Mon, 08 Sep 2003
Putting Up.
She gave a triumphant cry and came back with her trophy.
It was a largish bottle and its neck had been carefully sealed. A roll of paper could be seen inside.
“Jinn, break it open, hurry up!” Phyllis begged, pawing the ground.
Pierre Boulle—Planet of the Apes.
I’ve been reading a lot of trash literature recently. Crap sci-fi, old Ian Fleming James Bond novels, Leslie Charteris’ Saint books, all books a few votes shy of a Booker award.
Cheap and entertaining, two words that modern literature and film industries are trying hard to ignore. (Hollywood doesn’t entertain. It panders. Which is something slightly different.)
Cheap printing. Cheap paper. Cheap and simple layout. Cheap design.
These books, which all cost around a pound each in used book stores, give or take fifty pence, are the true competitors to e-book fiction.
Less impatient, Jinn methodically chipped off the sealing-wax. But when the bottle was thus opened, he saw that the paper was stuck fast and could not be shaken out. He therefore yielded to his mate’s entreaties and smashed the glass with a hammer.
The paper unrolled itself of its own accord. It consisted of a large number of very thin sheets, covered in tiny handwriting. The message was written in the language of the Earth, which Jinn knew perfectly, having been partially educated on that planet.
Pierre Boulle—Planet of the Apes.
E-books are priced high for two reasons, I’m told.
The first one is that of necessity. It costs money to put together a publication. Bolting modern markup and electronic media onto the traditional publishing process also adds another layer of complexity and cost.
DRM, cuts another layer off the margins because restrictions technologies require a constant level of maintenance and observation to be effective. If you don’t keep up as more and more circumvention techniques pop up like gophers on ephedrine , you’ll end up with an ineffective piece of software that’s cutting into your profits for no discernible gain.
The only solutions to low margins are either to increase the volume of sales or to increase the price.
Any attempt to increase sales is made problematic because of technical issues in current DRM systems and the archaic sales system the publishers still rely on.
DRM limits sales because you’d have to have a large part of your brain clawed out schizophrenic pandas suffering from congenital syphilis before you can accept some of the restrictions imposed on e-book purchases by publishers.
A single tune in the Apple iTunes Music store costs 99 cents. Don’t even try to tell me that a similar model is impossible to implement for e-books and publishers have to sell those things for five to ten dollars a pop.
The iTunes store is interesting for other reasons as well. The “only three machines but you can pretty much burn it to audio CD as often as you want” is much closer to acceptable DRM practice than anything you see in the commercial e-book realm.
The e-book equivalent would be to have little to no restrictions on printing the book and allow reading on three different devices.
Even with those relatively loose restrictions I’m not convinced that DRM will do anything but limit volume and cut into margins.
An uncomfortable feeling, however, restrained him from starting to read a document which had fallen into their hands in such an incongruous manner; but Phyllis’s state of excitement decided him.
She was not so well acquainted with the language of the Earth and needed his help.
Pierre Boulle—Planet of the Apes.
The second reason—and I’m speculating here, conjecture coming from the perspective of a comparative literature guy—behind high pricing is psychological. Publishers think that e-books are competing with the print books available new in bookstores and as a result they price them in relation to the print books.
Or at the very least they probably do not feel any pressure to lower the prices as long as e-books remain cheaper than the equivalent newly published hardcopy.
Which shows that they are blind to the fact that their main and growing rivals are used book stores.
In essence they are crossing swords with their more competent predecessors.
They are competing with publishers who knew how to put together and publish a variety of relatively cheap and accessible entertainment. The keywords here being ‘variety’, ‘cheap’, ‘accessible’ and ‘entertainment’.
I can walk into an Oxfam used book store with five pounds, walk out with four or five top notch books in good condition and be sure that the money went to a good cause.
E-books should be able to give me a similar sort of experience, the reading experience for those who have laptops with decent screens being not as bad as is generally thought.
“Jinn, I beg you!”
He reduced the volume of the sphere so that it floated idly in space, made sure that there was no obstacle in front of them, then lay down beside his companion and began to read the manuscript.
Pierre Boulle—Planet of the Apes.
Project Gutenberg guarantees that e-books have a viable future, even though that future might very well only contain e-books of nineteenth century novels.
But the concept of modern literature as cheap entertainment is obviously not a part of your average publisher’s vision.
And that is the crux of the problem with publishing. While it affects today’s e-book publishing the issue isn’t specific to the industry’s handling of the digital domain.
It’s the focus on bestsellers and prestige. What isn’t readily apparent is that a publisher’s motivation for finding the next bestseller is the same drive that’s behind the publishing of a slow-selling, more ‘artistic’ book.
It’s the drive for prestige and reputation, so desired because they bring a publisher power and money.
A book that isn’t bait for a Booker (or the American equivalent, a Pulitzer) and isn’t likely to be a bestseller doesn’t have much of a chance in today’s publishing market.
There are exceptions, of course—Fantagraphics comes to mind—but the state of the e-book industry is more a symptom of underlying problems in the publishing world, than it is a sign of an implementation problem in today’s e-book retail infrastructure.
Solving the e-book problem on a large scale means solving a large number of fundamental problems in our entertainment industries.
And we have to make up our minds whether it’s worth it at all.
Is it worth the effort?
Baldur Bjarnason,Clifton, Bristol.