Yes, it's essentially Amazon. But what can we (or anyone) do about it?
Not sure what the situation is today but, early on, we had to give up 70% of the list price if we wanted Amazon to sell our digital books. It's just mind-boggling.
And that's on top of the suboptimal user experience, because you can't sell a PDF via Amazon, and the Kindle toolchain is just awful. We have our publishing pipeline automated (DocBook to print-PDF, on-screen PDF, and EPUB); for a while we had bad Kindle/Mobi as well, but I don't think even that is possible today.
So, it's not only that Amazon gets a huge chunk of the money, you also have to accept the inferior quality of that particular distribution channel.
Comments
Yes, it's essentially Amazon. But what can we (or anyone) do about it?
Not sure what the situation is today but, early on, we had to give up 70% of the list price if we wanted Amazon to sell our digital books. It's just mind-boggling.
And that's on top of the suboptimal user experience, because you can't sell a PDF via Amazon, and the Kindle toolchain is just awful. We have our publishing pipeline automated (DocBook to print-PDF, on-screen PDF, and EPUB); for a while we had bad Kindle/Mobi as well, but I don't think even that is possible today.
So, it's not only that Amazon gets a huge chunk of the money, you also have to accept the inferior quality of that particular distribution channel.
I'm still carrying a glimmer of hope that the FTC will step up, follow through, and put an end to some of amazon's more abusive practices.