I read Virginia Postrel’s Atlantic blog on ebook pricing with some interest — but as a gadget freak, not as a book junky. Look, book junkies aren’t much interested in reading digital books. Not even those of us who also happen to be gadget freaks.
But Virginia’s comments about marginal prices got me thinking about another market for ebooks, one with lots of profit potential: Out-of-print titles.
Pretend for a moment you’re like me. Nicely done — but put down the martini for a moment so we can talk serious for a sec.
Pretend you love real books. Pretend you have some out-of-the-mainstream tastes. Pretend those tastes often take you to the local funky used bookstore. Or, more likely nowadays, to Amazon’s used book resellers.
OK, quit being me for a moment. Now pretend you’re a publisher.
The cost to move a title, any title, to the ePub ebook format (can we quit putting “e” and “i” in front of everything already?) is trivial. If it costs more than a few bucks to get a semi-skilled monkey to do it, I’d be amazed. I’m not even certain the monkey needs to be entirely sober. So: Look at Amazon’s top sellers and see which titles in your back catalog still sell for more than a few pennies in the secondary market.
Are you still with me? OK, great. Then slip back into your VodkaPundit smoking jacket for a moment.
You (me?), who has no interest in digital books, are looking for an obscure-yet-tasteful title from the A. N. Roquelaure oeuvre. So you go to Amazon and run a search. You find a few hits — consisting of a few dog-eared old paperbacks of questionable longevity and utility, or a brand-spankin’ new digital copy. Both are selling for about four bucks. (A dollar-plus-three shipping for the used paperback, four dollars straight up for the ebook.)
Which do you buy?
Now let’s say the ebook is only three dollars, but the ragged paperback is still Amazon’s unofficial standard of a buck plus $2.98 S&H?
Well, I’d certainly prefer to curl up in bed with a real book… but I know the ebook will last forever and somebody else has already highlighted and dog-eared the paperback version.
At this point, and at that price, I’d likely go digital.
OK, put your publisher hat back on.
The cost to digitize a book is trivial. The cost for marketing it is… about the same. Just make repeated announcements that your back catalog has gone digital and — this is the key bit — devoted readers will find you. Let me repeat that: Devoted readers will seek out your old books, and Amazon (and even iTunes) will lead them right to your bank vault. Er, right to your doorstep.
Yes, yes — Apple is trying to reinvent the book with the iPad and all its full-color, multimedia glory. And Amazon is trying to reinvent the bestseller with their tiny Kindle and its oh-so-readable e-ink screen.
Those margins, however, are going to be slim. Amazon’s will be slim, because new-book readers will be more price-conscience than ever for digital copies. And Apple because they’re going to have to offer lots of pricey multimedia content to offset their higher prices — and Apple’s iTunes (or the new iBookstore) cut is only 30% of the selling price.
But you — you’re in bed with your iPad or your Kindle or your laptop and you suddenly get a yen to read that one book you just read to death the first semester of your sophomore year in college. And you find it — brand-new digital or worn-out paperback. Which do you buy?
And as a publisher — who never makes a dime off of resales — which do you provide?
There’s a market out there. A big one. We just need a widget-maker, and publishers, smart enough to tap it.
PS I love my local funky used bookstore. But, dude, you’re hosed. Totally. Maybe you can borrow some Kleenex from the guy who used to own the local used record store.
UPDATE: Will Collier is a published author and, naturally, has a few thoughts to share on the money end of it.
AND ANOTHER ONE: Lein Shory says that size matters not.
Hey man, can I borrow that when you’re done? No? Dickhead.
Any time you come over, you maybe read anything you like.
But I get the feeling I won’t be extending an invite any time soon. Some guests take far less than three days before, well, you know.
Incidentally, hasn’t piracy done wonders for used CD stores?
Uh… hello?
Maybe i’ve missed something — if YOU buy an eBook, can you send it over to me to read? I know you can easily do so with the $2.99 paperback…
I’m a huge fan of Amazon Used, in addition to my local library, of course. But then, the books i want to own for myself (the ones i write my name/email inside the cover) are few and far between the ones i merely want to read and pass along (or trash).
The RIAA analogy I used on twitter is somewhat lacking, because unlike music, people don’t read books over and over and over for weeks/months/years at a time. Well, except for those few/far/between.
If you buy a book and like it, I hope you will share it. Or at least let me know so I can check it out for free from the library — they’re always happy to share. Dead tree’s rock!
