E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122403326.html

17 22 17 years ago

The publishers are going to lose this one, and probably disappear as an industry. They truly have no leverage. What can they offer to authors? Editors? "I'll hire one", says the author. Advertising? "You make me pay for that anyway", says the author, "and there's the web, and without paper and the associated payola, advertising will be much cheaper." The sensual experience of a physical book? "That doesn't put food on my table", says the author.

motters3• 17 years ago

I imagine the way that it might work in future is that the author registers their new book with Google or Amazon (or some other similar company acting as a distributor), and they then make the book searchable and downloadable by readers. The author selects what price they want to charge, with some percentage going to the distribution company. The distribution fee might vary depending upon whether the author decides to opt for additional promotion/advertising, or just do that side of things themselves on their own web site, or via their own social network. Authors retain copyright on their works, and can at any time cancel an account with a distributor and go to a new one.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

Hopefully the model you envision is what happens to all media, like music and (albeit much later) TV and movies.

JulianMorrison5• 17 years ago

I think any big-name distributor would want at minimum some sort of fixed term contract. Or else, the author could pull their book (or series) to a private site (and pocket 100%) the moment it took off.

Amazon and friends do have something to offer: eyeballs, and their good name. So they can negotiate.

I think you'll see newbies entering through what used to be called "vanity publishing" via Lulu etc, getting picked as a rising talent by reviewers, getting in the press, and finally being offered a contract by Amazon. This latter will become the equivalent of the old status of "published author".

xcombinator• 17 years ago

I never understood what sensual pleasure a physical book gives you, and I'm a big big reader of books.

It could be that I have no psychological anchors like your grandfather gift, your lovers notes and so on some people have. Some people love sniffing the glue and the ink chemicals too.

Quite the contrary, I love books content, not continent.

I hate having to "break" a book for reading it because otherwise you won't have uniform lighting on the page, in fact you never have in a book.

I hate having to sustain the weight of a big novel.

I hate having to wash my hands because it gets dirty with the poisonous ink.

I hate having to carry around tons of books when I move.

I hate not being able to change the font size or the format in shorter lines so I could speed read it better.

So I started digitalizing my library long ago, and I'm not going back, I'm not the only one.

I met a man 10 years ago that had 1000 digitalized books library, I remember being socked when he showed me. Now more and more people are doing that and is quite normal to see.

JulianMorrison5• 17 years ago

Yeah. I personally have nothing against paper books - except they are heavy and waste space. And when you think about it, you're holding what amounts to a 5mb data file (with multiple immutable passive display screens) and it's about twice the physical volume of a 500gb hard drive and doesn't mass much less. Wildly inefficient! A micro-SD card the size of your fingernail could store a thousand times as much.

icefox• 17 years ago

If I can not re-sell my ebook I wont buy it. If an ebook comes with DRM I wont buy it. Period.

stse• 17 years ago

Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books. Publishers also have extensive back catalogs. So even if a distributor (like amazon) started to provide the same services, they would have to compete with the publishers as they, as a distributer, would need the publishers back catalogs.

fburnaby• 17 years ago

>>Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books.

I'm cheaper than an existing publisher if the author is willing to go digital only. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity for small publishers to make a comeback...

cabalamat• 17 years ago

> What can [publishers] offer to authors?

Funnily enough, I was talking to an author in the pub tonight. He was saying that he likes having a publisher because he doesn't have to do the editing, advertising, publicity, etc.

diego_moita• 17 years ago

If the Kindle succeeds on grabbing the e-book market then the leverage is all in Amazon's hands.

If we end with no other ways of handling the book to the reader, Amazon might get too close to a monopoly in the book market.

JulianMorrison5• 17 years ago

Here in the UK, all the momentum I've seen is with the low end readers, Sony PRS-300 and similar.

sown• 17 years ago

I wonder if anyone has thought about doing a typesetting/proof reading service for self-publishing authors but no marketing

JulianMorrison5• 17 years ago

Ebooks are "typeset" in the e-reader. Formats are necessarily reflowable.

Calamitous2• 17 years ago

Proofing and editing the content would still be a valuable service, but I don't know if you'd be able to get authors to pay a sustainable amount for such a service.

motters3• 17 years ago

The other issue surrounding electronic publishing besides the cost is the DRM issue. I should be able to transfer electronic books between devices without restriction and without the possibility for some remote company or organisation to delete purchased content from my reader.

I imagine that book publishers will eventually become what iTunes is to music, but like the music industry they may have to go through a painful period of denial, loss of old business models and restructuring. Google are also paving the way for the future of publishing with their books service. It seems likely that before long in addition to merely previewing a few chapters on Google there will also be some convenient mechanism to purchase and download the entire book to a reader device.

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

Personally I would rather use a ebook reader as target practice for taking a squat than ever read a book on one, however that's personal preference and is a world from an equitable arrangement on digital publishing rights.

Authors have the ability to score a 50/50 revenue share on digital publications and make it a standard, which would be a phenomenal step in bringing fair payment to writers. It would put a writer five times further ahead than any artist selling on itunes, who's lucky to get 10 cents for a sale.

The reality here is that publishers are trying to take a cut of a pie that doesn't belong to them. I legally own digital publication rights to all my works, unless expressly stated in a contract that I'm signing them over, in most backlist publications those rights were never even considered, unless the contract stated the author was selling 'all' rights. The publishers here legally have no right to be interfering, and so far (quite rightly) appear to be losing the battle. If authors switch to fully digital publication to get a decent revenue share, as a writer myself I'll have to back them and, perhaps I'll have to pick an ebook reader off the floor and try to keep my pants on, because as a reader I want quality works and they're only going to appear if authors can continue to make a living. If the publishers get their way and cut the profit the authors can receive, then we might as well abandon all hope of another literary masterpiece.

Calamitous2• 17 years ago

Overall I worry that all this squabbling is just accelerating the shrinkage of an already diminishing market. I realize that the e-reader format is ideal for technical works, but what about fiction?

Does anybody outside of us old fuddy-duds just read for fun any more?

harisenbon• 17 years ago

As someone who has just finished reading the entire Discworld series on my Kindle, I would like to say that while e-books on a screen are more suited towards technical documents and "look them ups," any e-ink reader is just as good as, if not better than the paper version.

People are constantly surprised at how paper-like the screen is, and I've never noticed any eye strain or fatigue, even after reading my kindle for hours.

I would seriously recommend checking out an e-ink based reader if you want to try some fiction reading. Then head over to project Gutenberg for a metric load of free, public, e-books.

cstross• 17 years ago

Readers want books that are plentiful and cheap, publishers want to preserve their profit, and authors want a larger share of revenue.

What this article misses out entirely is the distribution chain.

Publishers aren't distributors. Amazon is a distributor and a retailer rolled into one. Ingram is a distributor. The other wholesalers are distributors.

The distributors take 70% of the gross revenue from a book, leaving 30% to split between authors and publishers. The reason the publishers are defending their margins is that Amazon are trying to increase the already-silly 70% cut that they're taking (by combining the retail and wholesale distribution stages into one entity). Amazon are also trying to bootstrap ebooks by cutting prices, and they don't want to run the whole process out of their own pocket. So the squeeze is on.

The smart publishers would be setting up ebook storefronts and selling direct to the public -- establishing their own distribution arm, in other words. But they're not used to thinking in those terms (if anything, they've been moving in the opposite direction for decades, shedding direct sales forces and outsourcing printing and low-level production work like typesetting).

E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry

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