…on their site.
It’s coming faster than anybody thought. Hardbounds are not necessarily overpriced, but it’s costing hugely to produce them, and push is going to come to shove much faster than once expected.
Gettin’ scary for the traditional publishing industry, guys.
Just read an interesting article about Amazon:
How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid
http://www.alternet.org/books/147590/how_amazon_kills_books_and_makes_us_stupid/?page=entire
Quotes:
“In researching this article, I uncovered widespread resentment about the aggressive way Amazon pursues its objectives, matched only by dread of being publicly identified as a critic of publishing’s largest customer. ‘They have no sense of collegiality,’ complained one publisher, who asked not to be identified. ‘They behave like pigs,’ said another, his voice dropping as he checked around to see if anyone was within earshot.”
“Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared to speak openly about Amazon’s bullying. His story is far from atypical. In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville’s distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of ‘co-op,’ money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as ‘kickback.'”
I refuse to feel bad for the publishers because they suddenly have someone higher up on the food chain above them. Their own practices dealing with people under them have not been squeaky clean over the years either. Capitalism can be cruel at times, but publishers have been in the game long enough to have earned what they get for the most part. Ultimately the only right thing is having the content back in the control of those who make it. So until that happens it doesn’t really matter to me who among the rest have pushed their way to the top of the pile nor who is feeling left out this week.
If you actually read the article, you will see that the problems publishers have in being forced to sell books for uneconomical prices, in turn creates huge problems for authors – smaller advances for authors, publishers less willing to take risks with new authors or mid-list authors, less willing to promote niche markets, less willing to let authors write what they want, instead of what the accountants think will sell, etc.
I think CJ has spoken at length about these issues in the past.
This is not about free markets, but about monopolies, unfair and illegal practices, and closed markets.
I’m not saying it won’t be a painful band-aid to remove, but the way publishers AND Amazon do business will be a thing of the past sooner rather than later and the shady business practices you linked to will be a footnote in history. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I don’t feel allegiance to either one nor feel sorry for either one anymore than I feel for the people who put out VHS tapes. Writers will survive as they always have. It’s the middleman who will have to figure out if they are relevant anymore.
Sooner rather than later we won’t be arguing which yoke is easier or who screwed over who when. The yoke will be gone, the publishers won’t be in the position to say which books will get out or not based on what their out of touch penny pincher in a suit decides (influenced by Amazon and Costco or not), and for the first time in the history perhaps the author will have freedom to succeed or not based on the quality of their work rather than if someone thinks urban zombie romance is going to be the hot thing come fall. Publishers have been blocking books and neglecting promoting them long before Amazon went into price wars. They will have to find a new way of sticking their foot in it because it won’t be in that capacity anymore.
My main point is that their business strategy has hardly been functioning right even before Amazon and their type came into the scene. They’ve always had an agenda when it comes to what books they push and they’ve always done a less than acceptable job promoting books. True, the author loses out more than the rest in all of this (and always has), but it wasn’t a well oiled machine prior to recent developments. The best thing that could happen is something new rise up instead of just returning things to the SNAFU standard the whole industry has been running on as far back as I can see.
The hard thing is going to be to identify/find quality. Word of mouth is going to matter a lot among readers. I mean, as a writer I can say “I love my books”, or, “Trust me: I’m a professional” but that’s not going to mean squat to a person who’s out there wading through stacks of books with similar claims. What will matter most, imho, is reader-sites and readers talking to other readers, to get them to visit sites like this one, to be able to go directly to the writers.
@sweetbo: CJ hit the nail on the head when she says, “The hard thing is going to be to identify/find quality.”
It’s fine for established authors like CJ who have built up a reader base (via old-fashioned paper books and old-fashioned publishers). Existing readers, word of mouth, and maybe some promotion will always mean that there are a certain number of people willing to pay for anything she cares to write. Those who go to Amazon and specifically type ‘Cherryh’ in the search box will be just as willing, or more so, to come to this site… if they know about it.
