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:

DRM

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.)

Pricing

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.

Chatting with John Berlyne about his new book on Tim Powers…

A while back I talked to Charles Lambert about his book, Scent of Cinnamon, and promised I’d do more of that sort of thing when I could.

Then I didn’t.

Sorry. I suck.

However – somewhat belatedly – I did speak to John Berlyne, whose book on author Tim Powers – POWERS: SECRET HISTORIES (excerpt here) – is one of the most remarkable explorations of a writer’s life I’ve ever heard of. Powers was a fave of mine when I was at school and university, and… well. See below.

———–

NH:

Okay, this is clearly a work of obsession – in the best possible way. Powers, though, comes across as a very relaxed guy. He’s sort of like someone you’d expect to be playing base at a James Taylor concert, or maybe hosting a really gentle talk show. How did you two interact? What was the relationship?

JB:

When I was an actor (a job I did for a lot longer than I probably should have), I once had the opportunity to meet one of my heroes – not an actor, as it happens, but a legendary theatre personality. In a terrific example of shattered dreams, the fellow turned out to be a complete tool!

NH:

Wait a second, you were an ACTOR? We’re so going to talk about that later…

JB:

Not that much to talk about in truth! Thankfully, it’s a bug I was eventually cured of. I’d much rather be doing what I do now.

NH:

So you say. Well, anyway – that thing with people turning out to be evil is very bad. I had that happen to me with someone a while back, and I’ve never quite been able to look at the guy’s work in the same way. It’s so annoying!

JB:

I agree! It sucks to have one’s idol’s smashed, although it strikes me in my middle years as being karmic in some way. One of life’s hard lessons. Thankfully it was not so with Powers. I’d admired his work for years but was always too shy to do anything vulgar like writing a fan letter. This was exacerbated by the fact that he was American and thus not exactly a local boy – this is before the Internet made everything much less remote. However when I did finally meet him for the first time back in 1999, (over at the NASFIC in Anaheim where I’d gone specifically to interview him for The Works of Tim Powers web site) Tim, along with his wife Serena, all but adopted me. A kinder, more generous pair you could not hope to meet. From that meeting, we became friends and regular correspondents and from that the book project evolved.

NH:

Fan heaven… (I have to second your thoughts about Powers, by the way. He’s almost unreasonably nice. The guy you see talking when he does an event is the real guy. It’s great.) Anyway… I remember reading The Anubis Gates at school, and I also remember asking my English teacher about the poetry of William Ashbless, and getting pretty odd looks. I feel a bit better about that now, knowing that Powers &co. intended Ashbless to be semi-credible, but still… do you have any early Powers moments?

JB:

Ha! You’re not alone in your Ashbless moment – I’ve heard of quite a few others who did the same thing. Powers has even done vanity searches for Ashbless’s name and come up with people who have quoted or referenced his works in their thesis. It’s cool that their original silly joke has ended up as a kind of viral hoax. I’ve actually seen the first poem that Powers and Blaylock wrote as Ashbless – each writing a line in their own hand (in fact it’s reproduced in SECRET HISTORIES along with some other very cool Ashbless stuff).

NH:

I love BUY the way you POWERS just slipped that SECRET in there, it was absolutely HISTORIES undetectable. It must OR be THE WORLD some kind of subliminal ninja marketing WILL END…

JB:

Ha! I don’t know what you’re talking about (SECRET HISTORIES, available now in three gorgeous states from PS Publishing). With regards to Ashbless,  I love also how the whole thing has grown exponentially throughout the years to become more acrimonious and outrageous – to the point where Ashbless is now accusing Powers and Blaylock of nothing short of murder and plagiarism. (And which, we are left to wonder, is the more heinous crime?) One of the high points for me of the entire nine years I spend obsessing… er…. I mean writing SECRET HISTORIES, is that Ashbless mentioned me by name in his contribution. Mind you, now I come to think of it, I hope he hasn’t got hold of my address!

NH:

Did he blurb for the book? Are we going to see him trashing it in future interviews? Actually, hey, maybe I should try to get him on here :)

JB:

He actually wrote a contributory piece for the book and signed the slipcased editions. Amazing really, given his reclusive and acerbic nature.

NH:

Powers sort of stands alone. He doesn’t really obey the rules, he does his own thing. Some very interesting people read him. Did you come across anyone who surprised you on that score?

JB:

I agree that he stands alone. It’s interesting to consider that you cannot really quantify his work in terms of other writers – in any field. It doesn’t really work when you say “Well… his stuff is kind of like Fritz Leiber meets Philip K. Dick with a hint of Lovecraft thrown in…” Powers is a truly archetypal writer, unique in fact. And there are plenty of writers who have come after him, whose work is described as “Powersean or Powers-esque”. But he’s out there on his own for sure. I think of late, the nearest anyone has got – certainly in terms of commercial success, is Dan Simmons, whose recent supernatural thrillers THE TERROR and DROOD – both terrific books, and both ‘secret histories’ – but these are a lot flashier than a typical Powers novel in that you they lack that special moment you get when reading them in which it occurs to you that the author’s version of events might actually be relating what was _really_ going on!! (In fact Powers says that, invariably, when he’s researching a book, he worries that at some point he’ll stumble upon The Truth, and find himself in the cross hairs of some sniper’s rifle.)

