A week or two ago we focused on the paradox that public domain books available for nothing from Project Gutenberg were being sold on Amazon (see Why Get It Free on Gutenberg when You Can Buy It on Kindle?).  The issue raised by Greg Newby, director of Gutenberg, was whether it was legal and ethical for publishers to charge for books that are available free. ”Is this legal? Yes. Is it ethical? I don’t think it is,” said Newby.

That question was fresh in our minds when Oprah’s Book Club announced that a Penguin double-volume, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, had been selected for the Club.  A visit to amazon.com informed us that you may buy the Kindle edition for $7.99.  However, the individual titles, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, may be downloaded at no cost on Project Gutenberg. Furthermore, a number of other publishers, perhaps guided by the Mr. Newby’s moral position, offer e-book editions of these books for nothing.

Interestingly, one of the publishers offering free Kindle editions of the two titles is… Penguin itself. Here are links to the Penguin Classics editions of Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities showing Kindle editions offered for $0.00.

To its credit Penguin does state on the page in the Kindle Store dedicated to the twin e-books: “PLEASE NOTE: Free versions of The Dickens classics, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations are also available for download.” Also, again to be fair, Penguin does describe the twin e-books as enhanced.  We don’t know what those enhancements are, and it would be nice for potential customers to be told what extra value they are getting to justify paying $7.99 for something they can get for nothing. The Penguin Classics edition of Tale of Two Cities offered free on Kindle has an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell.

Penguin and Oprah’s Book Club, having taken out an expensive full page ad for the twin volumes in the New York Times, obviously  have  great expectations of  profits. Wise shoppers may have other ideas, however.

Richard Curtis

According to top Penguin executives, writes Wall Street Journal‘s Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the company has reached a detente with Amazon to conclude a price war that lasted about a month. The behemoth retailer, responding negatively to the agreement Penguin reached with competitor Apple, had turned off the Buy buttons on Penguin titles. The dispute centers on the fact that Apple’s business model is vastly different from Amazon’s, putting the latter at a competitive disadvantage. (For background, read Are We Capitulated Yet? Amazon Turns its Guns on Penguin.)

As part of the settlement, writes Publishers Lunch’s Michael Cader, Amazon “presumably” will switch to the same model as Apple, but if experience is any guide, in all likelihood that will result in higher e-book prices that may dampen customer enthusiasm. Penguin presumably understands that and is willing to trade curtailed sales for greater control over the way its books are sold through third parties.

RC

Who can forget the hot war that broke out last January between Macmillan and Amazon, ending with Amazon capitulating?  (See Publishing’s Weekend War: 48 Hours that Changed an Industry)

But if you thought that Amazon had made peace with the publishing industry you obviously missed a posting we ran a few weeks ago reporting that Amazon Launches Spring Offensive.

You’ll remember that the original clash with Macmillan was over the introduction by Apple of a new business model for retailing books on the iPad. When Macmillan defied Amazon’s threats by signing with Apple, Amazon dimmed the Buy Buttons on Macmillan titles.

The quarrel with Penguin is over the same issue, but this time Amazon’s tactic is to sell Penguin’s books far below the prices offered by Apple. It may not be as high-profile as pulling the plug on Macmillan, but it sends an iron-fisted message to publishers who have committed to Apple or are thinking about it.  Gizmodo covered the confrontation with this bald headline: Amazon Stabs Penguin in the Throat With Ebook Pricing for Real Books.

The  skirmish was disclosed by Wall Street Journal‘s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. “In the latest round of the book pricing wars,” writes Trachtenberg, “Amazon.com Inc. has begun selling a number of new hardcover books published this month by Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA) for only $9.99 amid a dispute between the two companies over electronic books. Penguin stopped providing digital editions of new titles to Amazon as of April 1 because Penguin and Amazon haven’t yet struck an agreement on a new ‘agency’ pricing model, in which publishers set the retail prices of their e-books.”

Does Amazon have the right to cut Penguin prices so radically? That’s for Amazon to know and Penguin to find out.

The unfolding drama will make for some prime spectating over the next few months. Meanwhile, check out Trachtenberg’s Amazon Cuts Prices in Tiff With Penguin.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The Wall Street Journal.

The other day we received our first e-catalog from a publisher and we not only lived to tell the tale, we actually liked it. Though the digital revolution in the book industry has happily reached a tipping point, a lot of grouchy twentieth century old timers have stubbornly drawn the line at emailed catalogs. Here’s what I recently muttered on the subject:

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we’re all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers’ front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher’s face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of “catalogue”, despite Microsoft spellcheck’s insistence on dropping the “ue”, bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition.

Holding out for paper catalogs is kind of like die-hard Southerners flying the Confederate flag in their front yards. It’s a losing battle. Catalogs are going E whether we like it or not, and the Visigoths who spell it “catalog” have won the day.

The one we received from Perigee, a division of Penguin’s Putnam group, is handsome, colorful, informative, and easily navigable. The only problem is technical. The size of the PDF file sent to me was more than 6 MB. That can strain some older computers, get snagged by filters or push the dial on some inboxes close to the Full mark. The alternative is for booksellers and other interested parties to visit the publisher’s website and proceed to the catalog links. We did so and invite you to do so too. Click here, then click on the “catalogs” tab and scroll down to the various Penguin divisions. You can then view a catalog online or download it as a zip file.

Some files are larger than others and because the Perigee catalog is bundled with those of other divisions it weighs in at a hefty 114 MB; the zip is almost as big at 106 megs. Publishers will have to find ways to keep file sizes down. If an e-catalog requires too much time to load it will defeat its raison d’etre. For a busy bookseller, two or three minutes of watching a progress bar on a computer is as much time as it used to take to browse an entire paper catalog.

In time these issues will be resolved and as the industry grows accustomed to the new format, the advantages of e-catalogs will make themselves abundantly manifest; we’ll see video, audio, hotlinks galore and countless other bells and whistles. E-catalogs are cost effective and so much friendlier to the environment than their paper forebears. Indeed, Perigee’s catalog was inspired by one of the publisher’s own books, Green, Greener, Greenest by Lori Bongiorno.

Note that I spelled catalog in the contemporary style. But I secretly thought catalogue. Twentieth century habits die hard.

Richard Curtis