But suppose I’m looking for a good new SF author to read. There may be many, many thousands of self-published books out there. Probably 95% of them are not worth reading. How do I find the good stuff without spending a huge amount of my time searching through the haystack?
If a book is published by a publisher, at least I know that someone has liked it enough, or thinks that other people will like it enough, to put up their own money to back it.
Of course publishers may be wrong in their judgment. There are many cases of a book being repeatedly rejected by publishers, and then going on to bestseller/classic status.
But at least there is some kind of filtering process.
It’s all very well for everyone and his dog to have a blog and self-publish books, but how do you find new books that are worth reading? How does a talented new writer make money? Finding a critical mass of readers starting out from zero, when you are competing against 10,000 other new self-published authors (most of them writing junk) is whole other story.
A book is not like blog, where you can read a few paragraphs, see if you like the writer and whether they are saying something of interest to you, and then go onto the next, maybe adding an RSS feed to see future postings.
With a book you may not be able to tell for a chapter or two whether it’s worth reading or not. The best literature is generally hard to get into. There’s a kind of ‘potential barrier’ to getting into a book. CJ’s books themselves tend to start off very slowly and gradually build up. You have to invest a fair chunk of time to see if a book by a new author is worthwhile or not. Is it really worth doing this for an author picked almost at random out of thousands of others?
So there is, and always will be, a role for professionals who go through the chaff, pick out the good pieces which they think people will want to read, and put up their own money to back it in the marketplace. There will always be a role for people who can identify talent, nurture it, give constructive feedback, and give financial backing.
Nobody knows how the writing and publishing world will shake out in the future. We live at a critical turning point for the whole industry. But one thing I’m sure of, there will always be a role for good publishers.
Congratulations on being on the cutting edge!
Reasons for ebooks rather than hardbound:
1. Sales are immediate – receipt is nearly instantaneous (well suited to impulse buying and that I can’t sleep but I don’t have anything to read dilemma at midnight)
2. Saves the long process of actually printing the book – no binding, no shipment to stores. Less time from finalized book to book release. (…although it doesn’t seem like it when you are doing the conversions)
3. Saves a lot of fossil fuels and prevents a substantial amount of deforestation – environmentally more sustainable.
4. Saves space and clutter in the home.
5. Shareable among family without the books going missing…
6. Quickly replaceable (books redownloadable) in case of loss of home
7. The readers themselves are being engineered to feel smooth, and page quickly one-handed. Easier to read in situations where only one hand is available.
8. Font sizes to support readers of all ages and a fair range of visual impairment.
9. Some readers offer text to voice, or audiobook capability.
10.Some readers also allow stored music to be played while reading, thus giving the reader “white noise” while reading to focus attention or prevent distractions.
11.Single print of electronic book – or custom print and bindery may make a gift of a hardbound book once again a gift of great importance, rather than a last minute “What do I give?” alternative.
My interest in e-books coexists with netflix….there are lots of things that I want to see/read that I don’t need to own. But there will always be some things that I want to have in hard copy. Your books, Nand’ CJ, Larry McMurtry, Jane Austen, etc. we will always need, just as there are films we want on DVD because we enjoy breaking them down and taking them apart.
