Why the commercial ebook market is broken
(Note: In the following rant, I'm sticking to American currency and prices because (a) they're relatively familiar to non-Americans, and (b) they're where I've got the hardest data. Not to mention (c) being where the market I'm talking about is — or isn't.)
I've been ruminating for a whole long time now about the dog that didn't bark in the nighttime world of publishing — the coming ebook revolution, which has been coming now for something like 20 years and counting without much sign of actually arriving.
In point of fact, ebook sales figures are dismal. At best, they tend towards 20% of hardcover sales by volume — and that's for ebooks that are available in open formats that are not tied to a particular hardware platform, and that are not crippled by DRM (digital rights management) encryption schemes that prevent users from reading them on more than one machine. DRM-infested ebooks sell an order of magnitude fewer copies, in many cases not even covering the cost of taking the existing typeset masters and saving them in an ebook format.
The performance of the ebook market is in fact piss-poor. It can be explained in part by readers' natural aversion to DRM (if you change mobile phone or laptop, why should your entire library evaporate?), but also in part by publishers' idiotic aversion to the idea of trusting readers.
When you look at the "pirate" ebook field, things are a lot livelier. There are any number of locations on the internet where you can grab hundreds or thousands of novels, for free! — albeit in violation of the authors' copyright. These books are either produced by scanning a paper copy and feeding it through OCR (optical character recognition) software, or by cracking the DRM on an encrypted ebook. Lots of people download books off the net, but one thing even the proponents of ebook DRM agree is that it doesn't seem to have had any economic impact on the sales of dead tree editions. In fact, there's a lot of evidence from research into music file sharing that people who use "pirate" ebooks actually buy more of the real thing. (Eric Flint volunteered this source: The Effect of File-Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strump, published in the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Political Economy.)
So what's going on?
Let me stick my neck out here, with an opinion that goes against the conventional wisdom in publishing circles.
In the pre-internet dark age, there was a subculture of folks who would get their hands on books and pass them around and encourage people to read them for free, rather than buying their own copies. Much like today's ebook pirates, in terms of the what they did (with one or two minor differences). There was a closely-related subculture who would actually sell copies of books without paying the authors a penny in royalties, too.
We have a technical term for such people: we call them "librarians" and "second-hand bookstore owners".
Library lending was tolerated by authors and publishers because it was widely accepted that in the long run, people who borrowed our books from libraries were more likely to read them than people who had no access whatsoever. And having read, they were more likely to become regular readers and to eventually buy — if not the books they'd already read, then the next one on. Library users were often poor, or casual readers, or young. I remember latching on to the local public library when I was five or six years old. I read my way through most of Andre Norton's childrens range before I was eight, and I certainly didn't pay for them. I couldn't pay for them; I didn't have enough pocket money to make a habit of buying books at anything approaching the rate I could read them until I was in my teens, and even then, I was mostly limited to second-hand paperbacks.
So, in the dark pre-digital age of the 1970s, I was an avid supporter of that period's equivalent of your demonic ebook pirates. And y'know what? I defy anyone to tell me I was wrong to do so. Or even to assert that it hasn't, overall, been a good thing for the SF field, because it got me into the habit of reading, and these days, with a disposable income, my biggest problem is finding bookcases to stick all the new hardbacks I've bought over the years since my teens.
Now, let's talk about ebooks.
I'm not going to flog the already-dead DRM horse; I've been there before and both sides of the debate are fairly well covered.
What I'd like to point out is that the economics of the commercial ebook market are sick.
Right now, many of the largest publishers charge a cover price for ebooks that is 80% to 100% of the hardcover price. Virtually nobody except Baen (and now a couple of other publishers who've dipped a toe in the Webscription market, and some self-publishers) is even thinking about trying to establish what an ebook is really worth in the market.
We know roughly what it costs to produce a book, and we can point to the areas where ebooks are cheaper than paper editions (no dead trees and ink, for one thing; no warehousing or distribution for another) and more expensive (downloads, website maintenance). But we don't really know what an ebook is worth to the readers, because the market that could give us meaningful feedback on pricing has been strangled in the crib.
My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature. They're not cultural artefacts (pace Cory Doctorow); you don't buy them in signed, slipcased, limited editions. They're like stripped mass market paperbacks without even the value-added of doubling as wood pulp wall insulation once you've read them.
Now, there exists within writing and publishing circles a neurotic fear that sooner or later (probably In Five Years' Time — that seems to be the normal window) a cheap digital paper based ebook reader will come along, that makes the experience of reading text on a screen no different from the experience of reading a lump of dead tree stitched inside a piece of pigskin. And, as the horror story has it, we will be In Big Trouble, because the pre-existing availability of pirate ebooks will lead to enormous proliferation and a total crash in the value of books. Some pretty smart people believe this story, and the result has been to give it more credibility than it actually deserves. And it leads them to draw what I believe to be faulty conclusions; if you want an example, look no further than this column by Jerry Pournelle. (NB: I don't want to single Jerry out for specific opprobium, and I think it's only fair to note that what he's really talking about is the DMCA. However, I think this article typifies the received wisdom among many writers on the subject of ebooks, piracy, and DRM, which is why I dragged it in here.)
It's the received, prevalent wisdom — and it's a load of rubbish.
First of all, if overlooks the point that publishers don't manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra bells and whistles that sells for $350. We've had the tech for a $20 (or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they could sell the beast, they'd be churning them out by the bucketload — and it's perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160x160 green screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The reason nobody makes such a beast is because it's simply not profitable to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain't gonna happen.
Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters of the "pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry" theory, until ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore them. And that's regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and having the cultural artefact — is, well, it's just bogus.
We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you're paying $20 a pop. After a year you've got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and you're out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will stay in (they're set up for the club and they've already got a small bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the profits to pay for that first year's loss-leader.
But 80% of readers don't do book clubs. I've seen my book club sales, and they're piss-poor (except in France, which is different).
Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter — at least for this generation — for the same reason that it's near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more than US $24; consumers don't like being milked.
Now, having demolished the myth of the $5 ebook reader being just around the corner, the second problem the publishing industry has with ebooks is their misapprehension of exactly what the "pirate" ebook field is costing them. Some otherwise fairly intelligent folks in the SFWAs anti-piracy committee think they're potentially costing up to 30% of their revenue stream. I'd like to call bullshit on that.
There's a figure I've heard quoted (unfortunately I don't know the source so I can't cite you chapter and verse on it) to the effect that the typical dead-tree book has, over its life cycle, an average of four readers. Moreover, sell-through in paper is around 50-60%; that is, for every book sold to a customer, 0.8 to 1.0 other books end up being returned or pulped. So the real figure is more like ten readers per book actually printed by the publisher.
Think about that. Today, publishers try like crazy to tie ebooks to a single reader via DRM, in their misplaced zeal to reduce profit leakage; but for the economic hit from piracy to equal the economic hit from libraries and second-hand bookstores and friends lending friends books, the unlicensed distribution channels would have to be shifting nine ebooks for every one that is sold commercially.
And you know what? I don't think most of the ebook sharing subculture is even about reading the books in the first place — it's about collecting, and participating in a gift sub-culture where your kudos is governed by how much stuff you can give away. Yes, this probably sounds alien to a lot of you. All I can say is, you haven't spent enough time monitoring alt.binaries.e-books.flood and the other pirate ebook distribution channels. There are folks there who, of a weekend, post more books than I could read in a lifetimes. Random, eclectic, nonsensical collections of books, some of which are hopelessly corrupted and most of which are poorly proof-read. These folks are not reading what they put out. They're not putting it out with helping other people read the stuff as a primary goal, either. There's another dynamic at work, and no scheme to stop or reduce ebook piracy stands a chance of working until we understand why it's happening.
