Editor’s Note: The following is reprinted, with permission, from Rich Adin’s An American Editor Blog. We previously published Rich’s A Modest Proposal: A 21st Century Publishing Model. P.B.
Publishers are losing the battle over e-book pricing for many reasons, but the core reason is poor product quality. Publishers are so focused on the quarterly return that they have forsaken what once made publishing giants and made publishing a glamorous profession: quality editing—publishers fail to equate price with quality.
I guess I should back up a bit and make this disclosure: I am a reader of both e-books and print books; I buy a lot of books each year. In 2009 I bought more than 100 books in each format, but no duplicates. I also should say that I am a book editor. I work independently and for many publishers and authors, and have for 25 years. Early in my publishing career I worked for a couple of major publishers and at one time ran a small independent press. I say all this because (I hope) it adds some credence to my commentary.
Back in the olden days of publishing, 5 to 10 years ago, publishers hired editors for one purpose: to take a manuscript and improve it—improve its organization, its grammar, its readability, its consistency. Poor editors were not rehired, good editors were reasonably paid. There was a balance between price and quality: a consumer generally could feel confident that the book was well produced—editorially and physically—and that the price was justifiable.
Fast forwarding to today and everything has changed. Not a year goes by without consolidation in the industry. The industry has changed from small (relatively) local publishers to giant international media conglomerates. The guiding philosophy of publishing in the 1950s and 1960s— produce quality books and the readers shall come—has devolved to the quarterly returns of the 2000s; cut costs, quality be damned! Yes, there are still publishers who care, but they are a struggling minority in terms of market share.
Increasingly publishers are outsourcing what they used to do in-house. The 1990s saw the beginning of the rise of the book packager, an independent company who promised publishers that it could more quickly, more efficiently, and, most importantly, more cheaply produce the books for the publisher. Often the packager was a printing company that expanded its services to editorial and design. These promises appealed to the accountants and to those who had to face shareholders, so the packagers got the work.
Well, the packagers also have to make money, and if they are cutting the publisher’s costs, they have to hire more cheaply and locate where costs are less. It’s not rocket science to understand this. As a consequence, something had to give. Because the packager’s roots were in the typesetting/printing end, what flexed was editorial. Packagers discovered that savings couldn’t be made in their physical plants and equipment but could be made by outsourcing to less expensive and less experienced editors. And so they did and do.
Just a few days ago I was solicited by a packager wanting to hire me to edit STM (science, technical, and medical) books. The price offer: 80 cents a page. And the solicitor stated that for that high sum, a careful detailed, quality edit would be required. Just ain’t gonna happen.
As I pointed out in my reply, quality STM editing requires a well-skilled, knowledgeable, experienced editor who has an eye for detail (after all, do you want to have your doctor pickup a medical book that says the dose is 5 grams when what is really meant is 5 milligrams?). And experienced editors will tell you that a quality edit of such a book means a rate of 3 to 5 pages an hour, sometimes up to 8 or 9 if the book is well-prepared by the author. To make a living in America, the editor would have to edit 20 to 30 pages an hour at minimum at the offered price. So how high a quality edit should be expected for 80 cents a page? (And it also makes me wonder what the price would be for fiction editing? 40 cents a page?)
How does this relate to the pricing battle? Consumers aren’t blind and are generally literate (a topic for another day). When the publisher pays an editor what amounts to $4 an hour for editorial work, is the publisher likely to get a quality job? Is the editor likely to know the difference between effect and affect, between emotional ringer and emotional wringer, between roll and role, between boarder and border, between acceptable and exceptable? Will the editor really care? And when the consumer reads “John entered the house in hopes of becoming a border” or “Their laid the brief case with the money,” will the consumer be thankful that he or she paid a price for the e-book that is higher than the paperback price? Or will there be resistance? With their lax approach to quality, publishers are shoring up the $9.99 threshold they so want to resist.
Consumers are complaining about the high price being charged for ebooks for lots of reasons, but whereas a publisher might have some response to most reasons (acceptable or not), there is no response to the poor quality complaint. Smart publishers will rethink their book strategies and begin to chip away at consumer complaints by tackling immediately those quality issues that underly much of the unhappiness of consumers. Once this the quality issue is laid to rest, the other issues can be addressed in a more measured manner: It is much easier to compromise when there is only one problem than when there is a plethora of problems.
