren’t getting it. As a friend of an author who is signed on with HC, she does all the work to promote and struggles for price pulsing. She is NEVER going to sign with a publisher again unless they have a nice fat advance. Publishers are not only going about this all wrong, but they’re practically driving authors to self-pub. Idiots.

When readers buy from the publisher’s site, the author earns more money at royalty time. Amazon’s cut is 70% if the title is $2.99 or less, and 35% if above $2.99. Then the author gets their % from what the publisher gets, for instance, 40% of the 70% or 35% (whatever the contract between publisher and author reads.) Everyone is in the publishing business to make money. Do people go to work each day just because they want to get a product out to consumers? No. They want the paycheck. Hopefully publishers feel that quality is a part of that equation, and most do. There is nothing difficult about buying from a publisher’s website or downloading the book you bought. Mobi format doesn’t require the publisher to go through Amazon for conversion. Publishers hire converters to do that, usually in a package with epub, pdf, html, etc.

I convert many books on my own to mobi with Calibre and then download to my kindle. I do not have to use Amazon to convert. Also Amazon will start charging you for books sent to your acct. that you do not buy for them. It is part of their cloud, which they are now charging you to use.

That’s always been my biggest complaint with Kindle–the pricing (says the girl with more than 200 titles, but anyway). The e-book folx like to say “But look! It’s half the cost of a dead-tree hardcover!” That’s nice, but even for an author I really like, I’d rather wait another year for the paperback than spend twice as much on the hardcover right now anyway. I get a lot of my e-books from Bookbub, where the stock is free or greatly reduced. I can rarely bring myself to pay full Kindle price for a new e-book.

Amazon sent a letter where it was explained. The information probably is on the site somewhere.

I checked. They charge for data usage on Whispersync, otherwise the transfer is free.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200767340

“Amazon doesn’t charge fees for delivery of personal documents to Fire & Kindle devices over Wi-Fi, that are transferred via USB, or that are delivered to Kindle reading apps. However, there is a document processing fee for Kindle Personal Document Service if you use Whispernet on Kindle devices.”

Amazon seems to botched their announcement. (I have Prime so the E-mail receive said nothing to concern me.)

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/03/27/amazon-launches-unlimited-cloud-storage-kicks-kindle-owners-to-the-curb/

” Kindle owners now have a separate place to store the personal documents they SendToKindle which Amazon says ‘will no longer count against your Cloud Drive storage limits'”

Kindle owners should sign into Cloud Drive to check for themselves what space they are allotted and what they have already used and under what conditions they would need to pay for more storage space.

What I’m still looking for is an Amazon page that clearly explains all this.

I’ve sent E-mail to Amazon to ask them for clarification.

I get 5GB free storage because of Prime, but my “send to Kindle” docs are apparently counted against that storage space.

An update. Amazon told me that Kindle docs should not count against storage space. At first I thought something was borked because I was not seeing 5 GB of free space (I have this due to Prime). I poked around and realized I had purchased music from Amazon and those MP3 files were also in my Cloud Drive, and apparently *those* Amazon purchases count against storage space.

I have no idea what happens if you do not have Prime but expect to have your digital music purchase available in the cloud.

I am also unclear on how Kindle storage works for those without Prime. Presumably it is free.

On the bright side Amazon was pretty quick in replying to my E-mail inquiries so if you have questions contact them (and makes sure they didn’t auto-enroll you into some program that will start billing you in 3 months,)

It’s always struck me as a little odd that the major publishers don’t get together, cut out the middleman (Amazon) and operate their own retail online outlet. Seems the sensible thing to do if they wish to bypass Amazon’s odd and sometimes restrictive practices.

Ebooks from traditional publishers have DRM and can’t be converted—I know this because I tried converting some of MY old Fictionwise files and was informed it wasn’t doable. MOBI is the convertible Mobipocket format. The Kindle version with DRM is AZW. Are you saying you can convert AZW files without first cracking the DRM?

Books sent to your kindle email are already in mobi format. If you get books from Kobo or Netgalley for example they will send it to your kindle email in mobi format, this is then on your Amazon cloud. You can convert other forms , like epub on your computer using the Calibre program to mobi and other formats. So I will now do that instead of using my kindle email.