Interestingly, Baen's webscription titles are under-represented on the ebook warez newsgroups. I don't think this is an accident. Books that come up most often are either scanned and OCRd paper copies, or cracks of DRM-locked ebooks. If you look at the posters' activities in terms of proving status within a gift economy this makes sense; OCRing a book or cracking DRM takes time and effort, and is a demonstration of putting effort into something — it's a high value activity. Whereas posting something you grabbed off Baen's library of for-free books, or paid $5 for is just stupid — it's like turning up to a a wine and cheese evening your friends are running on a "bring a bottle" basis with a bottle of Buckfast or Mad Dog 20/20. It's cheesy, tasteless, and looks cheap, and that's how the ebook pirate elite will view you.
So, it's time for me to advance some tentative conclusions about why the commercial ebook market is broken:
Which leads to the next question:what is to be done?
(To be continued, when I get around to it ...)
Comments
I wrote a few notes on the book reader I'd like to buy at http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2007/01/05/a-book-reader which *might*, *might* make economic sense. But it's unlikely; it requires, I think, rather a lot of co-operation between publishers. If one ever comes on the market, though, I'll be first in line.
Posted by: Stuart Langridge | March 27, 2007 8:18 PM
Stuart: you're not kidding about the "rather a lot of co-operation". What it'd actually take is the abolition of the existing copyright regime and a hostile takeover of the British Library, probably by the corporate villains in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" (and if you haven't read that, you need to :).
But I disagree with you about several design requirements. Firstly, people are used to gizmos and gadgets. (Count the number of people around you who don't have a mobile phone these days.) I figure a couple of buttons are forgivable -- and your users are going to need an input device anyway, to select the book they want to read.
Secondly, and more importantly, it's too expensive. Booksellers in the USA found that for every dollar over $24 a midlist hardcover novel cost, the readership dropped 10%. By the time the price hit $35, virtually nobody was buying them. When you buy an ebook reader, it'd better damn have at least one book on it already, or it's no use to anybody; and I reckon those people who don't read more than one book per three to six months will not be willing to pay more than that one book's hardcover value for the reader. Why should they? Buying hardcovers is no more expensive, in the medium to long term (i.e. over the next year or two).
Reading is already a minority recreational pursuit compared to listening to music or watching TV and movies; it was bad enough for the CE industry launching the CD and DVD formats, trying to get consumers to buy in to a new player. eBooks are a million times worse, and only crazed bibliophiles like us actually want ebook readers. (Oh, us, and classroom managers. But they're a different matter. I'm talking fiction here, not text books.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 27, 2007 8:28 PM
Fair play on the economy point, since you know a lot more about this than I do :)
The thing about 10% dropoff per dollar is pretty instructive, it must be admitted. My idea was that you get around the problem of only crazed bibliophiles wanting ebook readers by essentially not telling people that what they're holding is an ebook reader; instead, you tell 'em it's a book which is a library or something and never ever ever mention the word "digital". I mean, people will intellectually know that it's really a computer, but if you make it look like a book and work (broadly) like a book and feel like a book and not be like a computer then your market becomes everyone on the train with a book, which used to be everyone and is now everyone who doesn't own an iPod.
Plus, now I have to go and get Rainbow's End. And the library's shut. Excuse me while I drown in irony. :)
Posted by: Stuart Langridge | March 27, 2007 8:35 PM
If you look at the movie pirating "business" you see something very like the book-sharing you're talking about, which bolsters your point. Right now the two main sources of pirated movies are a) digital copies stolen from the studio or distributor and b) copies made by taking a camcorder to the theater and pointing it at the screen. For the movie industry a) is a commercial security problem; if they can't reduce that to an acceptable level they're not trying hard. b) is exactly the book-sharing situation: the only reason for having such a copy is bragging rights, since most of them are unviewable.
One way to pad out the initial cost of the ebook hardware is to deliver it filled with books: 1 or 2 commercial properties, and a boatload of stuff from the Gutenburg Project. Sure, most people won't read them, but they'll feel like the initial deal is reasonable.
As for affording all the storage that'll cost, a book weighs about 1-2 Megabyte (or less) as a text file. Store it as PDF, and you multiply that by 10 or 20, but you still have space for a lot of books in 256 Meg of flash, which costs a few dollars these days.
And speaking of memory and hardware, if you handle it right there are already a lot of readers out there: every iPod that has a usable size screen. The first shot at a distribution system should be to make a deal with Apple to go through iTunes. They already have a deal with audible.com for spoken books, why shouldn't they do a deal for written ones?
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | March 27, 2007 9:10 PM
umm, I can't say I know much about commercial ebooks. As i've never bought one in my whole life, but take my story as a case study.
English isn't my native tongue. 3 years ago, I only read the stuff we had at school that I found mildly intersting. Then one day i was browsing around and found an Ebook-reader for my cellphone (a SE T610). I considred the idea awesome and started reading my first ebook ever. A pirated version of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Then I moved to some stuff from project gutenburg. It was a pain to read on that tiny phone before sleep in complete darkness, but that's the way i liked it and became used to. The software had an even a more tiny font, but I was addicted and i think it took it's toll on my vision. I only read at bedtime. for like 30 minutes. Sometimes more.
By the end of the year I considred myself an avid reader. Although I never truly read a paperback. Then Accelerando came out and I got a new phone (nokia 7510 I think). Again, it had that awesome free ebook reader. ReadM. Without all the space constraints and support for a myriad of formats. Also much larger screen/fonts. To be honest I almost never read in public on my phone. I don't imagine myself doing it on another device other than phones :/
Nowadays, my reading is diverted but mostly coherent to legaly free ebooks. Since I moved to Cairo I buy paperbacks (retail paperbacks of the books I liked where not an option in my hometown. Of course there was internet shipping but that's another story.
As to why I don't consider buying ebooks. Price is propably the largest factor. I consider commercial ebooks way too overpriced. Then there is format. I only want books in pure txt or maybe Doc (.pdb) format and most of what i've seen are pdfs. Then comes complete blockers like DRM, etc. Pirated e-books are usually in pure txt. Of course, I don't always find the books I want, which is why i'm seriously considering ebooks nowadays.
Hmm, this comment has grown too large and messy.
BTW, Do you know any ebook retailers that offer the above mentioned options and have Bob howard stuff for sale? :P
Posted by: Kareem Kenawy | March 27, 2007 9:39 PM
I'm not the market, but I wouldn't buy any ebook-reader that isn't high-contrast black on white (as is text on my computers' screens) ((maybe epaper will do the trick)), that is very lightweight and portable, has a really low energy consumption, a good bookmark function, doesn't look cheap and is usable in bed and in train and airplane. That is, the ebook-reader should not only signify belonging to the class of cultural valuable artifacts, but should also be usable in the way I use books (i.e. for entertainment). The only advantages of reader against real books would be the possibility to take more books with me travelling, the need for less storage space, and the possibility to read free e-books more comfortable than using my laptop. A e-book reader that is badly designed would not compete with the laptop, anyways.
But I do not only read books for entertainment -- there are other books I read for work, and use notes, sticky notes and underlines while reading them. I haven't yet seen a screen reader that enables this working with the text, so even with most PDFs (scientific papers), I print them out to read them. To enable this functionality in a stand-alone reader would be quite a design challenge ...
Posted by: Till Westermayer | March 27, 2007 10:26 PM
I really appreciate that you bring up the e-book issue and respond to the doomsayers.
:)
I'm still waiting for the "digital-ink" e-book reader that ISN'T crippled by DRM...
:)
Posted by: A.R.Yngve | March 27, 2007 10:30 PM
If every book sold has 4 readers, but only half of the books which are printed are sold, then surely it's 2 readers per printed copy, not 8-10?
Posted by: Chris Williams | March 27, 2007 10:39 PM
Here's my personal experience:
I've been using Palm OS devices as e-book readers for just about a decade now. At this point a Palm TX running PalmFiction is on par with the Sony reader in terms of quality and has the added plus of being self lighting. For reading long titles (Cryptnomicon or the Harry Potter Books) It's the only option I'd contemplate, due to the simple logistics of carrying around the text and having it handy at the times I get a chance to read (waiting for something or traveling). The 4 GB SD cards I use are under $24 and hold roughly 8 pickup trucks of books if compressed text is used (in reality it's split across a few hundred books, a few hundred MP3s, and several dozen videos. When I read a book I always buy a dead tree copy to support the author, and often buy several to give to friends. One of my best friends follows the same path.
