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Old 12-26-2011, 07:15 PM   #1
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The rise of the ebook, but not the end of the book

There has been a loot of discussion about ebook pricing, the end of the life of physical books and so forth of late on Mobileread.

I am of the belied that traditional publishers are on the decline and will become more so unless there are fundamental changes in how they distribute and run their businesses in this, the digital era.

The modern online age of retailing respects no boundaries. The longer that publishers continue with their old selling and distribution systems the more people will simply look for alternatives.

This Christmas, my wife and I gave a Kobo to our son in law, filled up with a selection of his favourite authors books, plus a few more. Our oldest and youngest daughters received book 2 and book 3 of a favoured series they have been reading. They both received the first book the previous Christmas.

The paperbacks were purchased on eBay, brand new and free postage. They could not be sourced at a local brick and mortar book store.

The books on the Kobo for my son in law were purchased from Amazon, "processed' and converted. Several of them had to be purchased in very indirect routes as Australians were not meant to have an ebook version at all. Another couple of ebooks were purchased author-direct via Smashwords and author webpages.

Two of my daughters love real books, one loves her Sony ereader. My sons in laws and sons are leaning towards ereading. The hardcover might become extinct, but the paperback should not.

The video (linked below) shows the dynamics of the change, including an interesting segment by a successful author on author direct selling, the direction a lot of publishing is going to go. With the reach of the internet, self publishing makes sense and using a major publisher, with the slice of profit they take, sees less so.

http://video.news.com.au/2180711410/...ed-to-continue

It will be interesting to see the sales figures for ereaders over the Christmas sales period compared with the sale of regular books. We gave away both. I wonder if our situation is similar to others?
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Old 12-26-2011, 07:30 PM   #2
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i got an amazon gift card and bought a bunch of ebooks. i also bought a massive stack of paperbacks.

both have a place in my life and both fill a different need. even disregarding the fact that we're merely renting from the publishers i will never be able to fully commit to not having a physical, tangible item for my $$$.

i agree in that things like region restrictions are a dinosaur that needs to be put down once and for all. its utterly ridiculous that there are innumerable books that we will never see in our respective countries due to arbitrary lines on a map.
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Old 12-26-2011, 07:45 PM   #3
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.. even disregarding the fact that we're merely renting from the publishers i will never be able to fully commit to not having a physical, tangible item for my $$$.
I see your point and I also still have physical books and probably always will. However any ebooks I purchase are not rented. I strip DRM from them and they are mine. They follow me from old ereader to new ereader. I don't distribute the non-DRM files to others; they are only for my own use and such uses are fair.

I agree with the OP that physical books - especially hard covers - are becoming a niche market.
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Old 12-26-2011, 09:31 PM   #4
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I don't think that physical books are going the way of the Dodo any time soon. I can see them bottoming out and becoming the much less used "format," but they wont go away completely.
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Old 12-27-2011, 01:05 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by no.guru View Post
I see your point and I also still have physical books and probably always will. However any ebooks I purchase are not rented. I strip DRM from them and they are mine. They follow me from old ereader to new ereader. I don't distribute the non-DRM files to others; they are only for my own use and such uses are fair.

I agree with the OP that physical books - especially hard covers - are becoming a niche market.
Agree with you whole heartily! But I do lend my e-Books to my kids. Buy lend I mean lend as in DTB style, if they have it I don't read it. And I make them give me there reader and I load and unload my books so I know what they have and don't have. Again I feel this is fair because I would do the same with a DTB.

Oh by the way my kids are young (8 and 10) when they get older and move out of the house they don't get to borrow my books anymore
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Old 12-27-2011, 07:53 AM   #6
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My guess for the near future is...

• Paper sales will continue to decline, though they won't completely fall away.
• Physical bookstores will continue to decline, though they won't disappear to the same extent as music stores.
• People will continue to kvetch about pricing on web forums, unless ebooks are slashed to $2.99 each.
• Big publishers will stick around, but will continue to focus more on big hits, and weed out the mid-range authors -- many of whom are a better fit for smaller publishers anyway.

By the way, many publishers in the US have started to adapt to the new environment, they just aren't doing what you want them to do. Agency pricing and limiting library ebook loaning, for example, are actually better suited to the digital age than the warehouse or "use it 'til the cover falls off" models.

