The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010

[riemann42]

All the eBook market needs to take off would be a few best sellers released as eBooks first. Capitalize on the demand for the latest peace of Laurel Hamilton trash and the demand for kindles / ipads / readtastic 5000s or whatever will increase overnight. Make this the normal thing, and many will try it. They can even charge $20 for the special prerelease version.

And as we all know, eBooks are like Meth. Try it once and your hooked for life.

[bevdeforges]

Originally Posted by fugazied

The short version imo is the measures (Geo-restrictions and DRM) and pricing which publishers demand are holding back mainstream adoption of reading devices.

Agree with you big time that it's the geo-restrictions and DRM that seem to be preventing the wider adoption of e-books.

The music industry blew it, but perhaps they actually got blind-sided by the move away from physical CD's. The DVD industry tried to institutionalize their regional rights by locking in the zone codes. Little matter they forgot about was that zone-free players were readily available (usually far cheaper than the DVD players with zone code locked in). So it's now possible for me to buy tv series and films in the US that haven't finished their runs in Europe yet. Neither Amazon nor any shop selling DVDs bothers to ask me to show where I live or where I'm going to play the DVD.

Publishers are going to have to change their business model to recognize the globalization of the industry. I've always been able to buy books (in person or by mail order) from just about anywhere in the world I like - the UK, US, Australia, Canada - as long as I'm willing to pay for the shipping charges and willing to wait for the physical books to arrive, or willing to schlep a suitcase full of books back home with me.

I live in a non-English speaking country, but I still can download software purchased online with no great difficulty - and it usually comes complete with the appropriate VAT rate charged. They do check the address I give them against the billing address on the credit card I use to buy the software. There's no reason the publishers can't do something similar. But it means a re-think of how they do business and a re-arrangement of how and where they make their money on publishing - as well as recognition of the fact that their customers have been buying books from around the world for years now.
Cheers,
Bev

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by riemann42

All the eBook market needs to take off would be a few best sellers released as eBooks first. Capitalize on the demand for the latest peace of Laurel Hamilton trash and the demand for kindles / ipads / readtastic 5000s or whatever will increase overnight. Make this the normal thing, and many will try it. They can even charge $20 for the special prerelease version.

And as we all know, eBooks are like Meth. Try it once and your hooked for life.

You are right. But, as we know all too well, the publishers are not interested in pushing ebooks over pbooks. They don't make any money on the hardware and are just grudgingly starting to accept that ebooks are here to stay. It is up to the hardware sellers; like Apple, Amazon, Sony to make such deals. Amazon tried to do it, Apple is bending over backwards to please the content owners since they are the new kid on the block. So don't expect the situation to change quickly.

[charleski]

And yet when it's our turn to create something new, we create electronic magazines that look just like printed magazines.

The real problem here is his notion of 'electronic magazines'. These have already been transformed, it's called the web, and the online versions bear little resemblance to a printed periodical.

The concept of magazines on ebook readers might have been relevant in 2000, but it isn't now - all you need is a browser. The repackaging initiatives that Time et al. have been throwing around are just a way to try to get people to pay for the stuff. For magazines that include a lot of visual material print still offers significantly higher quality, and that's not going to change any time soon.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The article makes one point that I think is key: The developing e-book industry is showing a distinct lack of imagination in developing their brand. (And I like the car illustration.) Maybe that's why so many are looking to Apple's iPad to "transform" the e-book world: Apple is known as a company with imagination, good at thinking outside of the box; if anyone can bring fresh and compelling ideas to e-books, it might be Apple.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Maybe that's why so many are looking to Apple's iPad to "transform" the e-book world: Apple is known as a company with imagination, good at thinking outside of the box; if anyone can bring fresh and compelling ideas to e-books, it might be Apple.

Apple's not going to change ebooks any more than they changed mp3s; Apple didn't create podcasts or mashups and doesn't promote them.

Publishers will need to figure out the ways ebooks are different from pbooks, just like they figured out how magazines are different from bound books, and then decide what features would make ebooks sell better. (And they need to get over the idea that that means "better than pbooks." Different media; different markets.)

Among other details, they need to figure out how to market short stories individually, the way iTunes sells individual songs. Record companies at least understood the marketability of single songs; publishers have never been able to do so because the per-unit costs of individual story printing was too high. With ebooks, it's economically feasible to sell 10,000 words instead of 70,000 or 250,000, if they can figure out how to market chapter-length works.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Right now, I have to scroll through page after page after page of self published books and PD books just to find a couple of new ebooks that I might be interested in on Amazon.

