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What is most evident is the extent to which publishing is going to be splintered, with technology enabling many more options. All the examples discussed above are successful options, but each with its limits.
Like traditional publishing the mix of activities is not much different; it is the scale on which they are done that contrasts with the past. One factor that is becoming quite evident is that the statistics of sales gathered and published are missing an ever-growing band that publishes POD and ebooks in quite non-traditional ways.
The activities of Amazon, Google and so on mostly mimic other, older models. For 'every book you can think of' who remembers Foyles in Charing Cross Road in London? Book retailing in large units, mail order, free samples? Nothing new, just adapted.
And I think there is a major misunderstanding about the conflict between the ebook and the print book. This stems from the issue of reading from a screen; a minority sport? I don't think so.
Today there are few that do not do more actual reading from a screen than they might ever have done of paper. The internet has introduced major portions of the populations to monitors - only a small jump from TVs after all. Add all the small screens and the day of the screen is already here.
It is significant that, allowing for the effects of the downturn on all figures, sales of print books has held up better than the majority of products. And if you examine the POD market you will see a growing 'underground' there too. For proof of the known change check the number of titles in US in 2002, and in 2008. I saw a five-fold increase.
Of course the ebook is going to rise and flourish. Many love the portability and availability. Equally the evidence or logic that the print book will disappear is scant. It is reading as a whole that will grow.
And I pretty much guarantee that publishers will continue into the distant future, but more like those of 60 years ago than the corporate disasters of finance management.
Writing, reading and publishing look to me like glowing lights in a grim decade ahead.
just attended a StartWithXML conference I helped organize. Britain has a
third or a fifth or a tenth the amount of ebook activity as the US
*because* there
is no Kindle! Kindle really jumpstarted the ebook revolution in the States.
Last year I spoke in Copenhagen and a Norwegian publisher had me buy a
Kindle for him when I got back, load some books on it, and send it over to
him so he could have one!
But even in the US, only a million or so people have Kindles. That's a tiny
number considering we'll just about all be reading on screens of some kind
in ten years. Or less.
Mike
--------------------
Mike Shatzkin
http://idealog.com/blog
mike@idealog.com
Founder & CEO
The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Co-founder: Filedby, Inc.
212-758-5670
world is going. How about on "any phone"?
Mike
world is going. How about on "any phone"?
Mike
public taste, the whole multimedia ebook thing will fall as flat as CD-Roms
did 15 years ago. We'll see.
Mike
--------------------
Mike Shatzkin
http://idealog.com/blog
mike@idealog.com
Founder & CEO
The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Co-founder: Filedby, Inc.
212-758-5670
1. As a writer, I am a firm believer in the freemium model. I'm delighted to let readers have my work for free. I think I can offer enticing enough premium material for sufficient of them to buy it to keep me in a living. And that needn't be books.
2. Why are they still talking about e-readers? the rest of teh world's moved on. Sure e-readers will continue to boom for 2-3 years, but seriously, the pace the publishing industry moves at, that's not a business model. They should be looking at cell phones rather than e-readers, and monetising serialisation and interactivity.
Come on, guys. Writers have got there. If you want any of the new generation of authors to consider having a "publisher" as a serious proposition, you're going to have to give us a reason. At the moment, you're giving us reasons to avoid you. Which is a shame.
going to be necessary. They may be different publishers than the ones we
have now in the long run, but aggregation at the publisher level will still
provide value that will get paid for. Except for authors that have already
had a publisher's help establishing themselves, VERY few will succeed alone.
Mike
http://streamwriting.com/blog/?p=116
about the way the literary landscape would flatten out, with authors or their managers going directly to editors, designers, printers, marketers. My point about publishers is that they need to convince us they can ofer something other than these individual services which could go the way of other business sectors and break down into small, specialist highly focused and flexible consultancies
publishing options and broaden their business models.
Mike Shatzkin
It's great to be new to the business at a time like this. However, I didn't intend to evolve into a publisher. A concierge, maybe. Thank goodness for talented friends.
Mike, I hope to make it to your Digital Book World conference. Thank you for your transparency, influence, and thoughtful predictions.
important components of the value chain change for "writerly" work in the
years to come.
