In a Friday Op-Ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman examines technology and the profitability of the ancillary market for publishing in light of the advancing market share of the ebook.
He cites the the predictions of Esther Dyson, who in 1994 predicted that digital content itself would not be the source of profit for emerging companies; instead, services and support surrounding the content would be the actual revenue-generating aspect of business. Comparing technology and software distrubution to the Grateful Dead business model, in which “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets,” Krugman states that there’s a need for publishing to prepare itself for the coming market change, brought about partially by ebooks and their popularity.
Once again the industry of books and music are compared to one another – which is always a rocking good time, because while they have some finer points in common, among them being structurally bugfuck crazy, the two models are very, very different. However, ancillary market profit might be one of the areas that the two medias come to share. The question is, how?
Music sales from “touring, merchandising, and licensing” are becoming mainstays of band profit as “downloads… steadily undermin[e] record sales.”
So, what about books? BEA was all about eBooks, baby, and ebooks are the new market for books. Touting the Kindle-Aid, Krugman draws a parallel between downloaded music and downloaded, aka pirated, books.
How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.
I wrote recently about the price tag of ebooks but my problem with the price has nothing to do with the comparative $0.00 sale price of ebooks from pirate sites. For one thing, I like good reading and know that snagging a free book means one less byte of good writing for me in the long run. For another, the formatting is often atrocious, the quality crap, and did I mention the immediate satisfaction vs. future quality reading thing? Yeah. Threaten me with the absence of good books from talented authors, and I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll even clean the sink trap (*ew ew ew ew*).
Krugman points out that newspaper attempts to profit by ancillary subscriptions for content they otherwise give away have backfired – and that free vs. subscription prejudice from consumers works both ways. Count me among those who get very ornery when a magazine I subscribe to prevents me from reading that same content I already paid for on the publication’s web site. (Consumer Reports, are your ears burning? The only reason I pay twice is because you’re a non-profit and your recommendations never fail me).
However, with publishing attempts to market books in innovate ways, the free ebook is making many, many consumers happy, and if it’s working appropriately, then one free download that’s professionally sanctioned (and professionally formatted, please, kthxbye) can make a world of difference in creating new fans and new customers of an author’s backlist of product.
But here’s the part that really made me stop and ponder:
Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.
This is the part where I wonder, “Hmm. Do romance readers figure into dire predictions of the death of publishing as we know it?” How many readers here and at other sites swear by paper books, the tactile experience of them, and the pleasure of shopping for them, trading them, borrowing them, and keeping them for rereads?
Books as promotional materials for other activities? I’m confused. I’m still rather startled at the degree to which authors are asked to make themselves in to celebrity representatives for the sales of their own books, and that they allow greater access to themselves for the sake of a voracious readership that wants more, more, more between the issue of each new book.
If you’re a reader like me, you read fast and eagerly, and the finish of one excellent book is a sad event soothed only by the anticipation of the next adventure in a new book, with luck also a good one. Reading is among my very favorite activities (right up there with sleeping, eating pastry, and drinking wine). So whether I’m reading an ebook, or a print book, I’m still after the book, not the promotional reading. I’m a solitary person by nature; I don’t have any desire to sit in a room with other people to listen to my reading. I want to read by myself in the quiet. I’m not after the author and I’m not after the experience of reading-as-interaction. I just want the reading of the book, in any form. And while I do blink at the equal price of ebooks, I still buy the ebook or the paper, because I want to read.
I agree with Krugman that the markets that intend to profit from digital media will have to alter themselves mightily to create new functioning models that account for the sizable difference between pages and bytes. But am I alone in thinking that so long as there are books to be read, there will be folks like me paying for them?
Thanks to SonomaLass for the link.
Roslyn, you can get sheet-feed scanners where you drop a stack of sheets in the hopper, and the machine does the rest. They’re not that massively expensive any more, and at least one of my writer friends has one so he can throw his marked-up proofs into it and get an electronic record of his edits before entrusting the hardcopy to the tender mercies of the post office. (Okay, he’s a geek and so is his editor, but even so…)
Get one of those, take a razor to the spine of a book you’ve finished with, drop the unbound pages in the hopper, and an hour later you’ve got the basis of an ebook to sell on eBay. If the place you work at has one of the machines, you don’t even have to pay for it yourself.
And yes, selling the pirated books is a nice little wheeze that has been around for a long, long time. There was, and probably still is, one guy who infuriated the fanfic community because he was copying free-download fanfic and selling it as ebooks. Ditto with the free original stories you find in various online archives. When I saw the explosion about the fanfic a couple of years ago, I recognised the name, because I’d seen his ads selling original stories and free software some ten years earlier. Though he generally stuck to the stuff that was distributed as freeware, rather than ripping off the authors who had publishers with enough money to hire lawyers.