NH:

Hah. I suspect the sniper would end up buying him beer instead of shooting him.

JB:

Lots of people read and revere his work it’s true – but what actually pisses me off – and I suppose it was this fact that formed one of the spurs for putting SECRET HISTORIES together, is how many people _haven’t_ even heard of him! I mean, this guy is an ornament of genre fiction, a giant talent… and his books have been out of print in the UK for over ten years!

NH:

They have WHAT? Are you KIDDING ME? Youch. What’s the score there? Is that getting sorted out now?

JB:

I know – it’s insane isn’t it? Worse than that, his two most recent novels haven’t been published here AT ALL!!! Yeah – I’m working on a solution to this embarassing industy oversight at the moment, but it’s hard. Although it’s acknowledged that Powers is a fabulous and highly respected writer, he’s never been regarded as a commercial proposition, which makes it hard to get committment from the bigger houses.

NH:

… This is a weird industry we work in, Berlyne. It really is. What’s the deal with that? (Hey, do you miss being an actor?)

JB:

And (rant, rant, rant) one of these OOP works is the World Fantasy Award winning classic supernatural spy story DECLARE, of which, when I interviewed him some years back, Powers said “One day I was reading the introduction to a book about Kim Philby – and the introduction was by John le Carré - and le Carré said “It’s odd the bits of this story we’ll never know. We’ll never know who Philby’s recruiter was. Was it his father? His father was such an odd guy. Who were the other agents that never came to light? Look at Philby as a representative type of empire England – 19th century England – and look how he wound up. Was that part of him essential to what he became?” And I just thought – keep talking, le Carré, you’re giving me my book! These are all valuable points.”

NH:

Oh, he’ll do that. Books fall off the man like snow off a roof… 

So you’ve done this, what the hell are you going to do next? Do you feel a kind of gap in your life now that this is done, or are you to track down, say, Thomas Pynchon and try to get him to talk to you?

JB:

Linking this with my rant above, I guess my next immediate project is to help get Powers back into print here in the UK and in doing so, to elevate his name reputation and *sales* to a level that equate with the sheer, unadulterated brilliance of his work. To me, bringing him back into print is a no brainer – and certainly the market has changed and is, I believe, far more receptive to the kind of work he produces than it has ever been previously. I mean there are far more mainstream friendly genre books (your own novel being a prime example) and the boundary between what the general readership can cope with and what the hardcore genre fans want is alot more blurred than it’s ever been. Look at novels like THE HISTORIAN, or ANATHEM or JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL – readers of these books should be offered TPs stuff. In many ways, there has never been a better time to look at relaunching Powers to a British audience – he’s practically a blank slate! Zeno (the literary agency I run with John Parker) is currently in talks with a number of publishers about doing just this! More on this anon.

NH:

Yeah, please, let me know how that goes – I’m still a bit boggled that he’s out of print here.

JB:

As far as another book project goes – I don’t know that I have long enough to live to produce a book that would rival SECRET HISTORIES. I mean this one took nine year for Christ’s sake! And I have a life now…, a girlfriend… a business! Part of it is actually to do with the subject matter of course – obviously Powers is something of a personal crusade – and the reasons behind how my obsession for his work came about are outlined in my introduction to SECRET HISTORIES. It was a very particular set of circumstances I can’t ever see being replicated with another author. Additionally, the fact that the material for the books was all there is something I can’t see happening with anyone else – I mean all those drawings, handwritten manuscripts, outlines, alternative versions, doodles, juvenile, early poems.. I can’t imagine, a) finding someone with such a treasure trove of an archive, and more importantly b) being allowed such access to it all.

NH:

Well, that I’m not so sure about. Writers seem to accumulate that stuff. You know, I saw Pushkin’s manuscripts in a museum in St Petersburg, and they’re exactly like that. Well, maybe not ‘exactly’. Powers probably doesn’t share Pushkin’s evident obsession with naked nymphs playing snooker…

JB:

Don’t get me wrong, Powers didn’t give me complete free range in all this – I had to dig deep to come up with the material in the first place (partly why the book took so long to put together) and come up with a way of presenting it in a coherant form (this was also took ages to developed/evelove) and there were parts that I had to fight tooth and nail to get his approval for. At the same time, my handling of the material had to be sensitive and carefully engineered – for SECRET HISTORIES is really a laying bare of Powers’s creative process. I made it rule right from the start that he has editorial approval over the entire content of the book, a decision that at times was more of a hinderance than a help. But all parties are delighted with the end result – that much is certain.

