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Michael Mace on the future of publishing – a “must read”
March 19, 2010 | 8:04 am
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By Paul Biba
In my TOC reports I mentioned that one of the best presentations I hear was the one given my Michael Mace. You can find Karen Holt’s report on his presentation here.
Now Mace has adapted his presentation and published it on his website and it’s a must read. Here is how he starts out:
I had a front row seat for the last generation of ebooks: In 1999 I was at Softbook (one of the early ebook reader companies), and later I interacted with the folks at Peanut Press (an ebook publisher) after they were bought by Palm. My short summary of the lessons I learned: Although some of the barriers that stopped ebooks in 2000 have been reduced, most of them are still in place. So I think the market isn’t likely to grow as quickly as many optimists are predicting. However, the economics of traditional publishing are very vulnerable to a paradigm change. That change is likely to happen later than most people expect, but once it happens it’ll probably move very quickly indeed. So stay out of the avalanche zone.
Here are the details on why, and how to avoid the avalanche when it does happen.
Related: Ex-eReader employee on the past and future of e-books
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Comments:
This was a pretty good summary. It’s really a shame that he left out the Kindle story, since the Kindle has been a huge hit. Jeff Bezos said that where a Kindle edition of a book exists, Amazon will sell 6 Kindle copies to 10 print copies.
That’s coming close to parity with print at the biggest bookseller. And that’s 37% of that market, going to ebook editions; Mace says he thinks the cutoff point where it benefits an author to self-publish the ebook edition is where 20% of the readers have devices they’re willing to read ebooks on.
I think the biggest obstacle to ebooks right now is that publishers don’t want them, and they want to kill ebooks instead of making money off them. There’s no other way to describe, in rational terms, the publishers’ concerted efforts to kill off subsidized flat-rate prices.
— asotir
asotir said:
There’s no other way to describe, in rational terms, the publishers’ concerted efforts to kill off subsidized flat-rate prices.
Don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
My belief is that the publishers are just fumbling their way into this new world. They’re trying not to make the same mistakes as the music industry, but even the music industry’s lessons don’t provide a clear path, since people continue to buy less and less music every year.
Publishers can see the writing on the wall, but the writing isn’t telling them what they need to do to continue making a profit into the future; it’s just telling them that the past methods aren’t going to work for much longer.
Another great point of view on this very same topic is the piece from ex-eReader employee John Siracusa that I blogged about last year (and edited the above to add a “related” link to at the end). He draws a number of similar conclusions.