Australia is complicated because someone decided to use taxes, tariffs and regulations to clamp down on foreign competition; this results in both more jobs and higher prices for locals. I'm fairly confident that if your government got rid of those protectionist policies and allowed freer international imports, your prices would fall -- but in turn you'd all be complaining about foreign competition, job losses in the manufacturing sector, and the horrors of expansions of jobs in the service sector, just like Americans have for the past ~15 years. So... pick your poison.
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Old 12-27-2011, 08:54 AM   #7
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So... pick your poison.
Our dollar is better than yours... So prices should be cheaper regardless of any taxes.

Price gouging is a common business practice here and more and more customers are turning away from bricks and mortar stores and buying online. A GST on sub $1000 purchases online would not make a dent in the price reductions already gained by such purchases.

Agency pricing is already under investigation in Europe and the US. So while the publishers spend money on lawyers and buying senators votes, their business falls apart around them.
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Old 12-27-2011, 09:57 AM   #8
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Our dollar is better than yours... So prices should be cheaper regardless of any taxes.
Exchange rates don't equal purchasing power.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/daily.../big-mac-index

Just ask the poor downtrodded (non-kindle) european ebook reader buyers.

Agency pricing has already done its (unintended work) in establishing a baseline (70-30) for rational publishers to build their ebook business off.

That djinn is out of the bottle and the traditional publishers are discovering that as ebooks make a bigger and bigger part of the pie, authors arren't going to be all that happy with 17% of the take when they can readily get 60-70% elsewhere.
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Old 12-27-2011, 12:28 PM   #9
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[QUOTE=rdjack21;1896785]Agree with you whole heartily! But I do lend my e-Books to my kids. Buy lend I mean lend as in DTB style, if they have it I don't read it. And I make them give me there reader and I load and unload my books so I know what they have and don't have. Again I feel this is fair because I would do the same with a DTB.

Pardon my confustion, what does "DTB" mean here? The two google definations I found definately don't match up with the above qoute.
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Old 12-27-2011, 12:31 PM   #10
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dtb = dead tree book.
(printed paper book)
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Old 12-27-2011, 01:01 PM   #11
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Thanks!
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Old 12-27-2011, 02:18 PM   #12
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dtb = dead tree book.
(printed paper book)
And here I thought they meant digital talking books.
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Old 12-27-2011, 06:14 PM   #13
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Exchange rates don't equal purchasing power.
Not quite true. As the dollar improves over the USD, imports cost less, so prices of physical items such as books should come down in price. However in Australia that is rarely the case. The recent articles on Teleread by Blue Tyson outing hatchette and Macmillan's price gouging practices is quite revealing.

When the AUD hit and went beyond parity against the USD mid 2011, there was a huge upsurge in online purchasing. It was unprecedented, causing many retail lobby groups to run crying to the government demanding additional taxes for online purchases so as to protect retail's cosy little "slug the customer" environment they have enjoyed for several decades. A recent study has confirmed that Australians are dealt price increases over 150 percent, some times more.

As I mentioned in my OP, online purchasing knows no boundaries. So the djinn is very much out of the bottle and for Australian retailers ripping off customers with huge mark-ups, the end is nigh.

I also believe that the mainstream publishers are going to lose more and more authors to self publishing as those authors realise they can make more per book selling online.
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Old 12-27-2011, 06:46 PM   #14
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Not quite true. As the dollar improves over the USD, imports cost less, so prices of physical items such as books should come down in price.
Purchasing power parity is how much product a specific currency buys compared against another currency, not against itself.
Just because the aussie dollar buys more than it used to (great for consumers) doesn't mean it buys more that the USD or Canadian Dollar on a dollar by dollar basis. Internet or not.
Mind you, what you're describing is the protectionist's nightmare and a good thing in of itself. Hopefully we'll see more of it: open markets are good markets.
But it doesn't make one currency any better than another.

Global english ebooks are a good development for everybody; aussie publishers should be looking to sell aussie authors' books to the UK and NorthAm, not worrying about keeping ebooks out. It's not just money that is flowing, but also ideas and stories.

Last edited by fjtorres; 12-28-2011 at 06:39 AM.
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Old 12-27-2011, 07:08 PM   #15
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You might find this interesting.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/05/09/...tralian-gouge/
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