Entries tagged with “print books” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Publishers: Let the Containers Go
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:
Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."
Open Question: Do You Re-Read Books?
Mac Slocum
September 8, 2008
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Proponents on both sides of the ebook debate point to the archival/re-read nature of their chosen format, but I'm curious to see if re-reading is a common activity or one of those things we'd all like to do but can't find the time. Here's a few questions toward that end:
- Do you re-read books?
- If yes, how often? (i.e. You re-read 1-2 titles per year.)
- Which titles or genres do you re-read?
- Does a book's format -- print or digital -- make you more or less inclined to re-read a title?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot?
Andrew Savikas
August 12, 2008
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A recent post from Adam Hodgkin over at the Exact Editions blog on book pricing kicked off a great thread on Peter Brantley's Reading 2.0 list. (Pricing also popped up quite quickly in the comments thread around our recent ebook pilot.) Adam argues that deriving digital prices from print ones is the wrong way to go:
At this stage in the development of the ebook market, book publishers who think about digital pricing tend to work back from the print price, to find a satisfactory, ebook price at 50% or 60% or X% of the list price of the print work (think of £195 annual subscription as the mortgage payment on a book -- I bet that is the way OUP fixed their subscription price). It will take a bit of time before publishers and marketers realise that the cost of production, in the sense of 'unit cost', has no conceivable bearing on the digital pricing, whether for outright sale or for an annual subscription. The chances are that in the medium term ebook prices will migrate to some more or less fixed pricing levels: $2.99, $4.99, $9.99, perhaps $19.99. Simplicity will be a virtue and digital books will be seen as having some natural price points (cf CDs or DVDs).
Mike Shatzkin followed up with his own insights:
This triggers a few thoughts about ebook pricing which are neither conclusive nor particularly consistent.
Ebook pricing for IP that is sold in single-title print book form (i.e.stand-alone trade and professional books) will inevitably refer to the unit cost of manufacturing the print book. Since that was a component of the print book price, it becomes a factor in the publisher's formulation of the ebook price. Why?
Because the author and the retailers will expect it to be that way and anything that fails expectations results in friction, contentious conversation with important trading partners a publisher would prefer to avoid.
Amazon is doing their best to break this linkage by having seized control of Kindle book pricing in ways that only they can. (It is highly unlikely that Sony would see value in selling a book below cost in order to establish a $9.99 pricing standard, as Amazon has done.) So far, publishers have not been forced to alter their pricing to Amazon to make wholesale prices conform to that retail price.
There is a "Soapbox" piece in this week's PW -- not available online as far as I can tell -- by superagent Andrew Wylie advocating (with flawed facts and flawed logic, in my opinion) that ebook retail prices should be the same as printed book retail prices and that the author's royalty should go up to 22.5% on the ebook. That's the author expectation I was referring to earlier, expressed by a powerful agent.
Wylie's argument is that if ebooks are cheaper than the corresponding print book, printed books will be abandoned and publishers will then and therefore no longer be necessary.
There is actually an analogy between Kindle pricing and book club pricing. Publishers told retailers for generations not to worry about lower prices offered by book clubs, because club membership (the obligations...) created a hurdle that left most book readers out and the PR generated by the clubs were a catalyst to sales elsewhere. Similarly, Kindle pricing is only available (useful) to people who plunked down their $349 or $399 for the Kindle, which relatively few people have done. So the Kindle pricing shouldn't affect the printed book pricing. In fact, with overall sales levels still having trouble cracking 1% of the total, NO ebook pricing should have much impact on printed book pricing. Yet. Despite the concerns of retailers and authors.
We are many experiments away from settling this question, which is a moving target. What makes sense when ebooks are 1% of the market may not when they are 10%, or 30% (and we'll be working our way up to those levels for a VERY long time.)
Bill Janssen, who addressed this recently in a post of his own, then weighed in:
Excellent point.
But there are many facets to this. It's interesting that many booksellers for the iPhone (well, eReader, Stanza) are essentially repeating what they did with the Palm, by distributing an app that is both a bookstore and a reader. The books are hidden behind the retailer's icon. Is that the best idea? Would authors prefer their books to be "first-class" apps? That is, the book would have its own icon on the iPhone "desktop"? Perhaps the app would have links of some sort to other works by the same author? Author branding instead of publisher/distributor branding?
I still feel that there's a powerful economic pressure for more disintermediation here...
But i2s' Alain Pierrot isn't quite ready for publishers to step aside:
I'd hate having the narrow space of any of my mobile devices clogged by a dozen or more 'disintermediated' author's egoes...
