The Business of Books & Publishing: Changing the Pattern

We see a lot of new ebooks being released that are riddled with editorial and formatting problems. From the publisher's side, the problem is that to proofread ebooks after conversion, especially after OCR (scanning) conversion, is expensive — contrary to what the naysayers believe, it is not a job for a high school graduate who thinks Twittering is the be-all and end-all of language literacy, but a job for a skilled professional — especially when it cannot be known with certainty how many ebook sales will be made.

Perhaps the time has come to rethink how and what gets published. I don't mean which books but which formats. Perhaps the time has come to publish only hardcover and ebook formats, dropping the mass market paperback from the mix and keeping the trade paperback for those pbooks that do not justify a hardcover print run (although considering that the cost differential is slight between paperback and hardcover, I see no particular need to retain even the trade paperback).

Before the coming of the paperback, books were available in hardcover only. That limitation was the impetus for several innovations, including the public library. But the limitation served a good market purpose. It kept the price high relative to incomes; created an educated class to which people aspired; allowed nearly all print runs to be profitable; created the first commercial publishing class (as opposed to scholarly class) of books; created the respected profession of editor; and limited the number of books available for purchase. As a side effect, it created secondary and tertiary markets for books: secondary being the used-book market and tertiary being the collector's market.

Today, the publishing world runs wild with no discipline imposed either directly or indirectly on the publishing world and process. Consider the growth of books published in the United States alone in the past decade: In 2002, 215,000 books were published traditionally (which largely means through the old-style process of vetting, editing, and so on by an established publisher) and 33,000 nontraditionally (which largely means self-published). Jump ahead a mere seven years later to 2009 and the numbers are 302,000 and 1.33 million, respectively. One year later, 2010, the respective numbers are 316,000 traditionally published and 2.8 million -- more than double -- nontraditionally published! I'm not sure I want to know the numbers for 2011.

The jump in the nontraditional publishing is simply a testament to the rise of the ebook. The numbers do not imply or correlate with sales, quality, price, or anything other than raw numbers of suddenly available books. If I read one book a day, every day, or 365 books a year (vacationing from reading only on the extra day in leap years) for 60 years, I could read 21,900 books, which represents a mere 0.0078% of the 2.8 million nontraditional books published in 2010. The likelihood of my being able to read a significant percentage of all books available to me is nonexistent.

How does this tie into the idea of dropping paperbacks? It runs a convoluted course like this: As I cannot possibly read all of the books published in 2010 alone, I would prefer to march publishing backward and be less egalitarian and open access and more unequal and closed. I want to make what reading I do count with minimal search-and-find effort on my part. I want to see more profitability for authors and publishers in exchange for better vetting of books and significantly better production quality control. One way to do this is to control market access.

eBooks are already eroding pbook sales, so let's help that erosive process by guiding it. If a person must read or buy a pbook, make the only pbook version available the hardcover version. Book buyers are already accustomed, from centuries of ingrained experience, to paying a premium price for a hardcover book. Book buyers perceive value -- whether that value is real or not makes no difference; buyers believe it exists, which is sufficient for it to, in fact, exist -- in hardcover versions. One side effect of that perception is that buyers of hardcovers tend to treat the books more carefully than they treat paperbacks, thus creating a secondary market with some value. Thus, let's satisfy the pbook market need by providing a better-quality hardcover.

By limiting the pbook to hardcover only, we are also changing the secondary market. A used hardcover will now have more value because there is no pbook alternative. And it wouldn't take a great deal of effort to figure out a way for authors and publishers to receive a small royalty from secondary market sales. Eliminate the paperback and there will be more incentive for that solution to be found.

The other benefit of eliminating paperbacks is that the ebook can easily replace it. More effort and money can be put into production of the ebook version and a more realistic price can be charged. Right now, much of the price grumbling about ebooks is a result of comparing the ebook to the paperback. Why should an ebook cost more than the paperback version? (The question is rhetorical here.) Eliminating the paperback removes the yardstick against which the ebook price is currently measured. The market will settle, just as it did for paperback pricing, around a few price points for ebooks, which will be less than the hardcover price. Within a relatively short period of time, that price stabilization will be accepted by most book buyers and what we will see is the market we had before ebooks will return, but with ebooks in the role of paperbacks.