Mike
Amazon doesn't set the prices for e-books. The publisher/author does. Amazon receives 65% of that price, the publisher/author 35%.
Kindle owners were the reason behind that $9.99 price; Amazon had advertised to that effect and Kindle owners were growing upset at the number of new e-books coming out (from traditional publishing sources) that were priced at only a couple of dollars less than the hard cover versions, so they instituted the 9.99 boycott.
The only time Amazon has anything to do with an e-book's price is when it goes on sale. Even then, the publisher/author receives their full 35% of the original price. Amazon takes the 'loss'.
certainly don't.
But what publishers are afraid of, even if they are getting 50% of the
retail price they set (which is more than you're getting) is that Amazon
will gain enormous leverage with 70-80% of the ebook market thru Kindle and
will then dictate prices. And if the market share were to stay that way,
that's a reasonable fear.
Mike
--------------------
Mike Shatzkin
http://idealog.com/blog
mike@idealog.com
Founder & CEO
The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Co-founder: Filedby, Inc.
212-758-5670
And replying to the earlier post wherein Mike and Christine scoffed at multimedia books, you may not be seeing the bigger picture. First of all, consumers are already getting tired of having dedicated devices that still preclude them from all the titles available. There is not one format that is common to all the readers. Epub format offers very little formatting so all the beautiful typography is lost. At the same time, they are all migrating toward accepting .pdfs and color screens will be the next generation. Reading on the typical laptop may not be for everyone, but there are touch screen models which rotate and Apple is rumored to be debuting a tablet with touch screen and virtual keyboard in the very near future. Why would anyone spend $500+ for an eReader when they could buy a laptop for the same price? Not to mention that Adobe Reader is resident on over 98% of the computers in use today.
And Christine, while your books may be just fine as they are, there are creative writers who embrace the opportunity to communicate with multimedia. I'm not sure where your definition of 10" notebook ends and the 9.7" Kindle starts -- but I can't see that .3" as the cutoff for portability. On the other hand, you can write one of your books on the notebook, but you can't on the Kindle. Hmmmm....
was saying I personally had no interest in them and I emphasize that I have
no idea how representative I am of the public at large. Good luck with
inventing a new art form that takes hold.
I agree that Apple's rumored tablet will, depending on pricing, make a
Kindle look very expensive for what it is. But there are actually a variety
of device manufacturers out there all making machines that will handle epub
files. Any number of them could end up making something comparable to, but
better than, Kindle.
We're capable of reading plenty of color now with iPhones. There will be
more complex multimedia books generated because of iPhones.
And I'm well aware that Amazon is selling ebooks at a loss. I believe there
are new deals in place that compel the publisher to share the discounts
offered to consumers, but the details of these deals are generally not
discussed and leak out only anecdotally. What I said is that publishers fear
that Amazon will, at some point, try to use their dominance in the market to
force publishers to give them lower pricing. Kindle sales, at the moment,
are a huge proportion of ebook sales. If they were to stay that way, that's
a realistic fear. That's what Arnaud Nourry was taking about in the piece I
blogged about.
Mike
--------------------
Mike Shatzkin
http://idealog.com/blog
mike@idealog.com
Founder & CEO
The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Co-founder: Filedby, Inc.
212-758-5670
And you are absolutely right that iPhones do read in color now - I have no fewer than five apps on mine right now that do just that. I'm still banking on the Apple tablet rumor, though...some are even saying it will have a cell chip and may be the hushed reason they denied Google their voice app use.
One thing is for sure...authors are the big winners. As the markets divide, there will be less competition and far more options, particularly when you look at the bottom line royalty. So, no matter which medium you use, communication and entertainment are becoming just that much more elegant and convenient. Publishers will, indeed, need to re-examine their role in the supply chain and give a bigger bang for the buck.
that wanted to write in private and let the world take care of them -- and
who could write material that people wanted to buy -- are not. Authors are
going to have to create their following in ways they were not asked to do in
the prior regime.
Mike
be reading on all of them. My own hunch is that today's Kindle will look as
quaint as a Commodore 64 by about three years from now. There are so many
variables: backlit or not, quality of color, connected or not, battery life,
screen size...and all of us use devices for different combinations of tasks.
