08:16 – The taxes are in the mail. Another year until I have to worry about that again.
The US DoJ has finally filed suit against Apple and two of the major ebook publishers. (The others had already settled.) The DoJ claims that the price-fixing by Apple and the major publishers cost consumers about $100 million in the last couple of years by pricing books $2 to $5 higher than they would have been in a competitive market. If anything, that’s probably an underestimate. Assuming that the DoJ wins, the effect on the price of indie books will be nil, and that of books from major publishers somewhat greater. Ultimately, getting rid of Apple’s “agency model” will result in lower prices overall for consumers, with essentially all of that cost reduction coming directly from the major publishers’ revenues.
As things stand now, an indie publisher prices his book at, say, $2.99. Amazon pays the indie publisher 70% of that list price, less a small charge for data transfer. For the average $2.99 book, the indie publisher is paid about $2.04 by Amazon. If the DoJ wins, the indie publisher will no longer set the selling price at $2.99. Instead, he’ll set the price to Amazon at $2.04, and Amazon will decide how much to sell the book for. Probably $2.99. So, no change there.
For books from major publishers, everything will change. As things are now under the agency model, a publisher may set the list price of one of its books at, say, $13.99. When Amazon sells a copy of that book for $13.99, it pays the publisher 35% of retail, or $4.90. (Amazon pays the 70% royalty only on books priced from $2.99 to $9.99; those priced at less than $2.99 or more than $9.99 earn only 35% royalties.) When the agency model goes away, that publisher is no longer able to set the selling price. All it can set is the wholesale price it charges Amazon for a copy. Major publishers, of course, will want to boost the wholesale price from $4.90 up into the $10 range, but that’s not going to fly. In fact, it’s quite possible that the terms of the settlement will forbid publishers from boosting prices significantly. So, if Amazon is still getting that book for the effective wholesale price of $4.90, it’s not going to price that book at $13.99. Instead, it’s more likely to price the book at maybe $6.99. That in turn puts the screws to the major publishers, who were using the $13.99 price as an umbrella to maintain high hardback prices. Not many people are going to pay Amazon’s discounted price of $20 for the hardback if they can get the ebook for $7. Hardback sales, which are what earn major publishers most or all of their profits, are going to tank even worse than they already have. And more and more traditionally-publisher authors, as they watch hardback advances and royalties continue to plummet, are going to start going the indie publishing route. Traditional publishing is already in a death spiral, and this will simply be the final nail in the coffin.
13:08 – About three weeks ago, I mentioned that I was considering replacing our Time-Warner VoIP phone service. A couple of people mentioned MagicJack. I was familiar with the name from a few years ago when I’d signed up for PhonePower VoIP service. I had an impression that I’d decided back then for good reasons that I wouldn’t consider MagicJack. So I decided to look into MagicJack again.
What I found out wasn’t good. First, the web site is incredibly tacky. Nowhere on it could I find anything about terms of service, and I looked. Nor does MagicJack offer telephone support of any kind. All you can do is contact their chat line. Which is probably fortunate, because what I read about MagicJack’s so-called support is that, incredibly, it’s actually worse than Roku’s support. Although some have found the equipment to be reliable, reports of “it just stopped working” are distressingly common. There are also numerous reports of what amounts to fraud, with MagicJack charging people’s credit cards well before the “free trial” expires, sometimes within a couple days of when they sign up. Finally, the BBB gave MagicJack an F rating, which is actually worse than Greece’s credit rating. I don’t even like to deal with companies that have B ratings, let alone an F.
Other than the fact that TWC phone service is outrageously priced, there’s no urgency. I’ll probably take my time and choose an independent VoIP company like PhonePower. It may be even be PhonePower. I suspect a lot of the problems that I had with PhonePower may have resulted from running the TA behind our router. If I do this again, I’ll stick an Ethernet hub/switch between the cable modem and the router and connect both the TA and the router to that hub/switch. I had the TA port on the router assigned to what D-Link calls the “DMZ”, which in theory is supposed to be the same as having the device in front of the router. In practice, I’m not so sure that’s the case.
