"Friction" is why e-books adoption is slow

[secretsubscribe]

I hope I'm not repeating something someone else has already said, but what is the availability of an ebook edition was advertized along side the paperback. I see dozens of ads for spy thrillers and horror novels that probably have ebook editions available but nowhere do i see "Also available to read on your Cell phone." It would probably confuse many but the idea is planted.
What if Barnes and Noble sold ebooks and setup one's device with the proper software. It sounds rediculous but many of us who buy paper from Amazon still but from the local or big chain book store and the situation can only be helped if the idea of the Ebook was accepted, advertised and sold through the same places people go to get their paperbacks. I saw a french video clip youtube that imagined a world where ebooks were common place and you could get ebooks are the local book store. I wish i could fill up my mp3 player at the local cd shop. I like going to stores.
There's a lot of comparison to iTunes and iPod but I think we're comparing apples to oranges.
I know very few people who need or want to carry more than one book at a time, so getting a reading device ends up being an extra expense and another piece of technology to recharge and because of this I don't think readers will be won over buy sexy iPod-esque dedicated devices and people consume far more music than books.
The market needs to be "attacked" in a very different way. The right device that emulates what one can do with paper closely enough, at the right price, will help. But thats all, it'll help. Eliminating DRM would be nice, (I've currently gone from buying mobi to lit in anticipation of the Sony Reader i should be getting in a few weeks), but most aren't concerned about DRM.
The publishing industry, if it cares, need to find an imaginative way to hook the average reader, and college kids, especially college kids.
Digital music caught on so quickly because its easy to sell instant gratification. Reading a book is work. It takes time and most people don't mind slowly taking up their living space with more books.
Where it becomes a definite convinience is in college where students might be walking around with 10 pound text books. if reading digital editions becomes common place there it'll take off everywhere else.

Currently, I only know two other ebook reader. My best friend, who's a gadget whore like myself. I introduced him to reading ebooks on his N-Gage. I was introduced to ebook reading years ago buy a friend who inhales vampire novels so quickly that buy paperbacks for every book is not feasible.

[NatCh]

Shucks, secretsubscribe, if we only posted stuff that hadn't been posted before, the board would be pretty dead.

Good thoughts, yeah, some of them have been mentioned before, but good ones generally get repeated.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I think Baen's webscription format has the best implementation of a low friction model for ebook sales.

<...>

Combining the idea that an ebook is worth less to a buyer than a paperback with time-sensitive pricing has worked for them. Baen makes more from ebooks than they do from Canada.

That's actually not saying a whole lot, as Canada is a small market. Canadian writers trying to make a living at it can't do so on book sales. Their goal is to qualify for government grants to writers. A few folks like Margaret Atwood have achieved market success outside of Canada, but for most, the goal is to attach to the government sugar tit.

Second, they provide the books in multiple formats without DRM. This lets you read them on whatever device or in whatever form you want. It also means that if they did go out of business, you could still convert the format to something readable as device technology changed.

They pioneered this with the Baen Free Library. That was promotion for the "dead tree" editions, pure and simple. (And drive Baen's metamorphosis from a struggling PB house to a thriving HC publisher with a 70% sell through rate.) Back then, Jim Baen didn't see ebooks as a source of profit, but that has changed.

They're beginning to test the waters with other publishers. It will be interesting to see how things work going forwards. Right now, they and Fictionwise are the only places that get my e-fiction money.

Well, they were trying to test the market with Tor Books.

Tor CEO Tom Doherty had been Jim Baen's boss at Ace Books years back, and they stayed friends and in touch. Tom and Jim worked out a deal for Baen to offer Tor content through Webscriptions, and it got to the point where both companies announced it. Then someone at Holtzbrink, Tor's German parent company, pulled the plug on the idea. Holtzbrink apparently has a new CEO with different notions, so we'll see what happens. Tom Doherty is one of the sharpest guys in publishing, so no surprise he was interested, especially when Baen already had the infrastructure in place to do it.
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Dennis

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Then someone at Holtzbrink, Tor's German parent company, pulled the plug on the idea.

Not entirely, though - Baen are still offering David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef", which Tor publish, albeit at a whopping $18 (which I paid ).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I think many of you are basing e-books' success on the dedicated readers, and thinking that PDAs and Smartphones are just too small to enjoy e-books. Remember, there are plenty of people (me included) who can read on the smaller devices all day, and are happy to do so. The PDA's Cleartype setting made that possible for me, for instance. So an investment of $300 or more is not required, just to get into e-books.

