We are all used to the comparison of the book trade and its approach to e-books with the music and video industry - ie hiding the head in the sand, ostrich-like, and vainly hoping it will all go away, only to raise the head, shake the sand out of the eyes, and see the pirates swarming over the beach with the treasure. Unless publishers get their act together, we hear, it will all be gone to piracy and the publishing industry will be bankrupt, derelict, a dinosaur, etc.
Yes, publishers need to work out what they are going to do about electronic distribution (and theft) of content. Yes, more people are buying e-books in one form or another - but cheap iPhone and Touch apps are going to stamp all over the expensive Kindle/Sony/etc model (book apps are already outselling games on the iPlatforms). Yes, books are pirated (often from the pdfs the publishers send to printers in India and China) and distibuted for free.
But books are NOT like videos and music. Why has no-one noticed? An mp3 or other audio file is a natural evolution of an LP, an audio tape and a CD. Think Pokemon - you get a basic level little monster and if it is successful it evolves into something more powerful in a Great Leap Forward. Films, too - from video tape to DVD to mpeg and other video formats on computer. But books? No. The difference is that you could never read a record, a CD, a video tape or a DVD without a piece of equipment. You can't hold a DVD up to the light and watch the movie. So if a better technology comes along, the cruddier technology will fail - of course. But a book you can read without any technology, and an e-book is an alternative rather than a replacement. The bicycle didn't replace walking; cars didn't replace bicycles, though the market share changes as new options are added.
e-books are an indulgence for the tech-savvy, money-rich, 1st world, social elite. If publishers neglect paper books while pursuing the illusory moneypot of e-books many, many readers will be disadvantaged and some people - those who most desperately need books - will be denied them. A library with 20 computers each with 2 million e-books can serve 20 readers at a time; a library with 20,000 books can serve 20,000 readers at once. A book doesn't turn off because it's run out of electricity; it's format doesn't become unreadable; you can only lose your whole library at home if you have a fire - you can't leave it on a train.
Make e-books, but give them away free with paper books - the format has no value, and if you are producing a paper book, producing a basic e-book is free - it's a by-product like weetabix or marmite (you can make it by sweeping up the spare electrons from the production process).
People will buy books if they are available and nicely produced. Books were always borrowed for free from libraries (and friends) and yet still people bought them. People like to have the physical object because of things they can do with it that they can't do with an e-book (like show it off on the shelf, smell the paper, enjoy the binding, flick through it to remind themselves of what it's like...)
Books aren't going away unless publishers give up on them, and even then there will be small presses and (God help us) self-published books. Because you could never do those things with a CD or LP or video (except, note, with the printed inserts) the change for the consumer from black vinyl to a bunch of electrons was insignificant. But an e-book does not replace all the functionality of a paper book so individual consumers will choose the format they prefer. Interestingly, it is the celebrity pulp novels that people are least likely to want in paper format. There is no pride or pleasure to be had in owning a Dan Brown paperback, surely? So the very books publishers are choosing to print are the very books that eventually - if they are right about the expansion of e-books - will be least well suited to that format. Hollow laugh.
Sorry, folks, I've not been blogging because things have been going wrong in a big way for more than a month. But I will be back. And in the meantime, I've blogged (about disasters) at ABBA.
How much should you be paid for an e-book? As with so many things - that depends. There is no concensus so far. There are two very different situations in which you may be negotiating e-book royalties.If a book is produced only as an e-book and never on mashed-up dead trees, there are certain costs that will never arise. These are the costs relating to printing, shipping and warehousing books - and then, on a bad day, pulping remainders back into mashed-up trees. (There is no need to pulp the electrons if they don't sell the e-books. Indeed, pulping electrons would cause a cataclysmic disaster, so let's not suggest it.) But all the other costs still exist, at least if the book is done properly. The costs of commissioning, editing, design, layout, and producing the final files are the same (though design may be lower, with a drab page design and no glossy cover). If the e-book sells for a substantially lower price than a paper book, the publisher may offer exactly the same percentage royalty as for a paper book. This might seem unfair, but it's possible that the maths are correct. A paperback produced in a large print run may have a printing cost of only a 25p or so; if the e-book sells for around two thirds or half the price of a paper book, the publisher is reducing their risk but not their costs.If a book is produced as a paper book and then also as an e-book, the situation is rather different. The publisher is aiming to break even (at least) on the paper sales, so any e-book sales are a bonus that cost next-to-nothing to generate. (To convert from a print-ready file to an e-book format is the work of minutes, and even with checking and so on it's only a few hours). If the publisher is offering you the same royalty for print and e-book in this case, you're being cheated. The Society of Authors recommends asking for a royalty in the region of 40%. If a book is in print anyway, it is entirely reasonable for the profits from the e-book to be shared pretty much equally between publisher and author as neither is doing any substantial work to sell the e-book, and neither is taking any extra risk.Many publishers are sneaking low-royalty clauses into contracts while authors aren't looking. You may think that your book won't become an e-book - but it may do, or it may be used in some other electronic format which your publisher hasn't even thought of yet. You need to keep electronic rights, say explicitly in the contract that they are to be separately negotiated or, at the very least, licence these rights for a short period with a review after 18 months or so. Things are moving quickly - the deal that looks OK now might look atrocious in 12 months' time. And you might even want to produce your own e-book... but that's an entirely different post for another day.
How often do you crop up on the web? How many times do your books crop up? Unless you search for yourself on Google every day - and if you do that, it's time to get a life - you probably don't know. Google Alerts can do the checking for you. Register, enter the term you want to search for - your name, the title of one of your books, the name of your main character - and pick 'comprehensive' as the search method and Google will email you each time your chosen phrase is found in new pages going online.How useful it is depends on your name/book title. If you're called Gordon Brown, you might as well forget it, as wading through all the references to Gordon Brown to find one that relates to you, the real Gordon Brown, will take up so much of your time you won't be a writer any more.Why do this? Vanity? 'Oooh, look at me, look at me, I'm on Google'? No, though you could do it for that reason. It's a good way of keeping track of reviews of your books and, increasingly, pirated uploads. That is, electronic copies of your books posted without your permission (or your publisher's) permission, usually for people to download for free. You can then decide whether to issue a DCMA take-down notice (more on that another day) or just glory in how popular your book is when it's free. Either way, it's good to know. Knowledge is power. And knowledge is also smug-juice.
