John August

Books

Readers as customers

Books

Ken Auletta looks at how writers and publishers are trying to figure out their roles in the age of [Kindles and iPads](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta#ixzz0mKike1Kn):

> Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing.

Is Amazon a bookstore or a publisher? A partner or competitor? Adding Google and Apple to the equation only makes it [more complicated](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/on-amazon-apple-and-dick-moves). But it’s a mistake to confuse uncertainty with doom.

> Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.

Auletta’s lengthy [New Yorker article](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta#ixzz0mKike1Kn) is worth a read.

(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)

The Variant, free this weekend

Books, Projects, The Variant

On Monday, I’ll be publishing a brand new short story.

As with last May’s [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant), I used an ad hoc collection of Twitter followers as a focus group. So if a few people claim to have read it, they might be telling the truth.

But they haven’t seen the cover art. Here’s an ambiguous detail from it: cover detail

In the meantime, I want to offer up The Variant for anyone who might have missed it. For this weekend only, you can [download the .pdf free](http://ja-vincent.s3.amazonaws.com/variant.pdf).

Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales

Books, Film Industry, The Variant

Cory Doctorow [points to a BYU study](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/04/free-ebooks-correlat.html) that shows releasing a free ebook version may boost sales of the printed edition.

You’d love to see a bigger sample, and correlation does not imply causation. But to me, it suggests that increased sampling usually generates more sales than it costs.

Advance screenings of movies work the same way. When a studio expects good word of mouth, they are often willing to give up a day’s box office ((When you buy a ticket for a sneak preview of The Proposal, it’s actually counted towards another film, generally one from the same studio currently playing at that theater.)) in order to get more people talking about their movie. They’ll also conduct word-of-mouth screenings tailored to specific audiences. “Free” and “exclusive” are big motivators.

(thanks Howard Rodman)

How much should ebooks cost?

Books, Follow Up, The Variant

The [NY Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) and [Gizmodo](http://gizmodo.com/5482774/how-much-it-actually-costs-to-publish-an-ebook-vs-a-real-book) are attempting to run the math on how much to charge for books purchased on the Kindle and iPad.

Amazon prices Kindle books at $9.99, while Apple will apparently let prices float higher on iPad books, with $12.99 being a frequently-quoted number.

With data drawn from publishing sources, these articles break down costs and profits. Poorly. They don’t differentiate between one-time costs (designing cover artwork) and variable costs (printing each additional copy). And how much of the marketing budget would be identical with or without the ebook version?

The number that sticks out most is the bookseller’s take. A 50% cut makes sense when dealing with a physical book sold through a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A 30% cut is crazy when dealing with atoms pushed out through a virtual retailer. As a reference, I sell pdf and ePub versions of [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant) and only give up 11 cents on the dollar. ((But I give up 65 cents of each dollar earned through the Kindle version, which sells much better.))

Amazon makes the Kindle to sell books; Apple makes the iPad to sell iPads — selling books is sort of gravy. That gives Apple more price flexibility, and should hopefully avoid absurd situations where the digital version costs much more than the paperback. ((I’m not ignoring the Nook or the Sony readers, but they’re not steering the ship.))

The publishing industry wants to keep prices up so they can make money. Can’t blame them for that. But you know something’s amiss when Anne Rice is the [voice of reason](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?pagewanted=2&partner=rss&emc=rss):

> The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.

One last point: How soon can we agree to spell ebooks with a lowercase e, and no hyphen?

The Times likes the hyphen, while Gizmodo feels the need to capitalize. I’d suggest that email is the best antecedent. That’s a term that has largely swallowed its hyphen, probably due to its verbification. Can we embrace the future and simply lose the hyphen now?

(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)