Got a book kindled. It took a while: trying logical hypertext tags, uploading the result [eventually first zipfiling the .html in a folder with relative images], processing and compiling, and paging through the thing with the dtp.amazon.com emulator mess, determining that the logical hypertext is only logical to people not at amazon.com, thinking up cheats, trying those, zipfiling, uploading....

It's done now. But, all things considered, I spent about sixty hours crunching sixty thousand words into what seems for the moment to be a decently formatted book.

Then there's the new problem. Hang on; I'll see if I can show you....

Oh.

Thrilled though I might be to learn that I can be trusted to price an EBook at two hundred bucks [at the current rate of inflation, that might make some sense in a few years], I'm at least equally unthrilled to be told that I can't list this thing for free. Or, really, for $0.00. It's the same thing for the enduser, though you'd still have to go into amazon.com and at least oneclick the thing before pulling it down to your Kindle [or a Windoze emulator, at least], therefore tracking the number of people doing that for me.

But that's okay; being nice and trusting, I EMail digitalrights@amazon.com:

Apparently, there’s no way on my end to set the price of a Kindle title to $0.00. I’ve got a title ready to go, intended to be free, serving as something of an advert for the next nine books in the series.
I guess I’ll go ahead and release it at $0.99 for now. Will it be possible to change the price to $0.00 after the fact?

And I wait for about twenty-four hours. Then I get this:

Hello,

Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding a price promotion for your title(s). Please note that you may change the list price for your ebook directly from your account. However, we are unable to provide an additional pricing discount at this time. If you have any further questions, please write to us at digitalrights@amazon.com.

Best regards,

Adam

http://www.amazon.com

Oh.

I've EMailed back already, with this:

There's no way to set the price to zero? I've seen hundreds of titles priced at $0.00 in the last couple days. How's that being done?

...though I'm already expecting another twenty-four hours to go by before I get a response again mentioning title(s). Because actually reading an EMail, containing a phrase like I’ve got a title ready to go, is a job for CyberHazMat, or something.

Oh: supposing any confusion remains outside amazon.com, let's go into amazon.com for a second....

So, yeah: I've got additional questions. I've already asked one of them. Others include Really? and Seriously? and What in east hell is wrong with your brain.

Meanwhile, I've got this more significant problem. Because the book I'm trying to set to $0.00 is LK0. For those who still remember that one. Ten years ago, I had it up for free download in PDF. It's the prequel, written in 2000, to the rest of the S97S, written in 1990 through 1999. The book itself admits that it's free, because it's kinda additional to everything else. And now I've got amazon.com telling me that, instead, it's at least ninety-nine cents.

That's great for something like iTunes, if you want a single .mp3 and can't figure out BitTorrent. But it's not how I wanted to play this. And, of course, there's really no releasing the thing for the Kindle on my own: everything's got to go through their little store.

This is functionally the same shit Reznor's been running into with the iPhone, except that my issue's less about content and more about trying to make something concurrently free but defensibly copyrighted.

I do of course get that amazon.com make 65% of whatever price kindling goes for. Which is funny, in a way: that's more than they usually make [in the beginning, they were holding out for 55% of the coverprice on real books; they've since dropped that to 40% to compete with real stores], and, also funny, the 35% left over after their 65% is more than I usually make. Which is the moderately cool thing about the Kindle, I suppose: if it's all the same to the enduser, there's no middleman involved; I write it; I code it; I upload it; it's a dollar; I get thirty-five cents; they get sixty-five cents; everyone kinda wins.

Except that there are already books up there for zilch. Not just the ones in the screenshot; also hundreds of badlyformatted publicdomain things. You can get bibles and Frankenstein and whatever O Henry shit for zilch, which is great. And you can get stuff written last year [by now, there might be stuff written this year] for free, because, somehow, magically, they're being listed for $0.00, despite that impossibility.

There is the one thing I hadn't factored, going into this a few days ago. I've got the emulator thing, and was mostly curious about the edges of possibility in formatting. So I grabbed a few books for zero dollars each and looked through them. One standing out, both for formatting and for actual content, was Mark Henry's [presumably no relation to O Henry] Battle of the Network Zombies. I'd actually heard of that one already; though, even now that I've got it open an AltTab away, I haven't read the whole thing yet—I've been retrocoding a book into kindling, instead. What counts, and might make a difference to all this, is that I got it a few days ago for $0.00; today, it looks like this:

I'm not sure what to make of that. It was released, presumably at $0.00, on 1st March 2010; I grabbed it for free on 4th March 2010; now, on 11th March 2010, it's $9.60, down from twelve bucks.

So I can't rule out the chance that it's just twelve bucks, currently down to $9.60, formerly down to $0.00. Though that would be weird, if only because, based on the contract amazon.com have set up for this, Mark gets $4.20 regardless what sale amazon.com run on a book; thousands or millions downloaded this thing for free which, if it was supposed to be twelve bucks, would have made him four bucks a copy which amazon.com would have had to come up with outside the more normal rules of commerce.

Also, there are still those PD books. I have doubts that people are listing those at 99¢ through $200 and making 35% while amazon.com get zilch. Even if I do still smirk at the reports of amazon.org from the first ten years or so in business before they got near breaking even, let alone going into the black; I suppose it's possible, based on history.

I dunno. No response from my latest EMail yet. I guess, for now, we can just speculate about all this.

Or I could just ask Mark, since we're all hooked up at twitter.com. More likely, I'll put off that level of research until amazon.com can count to one without hitting me with words like title(s). Never reply to me without reading exactly what I wrote; you could end up at gotards.com.

More later....