I'm very interested in Dave Gross's novels, but the lack of Kindle support is holding me back. That post by Mr. Mona talked about Amazon wanting too big a piece of the pie, but that seems likely a lesser issue under their new 70/30 pricing scheme.
Step one: Purchase book on Paizo store and download.
Step two: Download Calibre.
Step three: Use Calibre to convert into format your Kindle can read.
Step four: Read on Kindle.
It worked for me =) Good luck!
I'm a Calibre user, but if I can buy the books from Amazon I can download them to the Kindle app on my phone and will be able to download them to the tablet I am hoping to get in the coming months and synch progress across all three devices. It's just so much more convenient than having to wrestle the books onto my Paperwhite and then deal with the PDF on my phone or (hypothetical) tablet. While I can understand the avoidance of Amazon a few years ago, with agency pricing and the 70/30 split I just don't understand inconveniencing the customer.
Chief Technical Officer
|
Amazing may have offered agency pricing to Simon & Schuster, but they're not offering it to everyone. I just checked, and their current agreement, dated November 1, still has these clauses: "We will have sole discretion in determining all marketing and promotions related to the sale of your Digital Books through the Program" and "To the extent not prohibited by applicable laws, we have sole and complete discretion to set the retail customer price at which your Digital Books are sold through the Program."
(Also, when I say they *may* have offered agency pricing to S&S, I do mean "may." The terms of that deal have not been disclosed, and the Authors Guild (as of two weeks ago) says "we could be looking at agency pricing in name only.")
The problem here is that *all* of the major e-book resellers have clauses in their agreements that say "if anybody else sells your book cheaper than us, we get to match that price" (even if they're using the agency model). Which basically means that if Amazon decided to drop the price on our title, the iBookstore could drop the price too... so under their agreement, Amazon essentially gets to set the price of our book for *every* outlet, with no regard for our business requirements and desires.
Amazon claims their model encourages fair pricing on e-books, and they have even essentially told us what they think is fair—that the ebook should be at least 20% below the list price of the print edition, with a final price between $2.99 and $9.99. Well, our own Pathfinder Tales eBook pricing is quite a bit *better* than that ($6.99, 30% off), so if that's what they really care about, they should just say "so long as your list price is within that range, we will only sell at your list price." If they did that, I would have no objections to participating in their program, because it would mean that everybody would sell our e-books at the same fair price that meets our business needs.
Huh. Maybe it's different for companies than for individuals self publishing, because it's my understanding that the self-publishing author can set his own prices.
Anyway, I went ahead and bought the Gross novels and short stories and converted them to mobi with Calibre. Instead of loading them from Calibre to the Kindle, though, I emailed them to my Paperwhite, which was free since I loaded them to the Kindle on Wi-Fi rather than WhisperNet. Since this also put the books into my Kindle Cloud Storage, so I could load them into the Kindle app on my phone. That opens up a lot more possibilities for me to read these when I don't have my Kindle handy, so I wanted to mention that for other people who both use a Kindle and Kindle apps on other devices. Also, the current pdf sale you are running is just too good to pass up, so I ended up buying a ton of Tales books and short stories.
As always, thanks for being so responsive!
|
Chief Technical Officer
|
Huh. Maybe it's different for companies than for individuals self publishing, because it's my understanding that the self-publishing author can set his own prices.
Anyone participating in their program can (and indeed must) set their own prices. But unless you're one of the two publishing giants that they have undisclosed agency agreements with (that's Simon & Schuster and Hachette), Amazon is now, and always has been, allowed to sell for less than those prices whenever they want to.
Actually, one way that the Amazon agreement has actually gotten *worse* over the last few years is related to this: it used to be that if they sold your product below your list price, they would at least pay you as if they had sold it at the list price, but the current agreement allows them to pay you based on their reduced price instead. This means if they decide to give your product away for free, they now don't have to pay you at all—and this isn't hypothetical; they actually do it regularly enough that they spell it out as a specific example in their sales agreement.
|
One of the benefits of using calibre to convert the books to mobi is that I use Virgil Firecask's script to get the web fiction at the same time. Here is the link.