The future in e-publishing that I am most excited about is magazines. I love the idea of having a year’s worth of magazines at my fingertips. Tp be able to access articles and pix for reference or a slideshow for a workshop would make life a lot easier. I am a pack rat at heart; this has a huge potential to cut down on the stuff in my life. (Lynn is inspiring me to aim for a 5% downsize! 😉 )
Are Amazon books still DRMd? I’ll switch to using them in an instant if they are not. I hate the idea of having a book that you can (metaphorically) only read in one room of the house and then when you change the room you no longer have access to it……
Most of Amazon’s books are still DRM’d but you can have up to seven devices connected to your account so you get to download to multiple devices. In our family we have two computers, two Kindles, and a smart phone linked to my account, so spouse and I share books on multiple devices and I can share with my two adult children as well, by adding them to my account. When a device gets damaged or a child leaves the nest, it is very simple to deregister the device or add a new device. Recently my Kindle was damaged by a heavy weight falling on it. I got a new Kindle within 3 days, and the transfer tools made it relatively simple to transfer the titles I “lost” with the demise (without paying for them.) Several other e-book providers supply formats readable on the Kindle (and other devices). Notably – Baen books. Only disadvantage (if it is one) being that you download your books through a computer rather than directly over the air (Amazon offers this capability as well. It is a Godsend for those of us who live in the boonies and have erratic or non-existent 3G coverage. Typical download time at home 5-6 minutes per book, in DC on business, less than 45 seconds.) I currently am mining the depths of Project Gutenburg for free books out of copyright. They are non-DRM and I download them to a computer folder from which spouse and I both install them at will on our Kindles (works for most ebooks – just make sure you get the correct file format).
I should also add that Kindle for PC app is free from Amazon; also Kindle for iPhone, and other apps). If you are thinking about going the Kindle route, try out the Kindle for PC first and see if you like it.
I have the Kindle for PC app on my laptop and Kindle for iPod/iPhone on my iPhone, and once my new desktop computer arrives, it’ll join them.
Note that the iBooks app plus iTunes means I can load Closed Circle ebooks onto my PC and then onto my iPhone. (However, I’m vision-impaired, and the iPhone screen is *tiny* for that; an iPad would be a better choice for a reader.)
— I’m eager to see advances in ebooks so they can be as beautiful as real printed books.
— I’ve found that now, I am trying ebooks whenever possible, and then if it is something I truly want to keep, I want an in-print copy. But I will *always* love real books. — A totally blind reader might prefer an ebook with text-to-voice software, though.
CJ’s interview with Dragon Page’s podcast was really good. I wish there’d been more. I also found Tracy Hickman’s interview in the next episode interesting. As a reader, I *want* all those great choices in kinds of literature, especially in the scifi / fantasy realms. I *want* short story anthologies and novels and…and…. Yes, there’s a good reason for ebooks. My bookshelves can only hold so many books, but if I like something, I want to reread it when the mood strikes me, or if I can’t sleep, have free time, and so on.
One downside to Amazon and iTunes and other bookstores / audio-video stores online is that the customer goes looking for something specific and may miss those little “aha, eureka!” moments of finding something neat but unexpected, not what you were looking for, but it caught your eye/ear and looks/sounds good — and if it turns out to be good, what you like, then you’ve found something marvelous, a new love. It isn’t yet as easy to run into something online that way…and the warehouse bookstores have gotten so big and intimidating (in my major city) that it’s likewise easy to be overwhelmed. (You could fit a good-sized public library in there, along with the coffee/sweet shop.) It is also not yet as easy to sit down online and look through a book and see if it’s the one you want, or if another is better.
But on the whole? — Thanks to ebooks, I can now carry around great literature or pulp reading at will, limited only by the size of the drive/disk. So not only CJ but other favorite books/authors and classic stuff and reference materials are all right there, just waiting for an ebook reader that’s handy. I’m lucky to get one or two printed books with the other stuff I have to carry around daily. So ebooks are a real blessing.
I’m glad for Closed Circle. I’m also a regular Amazon customer (more than just books). If better alternatives arrive, excellent. I believe ebooks are a great way to go for individual authors and for the publishing industry. We just need the kinks worked out of the formats and the readers and a reasonable system for a person to retain access to his/her ebooks that “follows” the purchaser / giftee, so we can access our ebooks when and where we want, and keep that access, even if there is a hardware failure or natural disaster or (my goodness!) a time when we’re away from our regular access, but still want to read/watch/listen. You know, like a vacation or an emergency. (Being without a book or music / audio / video could be akin to an emergency. Depends on the viewpoint. Or the need.)
Looking forward to more.
I’m getting more curious about these all the time. I noticed one big difference between the Kindle and the Sony E-reader. A keyboard. Say I’m looking for a reference, does the Kindle allow me to type in a word and find the information I want?