One other consideration is that by eliminating the paperback, traditional publishers are eliminating a major debit to their balance sheets. To offer a paperback version means you actually have to do a print run -- the product has to be available in that form -- which also means that the direct and ancillary costs (e.g., returns, warehousing) have to be incurred. And if the paperback is a decent seller, it means that the costs have to be incurred multiple times. In contrast, with an ebook production costs only have to be incurred once; any cost of duplication of the electronic file, once perfected, is minimal.

Will elimination of the paperback cause pain in the market? Sure it will, just as any established market change and upheaval does. But this is an opportune moment to make that change. Publishers need to move paperback readers to ebooks. They also need to enhance the value of both ebooks and hardcovers in the consumer's thoughts. The easiest and most effective way to do this is for publishers to take their lumps now and eliminate the paperback from the equation. The period of rapid growth of ebooks is the time to reshape the market, not when the idea of coavailability of the three formats is entrenched.

image by TheCreativePenn

4 Comments on The Business of Books & Publishing: Changing the Pattern

  1. “It kept the price high relative to incomes; created an educated class to which people aspired”

    Elitist.

    “limited the number of books available for purchase”

    Artificial scarcity.

    Keep in mind that ebooks are still only around 10% of the entire book market. If you eliminate paperbacks, you push many readers out of the market who cannot afford the jump to ebooks.

    How far back do you want to go? Hand-illuminated books prepared only by monks and purchased only by the very rich?

    That’s not the way of the free market. If publishers try to reverse the time machine, new publishers and indie authors will fill the void, just like they’re doing now.

    As an aside, there are indie books I’ve read that are far better with better editing than some of the commercial bestsellers. Just because a traditional publisher publishes a book with all of the relevant editing and formatting, doesn’t mean it’s a good book.

  2. Excellent post. The music industry phased out cassette tapes (much cheaper than cds, which also required the purchase of new hardware to play) and focussed on cds and vinyl without losing their entire customer base. And now we see that things like vinyl collector’s editions are quite a popular high-price choice, and mP3s prices have settled (lower than some people might like, but still). Decreasing formats doesn’t decrease the industry’s diversity; it focuses initiatives and gives the massively flooded retailers a break.

    Do you think that publishers should publish all their books in both hardback and eBook formats or do you think some are better suited to one than the other?

    It’s pretty bloody obvious to anyone who walks into a bookshop, or tries to search for a decent read online, with no clear title in mind that publishers need to intelligently pare back their lists. We do run the risk of alienating new readers through too much choice. If publishers can do this in a way that increases their margins, all the better.

  3. I struggle with the concept of removing the accessible books from the market. Before I went e, I didn’t buy hardcovers, only paperbacks. Two reasons, one cost and the other weight – hardcovers are heavy.
    If the paperback was not available, I would not have bought the more expensive books, and perhaps would not have bought an ereader.

  4. Scanning books to create e-books? That has to be a temporary phenomenon, because modern books in any format would all be generated from a digital master. Paperbacks, hardbacks, coffee table books, kindle, kobo, pdf, … – I don’t see the problem.

1 Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. E-readers changing Americans’ reading habits | Books Speak Volumes

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*
http://the-digital-reader.com/2011/06/20/the-business-of-books-publishing-changing-the-pattern/
the-digital-reader.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
67184
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LL3GHGC7PEL5E43HZ5LJPHI2SLE7QQTE
<urn:uuid:8058d100-92b5-4842-bd04-5ea36b9620a8>
2017-01-18T13:58:55Z
104.28.12.126
sha1:XP7KAUCB523A2VEJAECF6QX2EVLRPHKL
<urn:uuid:2a30dca7-50af-498e-a654-f3887a61d5ec>
http://the-digital-reader.com/2011/06/20/the-business-of-books-publishing-changing-the-pattern/
length
response
<urn:uuid:372c0ad1-65f3-4980-958a-8297e6b457ac>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf