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Mike Shatzkin’s thoughts on ebook and POD combo publishing – may not be viable
September 15, 2009 | 9:55 am
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By Paul Biba
Mike’s thoughts on this are well worth reading in detail. He is skeptical of the business model, especially where it doesn’t involve some major entry into the general market through an intermediary retailer.
… There’s a new publishing model afoot, which is to lead with the ebook and just print what you need. That might be POD, and it might be press runs, if you can sell out whole press runs. If the ebook becomes a substantial chunk of sales and if ebooks maintain their prices, this looks like it could be a new way to do much lower-risk publishing. …
The idea of building a niche presence for most subjects simply through publishing in it, rather than by building a real [p]ortal or community site, seems futile. … If you don’t go out and reach customers where they are — at the big Internet retailers — you need to be selling ebooks to a very large community for sales to be substantial enough to run a business.
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Comments:
Good points. However, the current power of online retailers to command and control the market need not be absolute. Aggregate sites of other types can also enter this market and provide access to independents, without being tied to specific retailers or selling the products themselves.
Consumers are clearly clamoring for filters, reviews and aggregates (one of the biggest features of the Kindle store), but without being limited to only one store’s product. I think we will see more of these services, but through independent entities, take position in the market over time.
To any developers out there reading this:
An open-source group or smart company could change everything if they put their minds to it. If authors had a set of tools that helped them ePublish, they could sell direct. The software would convert their manuscripts to the main formats, provide widgets for promotion and shared-revenue referrals and build a global, common storefront that aggregated content from their peers to a virtual store. There would be a secure checkout system hosted by a trusted company that would take a small cut on each transaction.
Using this method and integrating a social framework that autosorts books according to popularity and other criteria, authors could steal the whole empire. This may be a fantasy, but going some way along that route might shift a little power back to the artist.
We owe Amazon a debt for kick-starting this revolution, but I am a little dismayed at their power-play; taking up to 70% of the cut. 30% is reasonable. At 70% they are leaving themselves open to a revolt if the opportunity presents itself.
In short, imagine an Amazon-like behemoth that did not really exist as a physical entity. It is owned by those who use it and constantly morphs according to the needs of its users – readers and writers alike. The best writers and self-promoters rise to the top. Small library shelves are spread throughout the net, constructed by individuals in a position of merit-based power. Those good at picking early winners and promoting them could make serious money – a new breed of middlemen who were paid directly by results.
That is what I’d really like to see in some near future.