E-books, retail, publishing: One More Time
[This started out as an editorial to the lead story for this week’s Geek Biz Report; about 10 paragraphs in, I realized this would be it’s own column.]
So, the news: Borders gets it’s sh!t together, investors shrug: stock price goes up a whole 10¢
[editorial]
here’s the breakdown: Borders isn’t going out of business. Yet. So, there’s that. Invest if you want to.
But: no matter who throws money at Borders or what kind of wet dreams they have about a Borders/B&N merger to form The One True Book Retailer, it’s still not going to happen. If you buy Borders & think BGP can buy out BKS — hell, if you have that kind of money you could rebuild Borders from scratch. And B&N isn’t shopping right now, so a BKS x BGP merger is even less likely. In fact, B&N is still busy digesting the College division, launching a digital division, and generally flopping around – waiting for someone to tell them what the e-book answer is.
There is no e-book answer. There wasn’t an e-book question.
& Just because Amazon shows up late and comes up with a half-assed, proprietary approach to a “problem” which already had a solution, thanks and manages to dupe people into buying yet another device (no matter how spiffy) doesn’t change the fact that e-books aren’t any newer than a paperback. Books are books.
oooo… there’s a new format and a new business model and Publishing Will Be Changed Forever! — yeah, yeah, whatevs. Check that wikipedia article I just linked to on ‘paperbacks’: 75 years ago there was a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper.
That’s about all that happened.
yeah, there was some business stuff, and book retail moved out of stuffy, out-of-the-way bookshops and into the mainstream. This is the embarrassment of riches you currently enjoy: some shops closed but nationwide mall chains, followed by the major big-box retail booksellers, arose from that mess and these days you can drive 5 miles to buy a book, just about any book, today — or, upon asking, have it in a scant 100 hours – so long as a copy of the book still exists somewhere on the market.
That is what’s amazing, if you ask me.
Books are still being published; hardcover books are still being published. “But, but, why would anyone pay $27 for a hardcover when they can get it as a $15 paperback?” Good damn question. The answer, of course, is that publishers introduce artificial scarcity: the paperback isn’t available yet. Buy it for $27, or wait a year.
Why this isn’t applied to e-books, right now and retroactively, is a mystery to me. Just tell Amazon No. Tell ‘em to sit down, shut up, and go sit in the corner. Amazon is a parasite; gaming the system for their own profit. Amazon is perfectly within their rights to do so: there is no law that says you can’t take advantage of a decades-old multi-tiered distribution system designed for nationwide retail sales, lay down some internets on it and squeeze it for profits. But, Dear Amazon, there is also no law that requires publishers to gamely take a reaming up a nether orifice just because you have some market share that you’ve had for a couple of years now and that you think is yours by right and into perpetuity:
Amazon, What do you do when they say ‘no’? When e-books are fully integrated into the system, what makes you think you’ll have access to all titles, all the time? — what, just because you’re Amazon? Hubris, much?
##
There are a number of readers—the true book lovers—who actively follow new releases and published reviews and favourite authors, and this number is proportional to the overall population (and so is growing slowly, along with population) but is for all intents and purposes static. Only so many readers.
The publishers, so long as they were in control, knew and pwned this market. First the hardcover, for the critics and libraries and collectors, and then the paperbacks for book clubs and the mass market. And this works: not every book merits a paperback reprint, and the reception of the hardcover informs the way the book is released (and occasionally re-introduced) in paperback formats. There are the book awards. There’s the occasional ‘break-out’ title. For the most part, it’s a meritocratic system (once one makes it over the curb—the steep curb—into actual publication) — the market decides the bestsellers, those worthy of paperback reprints and eventual acceptance into either heavy-bookclub-rotation or inclusion on school reading lists.
Parallel to the ‘literary’ track: some books go direct to paperback, skipping the hardcover release because it’ll do better as a ‘pulp’ anyway. 99% of Harlequin releases are pulp paperbacks — 110 new titles a month, shipping world-wide — so there is already another publishing model out there, past Amazon’s wet dream of ‘all e-book, all the time’ and the traditional publishing most of us are used to.
If Amazon were smart (and not just big and full of themselves) instead of attacking and emulating all of a clunky, internally inconsistent, and thorny publishing market as a whole — they’d just buy Harlequin: built-in catalog, built-in subscriber base—who are more interested in reading stories and not so much the book-as-artefact—and an established content-producing-engine that churns out 200pg books by the metric tonne yearly. Take out printing costs and the $3.99 e-book is handily the successor to the $5.99 pulp paperback and you don’t have to pretend you’re anything you’re not — and you’ve also bettered your strong conviction of $10 as an e-book price point by better than half.
