Tag Archives: opinion

Amazon eBook pricing war: Thanks for being evil, Apple

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Eric has a Kindle and loves it. 

One of the things we both love most about his Kindle is that he can get most books for $9.99. 

Me, I prefer audio books. I can read while I'm knitting and doing things around the house. Even though Apple has an easy way to get audio books in iTunes I don't do that. Instead, I get my books from Audible where I can get a $25 audio book for a credit that only cost me around $15 a month. Apple would charge me $25 for the exact same audio book.

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Apple's new iBook store gives more leeway to publishers to set their own prices on books. From last week's demo, looks like that price is going to be around $15 per book. Coincidence? Yeah, right.

Apple said NBC's demands would have raised the price of NBC shows to $4.99 an episode from the current $1.99 price tag.

 

"We would not agree to their dramatic price increase," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes, in a statement. "We hope they will change their minds."

At the time, the public saw Apple as the hero fighting to keep our costs down, even if it meant the loss of NBC shows from iTunes. Apple held its ground. NBC came back.

Now, Amazon is fighting what is essentially the same battle. Apple is entering the market that Amazon already has a foothold. You would think Apple would have fought to at least matching Amazon's pricing, if not beat it. The market can already bear $10 eBooks the way they do $1 songs. But no. Apple is perfectly happy to price their books at where the publishers want so they could get their deal, and then let Amazon fight alone to avoid raising their price to match. Thanks for watching our back, Apple.

That's business. That's competition. I get that. What burns me is the arrogance of Apple in assuming that because they are entering a market, they will control it. Which is all well and good if it's in all our best interests. If the customer wins by getting a better value for our money. But in this case it's not for us. Far from it. In this case, we lose because we're going to pay an extra $5 per book for absolutely no good reason.

In the video, Mossberg asked Jobs about the iBooks application and the price of e-books, with Jobs insisting the price would be the same on Apple as it was on Amazon.

“The prices will be the same,” said Jobs, before getting in a little dig at the maker of the Kindle e-reader. “Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon, because they’re not happy with it."

One could optimistically read that to mean that Apple's books will match Amazon's $10. Watch the video linked above. No way. Jobs knew his entrance into this market was throwing Amazon's pricing under a bus, and he's happy to do it.

In other words…now that we're giving competition to Amazon, we're more than happy to let publishers bully Amazon into raising their prices to match ours and we're perfectly okay with consumers paying more as a result.

I can hardly wait until Apple decides they're not making enough on audio books due to competition from Audible and they get publishers to bully them too.

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The iPad will probably be a great device. Someday.

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I’m not buying an iPad, nor am I buying into the hype about it. I love that with Apple products, folks don’t realize that they can’t live without something until Steve Jobs tells them what they can’t live without.

At this moment we have 5 Macs in active use in our home, 2 iPhones and one iPhone without SIM that’s essentially an iPod Touch. But I’m a realist, not a fangirl. I didn’t buy an iPod until its 5th generation. I bought my first iPhone at round 2.

I do see the iPad’s potential. I do understand Apple’s move to break free of the keyboard/monitor/operating system way of doing things. I can even appreciate the value of a closed system where you know that everything will have a consistent look and feel. 

The fancrowd is saying that the iPad isn’t for geeky-tech types like me. It’s for the casual consumer. Someone like my Mom who uses her not-the-latest-and-greatest computer for email and web surfing and keeping track of her finances and buying stuff on Amazon. She’d love an iPad, right? Nope. Not yet. And it has nothing to do with the price.

Here’s why I won’t recommend an iPad 1.0 to my Mom:

Apple needs to make up its mind. Does this device sit alongside a regular computer or replace it? It makes sense if it replaces the casual home computer. It can be used in any room of the house and is so pretty and convenient. I’m continually amazed at how much use I get out of my iPhone when I’m away from home. Yet the iPad has to be synced to a computer for content. Yes, the iPad has its own iTunes store and Mom can manage her email and contacts in the iPad without syncing because she uses Gmail. But then how would she back it up? If an iPad isn’t being synced to a computer and it gets lost, it gets corrupted or gets dropped and you’re out of luck. Apple needs to untether the iPad from a “regular” computer for it to really take off for home use. Otherwise, it’s an add-on luxury device and nothing more. The joke that is still MobileMe doesn’t count.

Mom has her computer at work, and she has her computer at home. She gets her books, magazines and newspapers on paper. If she’s going to read her content on an iPad, that content needs to be on the iPad. And that means her local newspaper, not The New York Times. While it’s nice that Apple has deals for books, I want to see many more deals with content publishers beyond books, and in such a way that it makes it worth giving up paper. Or more apps that provide that content. I get all my magazine subscriptions I can on Zinio now. A big reason is because a Zinio subscription is often cheaper than a mailed one. A big part of a Kindle’s appeal is that you can buy a $25 bestseller for $10. The deals have to make it worth people’s while to make the switch. Otherwise paper will always be “good enough” for the masses. 