Robert-
We’ve been on Vonage for several years now with relative success. When we started there were fewer choices here and I checked with John Dominick, who had mentioned trying it a year or so before, for an update – his response was that he had pretty much forgotten they were using it so he guessed it must be doing okay. That was good enough for me at the time. It is set up by hooking the Vonage box directly to the cable modem with coax (our modem shares a splitter with the TV cable box), then basically a pass thorough via Cat5 to the router. Early on there were a couple of glitches where I would have to shut down the modem, Vonage box, and router and bring them back up one at a time which may have been due in part to the semi-baling wire nature of our entire system. It may also have been early indications of our several year old routers imminent demise. When that occurred I was able to get walk me through it help from Vonage that, in conjunction with semi-help from Comcast isolated the problem. Very little since then except that the Vonage box itself went out. Again they were helpful and would have replaced the box except that it was one of those holiday situations and it was easier for me to pick up a new box at Walmart than deal with my wife’s impatience. I expect that there are less expensive alternatives but this seems to work and it ain’t broke while not being too onerous. Anyway, our experience for what it’s worth.
Paul
You might look at Nettalk. I have heard good things about them.
http://www.nettalk.com/
Do you actually need a landline? I practically never use mine. My nephew and his wife use their cell phones almost exclusively. I’m skeptical about relying on VoIP, as I lose my Internet connection often enough (3-4 times a year, sometimes for days at a time) to make it not worth relying on in an emergency. I keep my landline because I have to as part of my package, not because I want it.
re MagicJack: Huh. I haven’t had any problems with them, and I’ve been using the plug-into-the-computer device for about three years and the stand-alone for about four months. The only technical problem I encountered (a “just stopped working”) was addressed on their FAQ or tips or whatever page and involved reformatting the device and reinstalling the software from the site: a nuisance but no real problem. NB: I’m far on the right-hand side of the curve on technical chops. It’s possible my mom would have had difficulties.
Maybe I just got lucky on the hardware, but I’d guess that other people’s “just stopped working” could have been fixed the same way.
Agreed that the web site is tacky and poorly laid out. That’s a strike against MagicJack, but not a major one in my opinion.
I’ve talked to Barbara about dropping our landline. The problem is that her dad turns 90 this year and her mom isn’t far behind. She wants a reliable way for them to get in contact with her, and isn’t comfortable with having her cell phone on 24 hours a day.
As to MagicJack, the BBB F rating does it for me.
Robert,
After catching Ma Bell stealing from me for the second time, I switched to Vonage just about a year ago.
Over the years, Ma Bell had charged me for a phone I bought instead of leasing and I was too dumb to catch it until FIVE years later. They returned 13 months of the stolen money. Then, last year, I found they had put me on a 20 buck plan for long-distance calls within Canada, when I had switched over to using Google Talk to make ALL my long-distance calls. Granted, I was a bad customer. I was one of a handful of non-rural customers in Ontario who still had a rotary dial line. I had refused upgrading to touchtone when it came in, last century, even as they cut the cost of doing so several times. Even refused an offer to PAY me to switch, because of the offer wasn’t worth the aggravation. Bell seemed to respond by finding those OTHER ways to monetize me. So out with the thieves and in with Vonage.
It wasn’t a smooth switch, but it was a successful one. The first problem was that there was a limit on how many phones I could have on my Vonage connection. I wanted one for each room I frequent in the house, including both bathrooms. That toted up to six, but I could only get five. The guest bathroom, which I don’t use all that often, got left out. Ma Bell made the switchover as difficult as possible. But they eventually conceded. The last conversation with ‘my rep’ at the corp got him an earful after he told me I “was in violation of my contract for not giving them adequate notice of my intention to switch providers.” I’m surprised you didn’t hear me down there when I yelled at him to send me a bill for another month. I promised him I’d never give another red cent to the theiving magpies, even if Vonage failed. I’d try our cable company (another sinkhole of immoral grasping) or I’d pay for cell phones from somebody else, even if it cost me hundreds of dollars a month. But Bell? Never, ever, ever, ever again.
In celebration of switching to a service that costs me 22 bucks a month, taxes in, for 500 minutes of self-generated calling anywhere on the continent and unlimited incoming minutes, I went out and bought new Dect 6 phones for the house. Key feature? Call Blocking. First number blocked? Bell Telephone. M()#&RF%(*)(#$.
