The Book Conundrum

[penk]

So I'm in the final 18 hours or so of Arisia, and spent a little time this afternoon in the dealers room (after my duties at Registration were over). I noticed a couple paperbacks on sale that I was interested in. One is Glen Cook's A Passage at Arms, certianly one of the best books I've ever read, and one I had thought was out of print. My copy of the book has long since disintegrated, so finding it available again is a win.

Except.. I have no interest in purchasing paperbacks - or even hardbacks for that matter.

I used to collect books like crazy, and had quite a pile stored up. Since I've been reading more and more on my iPhone, my interest in picking up chunks of dead tree (and the hassle inherent therein) is diminishing.

But alas, publishers haven't figured out that selling a book digitally is a simple and effective way to make money with virtually no overhead. They already have the book printed and in digital form. Making it available for download is a minor step.

I firmly believe that digital books are the next step in written media. I just wish the publishers would catch up and let me buy books that I want to read, when i want to read them, and not simply offer the latest Stephen King novel at a stupidly inflated price.

I foresee a thriving black market for digital books until the publishers get their collective heads out of their asses and start putting their libraries out at reasonable prices.

Comments

[dsrtao]

Black market suggests money, but I'm pretty sure the underground book warez scene is a gift economy the way all other bits are.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Oh unquestionably. I don't see any profit going on here. I do believe the publishers are killing themselves much as the music execs are - trying to wring blood from a stone.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

I foresee a thriving black market...

Forsee? Dude, it's already there. There's a torrent on [a certain popular aggregator site] right now that contains TWO THOUSAND scifi novels: basically every book by every sf/f author of note for the last fifty years.

Honestly, the SF publishers aren't going to make it. The person to watch right now is Normal Spinirad: he's been effectively blackballed by the US publishing industry, but he's got the rights to most of his own material, and he's putting it up on Kindle for about $6/book. If (a) he can make any decent amount of money at this, and (b) other people catch on, it could be a pretty interesting couple of years.

[penk.livejournal.com]

I've torrented a few books and found the offerings... sketchy at best. HTML documents with little or no formatting, poor TOC management and chapter breaks that are arbitrary at best.

However, I'm an openminded fellow. If a birdie were to whisper the torrent URL or send said torrent along, I might be willing to give it a second glance.

In the name of science, of course.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Quality of the pirated ebooks varies pretty widely, but I've been pretty impressed by some of what I've found.

I don't think you're on the site in question, but ping me in realtime...

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

i imagine it would take many publishers more effort than "virtually no overhead" implies to put out ebooks in other than the crappy format you're describing here.

Fact is, when there's a format change, a lot of the pre-change stuff doesnt make it over. I used to be dragged around to garage sales and have seen a lot of 78s with music that got left way behind when things started spinning more slowly. The most popular N% of recent stuff will make it over to ereader format in the next 10 years, the percentage of less recent stuff that makes it over will be less. There may be a Googleish force that tries to grab everything over at some point when copyright law or The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market makes that possible, but in our lifetimes, there will remain big gaps in stuff from our lifetimes.

IMHO.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, a lot of spaces that were big gaps just a few years ago are already being filled by Amazon, with delivery format being your choice of Kindle or print-on-demand dead-tree. Plenty of little publishers have already gone this route, lots of books that were hard to find just 3-4 years ago can now be bought now, and more and more will follow.

[creidylad.livejournal.com]

It's sad to think SF writers won't make it...

But people do love a good book cover. And SF fans do get sort of enthusiastic about hoarding things, like certain editions of favorite books, so we can hope...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

It's sad to think SF writers won't make it...

I said that the publishers wouldn't make it. Very different thing. :)

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

The writers will make it, at least as much as writers have been making it in recent years (maybe a little more). Amazon, Apple, etc., are already providing distribution routes that allow the writers to make money. What will be missing -- what the small presses provide now -- is curation and promotion, and it's a safe bet that ample alternatives for both will continue to emerge.

