Bestselling author and mean mean jerk Douglas Preston
I just read this NY Times article (via) and I’m noticing a trend that’s really starting to infuriate me. It’s the use of the word “entitlement” by publishers and authors to describe their own customers.
In this article, author and complete jerk Douglas Preston is featured in this paragraph:
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
This kind of thing drives me absolutely insane. The ebook release of Preston’s book is delayed by four months because Preston and his publishers want their hardcover money. According to those publishers, Impact‘s “real price” is $26. Speaking of entitlement.
But let’s see some peasants brandish pitchforks. Exactly what are the outrageously entitled Wal-Mart Americans saying? Here’s another paragraph from the article:
“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”
Hmm. That’s logical, sound, completely unentitled thinking. For years, publishers have been charging $20 or more for “hardcover” books, implying that some of that cost goes toward the actual production materials. Now, with ebooks, they’re trying to charge the same price for brand new ebooks as they charge for the outlandishly expensive hardcover editions.
The problem with this isn’t that customers are “entitled” to think they should get ebooks cheaper. The problem with this is that no publisher has yet advanced any logical explanation as to why the ebook editions SHOULDN’T be cheaper than the hardcovers. The burden of proof is on the publishers, and they haven’t convinced anybody.
Furthermore, it infuriates me when publishers think or believe that just because their pricing system has been a certain way in the past, that’s the way it should be forever. $26 is not the “real price” of a book. Dan Brown is not worth $26, Sarah Palin is not worth $26. And let’s face it, Douglas Preston isn’t worth $26. (You can just tell by his hair, can’t you?)
In reality, the hardcover of Impact goes for $14.29 at Amazon. If you want customers to pay more than $9.99 for the ebook edition, start by showing them a formula that goes something like this: [hardcover price] – [paper, ink, cardboard, and shipping costs] = [ebook price]. To sell a hardcover for $14 and then argue that the “real price” of the ebook version is up to $15… sheer madness.
Now, I do think publishers should be able to set their own prices. I also think Macmillan is incredibly stupid to raise their prices $5 per ebook. I hope it brings them to their knees. Fine, though, it’s up to them.
But when rich, bestselling hack authors (Preston’s crapped out more than a dozen novels in the past decade) start insulting their own readers, things are taking a wrong turn. It’s not readers’ “absolutely astonishing sense of entitlement” that makes us think technological advancement should bring down production costs, it’s basic common sense. And no matter how many times publishers say ebooks are expensive to make, it will never make sense to charge the same amount.
I’ve noticed a mini-trend in the past week or two. First, in the Millions, I saw Confessions of a Book Pirate, an interview with a real, live ebook pirate, code-named “The Real Caterpillar.”
He does a little defense of piracy, which I’ll leave alone in this post, and he also has a few interesting things to say about DRM. Most importantly, he says he would pay more for an ebook without DRM and, when asked what would make him stop pirating books, he says:
I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.
Caterpillar also lays out the excruciating process he goes through to upload a single book, a process that involves scanning a hard copy page by page, and then proofing the scan by hand, which can take “5 to 40 hours.” Damn.
So, for pirates like Caterpillar, DRM has no stopping effect on their piracy (Caterpillar started years ago, when he couldn’t find digital copies of the books he wanted, so he’s used to scanning), and instead it’s actually a reason to keep doing it, because publishers still don’t offer “clean” copies.
And Caterpillar isn’t the only one who scans. In this summary of a panel at Digital Book World, Peter Balis says the majority of pirated ebooks are scanned galleys, manuscripts, or hard copies. This means DRM is powerless to stop widespread piracy.
From other corners, there have come cries of falling sky, from Macmillan president Brian Napack (and we all know Macmillan isn’t afraid to go to the mattresses), and from music industry group IFPI, whose latest report claims “95% of music is pirated.” That’s a grossly misleading stat, since IFPI also says that the industry has shrunk by only 30% since 2004. Evidently IFPI means 95% of albums are pirated by at least one person—and they don’t seem to know how much revenue loss piracy actually causes. Ars Technica does a pretty thorough examination/dehyperbolizing of the report here.
Still, piracy is a problem. So stipulated. But, as I’ve said for a long time, DRM is not a solution, and providing media in DRM-free formats is actually an incentive to buy it and not pirate it. The argument against DRM-free is that piracy will be easier and more widespread since pirates won’t even have to scan the books. That may be, or it may not (it didn’t happen with DRM-free music). But one thing’s for sure: DRM does not help paying customers in any way. With the iPad coming out soon—along with a whole new slew of DRM headaches—it’s a good time to remember that lesson.
If publishers (and content distributors) continue to fear a potential future threat more than they care about their present, spending, legal customers, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears when major houses tell sob stories about lost revenue.
You can only buy Wolf Hall and other Macmillan books through third-party sellers at Amazon.com (click for full-size)
Sony's Reader Store still stocks Macmillan books, and for the controversial $9.99 price point (click for full size)
[UPDATE: Amazon gave in, and will sell Macmillan books via the "agency model" Macmillan laid out. Which means Macmillan ebooks will cost $13-$15, even at Amazon. I'm putting the over/under on the date of Amazon's next major Kindle screw-up at March 15.]
So Amazon has barred all Macmillan books (print and digital) from its U.S. website after the publisher insolently disagreed with Amazon’s stringent pricing policies. Macmillan asked for either a different pricing structure or “windowing,” i.e. delayed ebook releases (Macmillan CEO John Sargent claims Amazon will make more money, and Macmillan will make less under the new structure, which confuses me). Amazon responded with the Macmillan ban.
You can still find Macmillan books at the Sony Reader Store, however, and you can find many selling for the $9.99 price point that started all this. I’m assuming either higher Macmillan prices or windowing is coming to Sony, but at least you can buy the books.
For the record, I think the entire hardcover pricing system is greedy and predatory; it’s essentially publishers milking their biggest fans’ excitement to make a few extra bucks. I think Macmillan’s making a big mistake in trying to preserve hardcover pricing, and refusing to fully embrace ebooks.
However, this Amazon move is thuggery of the first order, and it doesn’t feel like the stalemate will be resolved very quickly[UPDATE: Or maybe it will, what do I know] (or that it will be the last of its kind). The Macmillan ban combined with Amazon’s continued refusal to allow library ebooks on the Kindle makes one thing clear: Kindle is simply not the best ereader for book readers. If you read mostly books, get a Sony Reader or an Astak Pocket Pro. If you read mostly newspapers or magazines, get an iPad. [UPDATE: Amazon's cave-in brings the Kindle back to the realm of relevancy for book readers. But it still comes with too many questionable corporate decisions for my taste.]
Amazon’s really hyping Kindle books in the wake of an iPad that (maybe) doesn’t have proprietary formatting [UPDATE: iPad does indeed have proprietary formatting. Take a breath, Kindle]. Still… Henry Paulson? You know exactly what’s in this book (this), and you know it’s not going to be all that riveting. So who’s staying up until midnight on Sunday to get themselves the newest Hank? I doubt even Paulson himself will.
Maybe Amazon has a rogue algorithm that gives anything looking vaguely like “Harry Potter” its own midnight release party. T-minus 82 hours!
Hopefully this ad stays front and center on Amazon’s homepage for all 82 of them.
I recently got an Android phone; among the apps I’ve discovered are two content providers that have radically different (but equally flawed) philosophies on distribution.
One (i Music) lets you download mp3s for free, the other (TV.com) lets you watch really bad CBS shows, but not the good ones…
So what does TV.com get wrong? What’s the catch with i Music? What are these content providers doing wrong, and how are they actually encouraging piracy? How does all this apply to books and what’s a simple, one-step solution to it? All that and more, after the jump. … Continue reading »
1-6-10. Looks weird. Anyway, here’s some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
CES 2010starts tomorrow. I’m most excited about, predictably enough, a couple of ereaders: the Spring Design Alex, and the Plastic Logic QUE. Presumably both will premiere tomorrow, and hopefully they’ll be selling by the weekend. Among the questions in my mind: First of all, how much will they cost? Are the Alex’s dual screens useful or gimmicky? Is the QUE’s touchscreen as awesome as it first looked? And lastly, how much will they cost? If I had to guess, I’d say QUE-$500, Alex-$350.
There are a few pieces of pre- or non-CES news floating around. First of all, there’s the new iRiver ereader, which might or might not be laughably expensive. And everybody’s jumping on the Wall Street Journal‘s story that the Apple iSlate is coming in March for one cool grand. Sooooooooo… wait till April and get it for $700? There’s also the Skiff, the biggest ereader in the world, and the new Cool-er, the smallest (that is, the smallest with a six-inch screen and an overinflated price tag—but it comes in green!). I’m still waiting for a netbook with a detachable, backlightable E-Ink screen. It’s a few years away.
To get excited for the coming year from a, you know, reading perspective, here’s the Millions’s list of books to watch for in 2010. I’m looking forward to Robert Stone, David Mitchell, and Ron Rash, whose last novel, Serena, was among the best books I read this year. Salon does the same thing for January, though with sadly only four fiction books on the list.
So, this op-ed in the Times, it’s a publisher saying that the role of the publishing industry is basically to have good taste, to find and polish excellent books for people to read. He says, “A publisher — and I write as one — does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer’s work.” There have been a lot of responses: at E-Reads, Booksquare, and Salon, among many others. My own response is a little shorter: When there’s more than 70,000 books about vampires on Amazon, maybe publishers should do more selecting, and less promoting and positioning (not to mention less worrying about William Styron ebooks).
Random of the week: Did you see the Burj Dubai/Khalifa opening? Think Bellagio fountains plus explosions plus helicopter shots. They might have spent more on fireworks than the Empire State Building cost to build.
We’ll have some Christmas reading recos tomorrow, and then we’ll be back on the 28th with a new installment of our Best Books 2009 series.
In the meantime, here’s an extra-long installment of news about books and ebooks from around the web.
OverDrive released an Android audiobook app Monday (via). You can get it here. I’ve tried it, and it’s awesome. You can download mp3 audiobooks from you local library straight to your phone. Once you have the app installed, just check out the book from your library on your phone’s browser, and OverDrive automatically loads it. You can then download the audiobook in parts. Transferring audiobooks from your computer isn’t supported with Android devices (at least, on Macs)—it goes through iTunes for some reason—but it’s not necessary. This is still in beta, but I didn’t get so much as a hiccup in my few days using it. The Android app only works with mp3s—no WMA books (sadly, since the vast majority are WMAs, for now)—and an OverDrive smartphone app is also available for Windows Mobile.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook is turning out to be more popular than they’d expected. More news of shipping delays has surfaced, along with customer service snafus. Although, if you don’t get your Nook by Christmas, you get $100, so things could be worse. Meanwhile, switch11 at the Kindle Review has posted a quick hands-on comparison of the Nook and the Kindle. If you can’t guess from the title of his blog, switch11 leans heavily toward the Kindle in ereader comparisons; however, he seemed to like the Nook, especially for its clearer font. Personally, the features and mixed reviews of the Nook, combined with the hamfistedness of its rollout, have me more excited for Spring Design’s Alex ereader, which—so far—seems a lot like the Nook, only better. Maybe this update will help. (Update: it didn’t help much.)
Macworld has reviewed seven major ereaders—find the roundup here. Surprisingly, their favorite was the Sony PRS-600, the Touch. They dinged the PRS-300—which you can get extra-cheap these days if you’re a student or teacher—for not having a dictionary or image support. If you don’t care about those things and you read mostly novels, the 300′s your best bet, in my opinion. Macworld finds the Kindle’s controls kludgy, and while whispernet’s great, you’re going to be spending most of your time reading, not downloading books.
Here’s a couple of anti-DRM pieces. One by Cory Doctorow (via), one by switch11 (see above). Also, David Pogue’s DRM experiment has found (unscientifically) that lack of DRM has no effect on sales. And, the scary Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement threatens to be a DMCA for the whole world (that’s bad).
Say goodbye to paying an extra $15 for two pieces of cardboard
There’s been some kerfuffle recently about Amazon losing two dollars on every ebook they sell. Publishers are arguing, among other things, that $9.99 ebooks will lead to authors not writing books. Other ebookstores are calling Amazon’s price point “predatory.” Frankly, I don’t buy too much of that, nor the whispers that ebook retailers will have to raise prices. And I’m more than a little skeptical about the $2 loss figure.
Instead, I see all this as evidence that the hardcover is dying. The $25 hardcover book is every bit as unsustainable in a digital world as $18 CDs were ten years ago. And good riddance. It’s a terrible business model that will only lead to entrenchment in non-digital strategies and financial heartache for the publishing industry.
The Astak Pocket Pro (my review here) is selling for $99 at BooksOnBoard. What’s the catch? Well, the catch is that you have to buy $400 worth of BooksOnBoard ebooks. I haven’t shopped there in a while, but from a brief glance through their selection, most of their ebooks are $9.98, with new/popular releases going for $14.98, about $5 more than Amazon and Sony. Doesn’t quite add up, but it’s out there.
Before we get to the links, a little site promotion: I was Christmas shopping for books today and I wanted to get a mystery novel for my grandfather. Where did I look? Why the C4 Book Reviews section of course. Give it another peek, maybe you’ll find some gift ideas of your own. Also, check out our Best Books of 2009 feature, which will be updated Mondays through January. Well, enough of that…
I walked by a SonyStyle store the other day, and I have to admit they’re doing a good job of pushing their Readers in brick and mortar stores (I’ve also seen them in Best Buy stores amongst others as well). And while they have a decent selection of models, I’m not sure these themed Readers are quite necessary. In other ereader news, the Aiptek Storybook inColor is pretty neato looking, though I still don’t think an LCD ereader is ever going to really fly. The Aluratek Libre has a nice pricetag, but the same LCD concern still applies. (Before you poo-poo me, electronic ink–in our opinion–really does make a huge difference. Here are my initial impressions of the tech from last spring.)
The COOL-ER is getting a hardware upgrade, making it marginally cool-er in the eyes of the other wallflower ereaders. And there’s lots of Applet Tablet rumors floating around this week, but I’m not going to link to any, beacause I’m sick of them. We’ll discuss an Apple Tablet and its secondary ereader abilites only when (if) it actually gets announced. Here’s a review of the Sungale Cyberus, which also doesn’t look all that impressive.
