I discovered, when my old VCR died, that you can get one damn cheap these days. They still could be useful - when my daughter was on GMA I taped it off our DVR so her grandfather could see it.
To answer my own question, no. Here’s a picture of the inside of the Kindle 1. Here is a picture of the inside of the Kindle 2 which does use an ARM processor running at 532 MHz, which used to be fast. Gizmodo says the ARM core is in a Freescale multimedia processor, so the Kindle 2 does use an SoC, I expect.
I expect the Amazon design team will keep speeding up the Kindle as they cost reduce it.
Between the exchange rate and the shipping it’s still significantly cheaper for me to buy my books from the UK than it is to get them here or the US (unless I happen to be in the US on holiday, of course).
That’s the situation I think needs to change in Australia- the book stores (new and second-hand) need to stop charging so much if they want people like myself to shop from them and not the internet.
Is that even possible though? I’d guess the book market there is relatively small (total population about 16 million right), so book channels have to order and manage the exchange rate in advance and bet on what you might buy, but by yourself, you can buy when exchange rate is most favorable and get only what you want.
Do you see price similar patterns with other goods in Australia? I ask because I used to work for some high tech companies, and our distribution there was difficult because of the small size of the market spread over an area approximately the size of the US Lower 48.
The exchange rate on the British Pound has been pretty steady for a while now, and even with “managing exchange rates” and the like there’s still no reason for a 50% increase in the price. If I can buy one book or ten books at retail price (or near enough to it) from the UK and get them shipped out here for half what it costs to purchase them in Australia, why can’t Angus & Robertson or Dymocks or Borders buy ten thousand books at cost price and ship them out here and still make a respectable profit?
Computer games are the other major one- a new release PC game is AUD$79, about twice what it is in the US (even after factoring in exchange rates). There is no reason for this, and several gaming magazines here have run articles on the phenomenon, and the response from the game companies is usually “You know what? We don’t care.”
It’s interesting- it’s almost like a reverse “economies of scale”. If you buy a few books, individually, it’s really cheap. If you buy in commercial quantity, it gets expensive for some reason.
I can speak to that, having managed non-US product markets (including Australia) for several high tech companies.
The extra cost is because f these factors:
1 - There is almost certainly a local distributor
2 - that has costs to market, sell and support
3 - in a limited size marketplace
4 - spread over a huge area
5 - selling a game that has to either be localized at least some or
6 - face a backlash when the game’s language is not quite right nor is its packaging
7 - when the game itself may have limited appeal in the market
8 - but is committed to selling a full line of products from multiple manufacturers
9 - and is committed to spending a certain amount on marketing and support on behalf of its partners (the game developers)
In Australia (as opposed to Japan, e.g.) that can lead to higher prices because there is simply not enough volume to make up for low margins.
And it is true, the developer doesn’t care - to them, the distributor is selling enough, buying what they say they will buy, the numbers are good. Looks great, everyone is meeting goals. Nothing wrong with that picture.
If people stop buying though, that will get back to HQ very very fast, trust me. Might take a while to see a difference, but it will be noticed and considered rapidly if sales drop and don’t meet projections.
And that doesn’t even include pirated versions and gray market sales or varying financial conversion rates…
Probably it is due to the cost of holding inventory on the part of the bookstore, remote from the manufacturer, in a fickle market where shipping by ship has probably skyrocketed lately due to Somalian pirates, but where air shipping at least part way might in fact be cheaper.
I’d guess the big factor is the store has to bet before hand in buying books and ship them far and hope you buy them, knowing many will be shipped back too because they didn’t sell, while the book you buy is held close to the manufacturer and shipped only on demand, minimizing returns.
Given that Australia isn’t short of trees or printing presses, I’m surprised they don’t just print books locally and charge less.
I don’t buy the explanation for PC games costing more here either, I’m afraid. There’s no “localisation” involved- we get the US or British version. It’s just the game publishers being greedy, end of story.
Why would they print there? It is a small market as those things go.
Even without l10n (that sucks imho, you ought to get localized product!), you don’t believe the rest of that?
Things that are obviously going to be really, really popular- Harry Potter novels, that sort of thing- could be printed here.
No, I don’t. I believe they’re just excuses thrown about by the games industry to justify shafting non-US gamers.
There’s nothing to localise for Australia in most games anyway, IMHO.
It’s not an issue for me because I just buy my books and games online, but I’d rather buy them here (and keep people employed) if it wasn’t so price-gougingly expensive.
Aren’t those books kept under heavy security before release? Why risk trouble printing in every single market of only 16 M people? Probably that many within 30 miles of Manhattan alone, same for many cities around the world. I know does into sound fair, but Aus is a small and remote marketplace.
OK, I guess I didn’t spend years managing all those exact issues for many companies - including distribution Japanse sw products into the US. that was pre-internet by a small bit, some DVD products, such as major dictionaries, you could have hopped on a plane and flown back and picked up as few as 5 copies and been able to get them for less then we could sell you 5 plus you had a nice trip. And those were not localized either, just marketed and supported.
As an early innovator in l10n processes, I can assure you that there is a process to evaluate there, and frankly almost anything could be done better. I was always generally in favor of in country design pf packaging for instance, which costs, but they know better. And I was far more likely to push l10n of content on them because as a rule, distributors want it but are afraid to ask for it, not being engineers so not sure how to judge costs/risks. But they alwasy say - if only it was, we could sell more, so I would always try my damndest to make sure it was somehow localized for them.
Price differences in market are a problem, esp. now with the internet. You are essentially what we used to call a gray market buyer, and that has costs to the local dist too. There are no easy answers, and trust me, I have a lot less hair than I would have had I never had to manage all this around the world.
But I assure you, you don’t have to like it, but the outline I gave you is real and accurate. Quite simply, without the premium, the people you want to see employed would not actually be able to be paid what they are earning. You are free to vote with your dollars, but really you are making a tradeoff of “empty the local guy” vs. “save a few dollars”. No easy answers, like I said. But if you won’t pay, do you think others are lining up too? That is why local distributors are between a rock and a hard place.
There are about 22 million people in Australia, FWIW. So yes, it’s not as big a market as the US, but it’s still 22 million potential customers. I know Australia is a small and remote marketplace, but what that tells me is that there needs to be some changes in the way the marketplace works so that instead of saying “You’re not in the US, sucks to be you” it’s “Alright, we’ll adjust margins so that you’re paying the US price plus nominal shipping and handling”.
I imagine the Japanese market is quite different to the Australian one. We speak English, for a start, and have many cultural similarities with the US. I’m not saying all the reasons you give are invalid, I’m just saying the dollar figures hand-waved away with those explanations (at least here) are, shall we say, significantly higher than one might consider fair and reasonable.
I was involved with the gaming industry in this part of the world on a semi-professional level until fairly recently, and up until The Internet got really popular, the attitude was basically “If you want this game, you’ve got to pay whatever the store is asking for it, end of story” because mail order was slow, complicated, and it was difficult to find places that would ship to Australia or New Zealand.
Now, of course, 30 seconds with Google will have me the best price on the game, I can order and pay for it, and have it in my letterbox a week later, for 20-50% less than what EB Games are charging for it (depending on the exchange rate).
In the case of Australia, I’d say the cost of localising a computer game (instead of using the UK edition, say) just isn’t worth it, and- this is very important- most gamers don’t care. Changing the box art is about as far as it can realistically go, for the most part. (Unless the OFLC has taken exception to something in the game, which happens occaisonally and is worthy of a pit thread in and of itself)
I want to keep the guy in my local computer game store employed. What I don’t want to do is keep a half the (un-necessary) staff at a middleman (distributor) in Sydney employed when they (the distributor) aren’t doing a lot. There’s no real marketing for computer games here beyond posters in games stores and a few ads in gaming magazines (Sony are the major exception here), so beyond getting the games from Singapore or Malaysia (where the discs and manuals are made) and sending them out to the relevant stores, what are they doing? Whatever it is, it isn’t worth the $30 per unit price difference between here and the US.
Mistrust of the Internet is what keeps most people I know from buying online, but that’s a generational thing and in 5-10 years I think we’ll be seeing a lot more (legit) Digital Distribution of computer games.
Well, I don’t know TOO much about it, but its not the case that a retailer can just take any given book written and published in the U.S. and automatically sell it in Australia. The publisher has to secure rights, and that might sound stupid to you but it’s true. The same goes in reverse - just because a book is published in Australia, doesn’t mean it can automatically be sold by the publisher anywhere in the English speaking world. The more I think about it, the more I think this has something to do with copyright law. Copyright binds the publisher, not the customer – this customer can buy from whoever is willing to ship it, but the publisher can’t do that. This explains in a way the reverse economies of scale scenario.
The first (I think) 3 Harry Potter books had quite different UK & US version. Even a different title on the first one (HP & the Philosopher’ Stone in the UK/HP & the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US)
FWIW, we have 33 million customers in California alone, and that is maybe 1/10th the size. You guys are really spread out. Your local distributors have to cover an area the size of the US with 7% of the possible reward. And they have to pay their supplier for the right to do so.
Japan, while incurring additional l10n costs (yours are not zero, and they are not unrelated to yours as, if developers think a worldwide simultaneous release is necessary requires coordinating worldwide throughout the development cycle), has 9 times as many people as you in ~1/10th the space. Actual distribution costs are much cheaper because the market is denser.