My one issue is the occasional loss of Vonage connection. Once while in mid conversation. And my best friend was on the way over here, assuming a heart attack, when I finally got the service back up and running and headed him off at his front door. I then went out and bought a cheap non-smart phone for those kind of emergencies, ending 53 years of life without a cell phone. The problem is that if my ISP (my cable company) has a hiccup, Vonage goes out and needs to be reset. The process is noisome. I have to depower the Vonage box, decouple the incoming cable and outgoing phone connection to my phones. Repower. Wait. When power light no longer blinking, plug in incoming cable. Wait. When that indicator is no longer blinking, plug in a single phone put there for testing purposes and then wait for it to register. Check dial tone. If working, plug in the connection to my phone system. Takes patience and about three minutes each time. If I jump the gun, it’s back to the beginning. I’ve had to do this probably a dozen times, but it happens in clusters. So, about every three or four months. A bother, but I can live with that.
Do I recommend Vonage. Hell yah, when the alternative is a money-stealing monopoly.
YMMV, GM
I have a Vonage line. The Vonage black box seems to work pretty well, and it is behind our router. I do have to unplug the black box from the power about once per month. And I do have occasional call quality problems. Although that seems to happen more when I was using AT&T DSL than it does with Comcast.
Alas, that’s just not going to work. One of the reasons Barbara insisted we replace PhonePower was the silent outages. Our cable TV and broadband service would be working fine, and the phone was dead. (I’m not entirely convinced that TWC doesn’t do this on purpose to force people to buy their overpriced VoIP.)
At this point, I’m very seriously considering going all cell.
If you do go with a VOIP provider like Vonage, I’d seriously consider using features like the rollover to another number if the network is down.
I’ll recommend ooma again. You have to pay up front for hardware, but I’ve had great service in Vegas. I keep ooma and my small amount of network gear on an UPS. The small outages we’ve had here didn’t require any rebooting.
The ooma rings on my cell at the same time and you can pick the call up. I use the number for all those pesky sites, forms, etc., that need a phone number.
We are all-cell now, but I won’t rule out alternatives should something float my boat.
I have been 100% cell since returning to the US in late 2009, and my kids have been cell-only since about 2004 when they were at Uni. There was a mention earlier of turning off the cell phone. Why would one ever do that? Even when I got my very first cell, I never turned it off. My elderly aunt and uncle are constantly turning theirs off, and/or neglecting to take theirs with them when they leave home. I noted here once before, that cost them a day’s delay in getting a plumber to do work for them, as just after they left, I was still in their house doing my laundry (no washer/dryer at Tiny House), and the plumber came an hour earlier than expected. I called their cell phone and it rang in the kitchen. Plumber said he would come back tomorrow, although–if they had had the cell phone,–they could have quickly returned from nearby Walmart to give instructions and an okay for the plumbing work.
My cell phone is always in my pants pocket and turned on. I may not believe in personal transportation, but I do believe in personal communication. Except for business, I cannot see any reason whatever for a landline phone. Only problem with the cell, is that it does not ring in every room of the house, like landline extensions, so sometimes, I have to run to another room to answer–just like when I was a kid, and there was only 1 phone in each person’s house.
I’ve read that keeping a landline may be a good idea in the event of a widespread and long-term or permanent power outage and resulting cell towers also down. Is this a consideration?
I always have my cell, turned on, charged up. The same cannot be said, sadly, for the women of the household here. Always having to frantically hunt for them, losing them, not charging them, etc.
I’ve also been reading recently that lotsa folks are now disenchanted with the Droids and possibly going to the Apple garden and Windows phones. Thoughts?
I love apples, and I love gardens. But I do not like Apple Gardens. They just want you by the short and curlies so they can lock you in and extort money from you.
Apple actually ranks lower than Microsoft on my personal scale.
Word, homies. I note that a lot of the people who use Apple laptops, desktops, IPads and so on tend to be rich librul yuppies and progs. They pay more money for exceedingly proprietary products that run on an o.s. ripped off from open source origins. And also tend to smug and arrogant about it. A real turn-off for OFD, all the way.
I thought long and hard about getting an Apple II in 1980. I thought long and hard about getting a (?Mac) IIci in about 1990. And I’ve thought about Apple gear several times since. On every occasion the exorbitant price put me off.
I’d buy a Mac if I needed to do something it would do that nothing else could do, but I’ve yet to encounter that situation.
Otherwise, I despise Apple and will not buy any of their products.