It’s not that $10 is a bad price, or the wrong price — but it shouldn’t and honestly can’t be applied to all books, willy-nilly, just because you’d like it that way, Mr. Bezos. Books aren’t widgets. Books aren’t “content”, at least not in the internet-sense where content can be produced by skimming web-bots or tricking your users into writing ‘reviews’ for you.
Books are books, and books are special. If there is anything I hate ([gollum]hates hates hates it, Bagginses[/gollum]) it’s this idea that books are just another thing, to be bought, traded, commoditized, digitized, and sold sold sold.
Sure, e-books seem new, special, different — but they’re not so different. We’re actually arguing about the container, merely the outer wrapper —
iPad, iPhone, Kindle, ePub, PDF or just plain text: whatever the platform or filename, what’s inside is still a Book. This isn’t even a technological problem, just a cognitive one: how often do I have to repeat myself? Books are Books and almost by definition, books are not the internet.
##
Publishing is a dynamic business. Right up until the 1990s, in fact, there were precious few publishers who’d been in the game for a whole century; it was all 1890s and aughts & 1910s & 20s & 30s. Publishing as a whole (going to the etymological roots of ‘publish’: the act of making things public) is an extension of centuries and millennia of writing, printing, and culture — but the actual business units (as are currently extant) all seemed to spawn in a 50 year period prior to 1939. Someone with better academic chops than I should take that particular nugget and run with it; there’s a doctoral thesis right there just waiting to be written. And while a lot of brand-names are the same, actual ownership and management is not
Ownership has changed hands several times over, and many new publishers entered the field, and there was a time when no Major Media Conglomerate felt quite right unless and until they ate a major publishing house — consider Random House and it’s maze of imprints: many represent former competitors (Anchor, Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon) gobbled up over decades, and Random House as a whole was bought by the privately-held Bertelsmann group in 1996. This is a different business than it was 70 years ago; it’s big business. *Really* Big Business. And yet, there were no economies of scale to had in consolidation. The book business still hangs on by it’s fingernails, hoping for that next bestseller to pay for years of debut novels and careful editorial wagers — good books, all, for the most part, but break-even publishing at best.
The amazing thing: no one knows what’ll be that next breakout title. You, as an editor, pick books you like, you help the author polish her work, tighten it up, and then you release it into the wilds of the book market and see how it fares (while marketing the hell out of it). Sometimes, you get a Da Vinci Code or The Help. Sometimes, you sell just enough to break even. Most often, the book doesn’t even pay off it’s advance, particularly for a first novel. For years, decades, publishers didn’t sweat it; so long as the enterprise as a whole broke even year-to-year, great: keep going. A surprise bestseller would fund a publisher for a couple of years, a new opportunity to find new authors—deserving authors—and maybe, just maybe, the next surprise bestseller.
So long as the people making books also love books this system not only works it produces real gems – not the Da Vinci Code, but the smaller, exceptional titles that people love & that sell well, but fly just under the New York Times magical top 15.
Amazon hasn’t done their homework: they want to destroy the publishing business but haven’t thought about what the publishing industry is or does. Sure, you can look at King, Patterson, Steel, & Roberts, and say, “Hell, these guys don’t need a publisher… we’ll sell the manuscripts direct to the public as a digital file—no publishing costs—and share the profits and abandon the printed page for good!”
Sure, for an author that has a built-in fan base…
But how do we discover new books, new voices? And do you even know what editors do? It’s not just proofreading, I’ll tell you that.
Books are not files. Books are not widgets. Books are experiences, better than Hollywood, better than cable TV, sometimes better than real life.
And to succeed at publishing, or at book retail, One Must Love Books. Whole-heartedly, and with all our intellect and soul. Amazon can beat me on price, but Amazon can not create new readers. Amazon can index the entirety of the backlist, and the well-known names, and bestsellers — but Amazon does not put new books into the hands of customers, Amazon does not foster discovery and conversations, Amazon does not sell books. Amazon cannot put a book into the hands of a 5 year-old; Amazon can’t read that book to a child. If Amazon succeeds at supplanting book retail, they’ll also severely damage their own customer base, perhaps permanently. People turn to Amazon last, after talking to a friend or reading a review or following a link on a blog — or after going into a store. Amazon delivers the world to your doorstep, but can’t sell anything. Selling is a personal interaction; sales is a skill. Sales happens person-to-person, millions of times a day.
At the bookstore: We sell books — Amazon is merely an overgrown warehouse, a delivery system that ships the books after the hard job of selling the book is done. And like all parasites, Amazon is the only one that benefits, at the expense of the host.