What I see from my experience is:
a.)e-book readers are viable in the form of PDAs
b.)The users are raging bibliophiles, who love books and authors and are very interested in keeping bookstores and authors in business. They just want a secondary copy which is portable.
c.)DRM is simply to annoying to be viable.
d.)As long as we're talking transferable content (i.e. non-DRM) storage is completely moot.
Posted by: monopole | March 27, 2007 10:44 PM
Kareem: BTW, Do you know any ebook retailers that offer the above mentioned options and have Bob howard stuff for sale? :P
I live in hope. (Jim Baen made me an offer for non-exclusive rights to those books for Webscriptions, but unfortunately this was about a week before his fatal illness, and I didn't follow through fast enough.) As it is, I hope my main publishers will see the light about the stupidity of DRM within the next couple of years, but I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 27, 2007 10:45 PM
Sorry, Chris: it's the ratio of opportunities for readers to pay for the experience to actual remuneration events that I'm getting at. I need a less clumsy way of phrasing this ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 27, 2007 10:58 PM
Charlie, we thrashed around this one in Cheltenham, back in both our dim and distant bachelor days, and while I've come around to your way of thinking I still think the main stumbling block to e-books isn't DRM but that people who buy books actually like to buy books. They like the act of going into a bookshop and holding the merchandise in their hands. They like to be able to pick up something that isn't going to crash or need recharging. MP3 and music downloads had it easy because we've always listened to music on some kind of electronic device; digitising text is a bigger cultural shift, I think and will take longer to gain momentum.
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | March 27, 2007 11:11 PM
Dave: we've always listened to music on some kind of electronic device ...
That's a lovely phrase. Mind if I cut it out and keep it? ;-)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 27, 2007 11:26 PM
Charlie: well, yeah, apart from live music and orchestras and wind-up gramophones and that kind of stuff... You know what I mean.
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | March 27, 2007 11:36 PM
My hope was always for some massive institution like the University of California system to subsidize an eBook reader for its students. UC would put its geeks to work developing the thing, which would be able to hold a university education's worth of textbooks, notes, and lectures, then go to the textbook publishers and say, "Here's the deal. Either you whip up cheap (sub-$20) electronic versions of your books, or we switch our entire student population over to Wikipedia." And then UC sells it cheap to every other state university system, and we'll have an entire generation who can carry around their backup brains and read them whenever and share stuff, and...
...and then the drugs wear off and I go back to watching cartoons.
Posted by: Adam Rakunas | March 27, 2007 11:51 PM
It seems to me as a very avid reader (a few books per week all my life) that the problem is also selection.
Let's see -- in print (via Amazon, abebooks and alibris) virtually any book i might be interested in. I just finished reading some books by James Moffatt from the 20's and 30's. Cost about $30 total for 4 books.
Now, in eform -- perhaps a few thousand titles in a limited variety of genres -- many scifi, few academic theology; virtually no modern poetry.
Seems part of the problem for ereaders is simply content.
Posted by: Terry | March 28, 2007 12:10 AM
Well, first, the quantity of books published, scanned as ebooks and available for download are enormous. Pretty much anything you'd like is available somewhere, and if it isn't, new book-friendly scanners are making it easier to add to the mountain.
As for the electronics companies, screw them, really. Government and public schools should make their own reader and their own textbooks, thereby kicking out the Texan black hole for textbook funds. English and math don't change every five years, so we don't need to keep killing trees to make book publishers rich. A large number of e-textbooks are being created and distributed under public licensing schemes. The U.S. starves it's public schools; those schools need textbooks that cost zip. The One Computer Per Child project shows what can be done when profit is taken out of the equation.
And this brings to mind: why can't we build our own ebooks, if the parts are so cheap?
Lastly, we're in a giant climactic meltdown. We need more trees on the ground sequestering carbon; we, as a matter of survival, must stop cutting forests down to spray ink on the products. Preference for Victorian era bookbinding is not an option. 6.5 billion people cannot all buy books -- the deforestation for such lunacy will further tip the heat buildup into disasterous territory. We have to make sacrifices for the future of humanity. E-books are a small thing to accept in that frame.
Posted by: catbeller | March 28, 2007 12:22 AM
"And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20,"
No, that's called "refusing to give the customer what they want". I'm starting to think that Something Needs To Be Done. And $100 is more reasonable, from my POV (You really want an e-ink screen rather than LCD, even greyscale LCD). I'm not willing to spend on an expensive PDA which I *will* break.
"generations" are getting shorter. I know you mean people generations, I mean electronic generations. And it's increasingly clear that business and government institutions cannot deal with the increasing pace of change. That is, however, another rant.
Till Westermayer, yep, e-ink can do that. Another reason to want it. (It only uses power when you change the letters...)
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | March 28, 2007 12:28 AM
Charlie, the only flaw in your argument, and it's not a big one but worth pointing out, is that libraries pay royalties when they loan out books. Sure you're aware of the PLR, but for those that aren't:
http://www.plr.uk.com/trends/chart/feb2007.htm
Overall though, I concur, I've always leant books, borrowed books, etc, and doing so encourages more sales. Same with music, really. Publishers are chasing their tales rather than moving with the market. Ah well, some things never change.
Posted by: MatGB | March 28, 2007 12:39 AM
I love books, I'm running out of room in my house to store them all. When I first discovered "ebooks" floating around ye olde intarweb in the pre-p2p days I was very excited (hell I remember file trading on BBSes!). I grabbed everything I could find. I had thousands upon thousands of books. About a year later I tried reading one and made it about 3 pages in. By about 1999 I had deleted the entire collection. Then in the early days of bittorrent I found a tracker full of ebooks and repeated the pattern. Thousands of ebooks sat on my hard drive until I needed to free up some space and away they went.
The problem with ebooks is that their utility is pretty minimal. An mp3 player makes a hell of a lot more sense than an ebook reader. I never travel so light that a book or three is a burden, and a book or three is the maximum I will read when traveling. Compare that to music, I may want hundreds of songs in a variety of genres. Bringing them all on CDs is obviously a burden. The only actual benefit to ebooks is that people like me who love to own books would save a lot of room in their house, and really having shelves full of books makes for some nice decoration in your home. People look through your books and learn about you or find something to start a conversation about (Them: "Oh, I haven't read Accelerando yet, what did you think?" Me: "It's great, feel free to borrow it if you'd like."). Ebooks would be a supplement to a real book collection and never a replacement, whereas an mp3 collection is a workable replacement for a CD collection.
My prediction: There will never be anything more than a tiny niche market for ebooks. Even if the mythical $5 ebook reader is invented. Even if they give away the "perfect" ebook reader and sell ebooks of $35 hardcovers for only $.99 on itunes. Ebooks are like the futuristic uniforms regular people wear in crappy SF, it's just not going to happen. If we're still human in 50 years the bankers will still be wearing the business suit and tie combo we all recognize and those of us who are literate will still be buying books in the same format we all recognize.
Posted by: Jett | March 28, 2007 12:49 AM
Andrew, the e-Ink dev kit is a mere snip at US$3000: http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html
Posted by: Adam Rakunas | March 28, 2007 12:53 AM
Books, even paperbacks, take up space. I suppose we all dream of living in a place where there is room for our great library, but the reality is that wall space for books costs money. I accumulate books at a frightening rate - Andrea and I are traveling right now, we've been gone for ten days, and there are six books belonging to me in the luggage, four of which I've read. What a waste of energy!
Books that are worth lending out, I want in a good-quality paperback edition. Books that I enjoyed once, I want to be able to compensate the author for having written, but I don't need the hardware token, and I don't particularly want the $0.05/title the used bookstore will give me.