One of my main reasons to hold out is the “It’s another thing to lose the charger for.” Or in my case, misplace on my own or with four-footed, furry help.
I thought I heard something on NPR this morning about e-readers and standardizing format? Or did I imagine that? Or was that about movies? It could have included ebooks.
Kindle has a search key; you put in a search term and it then finds the references on your kindle. It then gives you the option of going to Wikipedia or the web. It also has a built-in dictionary. I use the search to find books I’ve mis-laid, rather than scrolling through 31 pages of books.
& the Sony touchscreen machines have a touchscreen keyboard. In my opinion, neither the Kindle nor the Sony keyboards are anything you’d want to use for more than a couple words. Both are ok for occasional text searches.
My mother and I have just committed Nookery(or should that be, ‘we have Nooked?’),and we love our new gadgets. The Nook is fun and nice and I like the idea of ‘lending’ her one of my books or vice versa. I’ve found some books that I can buy as an ebook which will enable me to get rid of some old, musty, dusty paperbacks (many of our ooold Burroughs novels, for a start, and a few older regency romances – I’m pressing her to replace her Georgette Heyers too). So there’s a goodly portion of at least one bookshelf cleared… heh.
But one of the reasons (other than just loving books) I’ll keep favorite books in hardcover or paperback is this… I live in Hurricane country. When the wind blows and the rain lashes against the house and our cable and electric go out, I can still read a book (providing its light enough). And let me tell you, without my books (in particular the Foreigner series, as a matter of fact) Mom and I would never have emerged from literally *weeks* without power following hurricanes Frances and Jeanne with our sanity intact. During those weeks, stuck at home, with no power and nothing to do once we’d made the daily run to the local water/ice drop point, we began a habit of reading aloud to one another that has continued to this day. Now we can use a Nook instead of a book, but the fact is, as genre readers, the bulk of our library isn’t available and probably never will be, unless we scan them ourselves.
So I’ll keep my books, and continue to buy paper books, as well as electronic ones.
And nothing, nothing, nothing beats the fun of just browsing the shelves and finding a treasure. Plus, while I can download a sample from a book, it’s generally just a few pages of the first chapter, and there are several books I’ve looked at that I’ll have to check out at the store, just to get a better feel.
Sorry for the long post.
I own a kindle and LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Form, function, it is all great.
That being said, if I were to buy an e-book reader TODAY it would probably be the Nook. Barnes and Noble is in the business of selling books — Amazon seems to be in the business of putting the publishing industry out of business.
I don’t know if either is better than the other, business practice-wise, but Amazon’s rhetoric makes me uncomfortable. I just want to have all my books at my fingertips… not “kill” anyone or anything. Jeez.
Kindle seems to be great for reference works, those books that you have already decided are valuable enough to you that you want a copy around permanently. But Amazon has removed browsing form the equation; you can’t pick up an e-book and flip through it to decide if it’s worth investing in. There are also books that will never be put into e-book format, save as someone’s labor of love. I have a number of science fiction books that are relatively good, but have sunk into obscurity and will probably never be reissued. I am pleased to hear that you can have multiple devices on one Amazon e-book account, so that you can transfer an e-book to any one of them. That might be the thing that pushes me into e-book readerdom, but I will not dump my physical book collection just yet. At $9.99 a pop, paperbacks are still less expensive than an e-book, and more portable.
Project Gutenberg is probably the best hope there is for the reams of sf that was published back in the bad old Belmont Tower days. They also depend on volunteers, and if you want to help save a literature, getting nearly-lost sf books into Gutenberg is a worthwhile endeavor.
Is there a link from Project Gutenberg that explains the type of volunteer work they need? I don’t have a scanner, so on that aspect I am hopeless. Given today’s copyright longevities, I even doubt my 20 and 30 y.o. obscure sci-fi is in the public domain. When was the last time you saw a collection of Zenna Henderson’s work? Manly Wade Wellman? Or Ann Maxwell (who mainly did romances!)
