With the Justice Department ramping up its apparently silly collusion case against the book publishers for agreeing with Apple to set their own prices, Rowling is showing that publishers and authors really do have the pricing power—if they’ll just use it.
It’s true that no other author comes close to having the power Rowling does. If the author of the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, say, goes to Amazon and tries to get the same deal, Amazon will probably tell her to get lost.
But if Random House or Simon & Schuster told Amazon et al. they were following suit, the booksellers might have to play along. That way publishers could legally control the price of their products while reducing the fees they pay to intermediaries and creating a sales infrastructure that costs far less than 30 percent.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble can still sell their Kindles and Nooks for however much they can get for them. And publishers and authors can do the same with their products.
The big problem here is that such a system would make buying books more of a hassle—forcing readers to input their credit card and address data each time they make a purchase. Publishers and/or authors would need to figure out how to fix that. They’d better get started.
Obviously, based on book sales, Harry Potter has sold more books. Also, as a film franchise, HP has had 6 big-budget films. It has had time to sufficiently grow into a great film series. I used to see them all in a cinema, buying tickets through cash advance online no checking account. As a film series, Twilight is just starting out. The first film sucked for several reasons (bad score, bad special effects, terrible editing, the awful blue tint, ridiculous dialogue, and Catherine’s desire to turn it into a quirky/eerie action film instead of a classic love story). That being said, 6 months before its release nobody knew what Twilight was. It went from being NOWHERE, to being EVERYWHERE. Also, the DVD sales show that the DVD sold like the DVD of a film that made 260 mill domestically at the box office. HP and the POA made 240 mill. It’s clear that the Twilight fandom is growing exponentially and continuously.
#1 Posted by Nancy, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 05:30 AM
What Barnes and Noble doesn't make clear in there special FAQ on Harry Potter books here (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/harry-potter-ebooks-nook-faq-frequently-asked-questions/379003492/) is that you CANNOT use a Barnes and Noble gift card to purchase the books through Pottermore. This means, in my case, and I presume that of other parents, that you try to bless your kids for their birthday by getting them the one thing they want, an expensive book series and a new ereader so they don't have to deal with the weight of those books, and $50 in gifts cards to almost cover the cost of the series, only to find out the gift cards cannot be used. A $50 overage in book cards is an awful lot of money to dish out for a preteen's budget. There should be a way the purchase can go through Barnes and Noble, just as it can through Amazon.
#2 Posted by Joan Bandy, CJR on Thu 15 Nov 2012 at 12:00 PM