Oh, and I don't want to have to wait until the damned paperback release a year after the book comes out in hardcover, and I bloody well don't want to be buried in hardcover books, and I don't want to pay $25/book for the privilege of reading it a year early. If you make me do that, I'm going to go to the library, unless I *really* like you. (I have a couple of your books in hardcover, actually!)
The idea that nobody would buy e-books if they were distributed in a reasonable way is poppycock. I don't know what percentage of the potential market non-DRM e-books represent, but it's probably noticeable. *If* they're priced right and easy to get.
Posted by: Ted Lemon | March 28, 2007 1:09 AM
Er, oh, and I could care less about having an e-book reader. I want the e-book on something I already carry in my pocket or backpack, so either my laptop computer, or my cell phone. If I have to buy an extra box, carry it around, and carry its charger around, it's not going to happen. But of course if the books are released in a reasonable, non-DRM format, the format doesn't dictate the reader, so I'm a happy guy.
Er, also, I've purchased quite a few books from the Baen webscriptions library. Not as many as I would like, because Baen tends to focus on authors I don't like, but pretty much every time I've had a choice between paper and electronic, I've gone electronic. I wish I had more choices like that.
Posted by: Ted Lemon | March 28, 2007 1:14 AM
I would pay $200-$300 US for a pocketable, expandable device with search functionality if it was bundled with, say, The Complete History of Middle Earth or The Complete Aubrey-Maturin or The Complete Stross.
I would pay more if it was in colour and I could buy it preloaded with The Complete Sandman.
But the devil is in the details, as Ted said, it would probably need to have other functionality (music, video). And it should have at least a Massmarket PB screen size. Other wise I'll keep wearing my cargoes and shoving trees in my pocketses.
Posted by: Chris Beck | March 28, 2007 1:30 AM
We have a little ebook club and it's doing very nicely, if I say so myself. We "give away" the old Gemstar reader for a year's commitment, and for your monthly $19.95 you get two books. After a year, the very wonderful device is yours to keep, and we hope you'll stay in the club. Many do. We pay royalties four times a year and really, it's been swell. It's a model that works.
Posted by: Nancy Birnes | March 28, 2007 1:31 AM
I already buy a considerable number of ebooks, as monopole says the latest Palms work well as ebook readers and are useful as PDAs as well. Minor quibbles about battery life and e-paper screens would be very nice, etc. but basically they work well now.
I'd happily buy most of my books in that form *if* I could get them at a reasonable price *and* DRM was not the pain in the rear it is *and* more ebook titles were available. Near hb prices is simply ridiculous (and hb prices are absurd already, no wonder recreational reading is dying a slow death. e-books are the solution, not the problem!) I think a reasonable starting point to see how the market went would be ebooks at %50 - %60 the pb price.
Secure Palm reader format is probably the most reasonable of the DRM schemes and what I use 95% of the time, but it sure would be better if they stopped being so retarded and dropped it altogether.
Example of what can happen if you allow flexibility: The other day I downloaded the podcast of "Just Do It" by Heather Lindsley from from Escape Pod, I liked it and noticed it was published in print in F&SF June 2006. Checked Fictionwise and sure enough they still had that issue available so I bought it (heck, it's only $3.99 not $39.99).
Posted by: David S. | March 28, 2007 1:57 AM
I personally love my Sony Reader - I bought it six weeks ago and use it constantly - it's my main medium for reading books. I've bought about ten and downloaded about 100 from manybooks.net. It really has changed the way I read, especially when it comes to casual fiction. 90% of what i read are novels that I'll read once and then move on from. I have a huge library, but I end up donating the paperbacks to goodwill every year because they take up too much space. And if I can buy a bundle of 3 sci-fi titles for $11.00, that's a great deal for me. If I can get great books under creative commons for free that's even better (I give away my own book, Geek Mafia for free). The e-book industry is still young, but I think it's got extreme potential for growth. Yes $350 is too much for most people, but everyone I show my reader to wants one. It's very easy to use and read and especially travel with. In four or five years when the electronic ink tech is even cheaper and more flexible, I think you'll find these things more and more popular. I really do hope they're the future, as, quite frankly, IMHO, they totally rule.
Rick
Posted by: Rick Dakan | March 28, 2007 2:18 AM
Ted Lemon, right, chargers - eink devices, again, can run off standard batteries, because they're very low power.
David S, well, the Baen prices are *effectively* 1/2 PB for UK readers. $5 is ~£3.00, paperbacks are £5.00-6.00.
I own over 250 non-DRM ebooks. I own 2 DRM ebooks, from fictionwise (an author who has some Baen Books, and some not - and I wanted the other...).
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | March 28, 2007 2:19 AM
As someone working with alternate business models for content distribution (first in music, now in publishing), I would like to pose a question to you all (and you too, Charlie):
If you could download a free ebook, to be read in a form already available (laptop screen, cell phone, etc.), would you return upon consumption to leave a tip in an online tip jar (via PayPal or a similar service)?
I write the Secret World Chronicle with Mercedes Lackey, and for some reason, our "donation" page has gone bonkers this week! Folks seem to see it as a way to thank Misty for years of entertainment... which is fine for me and for the hosting bills.
I'm a firm believer in "try before you buy" because that is how our "easy access" economy functions these days. Think of DVD sales: most people don't buy a DVD of a film they have never seen unless a friend or reviewer has strongly recommended it; rather, they purchase an archival copy of a movie they enjoyed as a rental or in a theater.
What I'd like to see is a well known writer with a well trafficked, professional website, who publishes a first run book with a tip jar model. I am betting that experiment would pay off. Handsomely.
The thing is, you don't need to solve the question of who will promote everyone's books if publishers are sidestepped through digital distribution. You only need to solve the question of who will promote YOUR books.
I think about this a lot!
steve
Posted by: Steve Libbey | March 28, 2007 2:58 AM
Since Sony released the reader I've been waiting for this essay. That is, the essay which inadvertently welcomes the end of the 550 year old pulp-based information distribution system. Like the mp3 revolution of almost 10 years ago, this revolution will not come from the top down.
I am in the business of creating and providing printed documentation, often volumes running in the thousands of pages. The technology has progressed to the point that my operation has regressed to taking PDF files and making hard copies. The "master" PDF is then provided on a gussied up thumb drive. My clients' customers over 40 have no idea what the thumb drive is. My clients' customers under 30 wonder why they are being weighed down with double-digit pounds of paper why they have better access to the same information on their ever present laptop.
Books will continue to exist, as LPs do today, for their fetish factor. The $50 stand-alone reader, which will sell for $150, is right around the corner. If you think some of the folks providing the vanity presses work today are a bit tilted, just wait.
Imagine a PDF version of the local paper or forums or blogs, instruction manuals, essentially podcasting one reads will be the killer app among those few remaining for whom picking up something and reading it is not an anathema. It won't be as big as the ipod, but it will not be uncommon.
The big players will be behind the times in this.
Posted by: Stan Baker | March 28, 2007 2:58 AM
I have to agree with monopole that PDAs are an ideal eBook reader. I read novels almost exclusively on my PDA, because it's backlit (and therefore ideal for reading in bed), and portable, nicely sized, has good bookmarking functionality, and lets me carry around a large number of books at the same time. I confess that I use Microsoft Reader (free download) and .lit files because it works well on my PDA (a Dell Axim). I tend to avoid PDF eBooks because the formatting doesn't work well on a PDA. Of course, I use the PDA for other things, too - being able to read eBooks is just an added bonus.
I see a stand-alone eBook reader as a non-starter unless it's the price of a hardback book. The easy comparison is to an iPod or a walkman, but those replaced comparably priced hardware (stereo systems) and in addition were portable. An eBook reader replaces a book (or even a stack of books), but books are already pretty portable. A single-use device for reading eBooks just doesn't make very much sense.
As far as the books themselves go, I agree with Charlie's thoughts on pricing - eBooks are more disposable than MMPBs, and should be priced accordingly. Also, until eBooks hit critical mass, there just won't be much of a market for them. One thing I would like to see to drive that would be including an eBook version (or access to one) with a dead-tree version of a book. Baen Books (yet another plug) has done this quite nicely, so I'm always happy to buy their books.
