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Three truths that publishers should try to understand about readers
March 27, 2011 | 3:34 pm
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By Joanna
The big shift that ebooks are bringing to the market is not necessarily the paper to pixels one—it’s the shift between the bookstore as customer and the reader as customer. The problem many print publishers seem to have today is that they don’t really understand who the reader is and what they want out of a purchasing experience. Well, time to educate them! Each of these reader ‘truths’ is arguably debatable, but this is a summation what I’m hearing—over and over again—on message boards, in comment threads and in blog replies. This is where your new customer is at, publishers! Understand, and you can sell to them better. Fail to understand, and you have no one to blame but yourselves…
TRUTH 1: READERS DON’T REALLY CARE HOW PUBLISHING WORKS
Time and again, a reader has posted a dumb-founded ‘such and such is happening and it makes no sense to me’ and someone who had worked in publishing will post a long-winded reply ‘explaining’ why something is, or has to be, the way it is. Whether it’s geographical restrictions, pricing matters, ebook availability or what have you, we’re running up against the common sense logic of the reader versus the legal and technical intricacies of infrastructure. And all of these technical explanations are falling on deaf ears, because here is the problem—the reader doesn’t really care. The reader just wants their problem solved so they can buy the book!
It reminds me of this restaurant I used to frequent back in my student days. They had an extremely popular and very delicious sandwich they served at lunch, made from smoked chicken, barbecue sauce and garlic bread. They were known for this sandwich. People would come to the restaurant specifically to eat it. Yet they would only serve it at lunchtime. If you went there for dinner and tried to order it, a stony-faced waitress would snippily refuse it to you. People would look at the menu, see the garlic bread listed under appetizers, see the smoked chicken listed under entrees and simply not understand why the restaurant couldn’t simply make them the sandwich. But there were reasons. There were explanations. The sandwich was not going to happen. And myself, Jane Average customer? I listened to the stony-faced explanation exactly one time. And then I simply decided that I would go elsewhere for dinner from now on!
When you find yourself seeing a reader comment and thinking ‘but there is actually a really good explanation for that!’ your response, publishers, should not be to try and educate this customer on why this baffling situation is actually just and right. It should be to recognize that you have a customer giving you input on what you need to fix in order to get their money.
TRUTH 2: ‘FAIR PRICE’ IS A RELATIVE CONCEPT
There is a lot of debate, both among readers among publishers, about what is a fair price for ebooks. What most of these debates miss is that setting an absolute for such a thing is neither productive nor practical because price is relative. A hardcover best-seller going for $9.99 in ebook is wonderful. I would happily pay that for the two Big Pub authors who are must-reads for me. But I would not pay it for a backlist paperback that I could get for $6, new, in paper!
Here’s the thing: IF readers felt like they could actually trust you to lower the price when the paper comes out, they would have no problems paying more for the new releases. But they don’t trust you right now because you’re not doing it. I can think of at least four books I had on my Kobo watchlist for over a year, for instance. I waited for the book to go from hardcover to paper, and in one case, from fancy paper to mass market paper. And did the price come down? No. It did get experimented with—$14.99 became $12.99 and then went back up again once, in one case. But I did not feel like I could reliably say ‘the mass market paper is out now so I can go back to Kobo and get the ebook for cheaper.’
Another issue that comes into play here is that paper books can still be discounted. So a reader feels affronted when they see a print book—that they can sell, loan, and have full rights over—priced lower than a crippled e-version that in some cases hasn’t even been properly copy-edited. They see themselves being asked to pay a higher price for a lesser product. And they rebel.
It doesn’t matter whether it really IS a lesser product or not. That is another issue to debate. And it’s not that $14.99 in and of itself is an evil price that I can’t afford. It’s that this price is relative to what else I can buy in this same category. I understand striking while the iron is hot and charging a premium for those who can’t wait to read a book. But then you need to have a system where the price comes down over time, as it does for the paper editions. Because if your customers don’t trust you to lower the price later, they WILL revolt over the higher prices you are charging now.