Your own instincts seem close to mine; I read books on Palm Pilots 10 years
ago and just gave up the Kindle for the iPhone over the last six months. But
a whole lot of people who read on Kindles and on laptops can't understand
reading on a small screen. To each her own.
Mike
time, but because I'm not a sci-fi reader, obviously not ENOUGH aware of
Baen. Thanks for helping my blog readers overcome the holes in my personal
knowledge.
Mike
Mike
--------------------
Mike Shatzkin
http://idealog.com/blog
mike@idealog.com
Founder & CEO
The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Co-founder: Filedby, Inc.
212-758-5670
I totally share your frustration. Some months ago I tried to start a debate on eBook prices with a couple of UK publishers and was totally discouraged by one of them, a very preeminent figure, who said the same thing: ‘nobody would want to talk about pricing policy with competitors’.
I think this is a real shame. Everybody in the publishing industry is together in the same boat: currently facing huge technological changes and powerful (and sometimes extremely bullish) companies, such as Amazon, that won’t think twice before squeezing publishers in order to increase their presence in the eBook market. This is the moment when publishers should get together and think strategically as a sector that is going through profound transformations.
Totally agree with you when you say that ‘Epub is probably the publishers’ best defense against Amazon and the Kindle’. This will be very interesting to watch… and be a part of.
I think the reasons for objections are different in the US and UK. In the
US, it is clearly illegal to discuss price with a competitor. What the CEO
who commented to me was saying was that discussing it with me, since I talk
to all the competitors, could amount to the same thing.
The situation is different in the UK because the publishers there are not
faced with a near-monopoly player in the ebook space such as Kindle is in
the US. That's a mixed blessing, because the Kindle presence -- threatening
though it is in many ways -- also really jump-started the US ebook market.
And that hasn't happened yet in the UK. But with the iPhone, a coming
Kindle, and a plethora of other devices to feed off a big epub title
reservoir, the jump-start might happen without a monopoly player and that
would actually be much better! And perhaps worth waiting for.
Mike
Btw, yesterday I read a statement by Dan Franklin from Canongate that really puzzled me: ‘“with e-books, publishers are calling the shots— through metadata, we price it one way and that’s the way it’s sold”’. I don’t know what he means since most of the eBook retailers are not bound to charge the end consumer the rrp that is informed in the metadata. I would be interested to know what you think.
M.
me as much as it puzzles you.
The US Amazon pricing won't be available in the UK. What will be interesting
will be to see what Amazon's pricing strategy is in the UK. When they
started selling Kindles in the US, there was no competition. It's a
different situation.
Mike
I personally don't see the Google move as a "huge thumb on the scale," as so many of the books that they offer are already available for the Kindle. Kind-hearted folks have been posting free, public-domain books to the Kindle Store ever since it was opened to the public. As an active member of the official Amazon Kindle Forum when the Google deal was announced, it was met with a collective yawn. No Kindle owners were interested; they had been reading those books on their Kindles for months.
I'm also a little leery of predicting the future of anything, much less this dynamic market. It means a lot to be the first major mover in a space. To use a different example, look at the iPod: it wasn't the first, but it offered the superior user experience. Others came after it. It still dominates the market today.
Not to say that this will necessarily happen with Kindle, of course. Who ever knows?
might be crap but a) Amazon doesn't promote anything like 1 million titles
available and b) makers of new readers (who are selling to a much less
sophisticated public than those that bought the FIRST batch of readers) will
make a point of how many titles you can load on it than you can't load on
the Kindle.
Your point about "first major mover" is also true of Amazon. They weren't
first any more than iPod was.
But I think Kindle is going to be caught up in a format change. Think
Betamax.
Mike
Publishers take note - as readers get hold of the idea that free doesn't mean bad, and start discovering great talent for themselves, groups of entrepreneurial writers are going to start exploiting the freemium model and emerging as players in the next phase of publishing
But publishers know that when they charge a higher price, they get fewer customers. Their objective is to maximize revenue; that's their job. If the number of customers goes down less than the price goes up, they've done their job.
AND let's remember that prices are really set by retailers, not by publishers. Those $9.99 books you're getting are thanks to Amazon or B&N, not to the publishers. And they can also decide NOT to subsidize a title, in which case you'll pay more (IF you buy, of course.)