I was interested in buying Sex and the City and Us (don’t judge me, I liked the show, okay! :)) only to find it has no Kindle edition at all. I have never seen that before for a book still in print and a new release. Is there some new pissing contest where some publishers are no longer supporting Kindle?
Anyone else see other titles not available on Kindle? It is weird and unexpected.
It’s not a pissing contest, so much as a matter of survival. The Kindle Unlimited program is ruining small publishers. KU does not pay royalties on each book “checked out”, but gives some infinitesimal fraction of a cent for each page read. I work for a small publisher who does not release books on KU, because of this, and because Amazon requires that the book be a Kindle exclusive for some period of time to qualify for the program. I would not be surprised if other houses are boycotting Kindle entirely. You can publish Print-On-Demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace service without submitting an ebook version along with it.
Simon & Schuster is a giant company, releases Kindle editions - a different program than Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which is for readers, not publishers, gets royalties on all its Kindle editions, and has nothing to do with publishing your own book.
Most of its books are available on Kindle right now. This is an exception. Maybe. The first review on the book’s page says it is of the Kindle edition.
I can’t find any way to order a Kindle edition, though. And this is also on the page:
The book was officially released yesterday and there may be some odd reason why the Kindle edition was delayed.
S&S completely supports Kindle. It says on its website:
AFAIK, nothing at all is going on at the company level. This is a weird exception, and I’d be very surprised if you didn’t come back in a couple of weeks and find a Kindle edition listed.
Yeah, looking at the book on the publisher’s website, it gives links to buy the ebook from Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook), Google Play, etc. The other links I checked seem to work, but the Amazon link goes to a nonexistent page.
For some reason Tom Clancy’s earlier books (the ones he actually wrote) are not available on kindle. (Not from Amazon anyway)
There are TONS of books on kindle and tons of books NOT on kindle.
Yeah. I’m shocked that this is the first time the OP has encountered this. A lot of books I own in paperback or hardcover aren’t on Kindle.
There are thousands of books not on Kindle, of course, but what was odd was it was brand new release which not normal. In any event is on the Kindle now.
Here is the link for the kindle edition of Sex and the City and Us. I’m not sure what happened earlier, but it’s up now.
The Tom Clancy books are available on kindle (here’s The Hunt for Red October), although it’s true that this wasn’t always the case.
For awhile, my favorite book of all-time, The Phantom Tollbooth, wasn’t available on Kindle, but now it is, and I’m very happy about that.
Kindle lets me have some of Roger Zelazny’s books, but not others.
I want to read “A Night in The Lonesome October”, but I cannot. My Kindle does not recognize that this book exists.
So what am I to do?
Obviously, one option would be to buy an old-fashioned dead tree edition and read that.
Another possibility would be to write to the publisher and ask them to release an electronic edition of the book.
Doing a little research, I see that the edition of the book that is currently in print is published by the Chicago Review Press. They’ve published two Zelazny books: A Night in Lonesome October and Jack of Shadows. The latter is available in electronic editions (for Kindle and others).
Why have they decided to issue electronic editions of one book but not the other? I can only speculate. Maybe there are rights issues. Maybe something about ANiLO, such as the illustrations, makes it harder to digitize. Maybe attitudes toward deigital publishing changed at the Chicago Review Press between the release of the two books.
I know lots of Dopers respond to thread titles rather than OPs, but it bears repeating: Yes, there are lots of books that are unavailable on Kindle. What’s unusual is for a new book, from a major publisher, to not be released on Kindle (especially if it is available in other electronic formats.) That was the case with the book the OP was asking about.
I am not a regular book buyer but I’ve always been under the impression that books come out in hardback exclusively, then paperback & digital later on.
But, I guess maybe that’s not the case, or not the case anymore, since digital versions are getting more expensive (right? They used to be bargain versions) so you a publisher doesn’t lose much money when doing a new release in hardback and digital at the same time.
Do they still wait to publish paperback versions?
This documentation, as well as this post, indicates that if you can buy an e-book in any supported format (AZW, AZW3, AZW4, CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, DJVU, DOCX, EPUB, FB2, FBZ, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ), then you can convert it to a supported Kindle File Format.
If you only have the printed edition, I guess you could scan it to load onto an electronic device, but that sounds like too much work unless you have access to a book-scanning robot.
Almost every major book appears in hardback and digital simultaneously.
Books that sell well will see a paperback version, usually about a year later, although some books are released simultaneously in paperback, like James Patterson and Bill’s Clinton new book.
There are three sizes of paperbacks today. Mass-market paperbacks are about 4"x6.5" and cost between $7-8. You’ll see them mostly for genre titles. A slightly larger format that is closer to 8" tall and costs $10 is used for bestsellers like James Patterson. (They have a name which I can’t remember: superior, maybe? Hey, Ukulele Ike, we need your expertise.) Trade paperbacks are technically any other size but normally they’re just the original hardback bound in paper and the same approximate size. Those are about $13-18, but can be much higher. How publishers decide which to use and when to release them and how much to price them is apparently a sacred rite involving entrails and the sacrifice of English majors and not meant for outsiders to learn.
All that’s sacrificed is the coffee to power the accountant. Whatever will make Amazon a bigger net profit, that’s what’s done.
Wow. Is this related to Obama/Trump derangement syndrome? Are you so triggered by the mention of Amazon that you’ll be blaming it for global warming next?
Publishers and Amazon have been at war for 20 years. Publishers have gone as far as to pull their lines off Amazon when they don’t like what Amazon does. Amazon is a necessary part of the book business, but there are many other sellers of books which must be taken into account.
Mostly, however, the overwhelming problem with your statement is that I’m talking about how publishers make their *internal *decisions about their *own *profits. Publishers decide when and how to issue paperbacks based on their own perceptions of the buying public. They don’t do so to make Amazon more money. Just the opposite. The more money and power Amazon amasses, the weaker the publishers’ bargaining position is.