[pwalker8]

Right now, the publishing industry is in a bit of a flux. What publishers publish is pushed by the big stores (B&N) and the smaller book stores are really struggling to stay alive. It is my understanding (I'm not in the industry, so all I know is what I read), that much of the business practices for publishers is set by tax laws and the problem of returned books. Since no one wants to keep books in stock, due to the tax laws, book stores are quick to return excess books and tons of books are destroyed each year, so there is a tremendous amount of wastage. Because of all of this, best salers carry the industry. With this combination of rises in book prices, making it less likely that a customer will take a chance on an unknown author and the tendency for big stores to only order books based on the numbers that author has sold, we have a vicious circle.

I think that Apple has shown the way for the book industry. On iTunes, I can listen to 30 seconds of a song, enough for me to decide if I might be interested in the song, plus the individual songs are priced at a price point that most people are willing to take a chance on someone that they don’t know. This has been a god send for indies and mid market musicians. In a very short time, iTunes has moved into third place among music stores, behind WalMart and Best Buy. A large number of people don’t particularly care about owning the physical album, they just want a easy way to buy music and it doesn’t get much easier than buying music on iTunes.

From a consumer point of view, a tiered approach makes sense. Best salers would be at one price, name authors would be at the next level and everyone else would be at a third. But more than that, most books should be priced at a point where I would be willing to take a chance on it. Looking in my book collection, I have paperbacks from the mid 70’s that were priced at 75 cents. For the longest time, paperbacks stayed under 2 dollars. As a rule of thumb, the majority of books should cost less than lunch.

For eBooks to take off, I think they will need to drop the idea of pricing based on what works in the big store fronts, and go with something like iTunes. Price the majority of books for less than eight dollars (a sandwich, chips and drink at the local sandwich shop) , build up a huge back list, let people read the first chapter online to see if they might like the book and lastly allow the customer to download the book in multiple formats, not just one proprietary format. I can export my iTunes songs onto a cd, which means that I can rip in back in mp3. Thus, even if Apple were to abandon iTunes, I still have access to my music. Audible, which markets audible books, has been around for a while, but they didn’t really take off until they expanded beyond their own proprietary format and supported iPods. I had bought a couple of books from them a number of years ago, but stopped using them because using their proprietary software to burn cd’s what a royal pain. When I found out that they had added iPod support a couple off years ago, I started using them again and have spent quite a bit of money with them since. Oh, I have all sorts of ideas of how I would put together such a store. It’s not rocket science and if you focus on what the consumer wants rather than what’s the minimum you can get away with, it’s all pretty obvious.