Of course, a lot of this will fall on the writers, who are already having to do more promotion than they'd like. The world where a mid-list writer can crank out a novel every 2-3 years and be assured of a comfortable living without having to otherwise lift a finger is long gone, but it's been gone for decades.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Your complaint seems 3-4 years out of date to me. The world you're calling for is already in the process of arriving. Lots and lots and LOTS of books are already available electronically via Kindle (etc.), and more are coming out every day. But yes, you have to pay for them (and yes, there's DRM attached so they don't end up with the torrent kiddies), and no, that price isn't actually "stupidly inflated". When you're Stephen King you get to command a premium price for your newest work. If you don't like it, borrow the dead-tree version from your library -- or wait a while for it to come down.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Well, my issue is that a book that is already in print is being sold on the B&N and Amazon stores at a price that to me is stupidly inflated. Modern books are already in digital form when sent to the printer. The overhead of getting that book out for download, and downloading it to a million kindles is pennies compared to getting a dead-tree version to a million users - so why is it being sold at the same price as a paperback?

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

noire and I have spent a bunch of tame talking through this, since the future of the industry is of obvious importance to her.

But alas, publishers haven't figured out that selling a book digitally is a simple and effective way to make money with virtually no overhead.

The publishing industry really does not seem to have tried very hard to change its business model in the last hundred years or so (despite the fact that the record industry's decline is a Real Obvious Hint) so it was only a matter of time before digital distribution and print-on-demand start turning things upside down. That said, there is, and needs to be, overhead - someone's got to be the editor, and the advertiser, because the internet does allow for a lot of "self-published" (if that term applies to digital media) dreck to get into circulation. I'll totally pay for my digital editions if it means I'm getting something that has at least been through the hands of someone who is a decent editor, and someone with enough experience in the field to know what's new and interesting, and what's another goddamn Tolkien knockoff.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I'm not advocating removing the publishing process. Editors and marketing - they're still required. In particular though I'm talking about releasing already loaded, edited, and formatted books in digital form. The book is already on someone's hard drive, formatted, proofed, edited, and ready to be sent to the big printing press. Converting that to Mobi format and putting on Amazon has almost no overhead compared to the cost of generating a dead-tree version and shipping it via truck to a brick and mortar location.

And that publish-to-store-in-digital-form has to be done... once. And a million people can receive it.

So why is the book being sold for more than the cost of the paperback version?

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I seriously considered picking up a T-shirt in the dealers' room yesterday with ten reasons why dead-tree books beat the heck out of e-books. I think three of them were "no {%*#}ing batteries!"

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

My counterargument:

4.8 ounces.

That's how much my phone weighs. And it's a sunk cost: I'm going to be carrying that 4.8oz around with me no matter what. Adding 5 books to it -- or 50, or 500, or 5,000, all of which are quite possible without coming close to filling it up -- adds exactly nothing to that weight.

I'll take the hassle of a few battery charges in order to never have to carry 4-20 pounds of books with me again, which I've done on more than one occasion.

(Also: 62 cubic centimeters, in a conveniently pocketable oblong shape. I can carry an entire library in my pants!)

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. After carrying a single small hardcover around Arisia yesterday and killing my shoulder, I'm vaguely sympathetic to this argument. :) I even have about five hundred books on my own iPhone.

But know how many I've actually gotten through? Four, I think. I detest trying to read unformatted text on a 2-inch-wide screen. PDFs might be more pleasant except that I cannot possibly read them when the page is shrunk to fit the screen, and when it isn't the scrolling and pinching back and forth drives me insane.

Maybe an iPad is a lot better for this -- dunno, I haven't been able to afford one yet. But using books-on-phones to replace a good book? NMK. :}

[candle-light.livejournal.com]

Yes it's a sunk cost, but how much does it cost to replace when you drop it in the tub while reading a book in the bath? :-)

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Heh, I haven't read a book in the bath in at least a decade...