Publishers Struggle to Wake Up from the E-Book Nightmare
As seen over at Publishers Weekly: Publishers Struggle to Wake Up from the E-Book Nightmare. An excerpt:
Nat Sobel must be thrilled: Simon & Schuster has announced that it won't release e-book editions until four months after hardcover editions, and Hachette (of which SF powerhouse Orbit is an imprint) has said it will create a similar arrangement. Jane at Dear Author, who I generally trust to have her finger on the pulse of e-book reader opinion, says "Readers who shell out $$ for dedicated ebook reader will not buy the hardcover" and adds, "Eh, at this point, who cares if pubs don't want the digital reader money. I'll still spend it. Just not on their books."
It's generally agreed that romance e-book sales are among the highest of any area of fiction, and in 2008 e-book sales were about 5.6% of all romance book sales, so even if Jane is right and those 5.6% of purchases were made by people who are e-book addicts and will accept no substitutes, S&S and Hachette don't have much reason to care. In other words, this move is really not about people who are already reading e-books; they'll be annoyed by it, but they don't take up enough market share to matter. Rather, this is about discouraging people who read paper books from switching to e-books.
Internet users tend to have a mentality of "I want it now and for (next to) nothing". We'll call this the NNN philosophy. Businesses that cater to it tend to get lots of users and lose lots of money (cf. Twitter and Facebook). Publishers have fewer readers but often manage to make money, because people are used to actually waiting and paying for books. Now that readers are starting to apply the NNN philosphy to books, publishers are pretty much screwed.
So I'm not going to diss publishers for trying to keep books profitable, because it's better for writers and for readers. I just think that they would do better to find ways to profit from e-books, whether through micropayments (a nice solution to e-book piracy: copies are distributed for free or available for purchase at a very low cost, but every time you open one you're asked to send a few dollars to the publisher, from which a royalty goes to the author) or higher pricing or subscription or content licensing or some other scheme not yet discovered. Huddling around paper and trying to wish the digital realm out of existence will do nothing whatsoever to keep book publishing a viable business.
Nat Sobel must be thrilled: Simon & Schuster has announced that it won't release e-book editions until four months after hardcover editions, and Hachette (of which SF powerhouse Orbit is an imprint) has said it will create a similar arrangement. Jane at Dear Author, who I generally trust to have her finger on the pulse of e-book reader opinion, says "Readers who shell out $$ for dedicated ebook reader will not buy the hardcover" and adds, "Eh, at this point, who cares if pubs don't want the digital reader money. I'll still spend it. Just not on their books."
It's generally agreed that romance e-book sales are among the highest of any area of fiction, and in 2008 e-book sales were about 5.6% of all romance book sales, so even if Jane is right and those 5.6% of purchases were made by people who are e-book addicts and will accept no substitutes, S&S and Hachette don't have much reason to care. In other words, this move is really not about people who are already reading e-books; they'll be annoyed by it, but they don't take up enough market share to matter. Rather, this is about discouraging people who read paper books from switching to e-books.
Internet users tend to have a mentality of "I want it now and for (next to) nothing". We'll call this the NNN philosophy. Businesses that cater to it tend to get lots of users and lose lots of money (cf. Twitter and Facebook). Publishers have fewer readers but often manage to make money, because people are used to actually waiting and paying for books. Now that readers are starting to apply the NNN philosphy to books, publishers are pretty much screwed.
So I'm not going to diss publishers for trying to keep books profitable, because it's better for writers and for readers. I just think that they would do better to find ways to profit from e-books, whether through micropayments (a nice solution to e-book piracy: copies are distributed for free or available for purchase at a very low cost, but every time you open one you're asked to send a few dollars to the publisher, from which a royalty goes to the author) or higher pricing or subscription or content licensing or some other scheme not yet discovered. Huddling around paper and trying to wish the digital realm out of existence will do nothing whatsoever to keep book publishing a viable business.
posted by pgenrestories at 8:09 AM
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