I love books, but find reading on my PDA much easier than reading a physical book. If I got an electronic version along with a dead-tree version, I'd have the best of both worlds, and would probably buy more books because I know I'd read them, instead of letting them sit on my shelf while I read something that's more convenient than dealing with a fat hardback.
Posted by: jeffk | March 28, 2007 3:03 AM
With the rise of sites like PaperBackSwap.com, I would not be surprised if the number of readers per book rises even higher. I joined in December, and I've already sent and received over 30 books.
Posted by: Kurt | March 28, 2007 3:07 AM
I don't think it's the lack of a cheap ebook reader that's really holding the industry back, I think it's the lack of cheap ebooks themselves. Plenty of people are happy with reading books on a monitor. I know I find it far more enjoyable than my attempts to read on a Sony Clie, which is the closest I've come to an ebook reader.
And given how common laptops are now, the arguement that ebook readers give people mobility to read where they want doesn't hold as much weight. The sort of people who will buy and read ebooks are the same sort of people who likely own a laptop and take it with them to cafes. They're probably getting most of their news online, on that same laptop. To think that they'd replace thier newspapers with a computer, but not books is silly.
The other large potential audience, and I think the source of many pirates, are international readers. English has become the defacto lingua franca of most of the educated world. And a good portion of international English speakers enjoy reading books in English. Unfortunately, the current publishing system makes that difficult. Even the English speaking countries have a fractured publishing system, with publishing rights divided up so that books are published months or years apart in North America, the UK, and Australia -- if they're published at all. And that leaves out probably a hundred million other people who are forced to pay to have books shipped.
Which brings us to price. The major English speaking countries are some of the highest cost of living nations int he would. Purchasing Power Parity might give an equivalent lifestyle in many nations, but it really hits you in the wallet if you're trying to pay $25+$15 shipping for a book when you only make $15,000 a year in your own country. Nevermind that you're a middle class professional at home, at US prices you're barely above poverty level.
So it's a real slap in the face to international readers to make a product that's accessible for them -- just a mouse click and credit card away, and then price it out of their reach. If every book was also published as a $5 ebook, you might loose sales in North America to pirates, but you'd probably gain even more from across the globe.
Posted by: Andrew G | March 28, 2007 3:13 AM
Fascinating post and I agree wholeheartedly, but I wonder if a universal ebook reader could be introduced for content that is already disposable and cheap: newspapers, magazines. A reader can be networked to allow for content subscriptions (to include books once the device takes off) and a minimum set of features, only those that are most valuable. If someone can get into the habit of reading the WSJ or Cosmo of a screen, it's a much smaller step up to novels.
Given that a 2GB SD card costs under US$10, a reader can come pre-loaded with a distilled wikipedia and most of Project Gutenberg for no extra cost.
Posted by: strix | March 28, 2007 3:16 AM
Not all authors in the old days liked second hand booksellers or libraries. Robertson Davies1, for one, was pretty caustic on the subject, and used to say that every time someone checked a book out of the library, that was one less book sale for him-a line of reasoning not too different from what we hear from the RIAA and MPAA nowadays. He lobbied the Canadian government to make payments to writers, with the monies coming from taxes, for every time someone checked out one of their books from the library.
1 For those of you unfamilar with him, he was one of Canada's literary greats of the 20th century, and was, in the last few years of his life, constantly mentioned as one of the people likely to get the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Posted by: Marty Busse | March 28, 2007 3:35 AM
I've become an avid ebook collector for a couple of reasons: firstly, because I like having searchable books, but mostly because I passionately love loaning books out and sometimes don't get them back. I've bought three copies of _Schismatrix Plus_ and multiple copies of at least one of Charlie's books. I'm coming to the conclusion that I'd really like to destructive-scan my entire library into some open format like HTML, and buy a cheap PDA as an ebook reader. But even with all that, I really don't see paying $24 for an ebook, no. $10? Maybe, if I get my choice of formats. Not $24. I'm poor; I wait for the MMPB version.
I see some brave authors selling ebooks online without resort to a publisher. None of them have really caught my eye yet, but if any of my favorites start taking this route, I'll be PayPalling them before you can say "dematerialization of cultural data". But I imagine most established authors wouldn't be too keen on giving their publishers the finger in such a way...
Posted by: postrodent | March 28, 2007 4:03 AM
Charlie, could you address the potential for an ebook reader as a substitute for deadtree school texts? I would love a device that contained the last few semesters' worth of my college texts, particularly the ones I refer to often. Seems like that might be a way to sneak an ebook reader into the mainstream, relying (preying?) on a market that forces people to buy books regularly.
Posted by: Mark | March 28, 2007 4:42 AM
Charlie,
I seriously hope you're wrong. I really, really *want* to be able to carry my entire collection of technical references in one 2-lb package. It'd be nice to have some recreational fiction in there, too. I have the O'Reilly Safari subscription, and it's great - but I need another display device to read it from! And as previously mentioned, I'm tired of schlepping books (including a few of your works) from shelf to shelf and house to house as I move through life. Remove the bookshelves and I could easily live in a 20% smaller abode.
Yes the publishers are pricing ebooks wrongly. If the egg came first - *that's* the egg; ebook readers are the chicken and will drop price naturally as soon as publishers get ebooks into paperback price range. That's *if* they do, so let's hope Jim Baen marks the path for them.
All your math wrt number of reads per book misses the point. Paper is a sort of DRM - you and the paper must physically coincide in the same space at the same time to read that instance of the content. The problem of DRM is to emulate that sort of behaviour, rather than allowing any one instance-owner to spawn off a thousand exact copies in the space of a heartbeat. Solve that, and the rabid fears of the music/movie/book/whatever publishing industries evaporate. Then we're good to go. The trick is to achieve the status quo, electronically.
Posted by: quux | March 28, 2007 4:48 AM
I don't have a reader, nor do I purchase e-books, but I'm waiting impatiently for the perfect storm of a cheap workable reader plus a drop in prices of e-books (already here in Baen) plus the shedding of DRM. Because I'm probably the ideal user of ebooks. I can burn through a novel in an hour and an epic in three. On a week's vacation I pack six to eight books and wind up re-reading half of them before the trip's over. I keep reading my paperbacks until the tape gives out and they fall into more than three sections. (Before that, they're just Parts 1, 2 and 3.) And my reading time is almost exclusively on the bus, and during meals, where hardbacks fail because they're too heavy to hold open in one hand. If I succumb to the lure of a hardback, I read it only in bed and carry a different one around with me.
But the single strongest reason I want an ebook reader and the marketplace to go with it, is one I've not yet seen mentioned - for short stories. I want to carry a library of my favorite short stories on the bus with me without lugging a half dozen Asimov's and a hardback anthology. I want to finish one short story and go immediately to one I'm in the mood to read, without going home and digging it out of my library. I want to search my collection of short stories by title and author instead of resorting to Google and my system of colored Post-Its to remember what anthology that particular one was in - no not that one, the other one by her. Was it in the 1991, or the 1992? Asimov's or F&SF? What theme was that anthology again? I want to make my own collections with themes and moods of my own devising, as I've been making mix playlists, mix CD's, and before that mix cassettes and 8-tracks.
I hear from the editorials at Helixsf.com, not to mention most anywhere else the topic comes up, that SF is dying and the short form is leading the way to the grave. If I'm willing to pay a twenty-dollar dead-tree subscription for one really kick-butt story per issue, on average, obviously I'd pay a buck or two for a download of one. As long as I could read it, on the bus, or with a fork in one hand, without having to print it out myself on 8 1/2 x 11 with a re-used file folder for a cover.
Posted by: Pteryxx | March 28, 2007 4:50 AM
I will bet you fair sums that ebook readers will be available for under $50 well before 2012.
I was largely writing about the DMCA being broken.
