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The Peacock’s Tail – why e-books should cost more to make
September 18, 2009 | 12:16 pm
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By martinkochanski
The peacock’s tail is the most honest thing in zoology. It says “This thing is expensive to construct and it makes me more vulnerable to predators. But I have built it, and I haven’t been eaten, so you see how strong I must be”.
Book publishing is full of peacocks’ tails. When I lift a heavy illustrated book from Thames & Hudson, I know that time and money have been spent on it. Since Thames & Hudson are a commercial organization, I know that they have done this because they think the content is worth the effort and because they think that many book-buyers will think so too. Honesty is guaranteed.
Even an ordinary litho-printed paperback costs money to design, make and market, so when I pick it up off the shelf, I know that many people have looked at it before me and have agreed that the time I am devoting to picking it up and looking at it will not be wasted.
Now look at e-books. The big thing about e-books is that they cost nothing to make and distribute. It follows that the only thing I know about an e-book that I am about to download is that it is going to cost me time to download it and look at it… and possibly discover what trash it is.
People often contrast life post-Gutenberg, when publishing required a capital investment and so the only works that were published were those that some businessman thought he could make money out of, with life pre-Gutenberg, when anyone could publish anything and its success in the market depended purely on how many consumers were willing to pay to have copies made. Cheap-to-make e-books not only abolish Gutenbergian capitalism but also, by making copying costless, abolish any honest indication of what is and is not worthwhile. I can no longer – as with printed books – trust other people to spend their time worrying whether a book will or will not be a waste of my time.
A market is a means of conveying information from producer to consumer and back again, and money (like the peacock’s survival) is a means of ensuring that the information is honest.
If the product itself carries no indication of its value, what can we do? As a reader, all I can do is to identify the e-book sites whose contents smell too strongly of Lulu, and avoid them. As a publisher – how can I convince consumers that they should spend their irreplaceable time thinking about what I publish? They cannot hold it in their hands and feel the weight and quality or flick through its pages.
Is the only logical solution is to accelerate the trend towards blockbusters with massive publicity spends – peacock-tails larger and brighter than ever before – or is there some other way of conveying to the consumer the simple message: Many of us have given time to looking at this thing and we guarantee that it will be worth your while to give time to it too?
Because in the end money doesn’t matter: time does. You can’t earn more time.
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Comments:
What about reader reviews? Don’t they fill this need? There are many sites with reader reviews that I find helpful in making new e-reading choices. Amazon, comes to mind. I don’t buy ebooks there because I have a Sony, but I can read the reviews for free. Standing in a book store is a very nice experiance, but before I go to an ebook store to buy anything other than something from a favorite author, I like to do some reaearch of reader reviews, way better than reading promotional material, or a quick blurb from a professional critic.
I don’t happen to find reader reviews very helpful. Occasionally a reader review is thorough and literate, but too often it is not. Additionally, one reader’s great piece of literature is another reader’s dung heap. Plus there is no way to know the reviewer’s credentials: Are they the author’s spouse? Significant other? Grandparent? Someone who likes to give scathingly bad reviews because their own book received one? And this is a particular problem with self-published books.
OTOH, as martinkochanski notes, being published by a known, legitimate publisher is an indication — not a guarantee — that there have been several reviews from skilled, knowledgable folk and that the product has at least gotten past these preliminary reviews. That is no guarantee that the end product still isn’t dung, but there at least has been some legitimate reviews. For me, I look to reviews in the New York Review of Books and occasionally the New York Times, as well as The Economist and Atlantic and other magazines I respect. Respected, well-known publishers do add value to an ebook; the question is whether that added value warrants onerous DRM and hardcover pbook pricing or something significantly less and DRM-free.
This post makes no sense and is completely backwards. Ebooks have the same “costs” in terms of writing sand editing a book as any other book. In fact, most ebooks are just an electronic version of a printed book (ever hear of “The Lost Symbol?”)and there were, of course, costs associated with that including writing, editing and advertising.
What costs are NOT incurred for an ebook are printing, warehousing, shipping (several times- manufacturer, distributer, retailer). It is for THOSE reasons that ebooks are cheaper to produce than print books. (There is a cost of conversion and storing on a server, but they are a fraction of printing and distributing Dan Brown’s 5 million copies. Remember, you only make an ebook ONCE (per format).