Let’s not give literary publishers the same rotten bone that music publishers are still gnawing away one, ok?
Thanks for the good twitterplay.
(Bombay Sapphire, 3 olives, tyvm)
Marty, there’s a mindset at work here where to observe something is to endorse it. (There’s a PhD thesis to be written on just this and deconstructionism and modern liberalism, but I digress.)
All I did was to observe that smart publishers combining with smart widget-makers will mean the doom of the funky local used bookstore. But as someone who has never once bought an ebook (and who also buys hundreds of used CDs and DVDs each and every year), I don’t necessarily see it as a positive change.
And in any case, eventually the widget (Kindle, iPad, whatever) will be cheap enough (think “iPod shuffle”), that you won’t mind swapping devices for a day or a week or a month. You’ll loan your buddy your living room widget, and go back to the one you keep next to the bed until you get the other one back.
I’ll accept that, it’s a valid point and I apologize if I took us off onto a sidetrack.
Still, I don’t recall paying for any of the music on my Shuffle (except for the little bit i burned myself), most is and was traded to and from thumbdrives among friends.
When (if? I, like you havent bought any) eBooks can be exchanged as easily, I might revise my passion for dead trees.
I’m a bit of a freak, because I actually prefer reading books on a computer screen to reading them in dead paper format, but I’ll throw in my two cents.
It’s a lot more expensive to digitize than you might think, at least if you want a high-quality book in a text format. Yeah, you can grab an old paperback and sell scans of it in .pdf, but that’s really lowbrow. Generally, if a book is old enough to have been written on a typewriter(as most of the ones you refer to will be), you have to go back and either OCR it or get a guy to sit there typing it all out, and in both cases you need a pretty thorough proofreading at the end. The cost is not too high in an absolute sense, which is why publishers do it for new books, but it’ll still run you four digits if you want to do a decent job. And that’s just for one book – nobody is going to launch a back-catalogue ebook store with one book, you need hundreds. For books that are, by definition, too poor of sellers to stay in print, that’s a lot of cash to be forking out on a pretty uncertain payback. I mean, yeah, if we ever get a real proof of concept it might work, but someone needs to do it first, and I don’t see any takers. Any book popular enough to definitely justify this sort of treatment(say, back-catalogue Steven King or Tom Clancy) is still in print and thus doesn’t need it. Who wants to spend millions of dollars digitizing hundreds of back-catalogue books everyone forgot about 40 years ago?
The closest I expect to see to this is something like the Baen Free Library, but all the books in there are digital-era stuff where the author submitted the book via floppy disk or email. The proofing has all been done, and it’s just a matter of copy-pasting to Notepad, slapping on some standard html code, and posting it to your website. Admittedly, there’s more of an incentive to do something for profit than there is when you’re giving it away like Baen is, but I still don’t see any publisher taking the first leap on this.
Hi, My name is Frank, and I’m a “Book Junky” and a “Gadget Freak”. I’m not saying its bad, I’m just saying it happens, thats all.
Oh, and I once owned a bookstore too. And despite having a good sized library with several first editions that are coming up on about 100 years old, yeah, I still love my Kindle.
You own a digital book, subject to the terms of the DRM. So far, the Kindle and Nook haven’t been good enough for me. Apple has done well in this area so far, so we’ll see what they come up with. I’m willing to trade the plausibly infinite longevity of a digital book against the ability to lend or resell it.
I think the most successful ebook model is Baen Book’s model.
$6 pretty much gets any book they publish, and for $15 or so, you can read the ARC version before the hardcover even comes out. And the book is yours, do with the files what you want, copy and give it away if you wish. Just don’t sell it.
Today, all manuscripts are submitted, generally in .rtf files, and converting to html or other reader files is easy.
Older books are a different story. There are generally no files of any sort for them, so the must be transcribed, or OCR scanned, and then proof read to correct any glitches in OCR. Many of the old book’s rights seem to be held by people who disdain ebooks as well.
Baen has no DRM, no restrictions, and some of the Hardcover editions now come with a CD of ebooks of the author/authors and sometimes of groups of authors. The CDs are made available to a fellow (who dies horrible deaths in many of the books btw) who puts images of them up for download. This is done with the full knowledge of the publishers (the late Jim Baen and his wife Tony Weisskopf talk with Joe to let him know when new CDs will be available even).