I have never defended high prices of ebooks, and in fact I have argued for condierably lower prices. The traditional division of profit in the publishing industry is that writer and publisher make about the same profit, and publisher pays overhead including editors and production and sales.
With lower production costs and much lower shipping costs, and lower distribution costs, the only reason ebooks are kept at high prices is to keep them from competing with print books.
Your notion of what I believe isn't derived from the column you quoted. I certainly did not defend high ebook prices.
On the other hand, the notion that authors must become performance artists and give their books away and charge for readings and jumping up and down on stages is popular, but you may lose some pretty good writers if you do things that way.
Jerry Pournelle
Posted by: Jerry Pournelle | March 28, 2007 5:12 AM
We publish e-books, some of them original, some of them SF/F, some of them by famous writers, some of them available only as e-books. This part of it is work, but also fun. It is a very small business, hidden-knowledge.com.
We publish them in more damned formats than you can shake a stick at. Is this a problem? You bet. A standard will help.
We publish them without any DRM. Is this a problem? Not at all.
We price them in the USD$4.95 to 9.95 range, comparable to a mass-market paperback. When considering price, remember that the online sales distributor takes 50 or 55% of the selling price, and keeps it to pay for the distribution mechanism. Is this a problem? I don't know; have you bought any new books lately? The price for used mass-market paperbacks or hardbacks on the Amazon Marketplace is USD$0.01 plus USD$3.49 shipping (not true for Charlie's books, but true for most SF/F). Second-hand books for $3.50? Not a problem.
Reading on screen? Not a problem. Reading on phones or MP3 players or Treos? Not a problem.
Presence of hundreds of books online for free at Google, or Munseys.com, or Project Gutenberg? Not a problem; in fact, a solution: many things for people to read when they've finished "The Doom That Came to Milton Mowbray" and don't have any money to buy new books until next week.
Just what is the problem? I don't think there is a general problem. I think our expectations are out of line with the typical adoption curves of cultural mechanisms, which always take longer than adoption of the toys du jour.
My guess is that e-book publishing is a self-organizing system that is slowly beginning to coalesce. Hope I'm right.
Posted by: Michael Ward | March 28, 2007 5:52 AM
I think Stross is onto something when he says "My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature." Maybe the problem is, in part, the content. Making cheap pulp paperbacks created pulp literature, which had different formats and different style from what went before. Dickens wrote serials for magazines, which were retroactively packaged into novels.
Maybe we should look for literature that's the equivalent of a one-, five- or fifteen-minute podcast. You read it once and then usually delete it/throw it away. It's short, it gets to the point, and you can read it while on the commuter train or waiting for your coffee. It could be something like 365 Tormorrows or it could be something like the Deep Love series that was a surprise hit on cell phones in Japan.
Right now, the best way to read novels is ink on pulp. The short story market is in intensive care. Flash fiction, read on PDAs or cell phones or music players, might be what comes next. The literary voice of the 21st century will come in chunks of less than 1000 words at a time.
Posted by: Peter Tupper | March 28, 2007 6:17 AM
Charlie, thank you for writing down what I've been thinking about for at least the last two years. I've been using a PC based ebook reader on my laptop off and on for a while, and have yet to buy a single ebook. The price is just too high. I also feel the same way about buying downloadable MP3's.
One publishing area that does seem to get the ebook thing is in electronic data books, nearly all component vendors now publish all their data books as downloadable PDFs. Granted these vendors generally gave away the dead tree editions in the hopes of selling more chips. So for them the use of the PDFs saves them a ton of money in printing and shipping costs.
Posted by: Brian Lingard | March 28, 2007 6:46 AM
I believe that ebook readers *are* going to be ubiquitous, and sooner than most folks in the business think. I already carry one with me all day every day: Plucker on my Treo. My first thought on seeing the iPhone demo was "That would make a killer ebook reader". I think that within a few years many people will have phones with a high-res, high-pixel-count screen that would be quite acceptable as an occasional ebook reader. Once these devices are widespread, it won't take much for the idea of ebooks to really take off.
Posted by: Dirk Bergstrom | March 28, 2007 7:13 AM
I don’t think we have to wait till 2012. As Dirk says many people have a free eReader in their pocket or handbag - their regular cell phone (non-smart but j2me enabled).
I have done a lot of reading on my cell and always have 3-4 books ready for 'impulse reading'. I got a nice little frisson just from the idea of putting _Accelerando_ in my phone.
It's strange that you can be waiting till 'they' finally deliver the long awaited eReader, and you turn around and realize you have been carrying one around for months.
Unfortunately I had to 'roll my own' books (including skimming and tweaking text format etc. to read well in the very small screen), and there is nothing available that is not public domain, creative commons (not that there is anything wrong with that…as far as it goes).
I started downloading and reformatting books for my cell phone. Over the course of many books I refined the eReader; to make best use of the screen and to make the interface non-intrusive, trying to directly connect me to the author. When I started researching more to read, I realized how many of the PD works I was interested in reading for their own sake, rather than to ‘feed the phone’ or an exercise in ‘cultural virtue’.
The process is laborious, and some people are never going assemble a book in a phone from scratch. I was getting a lot of value out of the books and I thought others might also. My partner and I put together a service www.booksinmyphone.com. There you can browse précis and purchase books from the ‘classic’ lists of major publishers that should run on 90% of the phones sold today. We charge a few dollars to recover the costs of formatting and distributing.
I think one way or the other this kind of reading will really take-off.
Posted by: nicholas bennett | March 28, 2007 7:32 AM
Charlie, I think you're headed in the right direction, with a clear focus on the economics of the situation. Assessing the economics is the only thing that will help us sort out what works and what doesn't.
Over on TeBC ( groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community ) I've suggested standardizing at a MUCH lower layer than most, and pretty well been laughed out of the room for it. I think I've earned my curmudgeon stripes by now. My suggestion was to standardize at 800x600 monochrome bitmapped pages, because anything higher drove up the minimum cost of the end-user device. It could handle simple images and anyone's alphabet, yet avoided the scope-creep that seems to drive us to laptops displaying PDFs.
You could still use such a format in a higher-end device, much like you can play CDs in your laptop. But it at least leaves the option of a $20 device open, much like you can buy a $20 CD player down at the corner store.
Standardizing on pure page images on an SD card with simply page/chapter navigation controls -- not even a file structure -- would allow buying preloaded cards, and stuffing them into an otherwise memory-less device that has no software that can grow old or host security vulnerabilities. And, yes, you can load your own cards with your own works if you want to do that. If an e-ink screen makes sense, fine - but standardizing on the media is more important than standardizing on the device or the display.
Of course, it comes in for ridicule from those who think that ebooks must be at least ASCII, and likely something even more complex than that. But it seems that almost anything you can do in the higher formats, you can do in bitmap - but the more demanding user ends up paying more for their device, while everyone gets the same bare minimum media. Now that's the kind of economics that seems to make sense to me.
Posted by: Chris Smith | March 28, 2007 7:51 AM
Catbeller @17: We have to make sacrifices for the future of humanity. Aha! A neo-puritan! No thanks, I don't buy into your eschatology.
Given the average number of books per household in the US -- about two -- and the average weight of a hardcover -- about 600 grams -- it would take roughly 6 million tons of wood pulp to bring every household in the planet up to US standards. Which sounds like a lot until you realize that (cf. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000) we've got roughly 422 billion tons of wood biomass on this planet. So the argument that we've got to switch to ebooks otherwise we're raping mother Gaia and causing deforestation on a massive scale is basically a load of bollocks.
MattGB @19: if we end up with a situation in which "pirate" ebooks are seriously cutting into copyright revenues, then either the existing cultural and legal enforcement mechanisms will have been broken beyond repair, or it's time to change the law. There is no reason not to track ebook downloads and apply a compulsory licensing scheme akin to the musicians' performing rights societies to book consumption, or to remunerate authors via a tax on bandwidth (as appears to be the coming model for online music distribution).
