And the ground forces of Kindle nation, Amazon warriors, I suppose, are wasting no time going straight for the jugular now that MacMillan and HarperCollins have expressed interest in raising e-book prices from $9.99 to $14.99, still roughly half what a new hardcover costs. Their tactics include boycotts, one-star ratings and email (and in some cases, NASTY email) campaigns against authors and publishers.
It's a two-part argument -- yes, e-books are cheaper to produce, but these readers don't seem to consider that books still have costs associated with them beyond paper, ink, transportation and storage. In short order, we have the author payments, agent's fees, editors' salaries, marketing, salesman, creating the book, and IT guys for support, etc. Cheaper overall, but not as much as e-book readers believe. And of course, author payments don't change -- they still get 10% of the wholesale book cost -- in other words, these readers, who have been attacking the authors as greedy, want them to make 1/3 the amount of money for the same amount of work. I doubt many of them will go into work Monday and tell the boss, "I'll give you a 40-hour week, but could I do it for a 1/3 of the pay? Oh, and I'll pay my own benefits, and could you throw 15% to my references as an agent's fee?" Anything less makes them hypocrites.
If Kindle means that authors are going to sell more books because the price is a penny under ten bucks, than it's a great deal. But it doesn't, and this Yahoo! approach to e-books, this Walmart approach to commercialization, isn't helping authors.
If iPad and Kindle, backed by all the publishers, agree to a price hike, then die-hard readers will have to follow. I just wonder how many casualties -- readers and authors alike -- there will be along the way. Some readers will find other entertainment avenues, and others will search for old books, cheap books, used books (yes, you can buy e-books used), and titles from small publishers, etc., who have yet to knuckle under the pressure.
Hey, maybe we can return to the days of the dime-store novel, which sucked as literature but kept the masses entertained. Even those people understood you had to pay just a wee bit more for Henry James and Stephen Crane. I just can't figure out why the authors -- like Jay Leno -- have become the bad guys in a battle happening three levels over their heads...
5 comments:
First, I'm not sure that multizillionaire Jay Leno is the best example of how this affects the struggling writer.
It's an interesting debate, though. As a consumer, I'd never pay anything close to the same price for an e-book as a tangible book because it's simply not the same product. Like most electronics users, I've had the experience of losing content I've created or purchased due to a hardware crash, software snafu or something of that sort. While you can certainly lose tangible books (fire, water damage, etc), it's far less common than electronic mishaps. Heck, I just lost a bunch of ringtones yesterday simply because I misclicked something on iTunes. Fortunately, a few lost ringtones are $10, not $100.
Don't forget that even at $14.99, you still have to buy or several dozen e-books just to break even on the cost of the Kindle or iPad (vs buying the tangible books).
And let's not forget how all this affects the small, independent bookstores, who are so vital to those in the writing world who aren't JK Rowling or Dan Brown.
E-books vs tangible books, some costs are the fixed regardless of the form (author's work, editor's work, PR) while others are different (the labor and materials to produce the physical product, distribution).
It seems the solution is that what the author gets should get a higher percentage of e-book sales because his raw contribution (the value of his work) would be the same dollar amount per unit but it would be of a lower overall expense thus a higher percentage. Yeah yeah I know... good luck with that.
This Tweet says it all: http://twitter.com/evanschnittman/status/9007413349
Not sure on the concept of used e-books; I thought the non-public domain/purchased on an account ones are non-transferable. I'd love to know more on the subject if anyone has links. But, since authors see nuthin of the secondary sales market of anything, I guess it doesn't make a difference to this discussion...
I know through iTunes, we can share with up to five computers so I imagine the iPad books will allow us to share within the family. (Hoping, here, that the iPad books will also run on iPhones.)
I still say the overall goal in this new world, esp. if you're a newbie, should be to sell well across the board in whatever form(s) a publisher offers your baby in, then build on the power of total units sold for future deals.
Leno isn't meant to represent the struggling author, he's a stand-in for how the wrong people bear the brunt of the public's anger.
Certainly the small bookstore has been essential to helping unknown authors become known commodities through promotions and product placement, and gone, I suppose are the days when the store down the street will let you do a book signing. I, too, wouldn't expect an author to get a greater cut since the price is going down while the publishers have more than enough expenses to make up the difference between no longer printing, shipping, storing, and removing books.
There's a certain logic in assuming that in a world where more people can read, more books would be sold, and in terms of shear volume, it's true -- more books are sold. But in a world where everyone can read, more people can write. Some will turn out drivel, some will be brilliant, but there are only so many friends you can convince to buy your books. Might be a boon to the self-pub, POD business, with authors who won't have to buy a hundred or a thousand books, store them in a garage and sell them when they can.
My bad, John. I didn't realize Leno was bearing the brunt of anything other than for being unfunny.
Hmm, not being able to afford an e-reader of any kind, I wasn't aware of this issue until now.
I have a policy. I don't buy books new unless the author is alive. I score a lot of sweet deals from used bookstores, but I don't mind springing for a new volume by a contemporary poet when I can afford it.
These readers accusing authors of greed... are these the same people who blame musicians for the prices of CDs? Reminds me of my ex who used to say, and I quote, "Art should be free."
If you're guessing that he was a huge pirate and no kind of artist, you'd be correct.
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