This was an interesting article in Publishers Weekly yesterday. Here’s a snippet:
However, while there is a nascent market for comics on e-book readers like the Kindle and B&N’s color device, the Nook, Amazon’s recently introduced digital “delivery fee,” charging publishers 15 cents per megabyte to transfer a book’s file to the Kindle, has forced some comics publishers to rethink using the Kindle platform.
While novels are text-based and unlikely to run up a delivery charge much over $0.02, graphic novels have a much higher bandwidth, and could be forced into a lower payment/royalty rate and higher list price because of their file size, directly because of these Amazon fees. In addition, Amazon also has a recommended file size which affects graphic novel pricing.
Anybody interested in comics on the Kindle platform should take a look. It’s a lot more complicated that I would ever have thought.
Amazon could fix this problem by allowing publishers to specify WiFi/USB download only and displaying that restriction on the Kindle page. That’d let publishers price graphics-rich books lower and I suspect most users connect their Kindle to WiFi at least some of the time. The same basic software that handles free document downloads when connected to WiFi could handle these books.
I disagree with the idea that anything should be sold “Wifi Only”. First, the majority of kindles sold are 3G. Second, it would be VERY EASY to purchase something not realizing it isa WIFI only. So, not a real solution.
Plenty of Apps in the Apple App store that are greater than 10mb don’t allow the 3g network to download the update. If Amazon is forcing these charges onto the content creators, allowing them only to be downloaded through wifi is a natural progression of where we’re headed whether customers will like it or not. Kindles are sold with ‘Free 3g’, but free always comes with some sort of cost.
I always believed the 3G versions a waste of money and I still do.
Howard: 3G is a necessity if you live in a small town without wifi hotspots and don’t have wifi in your home, or if you travel and don’t always hit places with wifi.
I agree 100% about the small town. Otherwise it is wholly unnecessary imho.
I’ve used the Kindle 3G for accessing book information while at meetings (where no WiFi was available), for checking my mail and downloading books while traveling (do you commute by train, Howard? Those of us who do know that WiFi isn’t everywhere), and for emergency use when my cable data service went out. WiFi is great, but having both options is a value I’ve come to appreciate.
As far as comics go, it costs Amazon money to deliver big files so I don’t think it’s wrong for them to pass these costs to the publishers. I’m not sure it’s consistent, though, for them to insist that publishers set prices the same on Amazon as elsewhere when others don’t impose the same charges.
Rob Preece
Publisher
If Steam can sell indy games for 3 to 5 dollars at much greater file sizes with unlimited future downloads, then Amazon is more than capable of providing their services for much smaller fees.
Amazon probably assumed they would make a few extra cents on text authors without giving any thought to the fact that they were putting up a huge cost barrier to creators who would want to publish graphic novels, children’s books, or cook books for that matter. It seems like a reasonable mistake, but one that they do need to address.