Only the current phobia of "socialism" prevents us considering alternatives to copyright as means of paying artists and content creators.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 28, 2007 8:45 AM
I agree with the initial post as far as regular ebooks (novels) goes. But the ebook reader revolution might be stimulated by the needs of people in the research community (researchers and students). For example, my university is step by step dropping printed journals and switching to ejournals. That forces researchers and students to either print a paper copy or read the text on a screen (regular computer screen or some ebook reader). Paper, laser toner and other printing related materials aggregate into large costs for the research institutions. And regular computer screens are non-optimal for reading longer texts. The universities then have incentives to push for cheap ebook readers. It might therefore be economically rational for universities work together and collectively subsidize production of a cheap ebook reader. Once that is established, the rest will follow.
Posted by: Tomas | March 28, 2007 9:02 AM
Quux @37: Paper is DRM ... hmm, that's a very interesting idea, and I need to give it some attention.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 28, 2007 9:15 AM
JEP @39: Hi, and welcome to the discussion. On the other hand, the notion that authors must become performance artists and give their books away and charge for readings and jumping up and down on stages is popular, but you may lose some pretty good writers if you do things that way. ... I'm certainly not advocating that; I think it's as much a parody of Cory's position as my citing you was a parody of the sky-is-falling scenario.
The real question is, how do we (as writers) continue to make a living while making our works as widely available as possible to a global audience?
And I'm hoping to find some new lines of thought here ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 28, 2007 9:18 AM
I'm a lover of all things technical and have been an e-book reader for years now. My first encounter with commercial e-books was relatively painless and the software used my credit card number as a DRM key (that was before DRM existed in its present form) to effectively discourage sharing.
I believe that the lack of uptake of ebooks is in part due to the "Monty Python Quest For The Holy Grail" that the average punter needs to undertake to get onto a device in the first place. That and the lack of High Street/Main Street retailers that would entertain a CMS/distribution system in their shops, despite the potential.
When you consider that Joe Public you can walk into almost any large supermarket and Bluetooth images from a cellphone and make perfect prints without a second thought then you realise that "the trade" needs a collective kick to realise the potential its missing and make it just as easy to download a book!
Posted by: peterg22 | March 28, 2007 9:55 AM
I've always been slightly bemused that eBook readers don't come packaged with all the best stuff from Gutenberg etc, appropriately reformatted for nice display. An eBook reader that costs $200 and comes with $50 worth of books is one thing - a reader that comes with 50 or so great works of literature, etc is another.
And pretty much most techies would buy a $200 device that partnered with O'Reilly etc to have the tech books they wanted, and added to that all the technical manuals from selected common manufacturers (as most of them provide them free anyway). Similar niche uses exist for academia and education, most professions, many large organisaiton. While its not going to lead to mass market use, it might lead to a big enough market that eBooks start to mature as a market.
The biggest problem is definitely that eBooks still cost more than a MMPB - and, apart from searchability etc, give you less. I'm guessing this isn't just publisher delusion, but markets too small to have effective economies of scale. The chicken and egg situation needs to be broken by a company that will do a good job of providing a range of content provision programs, as well as manufacture device (and also licence the standard to other devices).
Posted by: David Cake | March 28, 2007 10:14 AM
Incidentally, Jerry, do you know what Diane Duane and Lawrence Watt-Evans are currently up to (separately) in the way of subscription-based online serials? According to them, the profit margin has taken them somewhat by surprise ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 28, 2007 10:23 AM
Was going to write a lot, but saw that Jett @20 is on the same wavelength as me. As someone who reads a lot of short SF (www.bestsf.net), and has had gadgets going back many years, and have tried Palms, PocketPC, MobiPocket eBookReader etc, and have paid for copies of e versions of sf mags like Asimovs, you'd have thought I'd be a proponent of ebooks. But I've given up on e-book reading. Small screen/text, battery life, etc, and just less easy altogether than whipping out a pbk or a magazine on the tubs/train/bus.
Posted by: Mark Watson | March 28, 2007 10:23 AM
I am using a Palm Treo 650, with the Mobipocket Reader. Living in South Africa, the cost of books is quite high (approx. R120 for a new paperback). The availability of free / low cost books on Baen, Fictionwise, etc is a great solution for me, as even after converting the USD cost of the book to SA Rands, it is still cheaper - approx. 30%.
Thus, for a country with a weak exchange rate against the USD, e-books are a sound economic alternative to new paperbacks, and are usually available before the books hit the shelves.
Posted by: Gerard Walsh | March 28, 2007 11:12 AM
Okay, after thinking on it...
Charlie, frankly I think your argument is broken. You're trying to say that people won't pay more for a mobile phone than the cost of a single call. Reading on a mobile screen, or anything smaller than a paperback WILL be niche - that is the problem with the current market, more than anything. The size of the paperback...is not an accident, in ergonomic terms. That is the "problem", ime.
I also disagree that you should seperate classrooms and other reading here - I think that's the likely way to GET a cheap, reasonable ereader.
Adam Rakunas, yes. You need to pay for the development liscence and support. Dev kits for anything are expensive...it's not really got that much to do with the commercial prices of the end user product.
Actually, there IS another potential killer app. A second device, slightly higher spec, with wifi. And a subscription to a news service. When you go throguh the station in the morning, it connects to the news point, grabs the news onto your e-reader as you walk past...and you pull it out on the train and start reading.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | March 28, 2007 11:59 AM
Re: Eric Flint volunteered this source: The Effect of File-Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strump, published in the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Political Economy
Most direct link be:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE/journal/issues/v115n1/31618/31618.html
Posted by: A.P. Lukashin | March 28, 2007 12:13 PM
Andrew, a phone is not an ebook reader (in terms of instant gratification, anyway). When you pay for a mobile phone, you're not paying for a single call, you're paying for the capability of making and receiving calls -- usually many of them per day. When you buy an ebook reader ... well, if you're me, you read 50-70 books a year and about half of them are ebooks, and you read at 350 words/min, so you're buying something you use for about an hour a day. Which is in the same ball-park as mobile phone use. But if you're an average member of the public, you read maybe 2 books a year; if you take 6 hours to read the book, it's a gizmo you expect to use for an hour a month.
Moreover, the mobile phone gives you a capability you cannot have without it, namely the ability to be contacted (or to talk to people) regardless of where you are. Whereas the ebook reader just lets you read a book. It confers no huge advantage unless you want to either search the text, or carry around multiple books at the same time.
So the equivalence you're making just isn't there.
I agree with you about screen size, though. I currently read ebooks on a Nokia N800 web tablet (because the 800x480 pixel display is simply better than my Palm TX's 480x320). It's a bit smaller than a mass market paperback, and having a bigger screen would indeed be good. I'm less hung up on digital paper, though; if it'll run for 20-30 hours on two AA cells, that's good enough for me -- I'd be changing batteries about once a month, and even a voracious reader would be able to run for a week. And my Psion 3a used to do that, back in 1994. It's only the fad for colour backlit LCD displays that have turned PDAs into energy hogs; we had the technology to make power-parsimonious monochrome LCDs a decade and a half ago.
NB: if you want a wifi-equipped gizmo for reading news on the go, Andrew, you really want to investigate the N800 ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | March 28, 2007 12:45 PM
Andrew (33), I'm not sure the international price argument counts -- at least not for western "English as a foreign language" markets. In fact, US (and even UK) paperbacks are often way cheaper (even counting transport) than the local translations or local works here in Germany. That may be because Germany is a high-price book market with some institutions (book prices have to be fixed by the publisher, not the store, and if its not used-books or some special deals, stores must sold for the publisher-fixed price), that may be because of economies of scale, but whatever the reason is, reading English paperbacks here is cheap (hard-cover is another area).
