Is Publishing Doomed? JOHN B. THOMPSON with Williams Cole

[Elfwreck]

Rail: But will e–books become more of a norm as time goes on?

Thompson: There’s no consensus on this issue. I interviewed many, many key players in the digital divisions of all the large publishing houses, as well as the medium and small size publishing houses and everyone is very interested in this topic but everyone has a different opinion about what will happen in the future.

He interviewed... lots of people publishing houses... and they're not sure.


Translated from corporate-speak: "We have no idea how to maximize profits from ebooks, so we're telling everyone we can't tell how popular they're going to be."

I'm sure that, during the dawn of television, radio companies insisted that not everyone was going to bother with that new, expensive technology that only had access to a limited range of content.

[leebase]

Ok....my take on the article. I think he puts more stock in the form of a book than will prove to be warranted. People will still flock to see their favorite author, people will still love "books".

Why on earth should "publishing" be worried about people READING BOOKS. Were paperbacks the end of books? Was the printing press the end of books? The publishers of books are going to do just fine.

The SELLERS of physical books on the other hand -- need to consider what happened to the selling of CD's.

Publishers will simply switch how they deliver their product to their ultimate consumers. They already defeated Amazon's predatory pricing scheme to dominate the market. THAT was truly a threat to the publishers.

Lee

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by leebase

The price of a book is not now, nor has it EVER been, about the cost of printing -- nor of storage, nor of returns.

eBooks take out some of the cost of a book -- but not as much as people think. HOWEVER, that's still IRRELEVANT. The price was not EVER a function of the cost of making the book.

But the pricing doesn't make any sense if you try to look at it in a logical way. Publishers refuse to give any kind of numbers. They have a system that has too many losses from returns. They give a very small percentage of the "value" of the book to the author because the costs are too big, and they give 50% discounts to big retailers. Ebooks could solve many problems, but the publishers refuse to see that.

And nobody seems to notice that from the whole list of complaints against ebooks there is one big thing that is missing: public domain books. They were making money from PD books, with no royalties, marketing, and if it was a reprint, even no editing. From any basic calculations you can deduce that they were making more/book than in the case of new books. But with ebooks, people are getting ereaders, and they don't need the publishers for this anymore. And there is always the possibility that more authors will self-publish, making the publishers completely obsolete.

[Scott Nicholson]

Is publishing doomed? Yes. But aren't we all?

Scott
Disintegration Kindle bestseller
http://amzn.to/dBEesM
Not a bestseller everywhere else: http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/disintegration.htm

[Sil_liS]

I think that the best way to get an impression of what the professor considers normal prices is to look at his last book: "Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States", published: June 13, 2005, prices from Amazon.

Hardcover:
Amazon Price: $95.95
New from: $74.98
Used from: $74.98

Paperback:
Amazon Price $26.36
New from: $23.75
Used from: $20.75

[karunaji]

In my opinion, downplaying of technology advancement was unjustified. The cultural resistance may have some impact but only temporary. Cellphones got later widespread acceptance in the US due to better regular phone infrastructure compared with East European or Asian countries but it was inevitable.

For e-books the technology is still on the level of the first massive and expensive cell phones. We still don't have 10 inch color e-ink screens for the price of a standard cellphone. That rules out most textbooks on e-books. There is a lot of room for improvements. It is actually surprising to see how much e-book popularity has risen with the current tech. I think it shows clear tendency of masses to embrace better way of reading and the only obstacles are the technology that still needs to get better and its cost.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by leebase

The price of a book is not now, nor has it EVER been, about the cost of printing -- nor of storage, nor of returns.

eBooks take out some of the cost of a book -- but not as much as people think. HOWEVER, that's still IRRELEVANT. The price was not EVER a function of the cost of making the book.

Ah, but that's not what they used to say.

Lee, in the law there is a concept called "admission against interest".

I remember well, back in the 70s, when the price of books skyrocketed far beyond the rate of inflation. The publishers said then that it was because of the cost of materials like paper. That was their admission against interest.

They made their bed.

[Seanette]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

I think that the best way to get an impression of what the professor considers normal prices is to look at his last book: "Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States", published: June 13, 2005, prices from Amazon.

Hardcover:
Amazon Price: $95.95
New from: $74.98
Used from: $74.98

Paperback:
Amazon Price $26.36
New from: $23.75
Used from: $20.75

You wouldn't think from the title this would be such a specialized work as the prices would suggest. I do own a few paperbacks I've paid in the $20 range for, either out-of-print (as my most recent such purchase) and hard to find, or a few specialized reference works of interest to me.

