Having berated the consumer/reader for expecting a free lunch, I thought it was time I examined some other diners…
Publishers. I love you all. But see, here, chaps and chappesses: not all is right with the world.
As my dear, departed, and larcenous grandsire might have said, you are trying to sell a pup for the price of a pooch. More plainly:
eBooks as they’re put together right now are an inferior product, priced as a superior one.
They are less attractive to look at than dead tree books; often badly set and transcribed or reformatted; cannot be touched or dawdled with, nor doodled upon or easily marked up; cannot be shared easily; require a power-source; cannot be dropped in the bath and dried out; require an account; require the right software and the right operating system… so why are they more expensive than paperbacks?
A couple of issues:
Yes, I know. It makes you feel secure. The thing is, it costs money and it doesn’t work. DRM gets cracked as soon as anyone wants it cracked. It is sold to you as armour and it is made of lace. Sexy as that combination would be in the right context (settle down in the back) DRM is not a positive addition to the book world. All DRM does is make your product worth less to the reader/consumer, increase the amount of faffing the reader has to do to get the eBook to work, and hike your administrative costs. Even people who see a use for DRM want it to disappear.
So, thoughts on this, off the top of my head:
Co-opt booksharers. Make it a feature. Build a system of recommendations, the ability to lend (multiple but finite copies of) books to friends (with an option to buy after three chapters, otherwise it goes Freemium), give rewards, sell an enriched text with features which require an online account, sell the paperback with an eBook version as standard. Borrow from the iTunes model, where you can have the product DRM-free at a higher price. Consider selling books as serials, by chapter, the way people did when Strand Magazine was pushing Conan Doyle.
Experiment!
It strikes me that from an industry point of view, you can’t just throw books-as-files at the world and let someone else take care of the rest. You need to innovate, to own the dialogue – and not because you have the power of a big corporation, but because people are hanging on your every utterance, the way they do with Apple. You need to be vertically integrated. You need multiple revenue streams. You know all this better than I do…
I don’t ask for much, do I?
Ultimately: don’t cage the product. Make the product better and easier to access, so that the overall experience of buying an eBook is better than downloading a rip-off one. (And will someone please start building giant tortoise libraries? Thank you.)
Here’s a direct quote from the comments on my other thread on eBook pricing, in which I wondered – as I still do – whether we as a consuming public (or however you want to describe the mass of people who buy manufactured items and entertainment) have lost track what things are really worth:
I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for an eBook, because at more than that, I want more than I’m getting. I want a dust jacket, I want something physical. There’s an inherent belief (and I agree) e should never cost as much as its old world equivalant. You really do get less.
He’s right. You do get less. And often you get it for more.
In the UK, the government has somewhat insanely decided that eBooks are subject to Value Added Tax, which paper books are not. That’s a hike, in normal days, of 17.5% – right now it’s 15% because apparently that 2.5% VAT reduction is curing us of the recession. So if you assume a price of ten quid on a big paperback, the eBook priced exactly the same way at source will cost £11.75 when it hits the shelves. Well, okay, not exactly because that’s not quite how it works, but the problem is clear: eBooks are at a substantial competitive disadvantage.
Get lobbying, people. You are not all small independent houses. Many of you are large, world-spanning corporations with considerable muscle. Talk to whoever you talk to and make this an issue. It’s a bit mad, and it’s out of whack with the whole Digital Britain thing. eBooks should be getting a tax-break to encourage a new profit centre, not being cudgeled because HMR&C thinks they’re software.
But in the mean time, look: an eBook as things stand is an inferior product (see above) so it shouldn’t be priced as if it was the gold standard version (or at least, the hardback). The virtues of eBooks are storage and portability, and – if you have them on your iPhone as I do – reading in the dark. They could be other things, too, but as of now they’re just not. So the price has to reflect that. If it doesn’t, people will crack your DRM and laugh at you the way kids (including your kids, and I know you know this) laugh at the record labels.
Off the top of my head:
There isn’t going to be a mass exodus to eBooks from paper just yet. The technology is a bit clunky – so experiment now, learn now, while there’s time. And do not, ever, get into this kind of nonsense (2, 3) because it will make people hate you. For the moment – and I’m not sure how long this situation will remain – eBook sales may be additional rather than substitutional, and no one is geared up yet to make a total move to digital print. So you’re not damaging your core market here, you’re working to shift an additional product and to discover how it will work as it becomes more important.
Key point: stop thinking of the eBook as a cheap spin-off of the paper book. It’s a new, powerful thing, not something which is created simply by converting the .pdf of the novel to an ePub file. It has the potential wreck your (our) industry or to move it into a new form, or to work alongside the existing structures. What is almost certain at this point is that it’s coming, and if you don’t get on board whole-heartedly, somebody else will.
Today’s eBooks are your loss-leaders and your market research for what’s coming. This is where you earn customer loyalty and demonstrate acumen and innovation, make your eBook experience better than anyone else’s. This is where you can figure out what to do so that when it matters you have the best approach possible. You will not do that by putting an over-priced, user-unfriendly product out there. The first publisher who breaks ranks in the right way will steal a march on the opposition which may take a long time to claw back. So get your thinking caps on…
When you have an eBook product which is worth the money, people will bite your hand off to pay the right price for it. Otherwise, it’s more likely they’ll just bite you.