There are self=published ebooks, some of which may never be printed, but that is also true of printed books as well. So, again, your post makes no sense.
I think you’re just an apologist for the publishers in their greedy attempt to gouge customers (and Amazon) on ebooks sales. But note that at least for the first day or two, Kindle sales of Lost Symbol outpaced print books. Your days are numbered.
I agree with Richard Askenase . Ebooks are no more cheap to produce than paper books up to the point of printing.
To the ebook’s cost, you also have to add the various electronic expenses and a massive mark up for the appalling percentage the distributor takes off the top. For example, Amazon/Kindle takes 66% of the price before the publisher sees a penny.
As to judging the quality, the Internet is filled with special-interest readers. Find a group at some website or a Yahoogroup, and you’ll find people who like what you do.
Many review magazines also have a presence on the Internet.
@Richard, @Marilynn: I think the point Martin is trying to make here is that anybody can take any text file, slap it up on the web, and call it an “e-book”.
The fact that it’s an “e-book” doesn’t tell you anything about its quality until you’ve spent the time necessary to download and look at it—unless, as Rich notes, it has the name of some major publisher on it.
On the other hand, printed books at least have had some money and attention put into printing them. (Though this is less true now that any schmuck can get just about anything printed on demand if he’s willing to front the money—including bad Star Wars fanfic.)
But as the market changes, the gatekeepers will change too. For example, Alexandria Digital Literature hosts a collaborative-filtering-based book and story recommendation engine. You tell it what you like and dislike, and it picks out new titles that it thinks you’ll love. (You can also look up books you haven’t read yet for a guess at how well it thinks you’ll like them.) It’s completely genre, content, and publisher-agnostic; all it knows about any title is how well the people who most closely share your tastes liked it.
(After a long down period, Alexlit is up and running again now, so you can even try it out if you like. But be advised it’s running on a crippled trial version of the back-end database software, so will be limited to five simultaneous users at a time for a few months until Dave Howell can get it rewritten to run on a different back end.)
Maybe for books that you can flick through, but not for movies.
Replace the “Many of us -publishers” by the “Many of us -reviewer cloud you trust” and you have a different and better organisation to highlight worthy books.
Massive databases hosted by LibraryThing or GoodReads allow this and if we push the concept a little further, build your list of users with trusted tastes who tend to scan the bottom of the ocean for hidden treasures, a good way to get insightful suggestions by totally independent reviewers, and in case of a self-published ebook wave, to split the time formerly spent by the publishers so this can be done voluntarily.
The time spent by the businessman is spent by a review cloud you trust, no downside, more respect to the writer.
Anyway what you’re asking is to somehow incorporate a specific reviewer wage into the ebook price, rather than leave the choice to the consumer, be it a subscription to a reviewing website you trust or your volunteer reviewer cloud.
The fact that a major publisher has put time and trouble, and even aesthetic effort, into producing a book, says absolutely nothing about its quality. In fact, the only thing all that guarantees is that the publisher expects to make more in profits than it cost to do all that gussying-up.
Martin makes the plain assumption that an e-book, freed of the shackles of traditional publishing, is easier to get into the hands of consumers… but that they are more likely to be trash. Spoken like a true traditional publisher. As the market changes, the roles of creators, consumers, and middlemen (the publishers) will change as well. And traditional publisher who expects their role in the digital world will be the same as it was in the print world, is fooling themselves.
Another thing: A peacock’s tail is actually the most dishonest thing in zoology. What it actually says is: “Notice me, over any other bird stronger, smarter or faster than me, so I can get laid.”
You should check out Gary North’s article on the Picard Syndrome: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north228.html
“From the year 1450 until today, people have associated wisdom with printed books that have bindings. A book with a binding implied the following: (1) an editor, (2) a costly printing press, (3) a distribution system, (4) a publisher’s risk. A book required a lot of front-end costs. The reader assumed that a book had value because a publisher concluded, ‘this will make me money.’”
Basically, people attach more value to a book when it went through this heavy process.
If that is true and remains the case, then it should be easy to solve. For example, one signal is offering a money back guarantee.