This critique sounds very plausible and justified. I would only add one other aspect of atrophied quality in e-books. This is that screen delivery does not yet acknowledge or emulate qualities instilled in print books by typographers, book designers, papermakers, ink makers, printers and binders. This whole infrastructure of refined and assured quality in books is disregarded.
Incidentally, I use hand-held screen readers but usually only purchase books I already have in print. You mention that you have no duplicates, so you may want to try out duplication for a further evaluation of comparative quality. You do confirm to me that users of hand-held screen books must already have print reading skills and this is a big marketing issue. I believe the average age of e-book users is 43.
Gary, the reason I do not have duplicates is that I buy all my nonfiction and very select fiction in hardcover only; my ebook purchases are fiction only. With rare exception, I consider fiction “read once, throw away” reading, whereas the nonfiction I buy is intended to be both read and saved for future reference — by me or by children or grandchildren, i.e., part of a permanent library. The select fiction I buy in hardcover is written by a half-dozen or so authors whose books I collect for no other reason than I particularly enjoy them.
Nearly all of the ebooks I buy are from authors I do not know but whose books are sold at places like Smashwords and Fictionwise in DRM-free format and for very little cost. Occasionally I come across a real gem of a writer (e.g., Richard S. Tuttle and Celina Summers whose books I discovered at Fictionwise), but for the most part it is pretty clear why these authors are not being published by traditional publishers and why their books aren’t worth more than a few dollars.
I agree with your comment about screen delivery, but I think this is less of a problem with fiction than it is with nonfiction and is the reason why currently most ebooks are fiction and a large number are self-published or vanity press published.
I would agree with the basic argument here and it seems to be part of a larger problem publishers have with selling quality books. Many print books read pretty well for 50 pages or so and then fall apart. Why? Because the book was sold on the first 50 pages and the rest be damned. Most publishers have been driven to the marketing of a celebrity name rather than an unknown quality writer.
But most writers have gotten the message for some years that they have to edit their own books too – or pay for a freelance editor with their own funds.
In the eBook space I’m astounded at the low quality of publishers’ books. I’m amazed that few take advantage of the digital features an eBook offers. I’ve bought eBooks on the Kindle that have a subject index but no reference to the location in the book! What good is that?
Ebooks, especially information-rich nonfiction, must be programmed with hyperlinks, other search features, visuals, etc. I don’t think we’re there yet.
Fiction in all formats is being hurt by the poor editing. Recently, I read a major NY imprint paperback of a well-known mystery writer. She had mangled her geography so badly that she had NC and Georgia next to each other and Duke University (Durham, NC) in Savannah, Georgia, and the University of NC in Georgia. (Yes, really!)
A major sf imprint is reprinting one of the Grand Masters of SF, and no one has bothered to glance through the final versions so they’d notice the major OCR mistakes.
And the list goes on and on.
The major publishers have been cutting their editorial staffs in recent years yet increasing their lines so the poor editors have little time to edit, and last year the editors were cut again.
I laugh every time I read some NY publishing type touting quality of editing as a reason why the conglomerate publishers are so superior. They obviously aren’t reading their own books.
@Marilyn: For me, the UNC example is a real hoot. I went there. Which author, which book? BTW, you’re not related to the late Prof. Byerly who taught at UNC, are you? I disagreed with Rich re paperbacks, but boy do I agree with him about the decline of quality! Thanks. David
@Gary Frost
That’s right. As it should be.
An e-book is NOT a print book, nor should it pretend to be.
There’s no question in my mind that there’s been a significant decline in the quality of book editing. Initially I attributed this to outsourcing, but lately I’ve blamed our educational system. No one seems to care about homonyms anymore; principles and principals have become interchangeable even in the New York Times. Beyond this most basic level of proofreading, there’s little apparent editing for clarity and style and no apparent editing for conciseness and unnecessary wordiness.
With e-books the situation depends on the text used. Current and recent books generally copy the defects of the original fairly faithfully. No consideration is given to the special requirements of e-books to achieve useful reproduction of maps and tables. Older catalog titles often appear to have been scanned but not subsequently proofread.
While I agree with the main post, I think a bigger issue is the VERY SLOPPY editing of ebooks in particular. i.e., spelling and formatting errors (extra symbols, etc). There is NO reason for this.
I have purchased and read two James Clavell novels which were recently issued for the Kindle- Tai Pan and Gai Jin. BOTH were filled with typos, 98% of them could have beenm fixed by a simple spell-check!! HELLO- is that so difficult? If an ebook publisher won’t even put an OCR’d book through spellcheck, do they care about their product? No, so why should we.
