Macmillan is Australian for “even bigger ripoff”, by Blue Tyson

Several days ago I wrote an article about the astonishing price hikes inflicted on Australians by French usurers Hachette Livre.  So large, in fact, that the average of the prices samples was: 164%.  Macmillan’s hike? Much larger.

Astoundingly, believe it or not, there are even bigger ripoff merchants at work.  Most ebook readers will easily be able to guess the villain here. In fact, Macmillan jacked up their prices not long before xmas – ONLY IN AUSTRALIA.

Unlike Orbit, Macmillan’s websites are absolutely terrible from a reader point of view, without even an obvious book list, except in the case of the Australian site, where they have links to ebooks – but every single one returned a ‘page not found’ message.  One wonders at such incompetence in their biggest sale season. Merry Christmas MacScroogmillan.

To have a look at their pricing I decided to search for Tor UK books while logged into my Australian Amazon account.  There were 50 or so book listings available quickly, which is a good sized sampling for comparative purposes, in this case, I used a the UK logged-in price.

For comparison, the Orbit sample had these averages:

USA – $8.42 and Australia – $13.82

The Macmillan/Tor UK sample

UK – $8.66 and Australia – $16.42

Yes, you read that correctly. The average ebook price in Australia is over SIXTEEN dollars.  The standard pricing for a crusty old book appears to be $15.26 today.  This fluctuates with the exchange rate, of course.  Most of these books were available in the USA, barring half a dozen or so.  The average of the titles that were listed in the US is 8.75.  So taking into account sample error ranges, the US and UK pricing is identical.  No one here would be upset if books were 10c more expensive on average, that is for sure.  However, this still means Macmillan titles are the worst value across all countires.  I think we all knew that Macmillan books are bad value by comparison.

For Australians, the Macmillan ripoff ratio is monstrous, a whopping 190%.

On average, Macmillan books are nearly double the price here than everywhere else.  The number of Australian authors in that sample list?  A big, fat, zero.  So again, we aren’t paying so that they will actually publish Australian authors – it is Tor UK after all!  Macmillan is simply propping up a foreign profit margin at our expense.  A 26% ration MORE expensive than Hachette.

A few of the examples are so ridiculous that you might fall over laughing.

Farlander by Colin Buchanan (no, I had never heard of him either).

$33.59!  That’s 356% higher than the UK price of 9.44.  And this title is 7.99 in the USA; that’s 420% higher than the USA price.

Congratulations Colin Buchanan.  You have the worst value novel.  Ever.

Mark Charan Newton and Alan Campbell tie for second worst at $30.54.

While it will take zero time to count the Australian sales for Buchanan, you might be able to count the sales for the other two offending volumes on the appendages of one worm.

As another example of the crappiness that is Macmillan, popular author Matthew Reilly’s latest crazed thriller is 25.45.  Again, this is around double the price of the other version.  We hope he cries into his xmas goose liver pate about the sales drop, too.

A similar percentage of books were available for free on the net with a cursory search.  48 of 52, or 92%, compared to the 93% for Hachette.  Again the same, samplewise. So for Australians that like their downloading for free, if you were going to pick one company’s product over others, then pick this one.  They are more deserving of it than anyone else for many reasons.

Macmillan would actually be better value to Australian digital readers if it was run by a couple of real Vermes.

A note to authors: given the massive Aussie price hikes, surely your royalties should go up commensurately.  Merry Christmas – it’s likely that your Australian sales will fall off a cliff in December. You might want to check that your royalities are in the 65% [Hachette] or 90% [Macmillan]  higher, ratiowise.  Make sure that the greedy publishers aren’t paying you based on the old prices they may have quoted you. If you actually manage to make any sales, that is.

Next time one of these companies points out their love for literature, sent them a copy of this article. With DRM making books hard to read and huge price rises, and with fewer libraries, they clearly want to reduce the number of readers in Australia.  You cannot get any more anti-Australian reader than this company without one hell of a lot of work.  Maybe next they could make their books only available to read on an iJobs while connected to mobile internet, thus making them even more expensive.

To me, this also smells a little like desperation.

You can find a list of publishers and retailers that offer good value in the earlier post.

I would like to offer some xmas good wishes to another group, however.  While every other media organisation goes out of their way to Grinch it up and over-charge Australians in huge percentages, whether music, movies, videogames or books, there is actually one that does not.  In fact, they have done the exact reverse of everyone else.

Comics.

So thank you and merry xmas, in particular to:

2000 AD [Note, downloadable to keep!]

Comixolog

Dark Horse Digita

Top Cow! 

DC Comics

Image Comics

Dynamite Entertainment

Archaia Comics

Boom Studios

Devil’s Due Publishing 

These organisations have been working hard to keep prices down and to increase availability of their reading material.  They also sell their online wares FOR THE SAME PRICE IN AUSTRALIA.  They also run frequent theme sales. So take a bow, ladies and gentlemen.  You deserve it.

I’d suggest you take a look, even if you have never read comics.  There are quite a lot of free issues that anyone can read for nothing, too.  All you need is a web browser.  Another concept that book publishers in the main fail to grasp.  If you need suggestions for SF and Fantasy comics or advice in general, you can email aussievamp@gmail.com or ask here, or on twitter  and I can point you in some suitable directions.

Macmillan, even the Grinch wouldn’t want to associate with you.

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