I read ebooks on a PDA, and always have. The screen size hasn't been an issue (though I wouldn't mind a larger one). I use a PDA because it does many other things besides display ebooks. I can't justify the cost of a current ebook reader that only displays ebooks.

One of e-books' greatest strengths is that it can be read on many electronic devices, many of which may already be in your pocket, and it's up to the user (should've added that to my earlier list, too.)

Which is the goal, assuming the industry can agree on a standard format to support.

Enticing commuters with electronic papers and newsfeeds is another good one for the list. I've read with my PDA on the subway. And frankly, I couldn't care less what other people think of that... I'm too busy reading!

No one will pay obvious arttention to you on the subway: you might just be a psycho who will take it amiss...

Finally, publishers may be slow to adopt, but they are businesspeople. When they clearly see the demand for e-books, and the profit that can be made from it, they'll come around. The public has to provide the demand, and they'll have to figure out how to profit.

It's that clear demand that's the problem.

We are covering a lot of good ground, here. Unfortunately, none of it is leaving this forum. There are still lots of people who don't know e-books exist... don't know that they might be carrying e-book readers in their pockets... or that there are other readers they can try. How do we spread the word?

Word of mouth, in person, and in other electronic forums.
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Dennis

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Not entirely, though - Baen are still offering David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef", which Tor publish, albeit at a whopping $18 (which I paid ).

There for a while, it was unplugged, DW's new book is the first one after a fair hiatus.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That's actually not saying a whole lot, as Canada is a small market. Canadian writers trying to make a living at it can't do so on book sales. Their goal is to qualify for government grants to writers. A few folks like Margaret Atwood have achieved market success outside of Canada, but for most, the goal is to attach to the government sugar tit.
Dennis

I disagree. Canadian writers can make a living, and quite a few of them do. However, they tend to sell to the same New York publishers as American writers do. The ones who go for grants tend to be writing literary rather than commercial fiction and sending it to Canadian publishers. That's a very small market. The majority of the Canadian market (which is about 10% the size of the US market -- in line with the population) is served by the same US publishers as the US market. There's a reason that I can buy exactly the same book in the US as I can in Canada, and that the Canadian price is printed on a book I bought in Virginia.

Don't tar all Canadian writers with the CanLit brush. Many of them (Robert Sawyer and Dave Duncan for example) have no problem making a living from book sales.

[jasonkchapman]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

People who understand that the costs of an ebook are considerably lower than for a paper edition, and expect those lower costs to be reflected in a lower price. That is, most of us.

I think that's an arbitrary distinction, though, and I'm not sure how many people in the mass market care. People don't shop by production cost, they shop by perceived value. Do they insist on lower ticket prices for independent films on the grounds that they cost less to make?

People know that the latest book by Joe Bestseller costs one heck of a lot more to bring to market than a book by Manny Midlist. Still, we don't expect Manny's books to be 1/10th the price just because he only got a $3,000 advance and no promo budget.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I disagree. Canadian writers can make a living, and quite a few of them do. However, they tend to sell to the same New York publishers as American writers do. The ones who go for grants tend to be writing literary rather than commercial fiction and sending it to Canadian publishers. That's a very small market. The majority of the Canadian market (which is about 10% the size of the US market -- in line with the population) is served by the same US publishers as the US market. There's a reason that I can buy exactly the same book in the US as I can in Canada, and that the Canadian price is printed on a book I bought in Virginia.

The Canadain writers I'm aware of who can make a living as writers without requiring government grants all do so selling outside of Canada.

Don't tar all Canadian writers with the CanLit brush. Many of them (Robert Sawyer and Dave Duncan for example) have no problem making a living from book sales.

I'm not. But Rob Sawyer and Dave Duncan are exceptions. How many Canadian writers have achieved success outside of Canada? The point was simply that the Canadian market is probably too small to make a living selling only to it.

(And Sawyer had an, um, "interesting" tenure as President of SFWA, largely because his Canadian experience and consequent motivations didn't map well to US writer's concerns. AFAIK, he still gets Canadian gov't grants, and qualifying for the highest level is part of his goals. I can't blame him, and I'd likely do the same, but the environment he lives and writes in is rather different from the one here.)
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Dennis

[andym]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm not sure I'm with you; iTunes has been a great success. It would be a thoroughly satisfactory situation (IMHO) if a single standard, such as MobiPocket, came to dominate through simple dominance of the market, as Apple has done for music. A def facto standard is just as much as standard as a de jure one, after all.

