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Why publishers do stupid things with e-books
December 13, 2009 | 8:55 am
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By David Rothman
How come publishers repeatedly do stupid things with e-books, such as delaying them or bogging them down with consumer-hostile DRM?
Might one big reason be they don’t know who the hell their customers are?
The customers as the pubs see it: Resellers and others in the trade, with biz models to protect.
The people who plunk down the money: Readers.
In Why e-book delays won’t save trade publishing, Jane at Dear Author raises this issue, and I think she is spot on. Excerpt:
“I think one of the most fascinating things that I’ve learned in 2009 is that the reader is not the customer of the publisher. It is the trade. It is the reseller. Because we readers are not the costumers, publishers don’t make consumer based decisions. They make reseller based decisions. Because the publisher is geared toward selling to the trade rather than the consumer, we readers are often bemused by their behavior. Understanding this goes a long way in explaining [S&S CEO] Carolyn Reidy’s acknowledgment that some people will be disappointed in the delayed release of ebooks while simultaneously recognizing that.”
Caveat: I would hope that large publishers would be more attentive to the needs of small bookstores, which serve an R&D function ultimately beneficial to consumers. But there are ways for this to happen without slighting e-books—for example, fair pricing policies not so tilted in favor of the chains.
Image credit: CC-licensed art from Valart2008.
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Comments:
I am just curious about where they are getting their intelligence on what the customer does. For example, this notion they have that ebook sales are cannibalizing hardback sales because the people who bought ebook readers are the people who used to buy hardbacks. I have never heard of a single reader for whom this is true. Most either never bought hardbacks in the first place (i.e. read from the library or used bookstores or paperbacks because they were voracious enough readers that they could not afford hardbacks) or they prefer ebooks due not just to the price issue but also the storage issue (i.e. buy so many books that they do not have the space to keep them). So this idea that people who buy the ebook would have bought the hardback is, in my fairly extensive experience, completely false and I wonder where they got it from. If they really are basing their decisions on this completely untrue idea, they are going to have problems because they clearly don’t know their market very well.
very nicely put. but if i were a publisher, i’d still want to release e first, to gauge interest. dealing with remainders can’t be cheap. why not start out by using e to try to ‘right-size’ a printing?
The publisher’s “channel-think” is hardly new and hardly shocking.
It has, however, sunk more than its share of companies. There is an old story about how Microsoft tried to license Encyclopedias (Brittannica, World Book, etc) back in the 90′s, to promote CD-ROM use on PCs, and were turned down at every step because the publishers didn’t want to offend their corps of door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. So MS was forced to create Encarta. (We all know how that played out for the next 15 years, right?)
More recently, we have the Detroit automakers focusing on rental fleet sales and dealer needs (thus flooding the market with cookie cutter SUVs for every brand) rather than building cars drivers would actually want to buy.
The whole obsession with Amazon and Walmart is part and parcel of this whole backwards mindset that says that what used to work in the past must be enforced unto eternity. Riighhttt…
Best solution is to ignore them.
Give it time and they’ll literally go away.
(Can anybody out there name a big-time coach builder or buggy whip vendor without hitting Wikipedia?
)
Stupidity is a crime that carries its own punishment and ebooks look like they’ll just about ready to explode into the mainstream and blow away the last remnants of the 19th century publishing houses.
It won’t be pretty for a while but the end result will be a better world for the survivors. (And consumers.)
The sad truth is that, if the publishers don’t put the resellers first, they run into problems with getting their books out to the consumers. The route from publisher to reader has bottleneck after bottleneck built into the process, and no one wants to be denied a shot at getting through each bottleneck.
Publishing also is notorious for not knowing who their consumers are, nor knowing what they want.
For example, romance is the most lucrative fiction in publishing, yet the only customer surveys ever created have been done by the writers’ organization, Romance Writers of America.
All of this means it’s business as usual for big publishing. Welcome to Bizarro Big Business.
Some very good comments and I agree completely with ficbot’s comments. Our house is already cluttered with books, I belong to several libraries and use them a lot! I buy books to read, not to look pretty on a coffee table.
Looking at the type of books in remainder sales, most are cook books, travel books and other lightweight eye-candy stuff. You would wonder why they print so much of this fluff, but perhaps it sells better to book retailers!
I wonder how much WalMart plays into this scenario. Releasing to Kindle editions simultaneously with the hardcover edition does give Amazon a slight edge over WalMart, which has no ebook alternative.
A publisher that delays the ebook editions might then be able to negotiate better terms with WalMart as far as wholesale prices, returns policies, and shelf placement.
Dear Jane’s notion that the future of ebooks is going to be a battle between Google and Apple, with Amazon unimportant, seems rather strange. She picks this up from another source, and agrees with it; but I don’t see any evidence that Amazon, far and away #1 in ebook device sales as well as ebook sales, and with the world’s biggest list of avid readers as customers, is just going to be left in the dust by Google and Apple. I do hope these companies give Amazon a good competitive push.
The thing that really strikes me (and includes me) is that ebook readers are very heavy readers and ebook buyers. Most surveys show that their reading is up AND THEIR BOOK BUYING IS UP.
I have a Kindle, am reading at least 30% more than before (which was almost 2 books a week), and am buying Kindle books (never more than $9.99 and only a few at that). But I bought very few books before that other than used bookstores or taking them out from the library. So, I’m spending money on books at at much higher rate than before.
AND, like most other ereader owners, I have almost NO interest in physical books. Give it to me in ebook form or move out of my way, I’ll read/ buy something else. As others have said, if it is a hot book and NOT available as an ebook, the chances are I’ll never buy it at all, because by the ime it is out in ebook, I won’t care any more.
I strongly urge the AUTHORS to protest this with their own publishers.
ficbot: Publishers lack sufficient data to backup most of their claims. They can’t afford quality marketing research. They’re just making guesses based on their experiences and expertise, for better or for worse. This sort of guesswork does a good job in stable business climates but is terrible in a dynamic situation.
The future is author direct publishing. Readers are just starting to clue in to what’s going on.
I bought an ebook about 3 years ago. Wanted to do with it what I do with the free ebooks and etexts I download regularly: listen to it using text to speech software.
Which is impossible with their DRM.
Haven’t bought one since. Very likely won’t EVER buy one. I’d love to have an ereader. But not with all the strings that come attached.
It doesn’t matter what the route from author to consumer is, the fact remains that the chain of publisher, wholesaler, distributor, retailer, etc. only survives because of the end user – the reader.
As an author I write for my readers, as publishers, my publishers distribute for readers. that must always be the driving forces wherever one sits in the literary distribution chain.
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
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