TRUTH 3: DRM IS A RED HERRING
I get that piracy is an issue for you guys. Loss prevention is something that every business deals with. I understand trying to keep such losses minimal—you will always have a margin for this because every business does. But the best way to minimize these losses is to solve the problems that are causing actual, potential customers to turn away. And in that respect, DRM has become a bit of a red herring, for two reasons.
Firstly, there are other factors which are impacting sales more, and which you aren’t focusing on because you’re so worried about illegal downloading. If you solve these problems, you’ll get actual sales. If you ignore these problems (geographical restrictions, poorly edited books, lack of availability of a title in the first place etc.) you drive away customers who would otherwise have paid you for product.
Secondly, DRM is not effective as an actual deterrent because it’s so trivial to break for those who are determined to do so. It’s not stopping the unrepentant thief, and it is raising costs and creating barriers for people who were willing to pay you anyway. Read this article (http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/why-readers-hate-drm-the-short-version/) if you want to know more about what those barriers are.
The short version? Solve the solvable problems first. Then you can worry about the less easily quantified issues that remain.
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Comments:
The sad thing is that, despite all of these messages about DRM being bad, expensive, and utterly counter-productive, the publishers don’t seem to be getting the picture (or don’t care, et cetera, et cetera).
Take for example the issue I’ve been dealing with just the past few days. I recently discovered the Kobo bookstore as a fine alternative for the Sony Reader store (which, as a Canadian, still charges me in U.S. dollars). For non-agency-priced titles, Kobo is almost always cheaper for the books I like to read. So I thought “awesome” and went and bought a handful of ePubs, including a $35 collection.
Only, there’s one small problem. A problem that becomes a big problem when I change the font size to one I’m comfortable reading. The margins. Holy crap do those margins get big (an inch-and-a-half or so of white space on either side with two words in the middle). None of the Sony Store-bought titles had big margins. The problem here are the XML Page Templates that the Kobo ePubs have that are mysteriously absent from the Sony counterparts. I haven’t been successful in getting Kobo to figure out why their ePubs differ from the Sony ones. To me, it seems unlikely that a publisher would waste the time and money to provide two different ePubs to different e-retailers. It makes no sense. They both use the same DRM format, so they should be the exact same ePub source files.
The only solution that appears to exist is to remove the DRM and remove the XPGT file and its references. But quite frankly? That’s too much work to bother. It’s a waste of my time. In this case, ironically, it’s the bookstore that gets to suffer the loss of sales, because the publisher will just get their money from a store that sells me less broken ePub files. I just wish I hadn’t spent $85 on books before I’d noticed the problem.
Which is another truth: The only person who truly suffers at the hands of DRM is the paying customer.
Re truth 1: there are legal impediments that cannot be simply fixed or ignored. If people don’t want an explanation they shouldn’t ask ‘why’.
Also, tis not a problem that publishers have created by themselves, your restaurant analogy seems misplaced. There are genuine attempts to solve this going forward but agents, authors and the individual countries of the world have their own goals and restrictions. As nice as it would be to click our fingers and untangle what has happened in the past wishing and whining don’t make it so.
Joanna,
Just out of curiosity: did you get the smoked chicken, barbecue sauce and garlic bread sandwich at the other restaurants you moved to?
(I don’t work in publishing, but) I was also confused by this: “Because if your customers don’t trust you to lower the price later, they WILL revolt over the higher prices you are charging now.” I couldn’t fathom what is meant by a revolt, probably it is some other action than not buying – but what?
Joanna’s point is, it doesn’t matter that the legal impediments aren’t easily fixed or that there’s a good reason for them. What matters is, they frustrate customers. Customers may whine and complain, but at some point, they quit whining and complaining and spend their money somewhere else. Explaining to customers why things have to be some illogical way won’t stop them from doing that.
Out of fear of Amazon, publishers felt they needed to take control of their business with the agency model. However, they weren’t prepared for one of the major implications of that model: that they now had new customers who behaved differently than their previous customers. They walked out of a game of catch into a game of dodgeball, and are surprised that they’re getting hit by the ball.