There's a couple of things to disentangle. the 'problem' with iTunes is that Apple control the whole shebang. You want to sell to people with iPods and use the Apple FairPlay DRM - you have to go through iTunes and sell at the price Apple sets. Your only other route to iPod users is by selling un-DRMed MP3s. I don't have a problem with that, but I'm sure if I was a content producer I really wouldn't want to put myself in that position.

Mobipocket is a bit different. It's available on different platforms. You don't have to sell through Amazon/Mobipocket. OK so it's still a proprietary standard but it's a relatively benign one. I'm also assuming that ultimately Mobipocket and Adobe Digital Editions will both be able to read epub documents and so they will be more like competing web browsers.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I doubt you see an all-in-one.

The problem with converged devices is that the form factor is always a compromise. We want our smartphones tiny. We want our ebook readers to have relatively large screens. You won't get that in the same package...

True, but I suspect that single-purpose devices, will be a niche market and most people will buy some sort of hybrid. Which may be a videoplayer/GPS, a phone/MP3 player/ereader (etc etc - your guess is as good as mine).

There is still a market for paper computer books, and outfits like O'Reilly and Associates do just fine. Where the electronic versions have taken over is documentation included with software, as prices and margins on software make includng pronted documentation uneconomic.

True but I'm sure there not in it for charity. I suspect a) they make very good money out of e-boks and b) they can sell direct to the public. (There are also other advantages like being able to road test books as 'rough cuts' and be able to sell chapters or have a subscription service) Personally when it comes to computer books I would postively choose a pdf over a paper book.

Well, some standard has to be the key. I want all concerned to agree on a standard format for ebooks. I want to download content once, and read it on whatever device I have, without worrying about what content is in what format viewed by what software.

OK true, but it looks like epub is going to be the one. (or at least let's hope so). It's independent it's open, it's based on established standards (xhtml etc) and all the major players seem to be coalescing around it.

Books are prepared as electronic content for publication, and it's not that big a deal to generate alternate electronic formats for use as ebooks. (Imagesetters expect PDFs as input to generate the files that are used to make plates for printing.)

Erm well maybe - how many publishers seem to be capable of producing a reflowable pdf- never mind producing the same document in .prc bbeb etc etc etc? Make producing an ebook as simply as producing a pdf and the standard as ubiquitous as pdfs and everyone's happy.

Publishers will jump on it if/when they perceive a market, and get past the idea that "electronic format"="piracy".

True.

[phrodod]

Originally Posted by jasonkchapman

I think that's an arbitrary distinction, though, and I'm not sure how many people in the mass market care. People don't shop by production cost, they shop by perceived value.

But the only way you'll get people to spend the money on buying a reader is by giving them an incentive to do so -- cheap books is likely the best incentive for most people. If you gave the readers away, you could charge full price for the book. But because you have to pay for the reader as well, you need to offer a discount on the book.

To most people, the perceived value of an e-book reader is minimal. Either it has a tiny screen and short battery life (a palm, smart-phone, etc) or you have to pay a lot (Sony Reader, iLiad). A paperback book, OTOH, needs no separate hardware and can be taken anywhere. The perceived value of a partial solution (an electronic file) is less than the perceived value of a complete solution (a physical paper book).

You have to make up for that somehow. The benefits of the e-book are there for certain types of books (such as for computer references, where linking relevant information together non-linearly is a benefit), but for most books where you simply want to read through in order, there's little "benefit" to a reader. So you have to provide the benefit through lower prices and instant gratification.

I think that the college market will become significantly more interested when e-book readers allow users to do everything they can do in a paper copy (see color diagrams, highlight the book, bring it to class) while weighing a small fraction of what textbooks tend to weigh today. Right now, e-book readers aren't to the point where the on-line experience matches the paper experience unless you're reading on a computer (the page size isn't big enough, and dedicated readers don't display color diagrams), and if you need a computer, you could equally well schlep around the full text.

But I think that this is likely to be a great marketing ploy in the future, both at the college level, and down into the junior high and high school markets. At the local high school, they've gotten rid of student lockers (drug fears), so students must carry all of their textbooks with them all day. Of course, they must ALSO bring their notebooks, pens, pencils, lunches, calculators, etc., so the average backpack weights in at a hefty 20-30 pounds. If they could drop the 15 lbs. or so of books, and bring along a 1/2 pound e-book reader, that would be a huge blessing to the students.

Phrodod

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by jasonkchapman

I think that's an arbitrary distinction, though, and I'm not sure how many people in the mass market care. People don't shop by production cost, they shop by perceived value. Do they insist on lower ticket prices for independent films on the grounds that they cost less to make?

