How to stop our bookshops dying

 Posted by at 4:51 pm  4 Responses »
Jul 042012
 

Yesterday I visited the City with my kids. We wandered through a couple of bookshops looking for books they hadn’t read. In the space of 30 minutes six or seven books caught their eyes. I pulled out my iPhone and photographed the covers. Then we left. Later, at home, I popped onto Amazon.com and bought the books for significantly less than I would have paid if I’d purchased them in the bookshop and, equally importantly, they came as eBooks.

This is what is going to kill our local bookshops. The browsing experience cannot be beaten at the moment. I had done a lot of looking around Amazon for new books and hadn’t found any of the ones we ended up buying. A few minutes with shelves to browse made all the difference. But, and here’s the crux of the problem, Dymocks did not get any of my money.

I feel guilty though, because I recognise that this is not a sustainable model. The bookshop is only fulfilling one of my needs – the need to browse. They are not fulfilling the other core needs I have for (a) reasonably priced books and (b) eBook versions. So they are not getting my money: And there sounds the death-knell of hardcopy bookshops unless something changes. Lest anyone thinks I’m over-reacting and starts in on the ‘books will never go away line’, I would refer you to Fairfax and the other major newspapers ten years ago. They owned the rivers of gold that were advertising and managed to completely lose them through a misguided attempt to protect their hardcopy which they believed would never go away.

Anyway, so it was with great interest that I read of a new initiative by UK-publisher Angry Robot Books. To support the UK’s Independent Bookseller’s Week, they have started up something called ‘Clonefiles’. From today, you can go into a bookshop and buy one of their books in hardcopy, you will then be emailed the DRM-free eBook version as an inclusive part of the sale…

allowing them to read the novel on paper, on their Kindle, or on their ePub-based eBook reader. This Clonefile means that customers at Mostly Books can buy Angry Robot’s books and enjoy them in whatever format they prefer, whether physical or electronic!

This is an absolutely brilliant initiative. It plays to everyone’s strengths and meets the buyers needs at every level. It doesn’t directly deal with the price differential with Amazon but perhaps it does put the price argument into a different context. Rather that simply comparing the price of a product in your hand, the context moves to frame the price in terms of product and service. There is a value proposition in being able to go into a bookshop, experience the ambience, browse, talk to knowledgeable staff. These things are worth some premium if you also end up with the book and the eBook.

My only real concern is that you have to buy the hardcopy and kill a tree. That’s fine if you are one of those who deeply love your paper. I’m happy to read an eBook and would prefer to be able to just buy the eBook from the bookshop. If I could have done that yesterday I would have walked out with the perfect guilt-free experience – and the bookshop would have made some money.

It will be fascinating to see if this initiative works for Angry Robot Books and for the bookshops. I hope it does and I dearly hope we’ll see something similar here in Australia soon.

A touching story of books, LEGO and things

 Posted by at 8:58 am  No Responses »
Jun 062012
 

LEGO Minecraft box

I was listening to a rather annoying interview in the car this morning about books and ebooks. The basic approach seemed to be that people could never transfer their allegiance to ebooks because they need to hold something and because only paper books have proper editing standards. It was one of those interviews where I ended up yelling at the radio because I felt some of the comments were so silly and thoughtless.It was like listening to a religious argument – those in love with their books believed that ebooks are wrong, even if their reasoning doesn’t bear close examination.

One reason given for resisting the move to ebooks was that you can’t keep mementos such as boarding passes as bookmarks in an ebook. Too true; until boarding passes go the way of tickets and become virtual themselves. Standards will fall without paper books? Sorry, editing has nothing intrinsically to do with format. There won’t be any need for cover art? Try shopping on Amazon for an ebook – you still see a book cover picture. It just went on and on.

The most pertinent point was that you don’t get to own your ebooks in the way you can own a hardcopy book. But then these days that’s true of music, games, movies; so why should books be intrinsically different? The most interesting and compelling point was someone saying that they find it easier to remember things from a real book. I’m guessing this is because there is a visual and tactile memory that’s easier to access with a real book. You can recall how heavy the book was, how it felt, how it looked. On an ebook device all these things are the same for each book.

Then I came home and found several articles about the new LEGO Minecraft set which has just been released. The interesting thing is that Minecraft started out as a digital game, entirely electronic. Now a hardcopy version is being created based on that digital version. A number of commentators have asked what the point of that is? After all the entire point of Minecraft itself is that you can build in a virtual world without limits. So why make a physical version (other than profit)?

See? it’s the opposite of the books argument. And again people are taking sides.

Ultimately the fact that things are available in different versions should not be threatening for people. No more than the idea that someone could exercise a different choice should be threatening. But that’s not really the way most of us are wired is it? This does not need to be a religious divide. There’s no reason that hardcopy books and ebooks cannot coexist for some time. Hardcopy books do not require the rearguard defensive action that their avid fans seem to think is the only way to defend against the onslaught of ebooks. Everything else being equal (the world not ending, solar flares not destroying all infrastructure, etc) there is going to be an inevitable shift over time to electronic books. For quite some time though hardcopy books will be available to those who want them. There is a place for both.

And Minecraft LEGO shows the flow does not all have to be one way. It’s easy to envisage a scenario where a book starts out as an ebook and then, if it’s particularly well-received, gets a special small-run printing with fabulous binding and so on. The hard part with all these things is coming up with the original idea. Once you have that the various formats are all about marketing.

That said, the argument for real-world toys is far stronger, in my view, than the argument for hardcopy books. We live in the real world and it’s important that kids, and adults, understand how that world works. Playing with toys is a way of safely gaining that understanding. I’d far rather be dealing with an engineer who had played with LEGO than one who had exclusively built in Minecraft. But at the end of the day someone who has done both is almost certainly going to be the better for it.

Ebooks and the fallacy of local pricing for Australia

 Posted by at 9:00 am  2 Responses »
Apr 292012
 

The Sun-Herald talks ebook pricing.

Parliament has announced a probe into why Australians pay so much for computers, software, and ebooks compared to our overseas counterparts. About time.

The Sun-Herald asked Allen and Unwin to comment on why we pay more for ebooks than consumers in the US. The new JK Rowling book, The Casual Vacancy, will cost A$24.17 while it will be available in the US for US$19.99. Allen and Unwin’s head of digital publishing responded by basically saying you can amortise your fixed costs over a larger market in the US:

When you’ve got a population of 23 million compared to 300 million, the fact is you are operating in a much smaller marketplace.

There are a couple of problems with this reasoning. The most important is that there’s simply no reason for the ebook market to be considered as anything other than global. The fixed costs of editorial, production, etc aren’t being amortised over 300 million people in the US or 23 million in Australia, they’re being amortised over 323 million people between the two (and much more when you consider the entire English-speaking market). Given most people buy their ebooks from the US, through either Kindle or iBooks, there is simply no argument that the ebook market is local.

The second issue is that in a digital marketplace, the borders of a country are largely spurious. There’s really no more justification for differential pricing based on the marketplace being ‘Australia’ than on the marketplace being ‘Alaska’ and this applies even to the local costs. There are some local costs, there’s no doubt you need to do some local advertising and promotion. But those are costs that apply anywhere you’re going to sell books – and I struggle to believe that the cost of local advertising in Sydney in markedly different than in Anchorage or any other US city.

The other fixed cost is the local operation: rent, staff costs, etc. But most of those costs are remnants from the hard-copy industry when a significant local operation was required for physical printing, distribution, etc. If the consumer is buying a digital product through Amazon, all that’s required locally is a marketing operation.

Of course that, then, gives rise to the publishers’ next line of defence: that without a local operation there will be no Australian books published. Honestly, that makes no sense unless the Australian arms of the major publishing companies are publishing Australian content at a loss. Either the market can sustain a local publishing industry or it can’t – if it can’t, and we consider that a problem, then it is the job of government to step in with subsidies of one sort or another. Having local publishing subsidised by price-gouging the consumer on every other purchase just makes no sense. And it defies belief that when the local publishing operation is examining the profit margin on a particular publication they get to say a loss is acceptable because of some hidden cross-subsidy from the market. That’s just not the way major publishing houses operate.

In my view this comes down to one simple thing: the publishers are struggling to protect a revenue and profit model that was based around hard-copy distribution. While I believe that is incredibly short-sighted, they are entitled to do that. What they are not entitled to do is give spurious reasoning for their position when called on what they are doing.

See also: I wrote about this in explaining why I wont subscribe to New Scientist a couple of months ago.