Oh my gods YES, I hate this too. I wish there was an easy way to filter out all the self-published stuff. I'm sure there's some good stuff out there, but I've had too many bad experiences with self-published work that's available on Amazon.

[millicent]

Elfwreck makes an interesting point about selling short works. Actually in the UK there is a new company called Etherbooks who are starting to do precisely that. They intend to sell short stories or pieces of journalism by well known authors for 99p a download. Their site should go live in about two weeks I am told.

See: http://www.etherbooks.co.uk

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Among other details, they need to figure out how to market short stories individually, the way iTunes sells individual songs.

I like songs being available individually, because one knows whether one likes a song very quickly, and one might well want to have the ability to listen to it again and again.

But short stories are a different matter. I HATE buying individual short stories. I MUCH prefer to buy them bundled into a magazine or anthology. It take far too much time to identify interesting fiction to spend it selecting twelve short stories rather than one book of short stories.

Fictionwise has been selling individual short stories for ages. I hate them.

[Ben Thornton]

What I find annoying is when they don't make it clear that something is a short story, so you think that you've got a bargain on a novel, when in fact you've overpaid for half a dozen pages.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I think it's clear that the "tools" that consumers make such a big deal about on Amazon and other sites are really more about marketing tools, not so much consumer tools. It's hard to find what you want because the tools are just comparing your purchases to other purchases... not content to content. We need better tools to define and sort the content itself, and aspects relevant to that content.

P2P tools help, but they could also use more work--for whatever reason, I get very little good use or advice from them. I still feel like I'm alone, searching blindly for content I will enjoy.

This is a reason why I think books need portals that are operated independently of sales channels (like Amazon), to create a more well-balanced atmosphere of information and guidance when searching for books. Amazon is an extension of the book publisher who extols the virtue of their other books on back jackets, written by authors who are contractually obligated to write x number of book comments per year. Money dictates what Amazon pushes at the visitor first, not P2P recommendations. We need to divorce money from that equation, because it only leaves it unbalanced.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I like songs being available individually, because one knows whether one likes a song very quickly, and one might well want to have the ability to listen to it again and again.

But short stories are a different matter. I HATE buying individual short stories. I MUCH prefer to buy them bundled into a magazine or anthology. It take far too much time to identify interesting fiction to spend it selecting twelve short stories rather than one book of short stories.

Fictionwise has been selling individual short stories for ages. I hate them.

I love them; I've bought dozens. As money allows, I've been filling in my collection of Darkover stories and pondering whether whoever owns MZB's copyrights would be willing to release the novels as multiformats if they had good digital copies of them.

I do think they should be *clearly marked* as stories, not novels. And a good bookstore would get together with some skilled editor-people and make collections of short stories. They could create digital anthologies that can hit a much broader market than physical ones: buy them bundled to get a discount or selectively at full price. Potentially even, buy them bundled into a single ebook, to avoid the problem of cluttering one's ebook reader listings with a dozen "ebooks" that are 15kb each.

[angelad]

Elfwreck, that makes sense.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

As money allows, I've been filling in my collection of Darkover stories and pondering whether whoever owns MZB's copyrights would be willing to release Potentially even, buy them bundled into a single ebook, to avoid the problem of cluttering one's ebook reader listings with a dozen "ebooks" that are 15kb each.

If all the darkover shorts were collected together in a sensibly arranged ebook, I'd buy them. But I can't face buying and organising the 60 odd Darkover shorts on Fictionwise at the moment.

I did buy and sort into publication order the 80 odd Agatha Christie novels. But that was a comparatively simple task compared to sorting all the Darkover shorts into some kind of logical order or groupings based on story-line chronology. (And, incidentally, cost me about the same as buying all the Darkover shorts would have done, thanks to some rather splendid discounts available at the time.)

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

If all the darkover shorts were collected together in a sensibly arranged ebook, I'd buy them. But I can't face buying and organising the 60 odd Darkover shorts on Fictionwise at the moment.

Don't blame you; I got several of them as they first started to appear, so it wasn't an overwhelming list. But I'm already having trouble remembering which are which, and it'd be useful to have them in groups.

I could put them together in timeline/theme sets, but I don't know that it's worth the effort.