Nope, but the analogy doesn't hold. See below.

People know that the latest book by Joe Bestseller costs one heck of a lot more to bring to market than a book by Manny Midlist. Still, we don't expect Manny's books to be 1/10th the price just because he only got a $3,000 advance and no promo budget.

It can't be. There will be fixed costs that will be the same for Joe Bestseller and Manny Midlist. (For a similar sized manuscript, line-editing, copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, and pre-press should be about the same.)

And printing is like any other mass production operation: there are substantial up-front costs to put something in production, but the more you make of whatever it is, the cheaper each individual one is. The incremental cost to print one more copy of something is negligible compared to the cost of setting up to print it at all. The per copy cost to the publisher on Joe Bestseller's latest tome may well be a lot lower than the cost for Manny Midlist, precisely because the upfront costs can be amortized over a much larger number of copies.

I suspect the mass market knows quite well (or will know as knowledge of ebooks spreads) that ebooks are a lot cheaper to produce than paper books, because you don't have a physical product to manufacture, warehouse, and distribute. If the ebook and the paper book cost the same, what is the incentive to buy the ebook? (Especially since you can't resell or pass along an ebook to others.)

One of the problems publishing has now is sticker shock on paper books. It will be even worse for ebooks if they try to maintain the same pricing.
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Dennis

[Aenea]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

There's the recent mobipocket issue. It may not have had too much impact on reading, but what would have happened had they gone out of business? No DRM server means no more devices could be authenticated. So reformat/upgrade all your devices (likely to happen in five years or so) and there goes your library.

Buy MobiPocket ebooks with confidence! Just use your own PID and your own ebooks with this nice little hack http://home.casema.nl/alysa/mp.zip and you get a nice DRM free version of your legal ebook (most of the time in HTML + JPEG format...)

Aenea

[andym]

Originally Posted by phrodod

<snip>

I think that the college market will become significantly more interested when e-book readers allow users to do everything they can do in a paper copy (see color diagrams, highlight the book, bring it to class) while weighing a small fraction of what textbooks tend to weigh today. Right now, e-book readers aren't to the point where the on-line experience matches the paper experience unless you're reading on a computer (the page size isn't big enough, and dedicated readers don't display color diagrams), and if you need a computer, you could equally well schlep around the full text.

But I think that this is likely to be a great marketing ploy in the future, both at the college level, and down into the junior high and high school markets. At the local high school, they've gotten rid of student lockers (drug fears), so students must carry all of their textbooks with them all day. Of course, they must ALSO bring their notebooks, pens, pencils, lunches, calculators, etc., so the average backpack weights in at a hefty 20-30 pounds. If they could drop the 15 lbs. or so of books, and bring along a 1/2 pound e-book reader, that would be a huge blessing to the students.

Phrodod

Amen to that, I've just had all my books in storage for a few months. I was unpacking them yesterday and came across my copy of the Harraps New Shorter English-French/French English dictionary. Two volumes weighing in at 2kg (4.5lbs) - heaven only knows what the longer dictionary weighs. I've been looking at the SlovoEd deluxe version which looks like it might be the same thing except it will fit on a postcard and give me virtual instant access.

It's also worth remembering that there has been a lot of interest in the developing world in the ultra-cheap computers precisely because it could be cheaper to give evey child a free computer with the savings from not having to buy paper textbooks.

[Lemurion]

There is no real connection between the statement that Canadian writers can't make a living from book sales due to the size of the market and Baen making more money on eBooks than they do from Canada. What Baen is saying is that Arnold Bailey who runs Webscriptions for them writes them a bigger check each year than Distican (their Canadian distributor) does. Writers like Margaret Atwood write for a small segment of the Canadian Market, what's called CanLit. A writer who wants to make sufficient sales to live on in Canada basically has to write for the US publishers because they are the only ones who sell enough copies of their books in Canada to produce a living wage.

The impression I'm getting from your posts is that you think Canadian writers start by submitting to Canadian publishers and once they reach a certain degree of success they move into the US market with US publishers. That's not how it works there. People who write a certain kind of literary fiction (what's generally called CanLit) go to Canadian publishers. Just about everyone else starts with the US publishers, and there is very little crossover between the two groups. If a Canadian writer wants to sell to the mass market (in Canada) they go to the US publishers. The structure of the market is such that a Canadian writer looks at the US and Canada as essentially one market. So does the industry, that's why all the mass market paperbacks display both prices.

As a codicil, I managed a bookstore in Canada for a few years.