General-interest paperbacks, no way do I pay $20. As others have commented, there's plenty out there to read that fits my budget much better, and there are libraries that I'm already paying for via taxes.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

Ah, but that's not what they used to say.

Lee, in the law there is a concept called "admission against interest".

Yeah, it's an exception to the hearsay rule. And this isn't one.

I'm not even sure what your argument is - because "publishers," 40 years ago, stated that book prices were increasing due to higher raw material costs....what, exactly?

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Translated from corporate-speak: "We have no idea how to maximize profits from ebooks, so we're telling everyone we can't tell how popular they're going to be."

Laugh it up, fuzz-ball

But really, anyone (including us) who try to predict exactly what the future will look like, who the big players will really be, and what will happen to specific entities moving forward, is going to look like a big fool. And unlike you or I, these people's livelihoods depend on being correct.

Seriously, did anyone accurately predict that agency pricing would become so important, overnight, to the way ebooks are sold? Did you? (I certainly didn't )

Plus, Thompson's point is that the technology is not the most important element here. As usual, people are confusing a correlation ("economy down, ebooks up") for causation ("technology is the prime mover and its advancement is inevitable.")

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Seanette

General-interest paperbacks, no way do I pay $20.

Actually I find the price of the hardcover more interesting than that of the paperback. I mean, if the publishers are trying to make a point that the price comes from the demand, they are doing it wrong. And I really don't know how much it costs to keep the book in stock for 5 years.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by karunaji

In my opinion, downplaying of technology advancement was unjustified....

Not really. Those of us who have been alive and aware of technology for some time have seen a lot of "inevitable" technology fall by the wayside. CD-ROMs, HD-DVD, video-on-demand, Minidisc, .NET, the Apple Cube, Linux on the Desktop, the Paperless Office....

It's a mistake to look only at the winners and on that basis proclaim that technological progress, let alone a specific item, is an "inevitable" winner.

Plus, he's looking at a larger context. In many cases, it's not the technology itself that is driving social changes; in many cases, it's social changes that make a technology possible to flourish.

[dacattt]

I think he only partially gets it. He's pull out the facts, but I do feel like challenging his analysis.

At the end, he dances around this issue of book vs. e-book: "They cherish the book. And they believe that this is an artifact that they want in their lives. And some of the technological commentators in this industry just completely miss this point. They fail to see that books have this cultural value in the lives of ordinary people which is very deep and very profound and which is not likely to go away very quickly."

And yet he also does state that the US is currently going though "a sea of change". Kind of a 'dah' moment. He misses the connection people have with the stories they read.... not just the books... the story being the stronger connection. Yes, we love the feel and even the smell of our books. But story wins out. Mix in our "great recession" where so many folks are uprooted from homes and downsized, those physical books are having to be abandoned.... and there's an added trauma.

How do we connect back to the stories we love??? And, not loose them again??? The e-book becomes a way to not have to go though that loss again. We loose the physical book, but gain the security of the book ownership (.... which is also why there's such an uproar about DRM.)

So I believe the love of being able to "keep" the book, in any form, is going to trounce the desire to "hold" the book. E-book are the future for the paperback.


Now... we've just got to come up with decent ways for the author to still sign "our copy" of the book. (Baen has figured out the "hardback" want-it-now game with their ARC copies.)

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Plus, Thompson's point is that the technology is not the most important element here.

Kali, he wrote a book 5 years ago about "Books in the Digital Age", and he doesn't even try to sell it as an ebook. The new book is going to be "delivered traditionally, meaning bound in cloth covers".

Amazon also sells the book that he is advertising in the article. It is only as hardcover and it costs $16.50. I wonder why it is so much less valuable than the previous book. There are more reviews on the UK site, and all are positive.

[JeremyR]

What I find interesting is that books are about the only form of entertainment media that gets drastically more expensive as the years go by.

Music, movies, video games have pretty much been fixed at the same prices for the last 30 years. $10-15 for an album, $40-60 for a video game, $10-20 for a movie (when they didn't use rental pricing, anyway).

And yet in some of these cases, the price of production has dramatically gone up (video games and movies). But books are pretty much the same (probably cheaper to make thanks to computers).

Prices should go up, thanks to the inflation that is government policy making money worth less and less. But other areas of the entertainment media industry seem to avoid it somehow, or raise prices slower.