Joanna’s right, of course: It doesn’t matter what the reasons are but simply that there are problems in the first place. The fact is, the problems have solutions. Every one of them. But, for one reason or another, the publishers are incapable or unwilling to take those solutions and put them into action. It’s my belief that most of these are due to unwillingness for one reason or another (usually ineptitude).
The only one that springs to mind as an actual roadblock is the case of regional restriction. They don’t possess the publishing rights to those other regions. The only thing that would really stop them from getting those rights is if someone else already has them. Otherwise, the only road block is the money. Publishers aren’t necessarily going to be willing to spend more money on something, especially if it’s not selling to their desires.
Excellent article. It sums up a lot of the points I make when someone brings up pricing in the Kindle forums.
The latest slam in the pricing of backlist books is Atlas Shrugged. I wanted to re-read the book before seeing the movie but found the Kindle version priced at $18.99. No thanks! I ordered the used paperback for $.01 plus shipping instead. $4 book for me, a bit of a profit for the seller, and NOTHING for the publisher or the author’s estate.
Usually, I won’t even do that. I have many books languishing on my wishlist at ereaderiq.com waiting in vain for the price to come down. Instead, I buy indie books and backlist books from authors who got their rights back and understand the ebook revolution. There are very few authors who can’t be replaced by someone else in the same genre.
The one point you didn’t make is that people who pirate digital media were never going to pay for it anyway. The exception may be people frustrated by the geographic restrictions who can’t get the book anywhere for any price.
“And myself, Jane Average customer? I listened to the stony-faced explanation exactly one time. And then I simply decided that I would go elsewhere for dinner from now on!”
And I’m sure they were glad to see you go, because that’s one less whiny customer who thinks that the entire world revolves around her dinner preferences.
You seem to have this attitude that “whatever I want is how it should be, and if I can’t get what I want then someone somewhere is stupid”. You talk about “solutions”, but “do whatever the customer want no matter what that is” isn’t necessarily a solution.
Densityduck, I am not saying ‘if I can’t get what I want, then someone is stupid.’ I am saying that if I can’t get what I want from one place, I’ll go somewhere else and get something else that I want equally. It is not about being entitled, it is about having choices and choosing to exercise them. If I say to the publisher ‘offer the books at such and such price point or I won’t buy them’ then I am not being whiny and entitled and threatening them. I am giving them feedback about what sort of product I will buy and under what conditions. If they won’t provide it to me, I will shop elsewhere. It is my choice to do that. What I think the publishers have not grasped yet is that they are no longer the only game in town and people like me really do have other options where we can exercise our legitimate choices as customers—just as there are plenty of other restaurants I can go to if one of them doesn’t have a dinner option I like
DD, the customer doesn’t care what the solution is. The publisher either finds a solution or loses a customer. Lose too many customers before finding a solution, and you’re out of business.
Books are not a scarce resource, and publishers do not have a monopoly position. There are more books published every year than I could possibly read; there are more books published every year that I really want to read than I can possibly read. Publishers can’t sell me a high priced inferior product in such a market, because I always have something else I want to read.
but “do whatever the customer want no matter what that is” isn’t necessarily a solution.
Uh yes, it is if you want to keep customers. You are not the only shop in town and there are ways to get things without having to pay anything for them. People are entitled to be treated as customers because it just so happens they are the ones spending the money and they get to say how they spend it.
If you want their money I strongly suggest you get a better attitude or find another job.
To be fair, “the customer is always right” is not a universal truth. Sometimes the customer isn’t right. (See Not Always Right for plenty of examples.)
But on the other hand, if the business legitimately isn’t serving the customer’s needs, nobody is forcing the customer to spend money there. A business will serve its customer’s needs or sooner or later go out of business.
There’s a middle ground between “the customer is always right” and “we don’t care what the customer wants”. Frustration and annoyance are a big factor in human behaviour.