Found it… looks like proofreading it is, then. Considering the verbosity and verbiage on some of the old pulp stuff, I might be in trouble 😀 I’d be tempted to mend the language!
The $9.99 books are generally those currently out in hardback format. Most books that are out in paperback sell for about a buck less in e-book format. Still, I’m not dumping any of my current physical books for e-book copies. I just choose the e-book, when available, when I buy something new.
If this is the case, I’m going to have to save my nickels and dimes for a reader. I just spent $260 for my front brakes on the baby. I’m still leaning towards one of the Sony models, because of their rating by “a leading consumer magazine”. I’m not sure I need the Daily Edition, or whatever that high-end model is, just a nice easy to read screen. Until they figure out what’s wrong with my eye, I’m going to hold off, anyway.
I have what is becoming a very elderly e-reader, as fast as they are introduced and mutate. It is a Bookeen Cybook Gen 3, made by a French company. Came out a few months before the first Kindle. There was a sadly short-lived buyers’ club run by a bunch of Baen’s Bar members who were after a simple e-reader – not a phone, not a camera, not a locked-up DRMed machine tied to a content distributor. They settled on the Bookeen one, before it was quite even in production, and imported several hundred at a good discount, but they weren’t able to get the economies of scale to be a viable enterprise. Many of those first ones have bitten the dust; the screen was kind of fragile. But mine is still perking along just fine. SO much more comfortable in my hands than a huge heavy hardback book, and the font-size adjustment is a godsend when I forget my reading glasses. (Sucks to need readers!)
This is good news indeed, the rise of the ebook to take the place of paper
as the most popular format means that the prices of readers will drop
drasticly. Look at what happened with the cumbersome portable phones in a
couple of years they were tiny cheap and everywhere.
Once they are cheap enough, you can load them with good literature and get
them into the hands of kids.
The sappy chorus of the children are our future
goes here.
They are our future and illiterates who play Grand Theft Auto will make the
future a bad place to live in.
Remove the illiteracy and the other stuff just becomes a game instead of a
model for a career path.
The death of VHS tapes should have been a wakeup call on DRM, the single
vendor of the DRM kept raising the price per tape. Now they are back in the
buggy whip business. This sequence is not a fluke. Selling things that lock
out the buyer in a world that is in flux is financial suicide.
There is an apochryphal tale told in military leadership school: A young
officer found a phrase in a book about the Navy. “The enlisted man is sly
and crafty, and cannot be trusted.” So every morning at muster on his first
ship he read this to his division. From a reasonably run ship with no real
problems this one turned into a hotbed of lying, cheating, seditious and
insolent behaviors, because human behavior is to live up to the way you
are treated. There was no point to behaving otherwise when you would be
daily imaged as a scoundrel by authority.
DRM locks up the content people pay for and sends the message, you are a
thief who cannot be trusted at all.
If you place your trust in people, even if it turns out to be misplaced,
it sends the message that you want to live in a world where people can be
trusted.
The other point to the Naval tale is that the best organization on earth
can be sabotaged by one silly incompetent who is listened to wiping out
over a century of hard work in a few weeks. That’s why the story was on
the curriculum of a required school for senior enlisted men, because they
could take the young officer aside and correct his behavior before it
caused a problem, if they were aware of its consequences.
GRIN Many ebooks good, DRM bad idea.
Closed Circle got a shout-out today from the “Dear Author” blog: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/07/21/wednesday-midday-links-authors-releasing-backlist-titles-in-digital/
Great!
This has been an interesting discussion. While I am kind of old fashioned, and prefer a real book in my hands, it is obvious that the e readers are going to take over publishing. A good friend of mine works for a company that packages books (mostly short story collections). He is not sure how long he is going to have a job. The Publishers are going to have to adapt or die. I have not considered buying an e reader, largely due to the cost. They will have to get a lot cheaper for a lot of us. Toys like that are not compatible with my current income level
I sympathize with your friend…it’s difficult. One thing his company and he could do is join them, in the sense of using their expertise to create an on-line ‘brand’.
