“Books cost too much” was the slogan of the Crown bookstore chain (itself a victim of the horrid economics of the industry, not just a feud within the Haft family). A Salon article makes the same point. “Cost too much” rings true even if publishers’ margins are thin and most writers feel like perennial residents of Grub Street. “Book buyers now must shell out $20, $30 or even $40 or more for hardcovers that decades ago used to cost less than $10,” Christopher Dreher notes in Salon. “And the sticker shock is causing many customers not to buy as many books.” With a pure paper approach, middlemen bleed away the profits despite the high prices.
E-books are the future as we see it, but print on the demand, one of the possibilities mentioned in Salon, could also help. A well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead vein–which even publishers of nonlibrary books would be able to use for distribution–could make POD far more practical. Like e-books, the POD variety could be a welcome alternative to the margin-shrinking return policy of today’s book business; publishers could test iffy projects without bracing for a flood of unsold copies.
Our favorite part of the Salon article, however, isn’t about POD. Instead it passes on some wise recommendations from Michael Cader of the Publisher’s Lunch site and email list–on the need to break down the economic obstacles for young readers and make books seem less boring for them:
“Cader believes booksellers and publishers have ‘tapped out’ the small segment of the population that reads books with any regularity. Instead of raising prices–which can only go so high before those consumers turn away–he argues that publishers need to work on getting more people to read and on making book publishing a growth industry. He suggests utilizing more free and low-cost promotional techniques, promoting mediums like electronic publishing, and developing long-term programs aimed at getting younger people interested in reading. He describes the average person’s current school reading experience as ’12 to 14 years of making people dislike reading or making reading boring.'”
Hey, Michael, in a nice way, you’re getting closer and closer to the child-related elements of TeleRead. A well-funded national digital library system, especially one with a strong K-12 component, actually would help good publishers grow their future markets. It would increase the number of books that children could read–in line with their needs and interests–and deal in a coordinated fashion with matters ranging from book-friendly hardware to appropriate teaching techniques for the young and wired. And, yes, we are talking about royalties here for works still under copyright.
Dot-com philanthropists are not as rich as before, and politicians are stingier than they should be with tax money for libraries, but one famous booster of e-books just hasn’t lived up to his full charitable potential and might be a major source of funding here if he can keep an open mind. Isn’t it disappointing that Bill Gates, hailed as the Carnegie of the Internet era, has spent just a speck of the $24 billion of the Gates Foundation on libraries–probably just several hundred million in the U.S., excluding software donations? Time for librarians and publishers to speak up? Gates needs to understand that it is okay for him to pay in a massive way for content via an appropriate endowment fund. The big problem is that Gates sometimes has acted as if his giving away too much intellectual property would put him out of business. And, yes, it would be somewhat like Andrew Carnegie making donations of steel. But then again, a serious online library effort by Gates’ separate philanthropic arm would hardly turn Microsoft–one of the world’s most cash-rich corporations–into United Airlines. He’s already set aside the $24B for charity. Until Gates can resolve those issues, he’ll never be a true Carnegie in the world of wired libraries, regardless of the considerable good his efforts have already done in other ways despite his own healthy skepticism.
As for tax funding of a TeleRead-style system, with thousands of free books beyond those already in the public domain, some powerful arguments can be made for well-stocked e-libraries as improvers of academic performance in a very cost-effective way. See When poor kids grow up in book-rich households.
