Images

I have always been a buyer of books. It started innocently enough with the fund raiser book sales at Alexander Hamilton Elementary School. Over the years, picture books gave way to “chapter books”, to Russian novels by people with impressively long names and poetry without punctuation. My parents bought me books for my birthday and, later on, when they could no longer keep track of what I liked or had already read, gift certificates to our local bookstore. I haunted the library, as well. In 1974, when I had my first full-time job, I set aside $50 a month for books. To put that in perspective, my rent, including utilities, was only $110 at the time.

I had to slow down a bit when things like buying diapers and paying for soccer camp got in the way. And then there was the year without a book budget, AKA The Year of The Divorce. Over the past four decades I periodically moved boxes of books, then rooms of books, until in 2000 I had to pay for an international move and pared down to what I called “the essential 300”.

Eleven years later, much has changed. I no longer want to have to dust books, buy bookshelves, and schlep books around. Like the rest of me, my eyes are now almost 60 years old. That means that the act of reading has changed, and as growing longer arms is out of the question, bigger type seems like a grand idea. Enter the eBook.

I now do almost 100% of my reading for pleasure on a digital device, a Kobo reader. It is lighter and more portable than most non-digital books. I can go on holidays with enough books to keep me occupied for several weeks without taking along an extra suitcase. I can make the print as large as I need it to be. I can decide I want a book and have it a moment later, without having to drive to the mall, put my name on a waiting list at the library, or order it and wait for delivery.

There are times when the books I want most to read are not yet available in digital format. Or they are from an author’s backlist and may never be made available in digital form. Because there is a world of books out there, I can usually move on to something else. 

The more swampy part of all of this comes into play when eBooks are available, but not in Canada, or when the digital books are more expensive than the paper versions, or when pricing in my country, where Agency pricing prevails, is considerably higher than it is in Australia, where it does not. Pricing of digital books becomes a more important issue because I do not have alternatives like buying a digital copy from a second hand store, borrowing the book from a friend, or, often it seems, finding it in my local public library.

I’m not a scoundrel. I have no desire to visit the darknet and steal someone’s intellectual property. At the same time, it makes no sense to me that my friend in Australia can buy a book by a Canadian author for $7 cheaper than I can only because the publishers have negotiated Agency pricing agreements here. In what world does it make sense that I can buy a paper book online from the US and have it shipped to me in Canada, but I cannot legally obtain a digital edition from the same store and download it to my device? And why is a digital copy ever more expensive than the paperback edition?

I have read the arguments from publishers—the ones that say that we eBook readers are cheap and don’t understand the value of books, independent of the costs involved with printing, transporting, storing, and keeping them on shelves waiting to be sold. Like most people who love books, read voraciously, and have done so for a very long time, I do understand that there are costs associated with professional editing, proof reading, design, and marketing. I do understand that publishers sometimes pay cover artists and authors for digital rights, on top of the non-digital rights. I am willing to pay for value-added services. What I am not willing to do is have my eBook buying used to counterbalance or subsidize bad deals publishers have made in other segments of their market. 

It is not my fault that publishers negotiated bizarre ways of dealing with unsold merchandise. It is not my fault that publishers agreed to what turned out to be very bad deals for hardbacks and paperbacks. It is also not my fault that they negotiated digital rights country by country. 

It’s time for publishers to clean up their act. They need to understand that we eBook readers are their customers and keeping us happy is important to their financial futures. They may deal with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Angus and Robinson, and Chapters-Indigo, but we are the people actually buying their books. Publishers have a responsibility to price their goods—and assure their availability—in ways that we, the people who plunk down our hard-earned bucks for books, find acceptable.

Until they do so, I will buy my 100 books a year in ways that will surely cause them pain. I will buy books from non-agency publishers, rather than from the Big Six. If I can find a way (and usually I can) to circumvent geographic restrictions, I will. I’ll keep my old electronic reader around so I can lend books to my friends. I will find my way around format issues and treat the books I bought as if I own them, rather than as peculiarly licensed ephemera. 

Like most people who read eBooks, I don’t want traditional publishers to go out of business. I want to read good books that have received the careful attention of professional editors, have great cover art, and are properly proofed every bit as much now as I did in the past. I also want authors to succeed financially so they can continue to write more truly amazing books. I want all of that as part of a book-buying system that seems fair to me, the person buying and reading the books. 

Is that really too much to ask?

Editor’s Note: Vicki is a mental health educator for the Canadian Mental Health Association.  You can follow her on Twitter.  PB

7 COMMENTS

  1. Vicki, you may not get too many comments, because your piece is so brilliant as it is, and we will all be saying me, too. As a US citizen, I’ve long decried the insanity of being able to order a print book from Amazon UK and have it shipped to me, but may not be able to buy the digital edition here. And as to pricing, I have many books listed on ereaderiq.com waiting for Kindle price drops. In the meantime, I’ve discovered some self-published authors worthy of reading, the most notable being Shayne Parkinson of New Zealand. She really knows how to move a story along but is also meticulous in her editing. Let us hope that the traditional publishers do more price testing and discover that they can make more money at lower prices.

  2. The problems you’ve been encountering aren’t actually with the publishers, but the authors’ agents. They’re the ones who negotiate the rights deals that determine where a book will be published and in what formats.

  3. Bravo! Extremely well and rationally said. Celebrated Canadian author Louise Penny — who has won a record four Agatha awards for her Inspector Gamache series based in Quebec — cannot be purchased in Canada as an ebook from Kobo; but her entire series is $2.99 to $8.42 to Canadians as a Kindle. I can buy them all from Barnes and Noble in epub format … but in a unique B&N DRM scheme which requires a Nook device … which B&N doesn’t sell to Canadian residents. This is just plain stupid.

  4. I completely agree with you. One thing I do as a protest to the agency pricing herein the US is to purchase a used copy of the book when the price of the ebook is outrageous. It’s frustrating since I don’t end up reading the book on my ebook reader, which I would prefer, but I figure that allows me to get the book legally and I don’t reward the publishers’ coercive behavior.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.