Which doesn't mean either that I'm not a faithful 'fan' of individual authors. (I used to buy anything Julio Cortázar would issue and wait for the next...) But I do appreciate branding from a publisher as the good mix between time saving, quality warranty (whatever this can mean for each individual) and serendipity: obviously, some readers used to make a safe and fast bet when they bought latin american litterature from Gallimard's "La Croix du sud" collection without having been introduced to such or such an author.
Author branding might be a very short-sighted fantasm, nearer last century's most silly situations such as Enver Hodja's control of Albania's publishing, than any realistic situation where a brand offers good value to save time and attention.
Pricing also popped up in the comments thread around our recent ebooks pilot, including this one:
It seems to me though that your attempts to price "at a discount" from print books are misguided at best and silly at worst.
You need to start thinking in terms of "at an increment" from ZERO. The web is a huge place and offers amazing content for free. You would be wise to consider how much EXTRA you want to make from your existing paper publishing business. If you were only publishing digitally then I do agree that you need to take the discount approach.
I'll add that within our own Safari Books Online (our joint venture with Pearson), subscription pricing is not directly related to print prices, though the formula for paying out royalties to publishers does include the book's MSRP.
A lot of people are trying to figure out where prices are headed for digital book content, and to date there's not much consensus (among publishers or among customers). Add your own thoughts in the comments section -- what do you think?
What if Ebooks Were the Dominant Platform?
Mac Slocum
August 5, 2008
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I recently came across an old blog post from Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee that discusses the utility of the "technology flip test". McAfee writes:
At a conference years back I was sitting on a panel that was asked to talk about future of the book. As the discussion was heating up about the inevitability of the electric media, someone on the panel (I wish it had been me) proposed a flip test. He said "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?" It's fair to say that comment changed the direction of the panel.
The ebook vs paper flip test is intriguing for a number of reasons:
- It inverts the offense and defense: Ebook advocates become defenders and paper-book supporters become disruptors. Shaking off the vestiges of a default argument is always a good idea -- think of it as a "debate cleanser."
- It amplifies the strengths of each format ... initially: When I ran through the flip test on my own, I at first honed in on the cost savings of ebooks (no paper, no printing, no shipping) and the sensory aspects of print books. But further review revealed deeper complexities to this debate. And that led me to ...
- It upends assumptions: Print's dominant position in the real world causes me to challenge pro-print arguments, most notably the tactile experience overreaction that often derails discussions. But placing ebooks in the hot seat gave me a new perspective on ebook defenses. For example, if my default reading environment was electronic and networked, would I want (or need) a disconnected outlet? Would I crave solitude and a languid pace? Does the upside of ebook economics supersede the other reading/storytelling experiences I'm looking for, or would I welcome a print alternative the way I now welcome an electronic option?
What's your take on the flip test? Does inverting the argument open the discussion, or is this a diversionary trick that detracts from the issues at hand? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
(Original idea and McAfee link via Reading 2.0 list.)
Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive
Mac Slocum
July 16, 2008
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Ebook discussions invariably lead to the "tactile experience" counter argument. Many folks love the sensory associations of a printed book, and they'll defend those feelings vociferously -- even when no one is challenging them. The simple suggestion that an ebook could offer functionality beyond the scope of a printed book causes some book lovers to pull up the castle gates and light the moat on fire.
But here's the odd thing: A small group of bleeding edgers believe print's demise is imminent, but in many more instances the people taking a pro-ebook stance are also fans of printed books. They're not looking for printed books to go away, rather, they want to consume content in the best possible format for their particular needs.
I've witnessed a number of lively discussions in which the sensory argument overwhelms a broader analysis of future reading behaviors, and that's where the problem lies. In each case, the print defenders run through the "sensory checklist":
- Reading in bed
- Reading to your children
- Slowing down, sitting down, curling up ...
- Holding, feeling, smelling, experiencing ...
All of these are excellent print book defenses, but each is a counterpoint to debates that were never raised. The bigger conversation -- and something that often gets pushed to the back burner -- is about the reading ecosystem. Print books, ebooks, Web sites, mobile and whatever emerges down the road are merely conduits for content. Unnecessary defense of one format of another obscures the opportunity to customize and improve the reading experience on a title by title and consumer by consumer basis.
Sara Nelson summed up this same idea in a recent column:
... the e-worriers are, I predict, way wrong, just as those who worried that audiobooks would supplant "real" books, and DVDs would demolish cinemas were wrong. Sure, there is some cannibalizing and crossover, but just as there are certain books you would rather listen to than read (and vice versa) and some movies you'll rush to the theater to see, there is room in the world for another way to enjoy written narrative.
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