Prior to its launch, the iPad was sometimes called “the Jesus pad” for how it was expected to “save” the publishing industry. Peter Cox at FuturEbook has an editorial in which he states that it might better be called “the Judas pad.”
Cox cites the way that it is not legal to lend digital books to friends—previously the industry’s “no. 1 source of book sales” according to Cox—“without committing a serious criminal act.”
He also suggests that the publishing industry was suckered by “agency pricing”—that despite the promise of greater control over prices allowing publishers freedom to bring prices back up to reasonable levels, e-book prices nonetheless continue to decline.
And he claims that the current “YouTube/ADHD generation” is less likely to read e-books than to “use their iPad to watch piano-playing cats pissing in toilets.” He feels Steve Jobs was well aware of this and suckered the publishing industry with his infamous reality distortion field.
Personally, I think the truth is a bit more complicated than that. I don’t think there was any great conspiracy on the part of Jobs or Apple to try to sneak up and torpedo the publishing industry.
Instead, I think the publishing industry is being done in by its reluctance to pay attention to what consumers want. Rather than complaining about how consumers who want lower prices are guilty of “entitlement”, the industry should try to realign itself so it can sell e-books successfully at the lower prices consumers demand. Would be nice if they could get rid of that pesky DRM issue, too.
To be (mildly) fair to the BPH execs, I think it isn’t quite accurate to say they are *reluctant* to meet customer needs but rather that they don’t quite understand who their customers are (authors and end users, not agents/distributors/retailers) and they still don’t understand that we are now living, permanently, in a buyer’s market, not a seller’s market.
Examples abound of their skewed thinking, but the most blatant one is Agency Pricing itself. The “plan” appears to be to stamp out discounting so they can live in a continental-style frozen-price world, where there is no retail-level competition. Well, that model works in France and Germany because the content generation is much smaller than there is in the english-speaking world. The governments there see fixed-priced books as a form of cultural protectionism. (Canada and the Antipodes are somewhat similar, but not quite as much as the continentals).
The problem is, as has been pointed out, the BPH Fixed-price cartel doesn’t control enough of the market to prevail (they only make up a quarter of Amazon’s sales, if I recall correctly), *unless* Apple can convince the smaller publishers to play along. Right now, Apple’s own bookstore is such a small part of the market and the iPad platform is still open to Kindle and B&N and Smashwords and Kobo and anybody else that wants a piece of that pie, that there is simply no need for the rest of the publishing industry to follow the Oligarchs like lemmings. Even Random House realized it might be more profitable to stick with the wholesaler model a while longer and let the dust settle a bit before alienating the buyers.
Its way too early to tell but I think that as long as iBooks is *not* the only way to read on iPad, Apple will be neither savior nor traitor to the ebook market, just a high-visibility side show.
I think Apple will get the all headlines but that Amazon, B&N, Kobo, et al, will get the bulk of the sales.
Three years ago I would have to go to the book store every couple of weeks and pray that there would be enough new books on the shelves to keep me in reading material. If it looked good, I would buy it.
Now I have over a years backlog of sample books and books on my wish list competing for what my next read will be. The availability of the virtual books store with books that don’t go out of print has totally changed the way I read. It is certainly a buyers market for me AND price is now an issue.
“Instead, I think the publishing industry is being done in by its reluctance to pay attention to what consumers want.”
Change “reluctance” to “refusal,” and you’ve hit the nail on the head. As one of those evidently few voracious readers left in the world, I know the publishing cartel has made an enemy out of me. I still read their books (library), but I spend my book budget elsewhere.