Baen also has the Free Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ for those) with many books free for the reading in e-form. Authors who submit books to the Library say they often notice an increase in sales of the paperbacks to the books when they do so.
Baen also has a collection of short stories based on one of the book series (163x by Eric Flint) that started out as good stories rejected for a books of shorts based on the series. relatively unknown authors got a bit of revenue on it, and it did so well, the started making them in paperback as well, with a new short from Eric to make buying the paperback more attractive. The authors also get a better royalty from the books.
my eyes really get screwy after reading a dead tree so I tend to favor e-books. 99% of those I read are now from Baen. I can make the print as large as I want, and if I’m busy and in the mood, I can set a Text to Speech program to read the thing and listen to it.
They also have a monthly “Webscription” for $15 that contains several e-books and partials of upcoming books. it sorta serializes the books if you get the ‘scription every month. I tend to just get E-ARCs or the regular scheduled e-books.
Baen is running the site with e-books from these publishers as well, but the pricing on some of those is not as good as Baen’s, and I’m not sure about the DRM crap but likely Jim and Tony convinced them to give it up or relax it a bit:
Del Rey
E-Reads
Night Shade Books
SRM Publisher
Subterranean Press
Tor Books
Head on over, and take a gander.
http://www.webscription.net/default.aspx
p.s.
I am not afiliated with Baen at all. just a big fan who might get Red Shirted in the future.
I hate to nitpick—but Amazon.com charges $4 shipping per each book purchased through its reseller program. $3 is charged for each delivered DVD or CD. But your main point is nonetheless persuasive.
Just like with music, the main selling point of e-books to me is saved bookshelf space. Taking up more of my already bursting bookshelves is one of the main reasons I don’t buy books. Every Christmas my family gives me more, and because I never have time to read them (but always promise myself I will), I have an ever-growing pile of books from Christmases past weighing down my shelves.
Ever since moving to digital music, I’ve been free of having to worry about CD organizers. I’d love for that to happen with books too. Sure, there’s a few atlases and pictorials I’d need to have in hard copy; but the same goes for a few treasured laserdisc box sets that I keep even though I haven’t had a laserdisc player in a decade.
I wonder whether the ability to pitch out the space-consuming galley proofs of old out-of-print books might be as much of an incentive to the publishers to go digital as it would be for me?
I have self-published, as well as published a friend’s 2 books, so let me tell it from the other side.
First, it’s all about rights. Publishers try to take as many rights as possible, and pay as little as they can. Most publishers didn’t get online rights the first time around, especially for older books, so they’d have to get the rights back from the author. The author, OTOH, has signed so much away that they probably can’t sell the online rights to anyone else, but have no incentive to take $0.001 per copy, which is where a big publisher would have to set them to make anything on a $3 or $4 eBook after Amazon takes its massive share.
I had my opus at a 25% discount rate on Amazon. Electronically, they wanted either 40 or 55 percent (I can’t remember now), which left me with no margin if I wanted to make anything near the same profit per unit (or any at all).
Also, Kindle at least is an HTML version. You can’t just spit ASCII text in and expect it to be perfect; you re-typeset the book. My opus (a Hebrew bible) couldn’t even go on. I never had electronic rights for my friend’s book, and couldn’t justify the extra costs and loss of rights to Amazon to do the Kindle version for hers.
I will look at iBook for the Hebrew bible, if they use a PDF-like format. I won’t expect to make much money; it will solely be to see my baby back “in print” one last time.
Semi-skilled drunken monkey, reporting for duty. Here’s how to make your own hi-speed book scanner so as to digitize all your own books.
I’m not familiar with any electronic book formats. I was just wondering do they had a “dog ear” function for future reference? Can you scrawl comments in the margin? Underline good passages? Deadwood books may be more interactive that thought at first blush.
I agree with Stephen’s basic premise. I always thought Kindles would be a lot more attractive on the day when, for instance, I could download all 40 something Nero Wolfe books in a few minutes (maybe offered cheaper in a bulk package) rather than hunt around for them all on various e-tail or brick and mortar stores.
I don’t think publishers have long to live. e-books will eventually win out over printed books for the same reason dvds beat records, convenience. I can still see some reason for middle men in the music business, since there is still a lot of complexity and cost in producing music, but for books? Authors do not need publishers any more.