The price itself is also a signal. A high price can be interpreted as a sign of quality.
what steve jordan says. one thing i adore about e-books, is that ‘prettiness’ no longer plays a role in which book i read. but. excellently designed content is enormously helpful in, say, how-to books or other instructional materials.
i’m counting on excellence in typography and book design to be valued and live forever, even if print goes the way of.. the non-mutant frog? or even the dodo. which seems less likely.
i’m also counting on the quality of e-book design to be inversely proportional to the quality of printed book design, until the two forms reach equilibrium — in which case the printed book will just be a print-on-demand copy of the electronic file. (and in which case i will prefer the electronic version — print-on-demand being an almost perfect analogue to a kinko’s packet in terms of its ‘specialness’.) they’ll eventually be essentially one & the same, i’d predict — going either to my device of choice, or to the on-demand printing/binding machine.
One more thought: one thing I really like about the Kindle is the ability to download samples.
This replaces the need for “browsing in the library” and limits the risk of buying a book without knowing if it is at least decent.
Man. That’s the first time I ever heard someone argue that life was better *before* Gutenberg.
After that, you’ve lost me.
Now consider how much better life was before TV. In fact what was Hollywood doing exploiting Hard Cover Books by filming the story and presenting it in some form other than the Library. And the writer well knows that before the Internet the only people who could hear his diatribe were close friends with in earshot of his ramblings…Ah progress, moving on to the E book. And if he thinks money is the qualifier of good taste..how about GM.
@Julien: note that price by itself is no guarantee of anything – as the “I am rich” iPhone application showed.
One way to judge end-user approval of an ebook is to search for it on bittorrent file-sharing networks. Has anyone taken the trouble to copy it?
All I can is wow, what a boatload of crap that article is. Really, all I can say is good thing none of my money is no longer going to pay for Martin’s salary. I can remember lots of printed books I used to buy and could never finish because they were such disappointing garbage. Now, with ebooks, I can usually read excerpts and see ratings (ie fictionwise) leading me to make better judgements than those often poor jacket descriptions. Martin’s outdated and poor reasoning skills clearly demonstrate why he and most likely his company (if they follow his philosophy) won’t be around too much longer.
One reason publishers like myself survive is that when we put our name on a book, we’re essentially giving it our own personal seal of approval. Sure lots of publishers put out bad books, but have you ever looked at the stuff they’re rejecting? If a publisher puts out a book, you know they’ve spent dozens of staff hours in wading through the slush pile, picking out the winners, then dozens more hours in editing, trying to bring out the best in the book.
Easily falsifiable signals such as the weight of a bound paper book provide relatively little information. I will say, though, that one reason people buy best-sellers is that the fact that other people are buying them provides a signal of sorts. This is why some best-selling authors produce poor copy…they know customers will buy it no matter what and publishers often have no choice but to produce it or lose the author.
The important point that we’re asking readers to invest their hours as well as their dollars in our books is something that can’t be forgotten and I think Martin is on-point to remind us of that.
Rob Preece
Publisher
In fact, the probability is basically zero that any given person will be able to find a copy of your book to ‘pick up’, if they even know it exists…
I hate to say it, Rob, but this is hardly a good selling-point for the traditional publishing system. Self-perpetuating bad writing in order to make buck is what many people claim is exactly wrong with the present system, and needs to be fixed.
Let me solve your problem for you. I’ll set up an ebook publishing association. Everyone who wants to publish an ebook has to pay me $100,000. I’ll need a few laws written so no one can skip paying the fee, but the federal government likes to step in to prop up ridiculous business models, so why not mine?
Now, it’s really expensive to publish an ebook. Does that make you happy?
I think many people miss the point — it isn’t the cost of publishing per se that matters; rather it is that someone has determined that as between manuscripts A, B, and C, manuscript B is worth investing time and money into but manuscripts A and C are not. Having made this decision, at least in the larger book publishers, manuscript B is now reviewed by additional persons to confirm the decision. Assuming the decision is confirmed, then the company risks its money on the assumption that this manuscript will appeal to more than the author and a couple of the author’s friends. There is — albeit a minimal amount — some third-party objectivity to the decision as to whether the manuscript merits publication.
How many of us are willing to simply toss our money at any manuscript that appears out of the air? Rather, we look for reviews by others who have already risked their $5; occasionally we will be the first to risk our own $5. But are you willing to risk $20,000 on a manuscript that is not one we wrote, which is probably the minimum risk incurred by publishers on even the worst book.
We all want some sort of vetting. What some are unwilling to recognize or accept is that there are levels of vetting and a sophistication to the process that is gained through years of experience, experience that publishing houses often have.