Not all websites work. I don’t care how fast and gorgeous the browser is. The lack of Flash is a problem no matter how Apple spins it. Mom doesn’t know or care that it’s Flash that’s making her favorite websites do what they do. She doesn’t care it’s the reason for most of her computer problems. She doesn’t care that HTML5 is the best thing on the horizon. The websites she likes just won’t work. Apple is being stubborn when it comes to their desire to kill Flash, and they’ve done this before. Remember the bruhaha when they only included USB and removed the floppy drive from the first iMac back in 1988? I had that first iMac purchased on Day 1 of its release and I was able to buy a little USB device that plugged in to my computer and it let me get data off my old floppies. Not ideal, but there was a workaround. There is no workaround if a site doesn’t work on the iPhone/iPad and blaming it on the site is so not the answer. Neither is expecting every website to create something for the App Store instead.

Bottom line is that the iPad 1.0 is a device that isn’t for the techy-geeks, yet I think only the techy-geeks will really appreciate it.

Bring on iPad 2.0.

Nonprofits: Have we had enough of “vote for me” fundraising yet?

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This weekend, the winners were announced in the Chase Community Challenge. 

On paper, it seemed simple enough. Chase gives $5 million to nonprofits based solely on the votes of regular folk on Facebook. "Their money, our votes." In reality, the challenge illustrated exactly why these "vote for me" contests in the nonprofit world have got to go away. Businesses can do what they want, and while I applaud the move towards philanthropy, it's my opinion (disclaimer: and not necessarily the opinion of the nonprofit that employs me) that this is not the way to do it. Please look at the 1+1+1 model that Salesforce uses (and Google as well, I think) for a better corporate giving program.

The Chase Community Challenge started with an open nomination round. Each Facebook user, after authorizing the Chase application, got 20 votes to distribute among their favorite charities. The top 100 vote getters got $25K each, then competed for the $1 million grand prize, with 2nd-6th place getting $100K each. 

What's wrong with this picture? A lot. Beth Kanter summarizes some of what went wrong. Chase disqualified some charities without being transparent as to why. Allegations of fake profiles being created to drum up votes. I'm not going to rehash all that here. Beth does a wonderful job. Read it.

My main problem isn't necessarily about Chase. It's the whole recent crop of "vote for the king & queen of the prom" type challenges for nonprofits and is what Beth says best in her post: 

Scarcity thinking assumes no growth and heightened competition.  Contests that are designed to select winners based on popular votes only and huge dollar amounts inspire scarcity thinking. Much like throwing some fish food into a pond filled with starving Coi fish.

I hated watching our supporters eat the fins of other organization's supporters while they lobbied for votes for their favorites. Each charity had a page for comments, and those pages were filled with "use your spare vote for…" pleas. In other words, this was a contest where the success of your pet organization to make it to the top 100 was dependent on the failure of millions others. To win in round 2, your charity had to be content with 94 other charities losing. How do you decide that an organization's mission to provide help for Jewish families dealing with Autism has more or less value than an organization that fights a rare childhood disease or takes care of animals? That a local organization is more deserving than a national one?

Some organizations put incredible thought and time and resources into trying to win this contest (there goes that $25K). Time and effort that they maybe weren't spending addressing their core issues if they're really small or mostly volunteer run. It wasn't about mission, it was only about getting into larger networks and getting a click that I would argue was ultimately meaningless. That doesn't feel right to me. Will those votes translate into viable support and advocate engagement later? Does it really raise an organization's profile to be in the coi pond? I'd love to see some data a year from now.

Supporting nonprofit organizations that are working to make the world a better place isn't a Miss America contest. Shame on any corporation that thinks otherwise.

Here's a community challenge I want to see: Reward nonprofits for projects that require collaboration and networking. 

An example straight off the top of my head: A cancer support organization working with a meals-on-wheels organization and one that helps people with job skills designing and implementing a program to make sure that patients are eating right after treatment and can get back into the workforce after a long health-related absence. 

I think the possibilities are endless if we can get out of our silos long enough to consider them.

Extra points to the projects that require the most diverse organizations to actually work together towards a common goal. The general public can view and comment on the proposed programs, maybe even make suggestions of partners. Community insight and transparency is wonderful. Yet ultimately the funding decision is by a team that will evaluate based solely on the viability of the project and what will have the most benefit for the population it will serve. Not necessarily which will serve the largest population. Not necessarily which has the largest mailing list or Facebook fan page.

Nice dream. 

In the meantime, all I can do is beg corporations to think it through before the next challenge. If you sprinkle food at the top of the crowded pond, the fish aren't going to say, "you know, I've thought about it and I'm not really that hungry to fight for it." They're going to eat each other up like it's their very last meal. It's the fish's nature. It's ours. It's up to you to design your giving programs to make sure we're helping each other to the next meal and we're all being fairly judged on our own value, not purely in competition.