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A longer Long Tail: An argument for e-books?
July 11, 2006 | 12:04 am
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By David Rothman
So what should the book world do about quality issues? As reported in the Washington Post, the Lulu service alone can produce more than 90,000 copies of books in a month.
That’s a lot of paper–the equivalent of a fair-sized best seller. Imagine if Lulu and similar outfits take off sufficiently to change the number of books published, while placing more emphasis on the electronic format than at present.
Perhaps the search and metadata possibilities of e-books would make it easier to keep up with the deluge and identify the winners. What’s more, costs to consumers would be lower, so they’d be less relucant to gamble on unknown writers.
Question: Any librarians or others care to pin down the exact number of U.S. books published in, say, 1985? And do any librarians or others have thoughts libraries and the QC issue? Libraries can’t afford to offer everything.
Clarification, July 12: That’s 90,000 copies produced in a month, not 90,000 different titles. My thanks to Pond for the catch. I’ve changed the post accordingly.
Related: Online Book Publishing, also from the Post–a Q&A with with Eileen Gittins of Blurb.
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Comments:
This is something we finally agree on completely David!
There are so many authors out there writing books, but only a small selection gets published and many of those never get a second chance. ebooks could make a major difference here, giving all authors a chance to join the market, making literature more diverse (have you ever noticed how many books (stories) follow the exact same scheme?)
It would also make short stories possbile that are sold seperately, not in bunches of 10-50, just like you can buy single tracks at itunes.
I envision a global sales platform for ebooks.
I’d give it a policy that allows authors to sell their books there with a high percentage of the money going to them and only a little to the server-provider and allows them to do deals with publishers for paper-books as well (as long as the paper-publishers don’t demand exclusiveness…).
Pricing a book at 2€ would give people a chance to try out new and experimental fiction and give authors a chance to get their books read without doing major deals with publishers.
At 2€, i’d say the autor gets 75% per book and the server provider gets the rest. Depending on the amount of books that are offered, this could be a good deal for both, but since i’m no financial type, I can’t really say.
Does anyone here know how much a beststelling author gets per book these days?
DRM should work like this:
Every file is injected with “Owner information” at the moment of Purchase, that means thatthe name and address and maybe some identification number appear on the first page of the book. The book can be opened without special procedure and can be used on all readers that support that particular file-format. Editing of any kind however is blocked so that neither the text can be removed from the file nor the owner information.
Of course this kind of DRM is fairly easy to crack, but if should create enough protection to prevent “casual piracy” (nobody wants a book with his name and address on the frontpage to go on p2p…).
Hi,
I agree that ebooks will change publishing at some point, but not until one or more viable business models are established. Right now at acceptable ebook prices you gotta sell a lot to get to current print revenue, and without an ad machine and bookstore fronts, signings… how are you going to do that?
Various people suggested various business models (ads, tip jar, serialization, tax and distribute revenue based on downloads…) but unfortunately right now most publishers and authors are treating ebooks as a threat or nuissance so they are not willing to experiment. When ebook revenue will get to 30% or more of total for established print authors then we may see ebooks taken more seriously.
Look at how in the age of internet, reasonable shipping rates (and now even free shipping from UK to US say on many books at some ebook sites) and people still cling and defend the teritorial model of publishing; fortunately being 1st amendment issue, Congress cannot bar us here in the US from buying books overseas, though publishers howl especially in the textbook area. And you want ebooks that everyone will pirate and not pay
How do you dare 
?
DRM will die in any mass market ebook model unless the books become “disposable” or subscription based and I find both scenarios unlikely.
Liviu
hmmm…current print revenue? Revenue for whom?
Publishers are…in my private universe…usesless.
What do you need publishers for if you can just use a platform like amazon to sell your books directly? (in Theory…)
Any author can add a description for his/her book, and getting a cover designed…well…that’s something every author can decide. There are enough artists out there…
Or am I missing something here?
Hi, Roland. Here’s my take on publishers. Some are worse than worthless–they do damage. But there are also good ones out there which take the trouble to hire excellent editors and to promote the books they publish. Those are the ones that deserve to survive by adding genuine value. At the same time, yes, I also believe in the right of authors to self-publish; let the marketplace decide. Here’s to diversity! Thanks. David
Hi,
The book business is now 30B $ /year or so. How do you get that kind of money with ebooks? What volume do you need at prices that ebooks will sell?
As a consumer, how do you find out about books?
I am all for authors publishing themselves, for agents and publishers to get lost, but how realistic is it? Right now outside ads, there is no really succesful ebusiness that does not depend on something physical (whether auctions like Ebay, goods like Amazon…)
Look at the struggle of people who self publish ebooks to make money to cover their server costs. Even Baen who makes a good chunk of money from ebooks still makes the real money from print. I am very curious how their Universe magazine will do (hope it will succeed and as mentioned I am a 50$ year member, but…). I personally support ebook efforts as much as I can (I bought all 7 Aeon magazines and several other emagazines, I subscribe to eAsimov’s, I bought lots of ebooks from here and there including from selfpublished authors) but until we see lots of eperimentation from major publishers and writers I am kind of skeptical.
Liviu
Numbers.
David, check the washington post article again as to “90,000 books” as this refers to the number of copies printed, and not titles published.
