The book publishing industry seems intent on following in the footsteps of the music industry. Back around the turn of the century, the music industry decided it would be a dandy idea to treat their customers like would-be criminals, and to make it expensive and inconvenient to buy and use digital music. Digital music was bound to your devices. Not only could you permanently lose access to music you’d paid for, but it wasn’t even “yours” in the traditional way, since unlike a CD, which you could carry around with you and play wherever you wanted, lend to friends, or sell back to the music store, with DRM you were out the same amount of money, but you were stuck.
It wasn’t until Apple came out with iTunes that the music industry was given a sufficiently violent noogie by Steve Jobs, and finally allowed single tracks to be sold for a reasonable price. And it wasn’t until only a couple of years ago that Amazon and Apple among others forced the music industry to let them sell DRM-free tracks, which (what a shock!) resulted in people buying more of them, for a higher price.
By treating everyone as potential criminals and refusing to let people buy only what they want, the music industry has succeeded in cutting its revenue in half over the past 10 years. They’re down over 6 billion dollars a year, and it’s not because people stopped listening to music or because everyone’s a crook. I’ll bet a lot of people did what I did: bought used CDs for half the price of a new one, ripped the tracks to their computer, then stuffed the CDs in a box in the attic. Most of the time that’s still a lot cheaper than paying $1.29 per track for a download.
But this isn’t about the music industry. It’s about the publishing industry, which is doing its very best to dive off that same cliff, like lemmings in wingtip loafers.
I bought a Kindle a few years ago, with the promise that over time I’d be able to save lots of money on book prices. New releases would be $9.99 and I’d help save the environment and have all that convenience and instant gratification to look forward to.
That was “Bait”.
Now we are well into “Switch”. Most of the books I’m interested in lately have a significantly higher Kindle price than they do a paperback price. That’s not Amazon doing that, it’s the publishers. I was a little shocked the first few times I came across that, since it’s so illogical. They already get higher margins for ebooks from Amazon. Most of the cost of producing and marketing a book has nothing to do with the physical costs of printing and transportation, but it has to cost them something. What gives?
I think I know what it is. They’ve figured out what people are willing to pay for that book, this time. But you know what? People aren’t stupid. Take advantage of them once or twice, and they’re likely to lose any sympathy at all for you.
What publishers have forgotten is that all the same drawbacks exist for a Kindle ebook as existed for the early DRM-protected music, plus one whopper of an extra. You can’t lend them. You can’t sell them back to a used book store. You can’t buy them used, for less money. And unlike music, which you hope you’ll want to listen to over and over, you probably expect to only read an ebook once.
So by pricing the Kindle book higher than the paperback, they are creating an incentive for people to buy the paperback, read it, then sell it to a used book store or lend it to someone else or donate it to the library. Neither the publisher nor the author gets a penny from the resale, and people who buy the used book will not be buying a new one, either ebook or print.
The publishing industry has decided to walk around with a large “kick me” sign taped to their back, and the irony is, they put it there themselves.
Meanwhile, authors are smart, and they’ve figured out that the publishing industry expects them to create their own “platform” these days, in any case. The days of significant advertising for mid-list authors are long, long gone. So why should they hope and pray for the publisher to sell a few thousand books and give them a piddling little royalty, leveraging the author’s own hard work getting the word out, when they can publish it themselves and get the whole price (minus distribution fees)? It’s a trade-off that’s becoming increasingly tilted towards independent publishing.
It’s time for the hard-working editors in the publishing industry to march into the offices of their executives and administer a forceful but potentially industry-saving dope slap.
