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John Makinson, CEO of Penguin, speaks out
March 4, 2010 | 8:19 am
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By Paul Biba
Mackinson seems to be one of those executives who “gets” the whole move towards ebooks and epublishing.
In a presentation at the Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London he said:
“The definition of the book itself, as far as we can see, is up for grabs. We don’t understand at the moment what the consumer is prepared to pay for them. We have opportunities to do more product marketing, by including a sales message at the end of every e-book for example.”
“We’ll only find answers to these questions by trial and error by taking a dynamic approach to consumer pricing and improving our data analysis as we go.”
“We’ll have to be religious about some key issues; the indivisibility of physical and digital rights for example. We will need to develop new skills in data analytics and consumer facing technologies will need to become more fluent with new media, new formats and content platforms. We will have to be innovative and take some risks. ”
“We’ll need above all to listen to our readers and understand what they want and what they will pay for. If we can do all that, which is a big ask I agree, we will have a great and growing digital business.”
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Comments:
“We’ll have to be religious about some key issues; the indivisibility of physical and digital rights for example.”
Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but I think this implies geographic restrictions will not go away. That and DRM seem to be the two biggest complaints about ebooks now.
Paul, thanks for bringing to our attention this ultra-rational statement from a publisher.
Bruce,
But I really don’t know if he meant that here 
A mystery. Maybe he’ll clear that up.
I didn’t (and don’t) know what he meant by “indivisibility” of them — normally it would mean they couldn’t be divided
Thinking of how the word is used in our pledge of allegiance in the U.S.
Bruce, the geographic restrictions on e-books are not entirely the publishers’ fault.
Geographic restrictions in general are introduced by authors and their agents. This is a reasonable reaction to the market for publishing rights: the sum of selling the exclusive US rights to a US publisher and the exclusive Britain and Commonwealth rights to a British publisher is usually greater than selling the the worldwide rights to either.
Authors might be willing to sell the e-book rights separately, if they could, though it’s not clear whether the same market wouldn’t hold. But at the moment that’s extremely rare because most publishers will not buy the paper book rights unless they get the e-book rights (exclusive for the same territories) as well. This is not usually negotiable because this is typically a decision handed down to a publisher by the publisher’s owner (a larger multi-media conglomerate).
So the long-term issue here is either to convince publishers that worldwide exclusive e-book rights are worth more than they currently believe, or authors that they’re worth less than publishers are willing to pay them for a split into several exclusive markets. The latter is clearly not going to happen; if someone offered you the choice of $7+$8 or $10, which would you chose?