Which is exactly what I do not care about. I live and work in Germany but read mostly English and American authors in their own language. If a new book comes out by, say, Jasper Fforde or James Ellroy, or if I am interested in an older book by, to choose two other examples, Richard Feynman or Karl Popper, I go to Amazon US or UK and order the book. The postman will bring it with 1-10 weeks, and I read it, make notes in it, or decide to sell it or make it a gift.
If I go to Amazon’s Kindle store in the US [or UK] and want to fetch the same book I get the message that it is not available in my country. When I ask ‘WTF?’ I get the long-winded explanation on publishing rights, agents, authors, and probably something about a volcano exploding [I wasn't listening any more at this point].
Sorry, wrong number, I am not the one to whinge to about all that. Apart from everything I could reply – incl. the fact that most authors cannot even live by publishing books through publishing houses – the important point here is: I am unable to The Cold Sixthousand as an ebook because at some time here will be a German translation for my market. That’s not just uncommon sense that’s downright ridiculous … unfortunately I can’t laugh, so it’s not even a mediocre joke.
Important note: All writers and books mentioned are purely illustrative; for this comment I did not check again if any of those are now available as ebook for me. They weren’t some time back, just like many, many others.
I wonder if publishers are really that dense? They seem to be very smart in most other ways.
What if, instead, publishers were actually “dumb like a fox?” In this scenario, the real goal is not so much to thwart piracy but to establish a new concept of the product both in law and in culture. Thwarting piracy is the socially acceptable and defensible facade of a program that aims to change our concept of “book,” “magazine,” “song” and so on. We will not own copies of these things anymore. Instead, we will license them. Eventually, all of these things will become available only via a pay per use scheme. It will be a Brave New World.
Some people believe, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
Other people believe, “When life gives you lemons, stomp it into the dirt, point it out to everybody else, then go buy a grape.”
It’s no mystery which belief dominates here. Entitlement does not benefit the producer/consumer relationship on either side… it only produces antagonism and opposition, an “us against them” attitude that is mutually damaging. The above “truths” are prime examples of customer entitlement, and provide that damaging attitude in spades.
Instead of defending the idea that customers should be willfully ignorant of what it takes to bring them a product–an attitude that has given us the wonders of sweatshops, high-fructose corn syrup, cheap foreign labor, burning rivers and hazardous products over the years–maybe customers should take a little bit of the effort it took to provide the product for them, and actually learn something about how the world works.
Henry Ford: “You can buy my cars in any color you like so long as it’s black. What’s that? You don’t want black? Why, you’re just a whiny little good for nothing twit who’s got a sense of entitlement. I’ve given you lemons here, go make some lemonade instead of crying about the fact you can’t get the car in anything but black.”
Yes, producers can have a sense of entitlement, too. It’s something people on both sides of the counter need to avoid.
Ford should have taken advantage of the situation and sold paint.
“Instead of defending the idea that customers should be willfully ignorant of what it takes to bring them a product…”
With due respect, I think Joanna’s point – rightly or wrongly – is that the mechanics of “what it takes to bring [the customer] a product” isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the customer’s problem. To some extent, I think she’s right, and here’s an example of why.
Right now (at least here in California) we’re experiencing a shortage of tomatoes, and this has caused the price supermarkets charge for tomatoes to almost double. Does the supermarket publish big long explanations of the causes for the shortage? No, and really, that’s not my problem. What IS my problem is deciding whether or not I’m willing to pay $5.00 a pound for tomatoes. Since there aren’t massive piles of tomatoes rotting in the middle of the store, I assume some people are willing to buy tomatoes at a price of $5.00 a pound. Other people, I suspect, are not willing to pay that price for a tomato, and will either wait until the price comes down or decide they simply won’t buy tomatoes.
To come back to the publishing industry’s problem, I recognize that there are reasons why the publishers have to charge what they do for books, e-format and paper. Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s excellent series of articles, at http://bit.ly/fgBlyG, talks about many of these reasons, including the fact that the Big 5 publishers are locked into all sorts of long-term contracts — on printing, on office space, and so forth — that seemed like a good idea 20 years ago when they were signed but that are now killing them with overhead costs. (For example, Kris points out that Random House is spending millions of dollars A MONTH on long term leases they can’t get out of for office space they no longer need). It would indeed be naive to think that the publishing industry doesn’t face these realities, and that they’re not a factor in the way they set their prices.