Stephen, I’m such a big book geek I WRITE the stuff. I’m not a particularly big gadget geek (that’s my husband.) I think most of the “book geeks” who refuse to use gadgets are boomers, (it’s a generational thing) and sure as shooting they’ll embrace them now because Jobs says they should or at least that they should buy them for the ipad. Myself, I’ve had a kindle for over a year and love it. The only problem I have is when I pick up a paper book, I find myself trying to click “next page.”
I have two articles crammed into one (sort of) for my weekly contribution at Mad Genius Club. Both of them tie into this. http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/
JP, come on down to the diner in the Baen bar and we’ll discuss that redshirting.
The premise is wrong that book junkies don’t like Kindle. Although yes Josh you can dog ear pages (without damaging the book) write notes, look up words and link to wiki, but the main advantages are all about reading:
1. Easy to pack multiple books for a trip.
2. Finish a great book, immediately download another by the same author (great for series).
3. Can download first couple of chapters.
4. See or hear a recommendation? Get it without having to make a note, find it, and buy it.
5. Can read chick lit (The Help) without having to hide the cover.
6. How many times have you been at a resort, ski town, etc. and you have to search for a Sunday NYT, WSJ, etc. Download it for 75cents in a matter of seconds. (The newspaper experience is not the same as the deadtree version, but in these circumstances the saved time is worth it.)
The Kindle is very simple to use and links to Amazon so it is very reader friendly. Good luck getting a non-gadet person to get an iPad.
A.N. Roquelaure, hmm?
Some thoughts from the author of a rights-reverted out-of-print book:
http://wcollier.blogspot.com/2010/02/regarding-e-books.html
I don’t know if the funky used bookstore you enjoy going to is in trouble. After all, you can still physically go there and physically enjoy it. As long as you do those things, the store will do fine.
Same is true of dead trees bookstores. I visit my local Barnes & Noble at least once a month and usually leave with a nice armful of books. There’s nothing like the experience of being able to relax with a (admittedly non-alcoholic) drink and pour through books you think might be interesting, finding them more or less at random on the shelves. That’s something that can’t be captured too well with an electronic device or online bookstore.
What has happened to me is that if I want to cover an esoteric subject like sailboat cruising, I go to Amazon because it will have about 100 books on that subject for every one the local store has. And if I want a book that costs more than about $40 or so I will get the discount from Amazon. But none of that means dead trees or dead trees stores are doomed.
If I want an out of print book and it’s available only via mail order, I’m much more likely to buy it if I can get it in an electronic version. Why? Because the need for it is ephemeral. If you want something like this, you usually want it now, not a week from now. If I could download it into my iPad(*) for $5-odd, I’m going to do that without seriously exploring the dead tree alternative. That’s the same reason iTunes music is destroying the record store. Music doesn’t have the advantage of being something tactile that you want to hold in your hands before buying.
So for me, Amazon didn’t kill the bookstore. What it did was substantially increase the total amount i spent on books, because I had the alternative of buying a book via mail order and therefore either saving money or letting me buy something I could normally not afford. (Christopher Alexander’s architecture books are an excellent example of this.)
I suspect using a book reader will do the same – it will increase my book purchases but I will still visit bookstores to enjoy the atmosphere and to find books more at random.
D
(*) I am a big Apple fan and so iPad is obviously going to be my reader of choice. I also like the fact that it does a lot more than read books, with Steve Jobs’ patented style. I also don’t really like e-ink – it looks gloomy to me. Tack-sharp, but gloomy. Maybe I’m just too used to being around screens half my life.
The problem is the huge expansion of copyright thanks to Disney and Sonny Bono. None of those books will get converted, because there is not enough profit in selling the, and the book publishers won’t pay to convert them to electronic format, and will demand too high a licensing fee from anyone who wants to convert them.
So yes, electronic books will save older books, especially nonfiction, especially less popular but still useful. But before that, we have to ease up on copyright to bring back the number of years it lasts to historical standards.
Well, from the point of view of a POD author, – who alone sets the price of what the Kindle versions of my books are sold for – the ebook versions are a loss leader, or if you like, an attention-getting device, with readers who may be more likely to take a chance on a relatively unknown author at a cost of $4-5, rather than $15+ for a print copy.Which is why I put To Truckee’s Trail, and the Adelsverein Trilogy out in Kindle editions as soon as I could.
No, I probably won’t make very much off e-book and Kindle sales, but if it leads to more readers, and increasing sales of my follow-on books, I will consider it well worth it.