When the host dies, what will Amazon do? And after Amazon kills off both book retailers and book publishers, then who the eff is actually still making the books?
Is this a good thing? I can publish to the internet right now, skipping retail, publisher, and Amazon: why do I need Amazon? Do they provide editors, or marketing? [editorial and marketing cost money] Do they put my book on shelves in stores, to be discovered by browsing readers? [Amazon has no brick-and-mortar storefront, let alone multiple storefronts, and e-books are hard to shelve in libraries] Does Amazon do anything, besides list the book, with a page & a search engine, and a “buy” link?
I can set up my own page, my own ‘buy now’ button. And there are at least three major search engines out there that not only index the web, but also occasionally are the best way to find something on Amazon.
Amazon does nothing that I can’t do myself. Heck, I could even print and ship physical copies of the book myself: Ask Howard how well self-publishing works.
##
E-books are new, and the future is uncertain. But, 75 years ago there was also a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper. And that’s exactly where we’ll be, 10 years from now. I don’t know how Amazon will cope, but if they want to provide books (either as a retailer or publisher) then they need to study the system they’re breaking, and spend the time, money, and effort to replace it.
If they don’t, we will, and we won’t need Amazon to do it.
[/editorial]
I certainly bow to the amount of research you’ve done, but I think that you may have hit on the most important point without realizing it: If Amazon AND Publishers aren’t careful, they’re just going to get cut out of the mix.
Now, does that mean we’ll have thousands of bad books out there that people will be reading because there’s no editor? Sure.
But at the same time, some will set themselves up as content hubs that have a trusted name. If you’re a big fan of Stephen King, and he promotes, say, 10 authors and gets a small cut on the book sale, those people are going to end up getting a better shot at selling.
So where I think we’re headed is that there will be a few, smaller publishing houses that charge more for paper books for people who want them. There will be fewer books that millions read and more books that thousands read. There will be a lot of books read electronically, and some (like me), will collect those books and show them off much like a Photobucket account. Others will find reading the disposable act they already do.
In the end, we’ll lose out on some great talent that the old system would have provided. But I just can’t see how in the long run, a publisher can keep trying to use the old model when content distribution is, for better or worse, irrevocably changed.
Sometime, I’m going to write something longer on these shell of an idea.
Comment by Rob McMonigal — 7 June 2010, 15:49 #
One interesting thing I’ll note is how quickly the Internet spoiled me to all other forms of consumption — especially in the field of books.
Fifteen years ago I’d remember driving to a half-dozen bookstores hoping to luck into a specific book I was looking for. Some used books I literally went decades trying to find.
But with Amazon, eBay, et. al., I can go from “I remember this book I saw when I was nine” to having it shipped to me in 10 minutes. A few days later and I have it in my hands.
I wonder how this time compression will spill into ebooks. I suspect, as they become more common, the ability to go in a few seconds from “I want to read the latest cats-in-space book” to reading it — even at 2:00 a.m. — may result in the end of many trips to the bookstore.
Comment by Steven Marsh — 8 June 2010, 04:33 #
“If Amazon were smart (and not just big and full of themselves) instead of attacking and emulating all of a clunky, internally inconsistent, and thorny publishing market as a whole — they’d just buy Harlequin: built-in catalog, built-in subscriber base—who are more interested in reading stories and not so much the book-as-artefact—and an established content-producing-engine that churns out 200pg books by the metric tonne yearly. Take out printing costs and the $3.99 e-book is handily the successor to the $5.99 pulp paperback and you don’t have to pretend you’re anything you’re not — and you’ve also bettered your strong conviction of $10 as an e-book price point by better than half.”
I’ve got to point out that if you look at Amazon’s bestseller list for the Romance category, there are a huge proportion of Kindle versions; I count 76 Kindle books in the top 100 as of this hour, and of the 24 “real” books about half are pre-orders. This also holds to a lesser extent with the other “genre fiction” categories. There clearly is an audience of people who are “more interested in reading stories and not so much the book-as-artifact” and will happily do so on a screen when the option is available.
Amazon offers Kindle applications for non-Kindle hardware (especially plain old computers), which I’m convinced gives them a big legs-up in the e-book competition, but the fact that they’ve got a familiar interface and an existing (and pretty large) infrastructure of reviews and recommendations to sell the e-versions with is almost certainly a part of it.
And I think you underestimate the degree to which Amazon tries (and frequently succeeds) to sell you stuff; once you’ve bought, or even looked at, anything at all there’s a constant prodding with “customers who bought this also purchased” and “you might also like” and “recommended for you” offers that are sometimes glaringly misguided but sometimes do suggest something interesting enough to spark further purchases.
Comment by JRB — 8 June 2010, 19:12 #