But, at the end of the day, that’s not the customer’s problem. If Big Pub can’t deliver a product people want at a price they’re willing to pay, their potential customers will choose to spend their money at an indie press instead. Or in a Red Box video rental machine. Or on Netflix subscriptions and iPhone apps that make farting noises. Whatever. The reality of a market-driven system is that publishers, like software developers and streaming content producers/distributors, are competing for a finite number of entertainment dollars from people’s wallets. And as soon as the value they offer vs. the number of dollars they want gets too far out of sync, people will start making other choices with their money.
My Netflix subscription is worth it to me at $30 a month, but it wouldn’t be at $300 a month. My satellite TV *wasn’t* worth it to me at the $70 a month I was spending, so I cancelled it and I buy on iTunes what I can’t watch streaming on Netflix. I have some books on my wish list that I’m not buying because they’d be worth it to me at $5, but they’re not at $12. By contrast, some professional books are worth it to me at $125, and I buy those.
The problem I see, and the place I agree with Joanna, is when the publishing industry says, in effect, “but you, our customers, SHOULD BE willing to pay $14 for a DRM-restricted e-book, even when the same book is $7.99 in paperback.” Perhaps in their minds I should be, but the reality out here in the real world is that I’m not. So they can either find a way to reduce their costs enough to make a profit selling me that book for $7.99, or they can deal with the fact that I won’t buy it. It’s not about being whiny and entitled, it’s about having a limited number of dollars to spend on entertainment and prioritizing those dollars in the way that gives me the most perceived bang for the buck.
It might well be that the exigencies which operate upon the publishing business make delivering content at the price-point I’m willing to pay impossible. So be it. Lots of businesses, in lots of industries, fail because they can’t deliver what their customers want at a price they’re willing to pay. But arguing that, in this regard, the big publishing houses are “special snowflakes” exempt from the normal rules of economics, is a bit silly.
I didn’t say that publishers were not responsible to their customers. But customers who only look at their bottom line allow publishers to get away with murder; the aforementioned sweatshops, high-fructose corn syrup, cheap foreign labor, burning rivers and hazardous products are all examples of corporate actions taken to cut their bottom line, knowing that the customer was more worried about their bottom line to be concerned about trifling matters like health, safety, ethics and fairness.
If all you’re looking at is the inside of your wallet, you’re missing all that. Buying and selling is a two-way street. How can you make an intelligent decision without knowing what’s really going on?
A knowledgeable customer is what keeps producers (and publishers) in line, by calling them on the problems and engaging in mutually-acceptable solutions… or by buying elsewhere, and making sure the producer knows why you’re doing it (and that you’re doing it for the right reason). Producers faced with that kind of atmosphere are more likely to Do The Right Thing, toe the line, and keep things above-board.
A customer that willfully ignores all that, frankly, deserves what they get.
Steven Lyle Jordan said, “But customers who only look at their bottom line allow publishers to get away with murder; the aforementioned sweatshops, high-fructose corn syrup, cheap foreign labor, burning rivers and hazardous products are all examples of corporate actions taken to cut their bottom line, knowing that the customer was more worried about their bottom line to be concerned about trifling matters like health, safety, ethics and fairness.”
So, it’s the customer’s fault, if they want to decide how much to spend & where to spend it, that forces producers to do unethical things? I’m not following that logic. Certainly, if one finds out a company is engaging in unethical processes, one should condemn that. However, I don’t think the response would be, “Oh, company A is using sweatshops because I won’t spend X amount of dollars for their product; I guess I’d better start buying their products now!”
Or I don’t think the response should be, “Oh, I should keep buying products I think are overpriced when I can find something else I like for a lower price or else those producers could start doing evil things!”
I’m sorry but trying to condemn consumers for being price conscious is just another way publishers apparently don’t get it. As is expecting customers to do a thorough review of every company they do business with in order to make sure there’s no ethical shenanigans going on.
