The Ridiculous Way Publishers Sell eBooks

[UPDATE: The ebook version is now $14, the same price as the paperback, and the links take you to the The Enchantress of Florence at those various ebookstores. So consider this an account of how silly things used to be. They're still quite silly, but maybe not this silly.]

The book goes for $14. But how much are they charging for the paper, and how much for the words?

Here’s something odd. On the Random House website, you can buy several different versions of The Enchantress of Florence, the most recent novel by Salman Rushdie, which I’m currently reading (review out soon). You can buy the trade paperback for $14, you can buy the hardcover for $26, or, on either version’s page you can find a link to the ebook version.

The odd part? Both the hardcover and the paperback pages link to the same ebook, which is priced at $26, the full hardcover price. Now this is obviously a ludicrous, and frankly insulting, pricing system, but that’s far from the only silly thing they’re doing.

Who’s in charge over there?

Presumably, the benefits in buying the hardcover are that it’s made of nicer paper with nicer ink, has a pretty dust jacket, things of that nature. And I suppose it’s a first edition, which some people might care about. But an ebook gives you none of these premiums. An ebook takes only a conversion of the digital proof they presumably already have, and the tiniest amount of bandwidth to download it. It takes no shipping, no distribution arrangement, no physical infrastructure except a server.

The price alone is not where the silliness ends. If you want to buy the ink and paper copy of The Enchantress of Florence, Random House will ship it to you themselves. But if you try to buy the ebook, you’re taken to a list of online bookstore links. Not links to Enchantress at these bookstores, just their front pages. For a brief moment, I thought I saw the logic here: Random House prices the ebook at $26 in order to allow individual retailers to attempt to fleece their customer base for up to and including 26 bones.

I guess that’s one way to do it. Many of the linked bookstores do indeed try to bilk their customers, charging $18-$26, well more than Random House’s paperback version. At least one doesn’t carry it. And one of Random House’s links take you to ebookimpressions.com, which does not sell ebooks, but is just one of those weird “related searches” placeholders for the url.

With a little more effort, you can find Enchantress for less than $12 for a PDF. The Kindle Store sells the same book for $9.99. The Seattle Public Library lets you download a three-week PDF or Mobipocket of it for free.
(Although, you can’t get the PDF right now because I’m reading it (ha!)
and there’s only one copy.) And, though I’m loathe to mention it, the abysmal Sony eBook Store sells Enchantress for $18.20 and a headache.

What’s a reader to do? And more to the point, what’s a publisher supposed to do?

Not that you asked for it, but here’s an ebook business plan

All of this bespeaks not just a tone-deafness on the part of Random House and the entire publishing industry, but an active mismanagement of an entire emerging market. There’s a lot of talk going around about whether or not ereaders will replace books. The answer, I firmly believe, is that of course they will. They won’t eradicate ink and paper books, by any means, but they will become the primary way most people read books within, I predict, the next decade. Maybe the next five years.

Publishers have a choice: they can resist this coming change and do absolutely nothing to encourage people to buy their books electronically. This is what Random House is doing, flagrantly. They’re letting third parties take their books and run wild with formats and pricing. And they’re even tacitly supporting the wilding by offering customers on their own website no incentive, and often egregious disincentives, to buy electronic editions.

Here’s what I would do if Random House called tomorrow and appointed me the XO of epublishing (I’m pretty sure that’s what they call it):

1. Drastically encourage ereading by offering half-off discounts on ebooks on the house website; Enchantress would sell for 7 measly bucks
   
2. Strictly enforce those prices across all third-party retailers
3. Sell them on the Random House website itself
   
4. Sell them in only one format: PDF ePub, and commission a program to translate PDFs ePubs to any other format while ereader manufacturers catch up
   
5. Abolish DRM on all books we sell, or third parties sell

Maybe this wouldn’t pay off immediately. Maybe it would take a few months, or even a few years. But when the dust clears, and the Great eReader Adoption begins in earnest, the company that follows those steps will be far ahead of the pack, and will have the leeway then to further adjust to the new media world of publishing. There’s a curve here, and now is the perfect time to get far, far ahead of it.

Amazon understands this more than anyone else, though their proprietary books make their Kindle store more of a Kindle marketing tool (and a revenue stream to fund the “whispernet”) than a place for democratic ebook sales. With no DRM, I would’ve bought Enchantress for $7 without any hesitation, even with a free version from the library easily available.

The really confusing thing is that the recording industry just went through all these issues in the last decade, so you’d think we could skip them with publishing. I didn’t make up the list above, 80% of it’s cribbed from the laborious way iTunes figured out how to sell music, culminating with eliminating DRM just this month.

The list above doesn’t have to be executed by a publishing house, it could be a retailer that does it. But right now, the publishing houses are clearly blocking the way to cheap, DRM-free ebooks. Whatever. I’ll be at the library.

UPDATE: After the salient arguments below, I’m on the ePub bandwagon (and changed the post above slightly). My last reservation was that I couldn’t find another format besides PDF that used static pagination, which meant that students wouldn’t be able to use those formats for academic papers. But ePub does it well, and less obtrusively than PDF. I’m sold.

I also updated this post.

RE-UPDATE: Stanza is adding support for PDF, which will throw a monkeywrench into the ePub works. One of the primary advantages for ePub is that it works on all devices (except Kindle). Now, if PDF does the same thing (and is already more accepted), the ePub movement needs to get in gear if its going to make ePub a viable, accepted universal format.