Interesting argument, and I suspect you on to something Stephen. . As a book junky, I’ll always buy a book when I can. But on Amazon used books, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (yes, there’s an original book by Cameron Crowe that the movie was based upon) and “The Big Story” (Breakstrup’s account of the Tet Offensive) go for over $100 each. I’d love to have those books and would probably make the move to electronic print for just those titles.
Carter –
I’d like to see some of my favorite history books updated with interactive maps, scrollable/clickable timelines, that kind of thing. For that, I’d pay top dollar for a new ebook. Otherwise, I’ll probably stick with paper except for anything older and/or out of print.
“Well, I’d certainly prefer to curl up in bed with a real book… but I know the ebook will last forever and somebody else has already highlighted and dog-eared the paperback version.”
Forever?, a couple of months ago amazon found out they did not have the rights to sell 1984 e-book. Overnight they deleted the book from the kindles and then told the owner’s it was done. After the fact. You don’t own the book you own a license to read the book that can be revolked. I would rather they had to go door to door to take my reading material away.
I have no interest in digital books, but there are some beloved books that are out of print, and my paperbacks are falling apart. I think moving the back catalog to digital will enable two different but entirely wonderful forms of purchasing out-of-print books: the aforementioned digital, and print-on-demand. If I could have favorites reprinted and have a brand new copy of an old book, I would be delighted.
J.A. Konrath (thriller writer) has some good thoughts on this topic as well.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/02/digital-perception.html
If I promote a real book for Amazon I get a cut. If I promote an e-book I get nothing. Given the economics of delivery it would seem that Amazon is cutting its own throat.
Just to emphasize the attractiveness of the Baen model, I can tell you I have spend several hundred dollars at Webscriptions, vs. ZERO for ebooks with Amazon, and I don’t plan to spend any with Jobs either.
I would love to have a Kindle, and when they remove the copy protection so that my books are MY books, I will consider buying. Meanwhile, my brand spanking new Dell 17 in laptop was not much more than a Kindle, and it actually makes for a pretty good read, as long as I don’t have sunlight directly on the screen. And it is a really nice computer as a bonus! It may be a bit heavy for beach use, but I confess to having a bias toward real books at the beach anyway.
And the typical response to those who ask for Baen titles on bit torrent is “It’s only 6 bucks, support the author for chrissakes”. If producers and publishers are trusted, piracy is minor in my opinion, a lesson RIAA badly needs to learn before their business model collapses completely. People want to support artists, they just dont want to get ripped off. (as an example, I have been a Meatloaf fan for 30 years, but dadgummit, I own a vinyl album, an 8 track, a cassette, and a CD of Bat out of Hell). When I wanted it on my MP3 player, I just converted it from the CD. I have no intention of paying for putting it on every device I own!
To underscore your point (which I heartily endorse) run the following experiment: Try to buy an ebook copy of each of Dorothy Sayers’ novels. Her earliest work is widely available from multiple vendors. If it isn’t free, it’s close, but quality suffers for all Gutenberg/off-copyright ebooks. Now try to find anything she’s written after the mid 1920s. You can get paper, and you can get used, but ebooks of these titles are unavailable. It’s annoying.
I would have paid to buy these ebooks after I got a free taste and fell in love with Ms. Sayers’ prose. If we can get the copyright holders to create an electronic version, they’ll sell. Not like best-sellers, but in volumes you’ll see from a limited-edition reissue.
Remember what I said about quality suffering for Gutenberg ebooks. I’d pay for higher-quality versions of the free ebooks I already own.
Put me in charge of a publishing company and this is what I’ll do:
1) create an ebook production department or expand capacity if one already exists.
2) use excess capacity of ebook department to create high-quality versions of Gutenberg free-books.
3) create high-quality ebooks of all books I hold rights to.
4) price the off-copyright books cheaply and increase the price by a quantum if I retain rights and increase the price bu subsequent quanta depending upon sales volumes of dead-tree format copies.
Stephen,
I bought my ereader (it’s an Astak EzReader) for almost the same purpose you describe. I noticed all the great old books, some out of print, and some classics still in print but available in public domain on Google Books. Granted the best reading experience there is with PDFs but I don’t care. I can still make bookmarks and go back to wherever I left off.
Right now I’m reading “The Brothers Karamazov” (which I actually downloaded for free from ebookplanet) something that was recommended to me but never wanted to spend the money on. Frankly, with Google Books and free ebook sites its possible to have a library of hundreds of literary classics in the space of one thin paperback.
#16 STOSH: you’re asking about the ability to ‘dog ear’ and highlight for future reference or to write notes in the margins and, yes, you can do that kind of thing with e-books. It’s electronic, but there is a highlight function, a bookmark function and a function to take notes.
It doesn’t look the same, but it’s the same principle.
Meanwhile, B&N’s Nook is working on a function to ‘lend’ books to other Nook users. They borrow it for fourteen days and it deletes from their Nook and pops back over to the original user’s account.
As far as the pricing fight goes, I think this is yet another area where they should let the consumer decide. I’ve gotten pretty used to buying new hardcovers for $9.99 from Amazon but there are some I’d go $14.99 for.
Stephen, you wrote “Well, I’d certainly prefer to curl up in bed with a real book… but I know the ebook will last forever and somebody else has already highlighted and dog-eared the paperback version.”
—————
Will an ebook last forever? Will it work on my 2015 Kindle-V? What if I lose my Kindle next year and chose to replace it with a different reader? I’ll conceed that an ebook will last for a year or so, but after that, all bets are off.
Stephen, I have some inside knowledge of the “content conversion” business. The cost to take to paper books, and convert them to marginally proofread eBooks is about a dollar a page, and is done almost exclusively overseas. (The Philippines is popular for this.)
So if the content is free (you own the copyright, or the copyright has lapsed) then it takes a hundred or so sales to break even.
Oddly, I don’t see anyone talking about what this and future ‘e-book’ technology could do for education costs. A large burden on college students is reserved for text books, never mind the cost benefit reduction in tax revenues needed to provide public school with up to date text books and in sufficient quantity.
I’ve bought a lot of used books via amazon re-sellers and Alibris and have never had a quality problem — no or hardly any marking or dog-ears. The listing for each copy typically describes the quality of the copy and I’ve always found the descriptions accurate.
If you’re buying the books for research projects, you need to be able not only to mark them up, but file them or place them with other related materials. If you can get a pdf you can put each book in a file on the computer with other electronic copies of related material, otherwise you have to have a hard copy. You also need the hard-copy so that you can include page citations, edition dates, etc., so that others can check your references.
Casual readers who want to read and then discard are only a segment of the used-book market, and perhaps not the largest segment. Until research-oriented readers can get books in pdf with mark-up capabilities, there will always be a market for used-book hardcopy sellers.
Does Kindle have DRM? Yes.
Is it breakable, easily, with a downloadable script?
Yes.
So, assuming you’re not a complete idiot, yes, you will be able to read that Kindle book on your 2015 Kindle-V.
Now, consider that paperback you bought yesterday. Will you still have easy acces to it in 5 years? Or will it be in a box somewhere, or sold to a used book store because you just ran out of space?
eBooks are better than dead tree books.
Hmm..The copyright owners want excessive fees
for works which will never earn them another $,
in an economic climate drier than the Sahara ?
The conversion cost is ~ $9999, so the minimum
cost x copies sold to show a profit is ?
The demand is inadequate, for a piece of one’s past, with the bonus of propagating it into the future before it is lost forever ?
There is no Patron out there, willing to fund
conversions for one reason or another ?
Inquiring minds want to know: What would it cost
to put the entire historical run of Astounding
Stories, later Analog, on the Web in the public
domain ?
How about the works of H. Beam Piper ?
I’ve been reading etext on smart phones and PDA’s for over a decade and I’m going to also plug Baen Book’s model. They don’t assume their customers are thieves and sell their ebooks for roughly the price of a paperback.
I’ve blogged about ebooks & e-readers in the past (http://urbintechnology.com/category/etext-reader/) and researched and wrote a paper on electronic publishing for a graduate strategic management class.
The book publishers have been been given the “Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt” pitch in four part harmony about digital formatted material by the RIAA.
The RIAA wants the book publishers to forget the fact that overall music sales are up, despite the sales of physical optical discs containing digital music are down.
There is also the logistical factor in e-books. Printing books in large enough qualities to take advantage of economy of scale is expensive. Shipping the books to bookstores is expensive. Amazon having to warehouse books before shipping them costs money. Buying back books that don’t sell costs money (a practice left over from the Depression of the 1930s).
Any book you submit to a printer these days is submitted in a digital format. So you have your e-book already embedded in the cost of the dead tree format publishing costs. A web-based store front is a cookie cutter operation that you are going probably outsource anyway. The cost of the servers and software is a fixed cost. The variable cost for each sale is a small amount of bandwidth and cost of processing the credit card sale.
So I want to buy the latest John Ringo book. I can get a dead-tree format hardcover from Amazon. List price is $25, they are selling it for $17-18, plus shipping. Or I can go to the Baen website (http://www.baen.com), pay $6 for the e-book, available in multiple formats, none with DRM. Wanna bet which one of those sales Baen is going to make more money from?
There is a reason why none of Baen’s titles are available through Amazon as an e-text with Amazon’s DRM slapped on it. You can read those books, once you purchase them on the Kindle though.
You’ll be able to read them on the iPad too, using existing bookreader apps. Stanza and Bookshelf for example.
I have a large number of ebooks on my smartphone at all times, because you never know when you’ll suddenly have involuntary free time. (Granted that nowadays, I’m more likely to go web-exploring from instapundit or drudge, but I’ve had the always-available ebook stockpile since ~ 1997 when it was just a PDA, and there are times when signal strength is terrible or interfered-with.)
Large numbers of these are from Project Gutenberg, but I also have had countless freely-web-available PDFs and how-to-guides. But for fiction, I’ve frequently bought the dead-tree version and immediately downloaded the OCR’d version, because reading on my PDA was simply _better_.
+ I can read on it anywhere, anytime, non-disruptively
+ I have a variety of books with me without extra weight/bulk
+ I can grab lines and copy over to my great-quotes file
+ I can read in total darkness (red letters on black background) without eyestrain or keep-me-awake-lighting
+ I can read without disrupting my wife
+ I can set the reader to auto-smooth-scroll at whatever speed
+ because of that, I can read hands-free (I built a PDA-holder from a dead 2-segment arm-lamp)
+ because of that, I can trivially fall asleep reading (holding, turning, posture, put-away generally kept me awake extra long reading on paper)
+ I read without knowing where in the book I am at, so I can’t tell if I’m 5% or 55% from the ending (I turn off the progress-bar and wrote a program to amputate the page-numbers, an impossibility for physical books) (unless it’s Harry Potter and you know the year is ending)
- problem: fake Harry Potter ebooks that were as long and complicated as the real thing, substantially mimicing her style. I had to check versus my real copies to see which was real.
- there are OCR error-rates of perhaps 1/1000 words with a mangled character, often spall-chequed inn too engrish. Rarely is it not instantly obvious from context.
- there’s an interesting after-effect from auto-scrolling in bright-daylight black-on-white-screens where after reading for hours, if I switch to my todo-list (also BW) (but not a color screen) my brain starts perceiving the stationary as auto-scrolling when it is clearly not. This clears up after less than a minute, but it is amusing while it’s happening.
I *like* the ebook-reader program I use now and will gladly pay for no-DRM text-files that I can put into the format that it uses (but the not-Baen publishers are clearly terrified of the torrenting vulnerability) (I actually wrote a linux (perl) program to aid in the conversions, stripping off disruptive page-numbers and per-page author-title-header-lines and re-flowing the line-breaks to one-newline-per-paragraph)
Kentucky (#13), I don’t follow the part about online rights. If they’re separate from other rights, then either the authors still have them, or else someone else does–in which case Amazon could negotiate with them. Clearly I’m missing something…
David (#24):
I guess we won’t see any of these for sale on Amazon Marketplace, eh?
Here’s my take on ebooks as a tech industry computer monkey and fellow book junkie*.
I prefer to be able to hold my book, to leaf through the pages, to be able to pick it up and read it without having to power it on.
BUT I do, very occasionally, read electronic version of books. For a while I had a nice Baen addiction going, buying electronic version of the new John Ringo releases. However, I really only read them when I’m on my PC.
I don’t see myself ever shelling out hundreds of dollars for a device to allow me to spend still more money to read books that I don’t physically own. There are other gadgets I’d rather own and other, real books that I can put on the shelf in my library.
Mark Andrew Edwards
* I think bibliophile is a better term. Book junkie makes me sound too much like a supporting character from Trainspotting. Only with books, not heroin stuffed down my pants.
Lee Goldberg, a TV producer and author of the “Diagnosis: Murder” and “Monk” tie-in novels, has written about his Kindle sales. His latest one includes royalty figures.