That is your position, but that is not how it works form end to end. For one thing, a Japanese distributor and an Aussie one both want to make money right? And the developer, if they are smart, won’t want any distributor to have an exclusive on a market.
So your channels have to make money covering a spread out and much smaller base, yet all things being equal, the cost of living is roughly the same as 1st World countries. How can they earn enough to pay staff if they don’t make more per sale then they do in Japan?
Right, in the US, because we are so large, most people don’t ship internationally, it is not worth it. Even if you want to, it is not all that easy except by mail. Our primary shippers, FedEx and UPS are not so big on international, esp then (they have improved). DHL was probably the best bet in that niche, but it was expensive and not well known.
But the way these distributors get started is people see this as a problem in countries such as yours, build a business plan, see that if they can have a partnership with the developer, then they can share and sell with others like you and maybe make some money.
Yeah, maybe their business model is not sufficient anymore. Probably they are undercapitalized, and/or not able to predict demand well enough to invest their cash in inventory. that is the nature of distribution business, it is a tough but kind of invisible problem, exacerbated by the sparsity of your market. It sucks, I know, but it is true, and it is a pretty basic economics and business pattern across industries.
That may be, but trust me, I have heard these debates from every coutnry on earth. It is up to the developer, usually the Product Manager in conjunction with a CountryManager, to make that call. But really, the cost of localizing is seen as spread out over all the countries, because these days you have to do all of them that you are going to do at once if you are going to do it all, and it starts as primary development is going on, not after. So the only way lower l10n costs in Australia is a factor is if other countries such as Japan get no l10n either.
Yes, box art may be something, but that means not only design costs, but printing and other manufacturing costs, again to be borne over a small market. There are lots of tradeoffs.
I would be interested in a thread regarding OFLC/and or equivalents - there seems to be some weird stuff going on in terms of legal control of what type of content is allowed there lately, and I’d like to see more than just news stories.
I want to keep the guy in my local computer game store employed. What I don’t want to do is keep a half the (un-necessary) staff at a middleman (distributor) in Sydney employed when they (the distributor) aren’t doing a lot. There’s no real marketing for computer games here beyond posters in games stores and a few ads in gaming magazines (Sony are the major exception here), so beyond getting the games from Singapore or Malaysia (where the discs and manuals are made) and sending them out to the relevant stores, what are they doing? Whatever it is, it isn’t worth the $30 per unit price difference between here and the US.
Mistrust of the Internet is what keeps most people I know from buying online, but that’s a generational thing and in 5-10 years I think we’ll be seeing a lot more (legit) Digital Distribution of computer games.
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I think we can both agree the distribution model needs to change.
I mean, I was working in the electronics retail industry until late last year, and there is a lot of un-necessary bloat which is contributing to higher prices. (Distributor in Sydney or Melbourne and their staff, co-ordinating with the Buying Department of our Head Office in Sydney, then shipping it from Sydney to Queensland…
But I still don’t think that equates to a $30 per unit cost. Especially not when you’re dealing with thousands of units across the country.
Interestingly, the same sort of thing (distribution change) is happening with newspapers, too- now news is available (free) on the net, people are saying “Why should I pay for a newspaper?”
So far the papers haven’t got a satisfactory answer to that.
That would be the Blackwells on Charing Cross’ new toy? I had a look at it when they launched it, and it’s a neat idea. The Guardian, from memory, said it set them back about £100k, so it’ll be a while before they break even. Nonetheless, it’s a brilliant way to slip around Amazon/Lightning Source’s domination of the print on demand industry.
That would be VERY handy indeed- but the high price means it would be a very forward-thinking bookshop here that put one in.
After all, if people can buy $10 paperback books from this machine, they’re not going to buy the $30 ones on the shelf, are they? I can’t see a “Chain” bookstore shooting themselves in the foot like that, but a well-funded (semi-) independent might one day be able to pull it off…
You can’t get any book you want - they won’t be able to run off a copy of Harry Potter for you, or Bloomsbury will sue them into the ground (and they wouldn’t have the book on file to do it in the first place). They have a catalogue of about 400 000 books that are available. A lot of them are either specialised academic books or self-published novels, but if the demand is high enough, it could potentially be what happens to most books - instead of going out of print, they become print on demand instead.
Prices vary too. We buy print on demand books where I work, and the prices vary from £8 paperback to £150 textbooks.
(I got my cost wrong. The machine is godawful expensive, but Blackwells are leasing it, rather than buying it outright. Don’t know what they pay for it though.)
And for anyone interested: This is probably the article that **An Gadaí ** saw.
There’s a lot of stuff on Project Gutenberg that I’d be happy to pay $5 for a printed version of, because I don’t like paying $20 for reprints of century-old books that are well and truly in the public domain but that’s what publishers charge for them anyway.
Indeed it is.