Thursday, April 1, 2010

April Fools

It's the first of the month.  The morning when you might check your Amazon sales and think Aw because there are no transactions yet. 

The Agency Pricing debacle is finally underway.  I say debacle because it doesn't make any sense to me.  Book sellers are losing a major route to being competitive.  Deals are being made behind the scenes even now.  I keep imagining frantic nerds with contracts in their hands scurrying around the world in an attempt to finalise things.  Lots of pre-order kindle books have vanished from Amazon and other distributor websites because the deals haven't been finalised yet.  Lots of angry customers with money to spend and nothing to spend it on.  Lots of 99c indies rubbing their hands together gleefully in anticipation of the massive spending splurge from disgruntled big publishing house haters.

Maybe it will go smoothly.  Maybe consumers will want to spend more on digital versions of books that cost money to be shipped.  Yeah, right.  People like a bargain.  Bargain hunting is practically a past-time for a chunk of the world's population.  Now what?  Either spend more or go to the library and hope for the best?  Or, turn to indies as the best option?  Go back to paper?  Stop reading altogether?  I'm curious to see how all of this pans out but I am loving that it all begins on April Fool's day.  Seems appropriate.

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