E-Books, publishing and pricing

Once again there's a new development on which to hang a headline and a story about the decline of traditional, on-dead-tree publishing. This time it's the potential demise of the hardback book, with Amazon's Kindle, Google's e-books and Amazon's aggressive price-cutting to blame. Please, do read the linked article.

The question, once again, is whether this is a bad thing. E-books can be much more profitable to someone -- apparently, not yet more profitable to publishers -- even when they cost less than half the retail price for normal hardbacks. Obviously. Because there's no, you know, printing or binding.

This is upsetting publishers because they rely on release-control to squeeze their most enthusiastic readers for maximum profit. Just like the movies used to wait years to come out on video, trying to force you into the theaters. The Internet and the ease with which movies are pirated and distributed has made that impractical. Now there's a short theater release during which people who love the big screen experience can see the latest Harry Potter flick, followed by mass distribution of cheap DVDs at Wal-Mart for the growing number of people who own 12-foot plasma screens or simply don't like to deal with traffic.

Only this year will we see the second first truly ambitious effort by a Hollywood innovator to bring people back to theaters, not by attempting to withhold the movie from any other venues, but by making the experience better. CNN's headline asks, "Will James Cameron's 3D 'Avatar' change cinema forever?" The first ambitious attempt was IMAX.

Basically, there is one person changing things for each of the three traditional media markets: print (books and news) is being revolutionized by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who started off by blowing billions and billions of dollars selling discounted books on the Internet, until he changed people's shopping habits, a critical mass of buyers was formed -- and traditional book stores started dropping like patients in a Canadian hospital (OK, a bit of exaggeration there. Canadians live longer than American book stores).

Steve Jobs is the one man giving people a reason to not download pirated music, by making it easy to get high quality recordings cheaply and as soon as you want them on iTunes. I often can buy CDs for less, brand-new, on eBay, but iTunes makes it possible for me to have something the moment I think I want it. But the only albums I buy are usually of classical music; with pop music there are just one or two songs I want, since studios are used to forcing us to buy 7 crappy tunes for every 1 or 2 decent ones. Recording companies moan that iTunes hasn't brought either album or single sales back to early 1990s levels, and their earnings are way down. But that's much like Dan Rather complaining about bloggers being less professional than he was. It's too late, folks. Best to get with the information age and change your business model, even if that means making less per act.

Now there's Cameron, adding to IMAX another reason for going to the theather and paying a good chunk o' change for a viewing experience you can't duplicate at home. Good on him. But DVDs and movie downloads are still the way people will see more and more of their films and TV shows. Get used to it.

OK, back to the original reason for this rant: the future of print publishing. Many people still like to hold a book in their hands, and I think there will always be a demand for on-dead-tree media. But that doesn't mean publishers have a "right" to make many times more money than they pay authors by using controlled-release tricks such as limiting new titles to hardback for months and months. The trade paperback is an attractive way of binding books that is also plenty sturdy for careful readers. And for impatient readers like myself, the Kindle is a fabulous way to combine the original Amazon benefit of access to everything in print plus lower title prices, with the added benefit of access to a massive library of out-of-print books. Then you lose the drawback of waiting for books to arrive; they download in a minute or so.

And although Amazon is pretty aggressive at undercutting publishers, as I understand it, they've never gone after the profits received by authors. Meanwhile, all my published friends tell me the same story: even big printers are getting stingy (or downright fraudulent) with the royalties, eliminating the advance payments that encouraged publishers to earn back their investment by pitching the book aggressively to sellers and readers, and instead dumping much or all of the marketing and promotion work on the authors. Most publishers used to actually earn their high margins by doing work that was useful to the author; now they just rely on the prestige of their names to lend credibility to authors. They no longer edit, proofread or pitch like they used to. In an age when self-publishing doesn't mean what it used to, they're still relying on their name brand to attract both authors and readers. They're losing both.

My highly thought-out conclusion: screw 'em. Amazon might be a scary future monopoly, but they're getting more books to readers more cheaply, and so far without doing anything to undercut authors. It's conceivable that authors will be better off because of Amazon, while many publishers will be forced out of yesterday's business models. Or out of existence.

Eventually Amazon could get just as heartless with writers. I won't say it's all for the better. But I don't see any reason to be loyal to the old business model, either.