Piffey

Amazon announced the details of their new eBook world domination program (via Engadget) this morning. The new system would give authors an incentive to make eBooks fit the Amazon mold, instead of other sites or readers, by increasing the royalties of the authors. It’s an easy choice in a bum writing market of what an author is going to choose, but the catch is that you have to play by all of Amazon’s rules. This new set all falls under Amazon’s coming launch of DTP or Digital Text Platform publishing scheme.

Typically the Kindle marketed eBooks show the author around 35% of the $9.99 or so that the eBook costs. The rest of that percentile goes directly to Amazon. With the new DTP option for authors the percentages would be literally swapped with 70% for the author and 30% going back to the site.

The new DTP option will require that distribution costs be paid for by the publisher (typically $0.15 in data transfer charges), the books must be priced 20% below their print counterparts, and the books must support the Kindle’s humorously-termed “broad set” of features (like text-to-speech). As with many Kindle experiments, this option will only be available for books that are in-copyright and sold in the United States.

As other eBook stores begin to align themselves as competitors with Amazon, the company has no-doubt been scrambling to come up with a way to maintain its customer base. With the popularity of eReaders at CES this year, and eBook sales surpassing print sales this Christmas, we are undoubtedly entering the year of the electronic reader. Stores that offer more open formats, such as Scribd and Powells,  have been gaining in popularity along with eReaders that support these open document formats — such as the Sony or Aztek readers.

Amazon has made an excellent move in targeting the writers since the readers have to join up where the content is distributed. The writing market is in a serious downturn and a professional author will have to go where the royalties are: Amazon.

Of course the problem with this is that a company is going to corner a market into using its standards. This can only spell a lack of progress in the still-developing eBook industry. An open standard is necessary to bring reading and publishing to the next level. The eReader still has a lot of untapped potential — interactive books being just a possibility, something impossible with paper.

Hopefully authors can see the benefit of offering their books on other services and in formats other than Amazon’s DTP option and that other electronic publishers will make the move toward offering competitive royalty rates with Amazon. If 70% was the norm the content industry might actually be able to save itself before everyone realizes that technology has given writers the ability to publish without a publisher.