And it may be annoying & frustrating to a business, but if a customer tells you why they no longer want to do business with you, you can write it off as a loss or you can do your best to win their business back or you could pursue new customers, but chastising them for actually sharing their reasons for not doing business with you, well, I’m not sure how productive that is.
Sorry steven, but your analogy about sweatshops and foreign workers is stupid and useless here. You don’t see Nike producing an INFERIOR shoe that is PRICED MORE THAN DOUBLE another shoe next to it on the shoe wall that is also made by Nike where both shoes look the same and have the same name.
This is what the BPH do and they do it right in front of customers computer screens with their ebooks. If is looks like a ripoff, sounds like a ripoff, and smells like a ripoff, guess what….it is a ripoff!
Okay; so the reasons behind the publisher’s costs aren’t the consumer’s problem.
…so? So what? That doesn’t mean that the publisher can change the price.
See, that’s what I don’t get about this article. You say that books should only cost a dollar. The publisher explains why that doesn’t happen. Then you say that you don’t care about the explanation.
I’m having a hard time as seeing this as anything beyond a customer with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
I find this article to be a load of utter nonsense with a few truths scattered in between.
Truth 1: The truth is that most of the accusations against publishers since the eBook market began have been right. Of course the ‘insider’s within the business come out and try to sell a lot of ridiculous and untrue stories of why things must be the ay they are and there are ‘reasons’ behind it. But they have been consistently exposed. This has fertilised a widespread distrust of anything publishers say.
Truth 2:
“A hardcover best-seller going for $9.99 in ebook is wonderful.”
Ehh no it isn’t. There are dozens of best sellers I wouldn’t pay one dollar for. The issue of value is far simpler that this attempt to analyse it. People across the world have a fixed income. They have competing needs. Food, Clothes, Education, Movies, Games, Music etc. They compare value between the choices they have and between alternatives.
If what they would like to buy is cheaper, they can buy more, and/or take a chance of buying something they haven’t tried before. With the recession in place across so much of the western world, value is even tighter than 10 years ago. The theory about lowering prices later is irrelevant.
Truth 3: This is so silly it isn’t real. DRM is a HUGE problem that is holding back sales and will hold them back a hell of a lot more in the coming years. Geo restrictions, editing, pricing are equally a problem for the industry. The ease with which it is removed does not balance the perceptual problem and the logistical problem. People are more and more aware of the limitations being imposed on them by DRM and as the market increases and as the mainstream reader starts to get involved the DRM problem will be exacerbated. When readers start to move from one device to another, as new devices emerge, the anger will surface even more.
As far as the customer being right Chris’ statement says it all “if the business legitimately isn’t serving the customer’s needs, nobody is forcing the customer to spend money there. A business will serve its customer’s needs or sooner or later go out of business.”
The customer is always right. Period.
@George and “Worker” (if that’s your real name):
The logic here is clear: Most customers are only willing to pay the lowest price, and don’t care/turn a blind eye to how they get it (one of the reasons torrent sites are so popular); producers, knowing this, cut as many corners as possible to spend the least on their product, charge you as much as if the product was produced for more, and make an exorbitant profit. The analogies do fit, because they are all examples of the corners companies cut that largely go ignored by customers (even those who actually know about them), in order to provide those cheap products.
It is absolutely the customer’s responsibility to be aware of what they’re getting, and how it’s provided. Avoidance of that responsibility is providing producers with the excuse they need to sell you shoddy and overpriced merchandise–not that they are “forced” to do it–they do it because they can get away with it and make more money off of you (which, of course, is in the capitalist’s bylaws).
DD – Joanna never said or even imply that books should cost a dollar. What she said is that if customers don’t perceive the books as being fairly priced, they won’t buy.
I don’t know where this notion of “overdeveloped sense of entitlement” comes from, either. The fact is, customers _are_ entitled to fair value for their money and if they believe, for whatever reason, that they are being ripped off, they will go elsewhere.