Re the price of e-readers, this is why we have the free or shareware reader-programs offered on this site and over on Closed Circle: if you’re reading this you have a computer, and if you have a computer (or similar device) you can get it to display non-DRM e-books, such as ours, such as books from Project Gutenberg, or Baen Books, etc. Just download the software and click on any .mobi or .prc or .epub book you have on your computer disc, and it will automatically open and play it. Some of the readers also have a pretty good voice option, too.
We’re trying to keep it as inexpensive as possible. My vision of what books ought to be is more, rather than less, people able to afford to read, while keeping writers able to afford to write. I love to curl up with a good book, too, and even a laptop is weighty and difficult and a bit of a PITA, but hey, if you save enough by buying e-books (which should be a little cheaper) sooner or later (Kindles are now 189.00 and I think Nooks are right with them) you’ll have saved the price of a reader.
Has anybody here checked out how the iPad works as an e-reader?
I don’t have one but I sat next to an early adopter on a plane last March. It is truly slick, very, very pretty with the way the pages turn and the example I saw looked wonderful. However, e-ink is, I think, easier on the eyes when used for long periods of time. That’s not to say I would turn my nose up at one if it were offered to me. And the price differential is quite a bit.
iPads are probably the heaviest option out there. I held my coworkers with one hand and thought I wouldn’t enjoy doing that while reading for any long stretch of time and even two handed would get to my wrists pretty quickly. It also doesn’t have eInk tech and will have glare issues outside and give you as much eye fatigue as sitting in front of a computer for hours would. On the other hand, every persons computer situation at home is different. If you are also looking for something like a netbook and only occasionally read or read for short stretches it might be for you. It is all about priorities and cost. I’d say reading books isn’t very high on the list of things people use the iPad for (judging by the people I know who have bought iPads) and that is reflected in the design. It is just another app for them, not something the design was tailored to. But then most ereaders don’t do the other things the iPad can do because they are not netbooks and never were intended on being that. I have enough tech in my life, enough computers, way too much internet, and when I read I want to get away from those distractions.
Thanks for your replies. My apologies: I should have written “has anybody *else* here” etc… I admit with chagrin that I really like the iPad for ebook reading, which is strange because I adamantly prefer paper for reading and even more for editing. Paper is impractical given my job and the volume of text I work with, so I do the majority of that on computers (desktop and notebook).
Of course, I love reading to unwind, and I’ve tried ebooks, but the readers have always turned me off. I tried using my notebook, but that was too much like work, and I couldn’t sprawl out on the floor with it, not to mention that there’s something just wrong with having to use a mouse when you’re reading for pleasure. =) At any rate, I tried the iPad and found myself think “oh, hello there”. I know other folks don’t like them much, and I certainly see their reasons. Oddly, the iPad interface seem less computer-like to me, which is what I most need to wrench myself away from work. In the end, of course, I still prefer a printed book because it’s the least computer-like of all (and I like the texture of the paper, the sound of a turning a page)…
I know exactly what you mean: I am on a laptop from 5am until 10pm and find it difficult to relax with it in the curling-up-in-chair-to-read mode, so a reader is a good idea for me. Those who don’t have to live glued to a keyboard may find the computer perfectly comfy for them.
Anyone who spends lots of worktime on a comp will be less than thrilled to
do it for their leisure time. I found that I used the computer at home for
work related things and the odd game after all day playing Real time control
and data massaging. Retired, I went back to playing with the computer again.
The ebooks mean I can have an enormous library, which is good. I really like
the idea that if they are spread around enough humans can recover from any
disaster with our records intact.
A quick comparison of Procopius to Saxo Grammaticus will show you why losing
your records is a bad idea.
The good news is I saw an ereader for 139USD, and India says they are going
to have a 35USD ipad clone in the near future. A market of 2.4 billion makes
economies of scale on a whole new level.
Too lazy to turn pages or use mice, check out what Tan Le is up to. I can’t wait
to see what people do with this.