BlogU

  • Clueless Publishers

    By Joshua Kim December 10, 2009 8:12 pm EST

    Some publishers have decided to delay the release of e-books until four months following the hardcover release.

    The publishers are worried that:

    a. E-books have the potential to cannibalize sales of hardcovers.

    b. Profits will erode has e-book retailers (Amazon etc.) move to sharing less of the revenue in the future.

    Depressing.

    Publishers. E-book readers are your best customers. Think of us extensions to your marketing and sales force. If we are the type to read an e-book we are probably the type to share our experience of the book using social media. E-book readers will blog about your book. We will make Facebook updates. We will Twitter.

    Rather then having us wait four months to get your books you should be doing everything possible to get the e-books into our hands. For every e-book sale (and audiobook sale) you will realize a multiple of traditional book sales. We will leverage social media to talk about the book, not the format, and consumers of social media will then purchase the book in the format (usually paper) they are most comfortable with.

    After four months our interest in reading your book, in any format, will be basically dead. We like to read and discuss books when these books are in the general conversation. When the reviews are coming out. When our peers, friends and networks are also reading the books.

    Any effort to restrict e-books (and audiobooks) is also your fastest route to kill off the next generation of readers. We are coming to a time when a certain proportion of young readers will prefer to consume their books on multiple platforms. College students, and future college students, will want their content to follow them. Sometimes this will mean reading on a mobile device, sometimes on an e-reader, sometimes on a tablet or netbook, and sometimes on paper.

    Are there any voices of sanity in the publishing world?

Go to comments (7) »
Advertisement
On the Job Market Together?

Comments on Clueless Publishers

  • Posted by Cathy on December 11, 2009 at 12:15am EST

  • I was reading a blog post by a publishing consultant earlier in the evening that pointed out that this is not so much an anti-ebook move as it is an anti-Amazon move. He felt that publishers were trying to break their hold on the ebook market and possibly open up a direct channel.

  • Posted by Shannon , graduate student on December 11, 2009 at 9:00am EST

  • Cathy, I hope you're right. The dominance of the Kindle makes me nervous. I *love* Amazon, but I'm not going to buy a device that allows me to own books only as long as the company that makes the device is in business. I want to be able to read an eBook on my tablet PC (and make notes/highlight), on my Kindle, or even if I want to print out parts of it, I should be able to do that, too. Once I own a copy of a book, I should own a copy of the book, not lease it on generous terms.

  • They'll publish themselves out of business!
  • Posted by Angie Koponen , Assessment Coordinator at UNCo on December 11, 2009 at 9:30am EST

  • Perhaps publishers should pay more attention to Seth Godin: http://toc.oreilly.com/2009/10/video-seth-godin-on-new-media.html. Brilliant insights from both Seth and you, Joshua. The world of publishing is changing and the real winners will change in tune.

  • Baffling as a business decision
  • Posted by Andrew Bonamici , Assoc University Librarian at Univ of Oregon on December 11, 2009 at 11:30am EST

  • Joshua, et al.: This story provoked shaking and scratching of heads around my breakfast table, but for another reason. A $10 ebook might have a lower price tag than a $25 printed book, but this doesn't mean the publisher is actually leaving $15 on the table. Profit in any business is a matter of margin, not volume. It's hard to imagine that the publisher is making less profit on the $10 digital object than on the $25 volume after factoring in the cost of printing, storing, distributing, wholesaling, retailing, discounting, and remaindering a mountain of printed books.

  • Posted by Barbara Fister on December 11, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

  • Trade publishers (not textbook or scholarly publishers, but the NY houses that are making this decision) lose money on 7 out of 10 books they publish. Profit margins are slim. The printing and distribution are a much smaller percentage of the expense than labor and the retail markup. Amazon takes something like 65% of the cover price for its e-book sales. The publish has to pay to get the books into electronic formats. Amazon does not use e-pub, the (supposed) industry standard but rather their own format.

    What publishers are having trouble with is envisioning a very different world, where people have a choice of formats up front. They're used to thinking hardcover release, followed by a paperback release a year later. They have no economic model that will work with a book costing ten dollars or less, so they're trying to slot e-books in as if they are paperbacks. But one thing they forget is that the sale of an e-book doesn't end up costing the sale of a new book the way the used book market does.

    They'll have to find new models, and from the perspective of readers this is bone-headed and frustrating. But it's not the case that they are raking it in with a $25.00 cover price. After retail markup, printing, author's share, and distribution they make a couple of bucks. Since they tend to pay authors advances that often don't earn out, and a lot of books don't sell all that well, that two bucks doesn't include any profit margin.

    Most of the costs don't go away because it's not a printed object.

  • time to e-book depends upon the format
  • Posted by Nick Carbone , Dir. of New Media, Bedford/St. Martin's on December 22, 2009 at 9:30am EST

  • I can't speak to trade books, but for textbooks, most publishers I talk to seek to get the books to market as quickly as they can.

    But how fast an e-textbook comes out depends upon the format of the book.

    Some books, such as those at coursesmart.com or vitalsource.com can be rendered as e-books relatively quickly: those books are based on PDFs of the final print book; they replicate the print book.

    Other formats, such as the one's here (I work for the company that makes these) -- http://ebooks.bfwpub.com/ -- take longer because the books production process involves more than putting a PDF behind a Flash-based e-reader. The books at ebooks.bfwpub.com go from Quark to XML to be rendered as HTML. They have added features and tools: instructors and students can make and add custom pages to the book; they can insert links to other sources on the Web; they can share highlights and notes; and so on.

    So the books in that format do more, but take longer to make.

    Obviously one answer would be to do the books in XML first and then stream to Quark or PDF or whatever, but that's easier drawn up on paper than put into practice when print is still the mainstay. (Yes, e-books are growing, as well they should, but for now, print book use far far far exceeds e-book use.)

    The other delay is that e-books of the kind at ebooks.bfwpub.com require more production work: from Quark to XML has to be double-checked and from XML-to ebook rendering has to be double-checked and QAed. And that adds time to the project.

  • e-books
  • Posted by Fungible Faculty , Visiting Lecturere at Many on January 4, 2010 at 7:45pm EST

  • Surprised that no one has mentioned that the royalties on e-books are higher, at least in my limited experience. For my text, with a major publisher, the standard seemed to be 15%. But the contract noted that it went up to 50% for the e-book, which even factoring in the lower price, still generated a higher royalty.

Print
© Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed