There’s quite an interesting post on Booksquare today about ebook pricing, and why the publishing industry is keeping eprices artificially inflated. The writer, Kassia Krozser, lays into publishers for fearing to get on board with ebooks, refusing to invest in epublishing the same way readers are investing in ereading, and not realizing that they now have to follow the Kindle’s $9.99 pricing model.

She offers both hope:

People will pay for content as long as it meets some basic needs. Digital books offer as much pleasure as print books, but digital books are also viewed as something slightly different.

and harsh reality:

In the digital marketplace, books have to remain competitive with other media. It’s not so much your opinion of the value of your product that matters; it’s all about how the customer values your product…. You can trot out your business model and your profit-and-loss statements, but your customers don’t really care.

The thing is, I understand why big publishing houses aren’t getting behind ebooks. It’s the same reason people buy more Nora Roberts books than Karen Brown (besides the fact that they’ve never heard of Karen Brown).

The problem is that we all have a deep-seated aversion to risk, an aversion which allows consumers to be more easily controlled by major media corporations who themselves are seriously risk averse. This cycle is strangling the development of artistic media in the modern world.

However, the digital revolution of media (lynchpinned by digital piracy) has a chance to free us from that risk aversion, and lead to the resurrection of art, including, maybe most of all, the resurrection of good writing.

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Through The Elegant Variation, I saw this article by Lev Grossman in Time about the future of publishing. Grossman recaps the current woes of publishing, and–given the coming downfall of the major publishing houses that now act as “gatekeepers” for published books–he predicts that

The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

Ugh. The Elegant Variation’s take on this article argues against that point, saying that Grossman

sidesteps almost entirely questions of quality. There are passing nods to “gatekeepers” but he seems to suggest that cell phone novels, fan fiction and other self-published efforts should be taken as seriously as, say, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith, simply because there are people willing to read these things (and sometimes pay for the privilege).

I agree more with TEV than Grossman. We’ll need gatekeepers all the same once epublishing takes off. If anything, we’ll need stricter gatekeepers, that allow less material though.

In 2007, over 400,000 titles were published, and about 3.1 billion books were sold. That’s an average of around 7500 copies of each book, which is low when you consider the drek on the bestseller list, and all the books that must sell less than 7500. The shame is that the good books get lost in all that noise, a problem that won’t go away if novels get “wilder and trashier.”

In general, I don’t think the value that publishers give to literary culture–the “gatekeeper” thing–is what’s broken. It’s their distribution system that’s broken. We’ll still have room for plenty of epublishers that release quality titles. And someday we won’t dismiss out-of-hand books that only come out in digital editions.

[see the original at Time, and also TEV's take]

Well, I asked for a reason or an excuse why publishers continue charge so much for ebooks. Yesterday, via MobileRead, comes… the excuse, in the form of an interview with a German publisher, Michael Justus, who defends his ridiculous pricing.

Check out the original post for full details, it’s irritating, interesting stuff. Essentially Justus argues that ebooks cost as much to make and distribute as paper books. He complains (at length) about things like having to convert documents to multiple formats, and editing the metadata, by which I assume he means crippling his books with DRM.

At best, this is an argument for a universal format and against DRM. At worst, it smacks of an office full of Luddites who think the intern using Google is casting some kind of magic spell. eBooks simply do not cost as much to distribute as paper books; if they did, how could some publishers already be distributing dirt-cheap ebooks in multiple formats? And how could Matthew McClintock from Many Books do it for thousands of books for free? (He doesn’t convert them by hand, you say? Shocking.)

The answer might well be that those two examples don’t use DRM. If this is the case, the choice for Justus is not to keep prices high or die, as he claims, the choice is to eradicate DRM or die (doing things more efficiently also probably wouldn’t hurt). It would be easier to cut Justus some slack on the DRM issue if the recording industry hadn’t just gone through this same dog and pony show for the past decade.

There are two ways that these old-media publishers can transition into the digital world:

1. They can embrace epublishing themselves, and find a business model that works. Or,
2. They can let somebody else finds that model and watch themselves become irrelevant before they know what hit them.

Right now, it looks like Justus is aiming for#2.

[read the full, long list at MobileRead]