I think it is, because Ellora’s Cave, for example, does it all the time.
And let me tell you… that was my first experience overpaying for an eBook on Amazon when I could have just gone directly to the Ellora’s Cave website and pay approximately $5 less for the same eBook.
Thanks Jules. I haven’t spent a lot of time researching scanners, mine just came with my printer. I use it very rarely, mainly to put stuff up on my blog.
It makes sense that they would have a super-duper one and it’s incredibly frustrating, I’m not sure what can be done about these people. I just had a thought, I wonder if it would be worth it to publishers to have some type of obliterating watermark built into the paper that renders a page unreadable if it’s copied? I’ve seen similar with stuff like college transcripts and the like. I mean, I’m sure the technology is crazy expensive, but it might be worth it for the really big names in the business. Maybe something similar can be built into the e-books. (Actually, I assumed it was). I’m no techy, but maybe something that keeps it from being copy able.
I guess this is one of those times that being a low-visibility author actually has its benefits! -lol- The demand for my book would presumably be too low to bother. But still, there are already so many barriers in the way of actually making a living in this industry that we really don’t need anything more.
There are other ways of doing it—I’m just describing the one that requires the expenditure of a reasonable amount of money up front or access to someone else’s kit, and the way I might do it if I wanted to go into business selling pirated books rather than just asking for donations “to support my website’s bandwidth”, and I already had access to such a scanner.
But there really are people who will sit there and do it *manually*, essentially as a bragging rights thing. I’ve done it in a legitimate context (getting something into a current-for-the-time electronic format so a long out of print novella could have a new edition without someone having to type it all in again), and it was very tedious, but doable.
Those scanners are, on the other hand, great time-savers if you’re entering stuff to go on Project Gutenberg or the like. The difference for a book like Boswell’s biography of Johnson can be measured in the hundreds of hours.
We get a lot of Canadians visiting and shopping at our bookstore. Can’t say that i blame them.
I did hit my Border’s yesterday. WEB Griffin has a new book. Hubby and I always argue over who gets it first- since I pick it up and pay for it I usually win. THIS time however, he is going to dl it to his ereader so he can take it with him on the road tomorrow. He had no problem whatsoever with me buying the book either. He totally understands the need for me to have a print copy in my hands, and on my shelf.
I do the same with audio books- I love to listen to Stephanie Plums adventures when I am driving long distances. Although I have always wondered what people think when they see me by myself laughing my ass off.
Print will always be around I hope. I love the feel of a book in hand.
I love print books. I will always love print books. But mostly, I just love to read.
As a reader, I will eventually read more e-books, when the devices are cheap and in a format I’m willing to interface with. I don’t want to read on my computer, phone, or blackberry, and I’m not spending $350 on a Kindle. I might spend $49. Maybe. $25 would be a no-brainer decision; I’d buy it in a heartbeat and several dozen books to go with it.
Here’s basic info at Wikipedia about e-books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book
If book publishers choose to publish in e-format only, they would still have all the expenses of acquiring, editing, formatting, distributing, marketing, and selling the e-book, not to mention all the overhead costs (rent, staff, office supplies, etc.). The only expenses that totally go away are the ppb (print, paper, binding) and shipping. And some new expenses take their place including the costs of formatting the text into the various files types that each vendor uses (Kindle, MobiPocket, Sony Reader, etc.) and the costs of storing the files and accompanying metadata.
IMO, e-books will transform the textbook market most radically over the next five to ten years. Imagine carrying a laptop or other device that contained all of your textbooks, chapters, articles, and other required reading, instead of a heavy pile of books. And if you come across a reference in a footnote and want to read that article or book, too? It’s just a couple clicks away.
Late to this discussion.
Imagine losing a laptop with all your textbooks, chapters, articles, and purchased ebooks on it. That have DRM and that you cannot copy onto your thumb drive or otherwise squirrel away a backup for because heaven forbid you re-sold your books to someone after you were done with that class. Imagine going through the bs of trying to get a free replacement copy of each lost e-item. Imagine growing old before that happens.
Now imagine losing a printed book, even a $250 textbook. Now imagine buying a replacement copy. Or borrowing a friend’s.
Resolve the fairness differences in the ownership experience, and you’ll have the key to getting the new technology universally adopted.
What’s DRM?
Just like with my downloaded music files (knock wood and spit on the ground I ever lose my iPod), I have all my eBook files backed up onto an external harddrive, along with all of my other computer files for that matter. I haven’t yet come across an eBook file that I couldn’t backup; IA – shame on the company that doesn’t at least let you do that! (And knock wood and spit on the ground that I ever lose my PowerBook too, for that matter! They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. Stolen, I can see the potential for with greater ease than lose…)