Take away: It’s found money if you’re books are gathering dust on a shelf.
http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2010/02/you-can-become-a-kindle-millionaire-part-12.html
This is one of the killer-apps for iBook, if I may be so opinionated as to declare. I’ve been digging around a little bit, and can’t say too much because of NDAs, but I’m of the strong opinion that truly interactive, multimedia texts that are mobile are going to take the world by storm. College textbook publishers should be all over this. I’ve read of at least a couple already that are working on converting wholesale. But that’s just the first generation, where already existing texts will be pretty much copy-n-pasted, with little interactivity built in. But as new books come out, and next editions of popular texts start to go through their internal publication process, someone’d better be thinking waaaay outside the box as far as what’s possible.
History books are a great example. Think about what you can do with mathematics and science. What about music texts, where you can have the audio to accompany the theory (Garageband lessons writ large)? Rhetoric? The sky’s the limit, as far as I’m concerned.
I think a lot of people are missing the revolution that is coming with iBook. And Amazon’s in real danger with the Kindle.
True dat, right down to missing the funky, musty smelling, hippie infested used bookstore that doesn’t mind me bringing a coffee in and sitting on the floor and taking the expensive old books for a test read. You break it you bought it of course.
Lee Goldberg’s comments on Kindle sales are interesting. Note that he is setting the price and can adjust it pretty much at will in order to drive sales.
Here is another aspect of that. Authors often list their own books for sale at Amazon on their websites. The amount they make from the sale through the Amazon Associates program is often more than they make on royalties from the sale of the book.
Amazon doesn’t pay any associate fees on Kindle e-book “sales.” I agree with the earlier post that you don’t actually “purchase” e-books from Amazon, you are buying a licensing agreement that grants you limited access to the e-book under restrictive requirements, including DRM. (http://urbin.net/blog/?p=579)
As I said last July:
“Amazon, and publishing companies, need to recognize that they make most of their money off avid readers who are willing to spend money to support their favorite authors. Their fear driven reaction to the fear mongering of the RIAA is pushing them toward a business model that is hostile toward their best customers. They would better serve their customers, and their stockholders, by working with the customer instead of treating them like criminals.”
(http://urbin.net/blog/?p=706)
Part of what Stephen is saying is that publishers seem to be missing the fact that eBooks evade the “First Sale Doctrine” entirely. eBooks are licensed, not sold, and so that permits publishers using DRM to keep people from trading, lending etc., their eBooks to one another. Thereby capturing more revenue, and justifying even more the investment in returning out of print catalog to eBook form.
I think there’s a third option that hasn’t been discussed: digitally printing books. Coming soon to a brick-n-mortar bookstore near you. It takes about 2 minutes to print a book and cover from scratch, about another minute to bind them together.
The upside on paper is it doesn’t get lost if the book is dropped hard, doesn’t get erased when you fill the memory on your reader and need to clear space for a new book and such. Paper books give a nice feel of permanence while buying ebooks make them feel rather more disposable.
On the other hand, you can fit quite a number of books on your reader (I use Mobipocket for the CrackBerry), so I’ll just keep embracing the modern and the traditional.
One off printing is still much more expensive than bulk printing. Paperbacks at hardcover prices. This still is “worst of both worlds” solution. No economy of scale for the printing and a very high variable cost per book.
I understand POD is more expensive than mass production; I accept that upcharge for buying a new copy of a book that can’t otherwise be acquired new.
The cost of conversion at about $1/page is an interesting wrinkle, though I don’t think it needs to be that high. OCR scanning has come incredibly far since the ’90s, and I daresay you could probably put together good software for picking up formatting cues like centered lines, margins, etc. If more material was in the public domain (you can thank our dysfunctional copyright system for that), I wouldn’t be surprised to see an open-source program being developed to convert scanned pages to a digital-friendly format. Such a program, if available to all publishers, would drop the cost of conversion down significantly and leave proofreading as the only major obstacle. I actually found much worse conversion prices online (one company charging $20+$2/page for completely unstyled conversion of a trade book), which suggests that there’s significant room to improve on the prices of this industry which seems destined to grow.
I agree with the point made by many of the commenters here: it can’t be that difficult to refine and improve the software needed to make more of publishers’ backlists available online – after which, as you point out, the cost for each additional ebook sold would be 0. If those were sold online, even at a reduced price point of a few dollars, it’s money for authors and publishers to share, and it’s a new opportunity to reach more readers. For the life of me, I can’t see a downside.