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Writing and Publishing, Part 49:
Becoming your own publisher:
Marketing:
E-Books.
According to a large number of people in this industry, E-books
are the wave of the future. Printed books will go the way of the
dinosaur. Perhaps these folks have never been to an ocean beach
and seen a real wave. I need to ask, what is the E-book's real
place in the scheme of things? Will print books be displaced altogether?
It seems to me that there is just a great deal of misinformation
and confusion about E-books. Right now there are several things
which confound the situation. Let's look at some of them.
First I must ask who is it that buys E-books? When King made his rather inept foray into self publishing he began putting chapters of a book on line on the honor system. People were supposed to download the book and send him money. So far as I know, he never finished that book. I surmise that he discovered that not all people behave honorably.
But, who was downloaded the King book? Was it King fans? I think not. I think most of them were new-thing gadget nerds. I believe it is the gadget nerds who are driving this nonsense. If so, what will happen when the next gadget comes out? My guess is that they will drop the E-book devices into the dusty rooms with the brass lamp from aunt Martha, the coffee bean grinder, and the hoola-hoop. They will leap onto the band wagon of the next gadget. After all, they are not book people.
When that happens, E-books will settle down to fulfill their real role in publishing. I believe that role will be as a distribution channel for technical books. If I were publishing mostly technical books, I would make sure that they were also available in E-format. After the gadget freaks move on, the E-book distribution method will have real value for students and for research. I believe that's all. It will be much easier for a typical college student to carry a 2 or 3 pound E-book reader than 30 or 40 pounds of real books. This model will also be effective for the researcher in the field.
For the rest of us, who read books for pleasure and education, we will continue to insist on real books. We do not want to curl up with a gadget in our chair by the fire. We will always want the smell and feel of a real book. The simple fact is, there have never been a great number of people in the world who read when they do not have to. I suspect we number, perhaps 10 percent of the total population. I mean people who read for knowledge or the beauty of the prose or the power of the story. That has not changed. Nor has the fact that we like books. Some of us love books. We even collect them. We don't want gadgets. We do not want a glorified etch-a-sketch.
As to the larger population, the masses who buy the titillating stuff will always be around, but they are not book people. They are mostly voyeurs of one form or another. They will buy the O. J. Simpson garbage and the stories about other notorious people and events. They will also read the tabloids. So what? They will not use E-books to find their next fix. It would take too much effort and time.
Now, someone is sure to cite the industry pundits who contend that E-books will muscle out printed books because they will be much less expensive. There is this really crazy notion floating around that the manufacturing cost is a major part of the cost of the book. I know that it is not. Take a hard cover book like "The Anatomy of a PC." The cover price of that book is set at $29.95. Even in a very small quantity of 1500 books, the manufacturing cost to me was just $5.10 per book.
So, in theory we could discount the book down to $24.85 for the E-book version. If you wanted a book to teach you how to build a computer, would that look like a good deal? Where would you put your notes and highlights?
Well, where is the cost of a book? If you have read most of this essay series, you realize that the major part of a book's cost is in the distribution. The rest is in the actual writing and publishing. All of the people involved in this process are still going to want their pound of flesh. Even Amazon,com has recently realized that you cannot discount goods just because you are on the net. There are still costs involved.
You still have sales people, marketing people, and inventory control. You still have credit card handling, unless you want to endure the King experience. In addition, the author, publisher, artists, and prepress folks must be compensated. When you get through the process, the savings of E-books over real books is not significant. It is not a good enough reason to choose an E-book format; especially if you are a real book lover.
There is one more area which needs to be addressed, before E-books can fulfill their role in publishing. That is the issue of the E-book reader. By that, I mean the gadget a person must have to display the E-book file in a readable format. Currently there are competing standards. It's really a bunch of crap, driven by the greed of Microsoft and others. Of course, Microsoft had to revert to their, ‘not invented here' hidey-hole. Never mind that the established PDF is a perfect solution to the universal reader issue.
I have already discussed PDF in previous W&P essays. I can simply review the important points here. First, the reader software (Adobe Acrobat) can run on any computer. Thus, with PDF, the E-book reader could be a notebook computer. For the college student and the researcher, this means that they would only need one device instead of two. It also means that a person who has a computer only needs the free Acrobat download to access E-books. He does not need another gadget.
For the publisher, unless he has his head in an odoriferous place, he already has the software needed to create PDF documents. He has all of the tools he needs. He does not need to hire E-book experts, whatever they are. In addition, the PDF tools allow a great deal of control over the creation of the document.
I have no idea how all of this will play out. With the big software thugs in the game, it is not at all certain that the public will be well served. For my own part, I can only urge all publishers, large and small, to push for a PDF E-book standard. I suppose a few prayers could not hurt either.
Next time I will get into a discussion of advertising methods.
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