A couple weeks ago, in the Telegraph, Adrian Hon announced: “Your time is up, publishers. Book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale.” He conducted an experiment: to see how long it would take to locate an unauthorized e-copy of a book he already owned but didn’t want to lug around. It took him about 60 seconds. Empiricist that I am, I decided to conduct the experiment myself and came up with the same result. In fact, I located thousands of titles, many of them currently hardcovers on display at my local big box book store.
Hon’s point is simple. Publishers have been negotiating ebook prices up (e.g. see this piece from February 2010 in the NYT). At the same time, they balk at the threat of piracy. But the fact is: readers don’t see any value added to warrant the inflated ebook prices. All they see is gouging. The initial response from readers was to game Amazon’s rating system, giving over-priced best-sellers one star ratings and lousy reviews. But the longer-term response is piracy. The solution to this response is to acknowledge piracy as a fact of life that can be moderated by offering readers reasonable prices.
I’m always leery of the word “pirate.” Many people invest the word with moral baggage. But sometimes it’s more helpful to take a pragmatic approach and treat the unauthorized use of digital books as an economic behaviour. Given the low risk associated with file sharing, there is no disincentive to engage in piracy. That leaves only one approach: create incentives to engage in the traditional consumer transaction, the one that involves readers paying money to publishers for the pleasure of a good read. In other words, publishers would be well-advised to frame their strategies in positive terms.
Dumb Ideas:
But first, publishers have got to stop engaging in practices that produce negative responses. For example:
Selling e-books that are already in the public domain is a dumb idea. Once readers discover they can already get the same product for free from the Gutenberg Library, Google Books, or other online resources like epub Books, they’ll resent publishers for it and want to punish them. As I view it, this is a case of publishers exploiting the ignorance of customers for fun and profit and is no less reprehensible than the piracy they protest. So if publishers want to gain public support, they can start by removing public domain titles from their catalogues.
It’s a dumb idea to try persuading readers that all the added value from the traditional publishing work flow (editing, copy-editing, marketing, cover design, etc.) still applies to e-publishing. Whether or not it’s true, readers aren’t listening. The perception is that publishers contribute less, not more, to the value of an e-book. The world of e-publishing is only now cooling from its primordial gasses and it’s still anybody’s guess what life on the new planet will look like. We’ve got these things called xhtml files that get bundled into an epub format along with style sheets and image files, but these are like one-eyed beasts roiling around in prehistoric oceans. And as for book trailers? And generating buzz through social media? Do e-publishers really have any expertise that adds value to the process of getting a writer’s work in front of a reader’s eyes?
It’s dumber than dumb to delay the release of digital books until the hardcover edition has been out already for three or four months. Simon & Schuster tried this earlier in the year. What were they thinking? E-book owners are hardcore readers. They’re the ones most likely to buy books first and to contribute to online reviews/comments. Shutting them out increases the incentive for them to get their e-reading fix elsewhere. Publishers who do this almost deserve to have their wares stolen. It’s like telling the business class travelers they’ll have to wait while the riff raff boards first.
What makes all these ideas dumb is that they end up alienating paying customers.
Less Dumb Ideas:
Stop yakking and add real value. For example, create reading communities, either online or through apps or both that are only available as part of a paid subscription included in the price of a book. Right now, publishers really suck at online community-building. Sell books as apps with additional (extra-textual) features. Get experimental. For example, explore the idea of the transmedia novel. View it as R & D. While writers are good at writing, they haven’t the resources (especially the time resources) to supplement their writing with other media. That’s where a publishing house could make itself really useful. This is nothing new. Writers team up with illustrators all the time. Just expand the range of media that get thrown into the mix.
Reduce prices over time. After a year or so, most titles land in overstock bins with $4.99 stickers on them. Now, publishers hope they can maintain higher prices over time with DRM managed files. Good luck with that. Typically, titles land in overstock bins because that’s what they’re worth. Why not give readers a break and offer them the digital equivalent of overstock prices?
Follow Apple’s lead and ditch DRM. As the music industry has learned, DRM is counterproductive. It doesn’t prevent piracy because there’s no such thing as perfect encryption. Once cracked, the decrypted file spreads like a weed. And it is an inconvenience to legitimate users. Apple ditched DRM, made its pricing affordable, developed a community that allowed for amateur posting, and now, for good or ill, Apple dominates the field.
My Bold Prediction:
For each tool on the internet, there is only room for one general provider. e.g. Apple & music, google and advertising/search, YouTube and video, Facebook and social networking, eBay and auctions, Flickr and image sharing, Wikipedia and information sharing, Amazon and book-selling. There is always room for niche players, but one produces a template which dominates. The reason for this may have something to do with Jaron Lanier’s notion of digital lock-in. As yet, however, there is no template for the digital text provider. That is still working itself out. At the end of the day, there will only be one provider, and any other providers will be viable only because they occupy niche markets. That template may end up being produced by a publishing company or its parent media concern but there’s no divine fiat that favours existing publishing houses. Whoever produces the template, they will succeed because they adopt the practices I mentioned in reference to Apple and mp3 files:
• no DRM
• cheap, cheap, cheap
• community that blurs the professional/amateur distinction
All the other digital text providers will die.
(All this is predicated on the assumption that epublisher and eretailer will merge functions since the hop from one to the other is minuscule in the digital world.) It may be that the template already exists. Amazon? Smashwords?
In the meantime, if you’re selling your ebooks for $14.99, don’t expect any business from me.