I imagine that Stephen King alone in 1985 sold more than 90,000 books, paper and hardcover…
And also –
the washington post article really is not well written at all. In addition to the confusion over “90,000 tomes published last month” (does “published” refer to titles, or copies? I imagine copies, but I can see how a reader could understand titles) there is also the gem of confusion, “authors set their own royalty rates, getting 80%, while Lulu gets 20%” written in such a way that it would be easy to misunderstand it to mean that authors receive 4/5 of the cover price of the books, instead of 4/5 of the royalty alone, a figure tacked on top of the printing/binding fees.
Hey, Pond, thanks for the catch–I agree with your interpretation. Of course, while this 90,000 stuff is ambiguous in the Washington Post, the underpinnings for the Long Tail discussion remain. – David
Roland:
I’m not convinced that personal watermark-style DRM is a good idea (and David, I know you’ve also discussed this in the past). For one thing, there are a number of technical issues with implementation, as in any DRM scheme. Ed Felten talks about that on his Freedom to Tinker blog (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=981).
However, even if it works, I question whether we want it to work. One of the problems with DRM is that it prevents legitimate fair use of content. If DRM prevents the owner from doing something legal with the content that they would otherwise be able to do with a print book, it is a failure, in my opinion. (Not to get sidetracked, but I really believe that limiting digital books to be exactly as bad as print books is a terrible rejection of their promise).
So, with a watermarked piece of content, the owner will not share it on P2P networks. But she will also not share it with friends, family, or neighbors – she might trust them, but if they share it with someone else, or accidentally leave it in the wrong folder, or any number of other scenarios take place, the content with her personal information is all over the Internet. Leaving her wide open to accusations of criminal activity, not to mention exposure of private details.
There’s also excerpting – if a content owner wants to put a snippet of the work in an article or a paper. She is then not only publishing the quoted information, but also potentially her home address, account details, or whatever other personal information the watermark contains. This not only makes it impossible to write anonymous works that quote watermarked material, it would make any author think twice about publishing works that contain quoted material freely.
Another objection is touched upon by Kathryn Cramer on her blog (http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2006/02/watermarking_as.html), and points out that watermarking could potentially harm small content creators (as many DRM schemes do).
There are good features to watermarking, certainly, but I don’t think it’s the perfect solution by any means.
(I think I will cross-post this to MobileRead, where there’s a discussion going on….)
Hey bingle…
I’m not really disagreeing…:-)
All I wanted to point out with my “owner information DRM” is that there might be a way to offer some protection while still leaving quite a lot of freedom.
I’m a DRM enemy myself, but I do think we wouldn’t do anybody a favour if we left the ebooks too easy to share….human nature tends towards laziness and carelessness…
To be honest, everything that works better than the current incompatible DRM and poor content availability has to be worth a try. And if you make ebooks cheap enough, then some “restrictions” could be tolerable.
What I find pretty alarming is, that there are lots of ways to get almost every book in minutes over irc and p2p, but no way to get 95% of books legally and the few % you can get are too expensive and won’t work on anything besides your local PC (where reading books makes lots of sense).
I wish publishers and authros would take a look at the various ebook (scanned paper books) sharing sites and networks and make the connection that even selling their books at discount prices without any DRM at all wold be better than just more or less forcing ebook lovers to go illegal and pay nothing…
I just don’t get it sometimes. The ebooks are all there, well formatted and proofed most of the time, ready to be downloaded, easy to access, easy to find (search for) and compatible (offered in various formats) with almost any device.
In my opinion, anybody who doesn’t start selling ebooks the moment he sees those huge book archives that are available for FREE (albeit illiegal) download all over the place just doesn’t deserve to make any money.
Sorry if that sounds provocative, but believe me, if I had the chance to speak the the top publishers and autors out there, I’d ask them that question!!!
btw. My Iliad is arriving tomorrow…FINALLY…and I’ll finally be able to read my ebooks without killing my eyes…^^
The idea of embedding digital watermarks in an electronic object to facilitate the tracing of the purchase history and provenance of the object has been discussed for years. Also, the related but distinct idea of embedding the actual name and address of a purchaser has been discussed. Some proposals further suggest including credit card type information. (The Palm Reader apparently used a variant of this approach.) These ideas are interesting as discussed by Roland Rohde, bingle and others above.
But I think that there is a major problem with all the proposals that rely on traceability as a deterrent. Pirates (“data thieves”, “information liberators” or whatever) can simply secretly copy ebooks and then distribute them on peer-to-peer networks and other pirate channels. Currently, the average level of security on personal computers is atrocious. A substantial fraction of the computers connected to the internet have been compromised and contain spyware, adware, trojans and/or other fauna of the genus malware. Breaking into multiple machines and copying myriad ebook libraries is quite doable by piratical groups.
There is an underlying and powerful mismatch in incentives between copyright holders and casual readers. A copyright holder may believe that he or she will suffer millions of dollars in damage if his or her ebook appears in pirate distribution networks. However, the typical reader of the bestseller will not spend millions of dollars to secure his computer system against intrusion. If an ebook in a pirate channel is traced to an individual then he or she will likely disclaim responsibility and say that it was “stolen”. Further, readers will not be willing to assume million dollar liabilities simply to read an ebook.