Catbeller and Charlie about "paperless saving the world" -- I guess one could look at the prophecies about paperless offices thanks to digital word processing as example where "saving paper by electronics" didn't work (nowadays draft prints and so on have multiplied the mass of paper used in offices). I don't think it will work with newspapers and books, for different reasons. One is haptics, another one are unintended uses (old newspapers are messy, but helpful to wrap garbage in or to clean the windows ...). And even if replacing books with readers and ebooks will work (and will really be a replacement and not only an additional way to read, as it is the case with MP3 players), I'm not sure if it pays, ecologically speaking. Manufacturing electronics is really dirty from a life-cycle point of view (i.e., including the extraction of raw materials etc.). Manufacturing books, especially if one uses partly recycled paper or the like, is much cleaner. I would guess that the ecological effects of one e-reader are comparable to a fairly large number of books. There is also the amount of energy used for using the reader. And the comparison becomes even worse if the reader is replaced every two years or so because data is transferable and the new model looks so much better (or the old one is broken). ((On a related note: the internet server architecture is fastly becoming one of the biggest sources for energy consumption ...)).
Posted by: Till Westermayer | March 28, 2007 12:50 PM
I'm another Palm PDA user and that's what my book-or-three-a-week reading's been done on, almost exclusively for the last decade. I have a couple of dead-tree books that I want to read, but it's just too much hassle! (You need a light on (bright enough and in the right place), two hands free to turn pages, no dictionary pop-up, no auto-bookmarking, etc. And that's assuming that you have the book you want in your hands already!)
One of my pet peeves is the idea that ebook readers need to be the same size and heft as a dead-tree book. The size of a paperback is a compromise between manageable size vs thickness (for a 'standard' novel) vs minimising the hassle of turning pages.
An ebook removes the page-turning impediment (just a momentary pressure of the thumb, without needing to move it much if at all) and so fewer words per page is no problem.
For textbooks or other graphics-heavy material, the problem is restored and a tablet-PC style of device is more the order of the day.
Battery life, display resolution and price are transient concerns, and the current exponential progress in technology will sweep those problems aside.
Posted by: Ian Mackereth | March 28, 2007 1:00 PM
Charlie, I'd agree IF it was only novel reading. But it's not just that. You can use them for ANY text. And there's a host of educational material and manuals which they can also be used for, and they'd be useful in the workplace for a lot of people as well.
The news thing isn't for me (I don't spend long enough on the bus, generally, for it to be worthwhile - but large numbers of people DO commute), but regardless the N800 is simply out of the question. I can't afford a £275 machine, and it's fragile - I'd break it inside in a month. As I said, I have a Fujitsu Stylisic 1200 which is old as heck, but it's quite rugged (And it was £90).
Till Westermayer, recycling paper above the quality of newspaper rag is actually less environmentally friendly than burning it for power and buying new wood from a sustainable forrest.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | March 28, 2007 1:13 PM
Charlie@47: And languages are region encoding, though it's pretty easy for some people to crack.
Posted by: Feòrag | March 28, 2007 1:15 PM
Charlie, you hit the nail on the head with the motivations of the pirate. Of course, this is true of most of the warez pirating culture, be it a pirated copy of Photoshop or the latest and greatest game: it's all about the fact that the pirate(s) got it somehow, broke whatever copy protection is on it, and then posted it. Preferably before it's official release. There's where they get respect in their little subculture.
What would happen if the books were cheaply available, widely available, with no DRM? Why, there wouldn't be much challenge to that, would there? No challenge=no respect for the pirate=the pirate moves on to something more interesting.
As for myself, I've spent quite a few hours reading books on the internet: John Scalzi's "Agent to the Stars", some of Cory Doctorow's releases, and quite a bit of the Baen Free Library. In most cases, while these didn't translate into direct sales for those works, it certainly translated into sales of other works by those authors.
Posted by: John | March 28, 2007 1:26 PM
Ian@57, size is also related to readability, i.e. the letter size should not be too small (and not to big), and there should not more than ~ 45 letters per line, if you look at it from the point of view of usability/cognitive psychology. E.g. this blog is not really well readable on a large screen. And a book on a phone (or a small PDA screen) is nothing I want to try ((I once did read some free SF book on my PDA and found it a nuissance; others on a small laptop, that worked better)). So an ebook-reader should have more or less the size of a larger paperback, somewhere between ISO B5 and ISO B4. Oh, and I want typographically rendered pages, not "system fonts"!
Andrew@58: I guess the eco-bilance of recycled papers vs. fresh papers depends on the way it is de-inked and what is understood by "sustainable forestry" (worse or better than FSC?). But it doesn't change my argument, just replace "if it's made from recycled paper" with "if the paper is produced as eco-friendly as possible".
Posted by: Till Westermayer | March 28, 2007 1:36 PM
One reader's datapoint. I like having physical books, and for "consumption" reading, carrying them around doesn't bother me. I buy a few e-books, but they're generally stuff that's PoD, or otherwise not readily available as physical books. I notice, however, that I don't stick them on my PDA, which could handle them fine. The stuff I have on the PDA is reference material; the point of having it electronic is to save carrying big binders around.
Posted by: John Dallman | March 28, 2007 1:38 PM
Just to add another anecdotal voice to the fray: I actually prefer e-books to their dead-tree versions. Aside from a few legacy books that couldn't bear to part with when I moved overseas, I do all my reading on a run-of-the-mill home PC or on a laptop. I've stopped buying paper books altogether except for those I cannot get in any other version.
Aside from all of the already-mentioned benefits (search, storage, and so on) what I like the most is the fact that I can adjust the text size, style and line length to whatever is comfortable to me. As my eyes have begun to fail me, I find the ability to blow the text up "real-big like" a definite advantage.
The biggest negative is that I get a lot of flak from my wife and her mother-in-law for being on the computer all the time -- although they spend a similar amount of time with their books. I can't quite get them to understand that I am doing exactly the same thing they are, but through a different user interface.
Posted by: Joseph Dietrich | March 28, 2007 2:33 PM
Well, I've been reading pirated e-books on a palm T5 for the last couple of weeks. I say pirated, but I feel no guilt about obtaining a copy of a book I own in dead-tree format which happens to be on another continent and which I have a hankering to re-read. It would be nice if you got e-book versions with paperbacks, for example.
I read a lot and I'll take any opportunity to grab a copy of a new interesting book that comes out, but I refuse to re-buy books I already own. I'm more cautious about buying books from a brand-new author, and tend to sniff around reviews, but I have a long list of authors whose new books I'll buy more or less automatically.
Of the very few books I've read in (unemcumbered) e-book format first (Bujold, Accelerando, Stross horror bits, Weber, Doctorow), I've then gone on to buy the dead-tree versions of almost all of them immediately.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the e-ink based reader coming later this year because it's going to make reading these sorts of books far more pleasant, but I'm still going to primarily be buying dead-tree paperbacks (because that's all I have space for).
Posted by: Bruce Murphy | March 28, 2007 3:03 PM
It's a case of the Waclawsky principle.
Explanation - last spring, I interviewed Motorola's chief software architect, John Waclawsky, who remarked apropos of something different that there are two kinds of technologies, those that offer substantial direct benefits to the end user, and those that are designed by people who think they can see the future, and that these are also known by the names "success" and "failure".
Posted by: Alex | March 28, 2007 3:08 PM
Till (57),
I wasn't thinking of the European market for English-language books. Western Europe already has a standard of living high enough to afford to import books if they want, as you mention. Eastern Europe will probably follow over the next several years as they become more integrated.
I was thinking rather of places like India, Africa, South America, etc. I run into a few book pirates who justify their piracy on those grounds. There was one South African I spoke to that was very passionate on the subject, basically saying it was neo-colonialism of wealthy country's industries trying to steal the wealth of the developing world by charging unfairly high prices for goods.
It's the same problem that the movie industry has run into, and tried to address with their region system for DVDs. People in 2/3rds of the world aren't going to pay $25 for a DVD, and they aren't going to pay that for a book either.
I agree with them, for reasons of my own. I think ebooks should cost slightly less than paperback books. As a consumer, you aren't getting a physical object, so you shouldn't pay as much. Of course, with books as with music and movies it's the information that really matters. I'd probably set the price of an ebook at about 80% of the price of a paperback. $4 or $5 seems fair, maybe $8-$10 for new books for the first couple months.
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