NH:

Hell, yeah. (And it’s frankly so much more of a contribution to society than all those episodes of El Dorado you were in.)

JB:

I shall now flounce out of the room and cry on the phone to my agent. Where’s my dresser?

Are you insulted?

Apparently, publishers are pricing eBooks in a silly way, and it’s insulting to the reader.

Certainly, people do get hot under the collar about eBook pricing; when Amazon tried to start selling them over ten dollars a shot, there was a minor revolution.

Well, okay. There’s definitely some silliness around – my book was briefly available as an eBook for two different prices – hard and soft cover eBook. Eep. It’s not intentional, it’s just the kind of thing which happens when large companies start getting into new areas.

It’s also true that there are no printing, warehousing, or shipping costs associated with eBooks, although there are presumably infrastructural costs of other sorts – even if they are likely to be lower.

However…

I think it’s also the case that the last ten, fifteen years has encouraged us to believe that stuff should basically be free. It was the time of the big discount, because all you had to do to make money was watch the market spiral upward.

It probably should have been obvious that that wasn’t sustainable. In fact, it was obvious, but no one really wanted to talk about it.

Talking to a couple of publishers recently, I’ve been surprised by how the cost of a book breaks down; I had assumed that the physical costs were considerably higher than they are. According to what they told me, the bulk of the cost part of a book’s jacket price is operational – editing, publicity, and the business of running a publishing house. If a book costs twenty five dollars, one U.S. editor said to me, only a few bucks of that is print and paper. At which point, of course, eBooks just aren’t that much cheaper than dead tree books to make.

So I find myself looking at the ten dollar eBooks and thinking: huh. That cannot possibly cover everyone’s costs.

One way of looking at that is to say that it’s not relevant – it’s not a question of what the costs are, but what the market will pay. I’m not comfortable with that. The market can be an idiot. Large groups of people make many decisions very well, but they’re not always rational about what they should pay for things – ask the State of California (2). Given the choice between raising taxes and getting a tax break, people will generally go for the break. They will then also – and here’s California’s problem – vote for a bunch of really expensive stuff they would like for the government to do immediately.

That kind of thinking has been encouraged for a decade or more, and – surprise – it doesn’t work.

So I expect you’re wondering – as George C. Wellbeloved would have said – what I think about all this. Well, I think eBooks are priced in silly ways and I think they need to be made more amazing. I think DRM is a pain in the arse and I don’t see that it works, and at the same time it stops me from doing with eBooks what I would do with paper copies. I also think that the market is presently executing the newspaper and brought us all the fun of watching pensions and 401Ks vanish in the mist, so I’m not really impressed with its financial acumen.

I think we, collectively, need to acknowledge that stuff costs money.

Amazingly, at the bright, shiny beginning of the 2000s, we’re learning once again that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I was ducked into a big department store on Tuesday because I had quarter of an hour and I saw a winter coat, absolutely perfect for me, made by a really cool designer, on sale for £300. That’s a lot of money, but it’s much, much less than the original price of the item, which was £3000. Yep. 10%, people. (Particularly good since I’m still sulking about the non-existence of the Gone-Away Coat.)

So I thought, okay, that’s great. I hadn’t come in for a coat and I didn’t really want to carry it home, but when something is in the perfect size and looks amazing and has been reduced from a stratospheric price to something manageable and will last you for a decade or more, that’s a moment to make a few compromises.

Except it turns out I misread the sticker price – it was £500. Yup. 16%. And I looked at the guy behind the counter and said thanks, and walked out, because I didn’t want to pay that much for a coat.

Well, okay. On the one hand I was right. That extra two hundred quid made a huge difference. It wasn’t what I was prepared to pay, it was nearly twice as much as I thought we were talking about.

But I was also pathetically, ludicrously wrong. That coat was worth a huge amount more than I was being asked to pay. The designer and the shop were taking a loss selling it at that level, and they were doing so to clear stock. The reduction was massive. I was being a tit. I could probably have bought it at that price, taken it home, and sold it on eBay for twice as much. I ignored what it was in favour of my own perception of what I wanted it to cost.

I am an idiot.

It seems to me that we do this with everything at the moment, and we have to stop. We pretend there are no environmental costs associated with flying, because if we acknowledged them then flights would be more expensive than we want to pay. So essentially, what we are doing every time we fly is taking out a mortgage we already know we can’t pay for and pretending it’s not there.

Does that sound familiar?

So coming back to eBooks…

On the one hand, yes, eBooks need reasonable pricing, and they need to be unshackled from proprietary formats and the rest. But on the other, it’s not a question of what the market will bear, with eBooks or anything else.

We have to learn that things have costs, and those costs are not always mutable, even if that doesn’t suit us.

[++UPDATE++ This conversation became so interesting that I wrote more about it - looking at the downsides of current eBooks and what probably needs doing - here.]