This is inexcusable for a major selling Author (even one deceased). You mean there is no relative that wants to make sure it is issued right? What about using readers like myself as proofreaders- at no cost. Just get it right!
In the scheme of things the consumer loses on quality because publishers have learned a basic dynamic of the business: books are NOT returned by consumers because of quality issues. If you bought a defective TV, you would be returning it. How many of us have ever returned a book for poor editing? Many readers don’t even discover the quality problems in a book until months after the purchase, when they finally get around to reading it. Probably we need to start a special award category for the most poorly edited book of the year. And the nominees are . . .
David said, @Marilyn: For me, the UNC example is a real hoot. I went there. Which author, which book? BTW, you’re not related to the late Prof. Byerly who taught at UNC, are you? I disagreed with Rich re paperbacks, but boy do I agree with him about the decline of quality! Thanks. David
David, I’ll tell you privately. Email me at marilynnbyerly at AOL dot com. Remember the second “N” in Marilynn.
The book is really excellent, otherwise. A clever premise that’s well executed. I’ve read the second book in the series and enjoyed it, as well. The author seemed to go out of her way to mention the distance between Georgia and NC and straighten out the geography in the second book.
As far as I know, I’m not related to the late Prof. Byerly, but my sister-in-law, Dr. Ingrid Byerly teaches there and at Duke.
@Rich – great article. In terms of returning books, it is really hard to return an e-book. Unlike a HC or PB, an EB doesn’t have a physical form to return.
Another thought I have is REALLY scary where the best EB are not found from the publishers/authors, but from the “pirate publishers” who, through the process of scanning, have set up systems of proofing and editing with resulting versions of the pirated books with completely fixed grammar, spelling, and formatting errors (not so much the professional editing though). The whole thing is wrong in stealing money from the authors; however, it can be a much higher quality of work (maybe not wrong in stealing from the publishers since they couldn’t do their job correctly but that’s another argument).
I think it’s become apparent that many major print publishers look upon eBooks as a way to recapitalize their backlists and skim some profits off a reissue. This is exactly what happened in the music industry. It’s a bridge strategy to an unknown new revenue model.
To that end publishers are merely digitizing a print book through scanning with no added value. Quality is not a real concern, but such a product is not worth much. Just like when CDs went to the bargain bin to be sold at $2.99.
The market solution to this must reside with consumers who review their purchases on the online bookstores. Before I buy an eBook on Amazon I read all the reviews that previous buyers have written, then make a judgment based on price. I think until this becomes the norm, consumers will continue to feel cheated by poor eBooks and there will be little incentive to publishers and authors to improve their quality.
I think it’s become apparent that many major print publishers look upon eBooks as a way to recapitalize their backlists and skim some profits off a reissue. This is exactly what happened in the music industry. It’s a bridge strategy to an unknown new revenue model.
To that end publishers are merely digitizing a print book through scanning with no added value. Quality is not a real concern, but such a product is not worth much. Just like when CDs went to the bargain bin to be sold at $2.99.
The market solution to this must reside with consumers who review their purchases on the online bookstores. Before I buy an eBook on Amazon I read all the reviews that previous buyers have written, then make a judgment based on price. I think until this becomes the norm, consumers will continue to feel cheated by poor eBooks and there will be little incentive for publishers and authors to improve their quality.
Sorry for the duplicate post…technical difficulties!
Read “Victorian Internet” from Amazon yesterday, the ebook was full of OCR errors. “i1835” instead 1835, “Rom” instead of “Born,” etc. There were quite a few that would have been caught with a basic spell check pass – “Rritain” instead of “Britain” for example. Bleh.
I am considering the Kobo eReader and have tried the web-based reader and downloaded a couple of the free books (e.g. Alice in Wonderland). I have found that the text includes “Digitized by Google” every 1/2 page, and that OCR software has been used and with no editing. This resulting text has a lot of typos in it, to the point where I wouldn’t read such a book.
Is this what we can expect of the “free books” lure of the e-readers? It sounds above that even the for-sale books have some OCR and serious editing problems, in which case the novelty of the free book reading is not novel at all (sorry…).
I am also disgusted by the editing of the ebooks I have bought. Even major series or popular books fequently have horrendous errors or are badly formatted. It really annoys me because for some one who doesn’t work in the UK I am unable to buy paperback and am frequently prevented from buying my favourite series because a publishing house has withdrawn a series leaving me no legal alternative. And to add insult to injury the series that are available are badly edited which dies not encourage me to pay for them.