DEATH OF THE E-BOOK (1,400 words) https://facebook/groups/writingnovels Don’t be surprised if history reveals the e-book to be a kind of quirk of the early 21st Century. I’m not saying e-books are going away. I’m just saying that there are a lot of problems with e-books, and these problems won’t ever go away. For the reasons below, I think e-books will eventually have the same relevancy as audiobooks. Pirating, for one. A paper book has a natural defense against pirating. You have to re-type it. Then you have to re-print it. Once an e-book is published without DRM, a billion copies can be made in a matter of minutes. Authors and publishers don’t like that. Authors who don’t sell any books like it, because they believe it increases their readership and that those thieves will eventually buy their books. But that’s amateur thinking. People who sell books don’t want people stealing their books. Another is value. E-books have no value. They are not an asset, even though a reader pays money for them. They often pay the same amount they would pay for the paperback, and yet the one thing a reader wants, if they like a book, is to own the book. You can’t own an e-book. It doesn’t even exist the way material things normally exist. They are never out of print. Authors don’t like that, if they are published by a third party; it means the publishing rights never revert back to them. That means the publisher has the rights to the e-book forever, or until the end of the copyright (author’s life +70 years). It’s very difficult for reviewers to review them, because the reviewer’s audience may like to read “books” as most people do. Not e-books, which are still in the minority. If you review an e-book, unless it also comes in paperback, only people with the right kind of e-reader can read them. So if you spend time and space to review them, it’s a review that only matters to a small amount of people. It is true; e-books can be distributed everywhere around the world, but only to those with the right reading device--unless they want to read a book on their phone. And though that is possible with the Kindle app, no one really likes to do that. E-books are notorious for poor quality. If they aren’t out-and-out slush pile stories, they have horrible editing, and if even if they don’t, they are often poorly formatted as an e-book, especially books that are sold outside of Amazon’s KDP system (Kobo, Smashwords, Nook, etc.). The good quality e-books usually come from traditional publishers who also publish the hardback and paperback versions of the book. The fight now is to price them equally, or to eventually make the e-book more expensive, the way the audiobook is more expensive. When that happens, only poor quality e-books will be cheap, and no one reads those anyway. E-books are still terrible as textbooks or any kind of book that is used as reference material, mainly because you can’t flip through the pages. They are terrible as picture books and useless for children’s books. Think about the size of a coffee table art book. Think about the size of a college textbook. No one in their right mind is going to carry around a comparable e-reader with that size of a screen. Because they have no real asset value, there is nothing to stop the depression of their price. E-books, according to the laws of economics must eventually become free. And this is already happening. Kindle Unlimited has gone to free e-books and uses creative ways to get revenue like subscription fees in order to pay authors and make a profit. The only way to combat this natural deflation is to artificially jack up the price, and if publishers are going to do that, they might as well make the e-book more expensive than the paperback or hardback and save their livelihoods. Traditional publishers will disappear if e-books dominate the market place, but traditional publishers are what maintain the quality standards of literature. Even now, independent authors are motivated to make quality e-books based on the standards that still exist from the traditional publishing influence. However, traditional publishers can’t keep their doors open selling e-books for $0.99. An e-book has to have a functioning e-reader. A book requires only a pair of eyes. As I write this article, once again I’m waiting for my Kindle reader to charge, because I left it on with the 3G turned on. I would do anything to have bought the book today when I was in Walmart (John Grisham’s “Grey Mountain”). A book can be easily given as a gift; e-books cannot. A book can be signed by the author, an e-book cannot. A book is remembered whenever it is seen on a shelf; an e-book is never visible unless someone specifically looks for it on an e-reader. This is why seven years have passed since the introduction of the Kindle Reader and the catalog of Kindle books on Amazon, and yet the book industry is barely phased. Two years ago, at work, I saw two other people besides me reading on e-readers. Today, those same two read books. I’m the only one at my work left reading on a Kindle. The next book I buy, after John Grisham’s will probably be a regular book. I may sample the e-book, but if I like it, I’ll probably order the paperback or hardback. And every author knows, for all the reasons above, that if they publish a book, and it is only available as an e-book, they really haven’t published. E-book only seems artificial, like eating meat grown in a laboratory. It’s not the full publication of a work. A paper book is a paper book. An e-book is an e-book. An audiobook is an audiobook. They really can’t replace one another. When Kindle came out, it seemed only logical that e-books would dominate the literary marketplace. Now it doesn’t seem that way. Consumers may demand cheaper prices for e-books, but that really doesn’t matter. Consumers demand cheaper beef, bread, and milk as well, but they don’t get it. Publishers are not going to put themselves out of business chasing e-books down the deflationary path they must travel. What will happen is this: Traditional publishers will publish books, and they will sell the e-book as a more expensive add-on, like the audiobook. Or, e-books will begin to decline as a fad as fewer and fewer people purchase e-readers (There will never be a critical mass of readers using their phone as a book.). If this happens, it will cause an uptick in hardback and paperback sales, and this will drive the e-book into the specialty market just like audiobooks. Poor quality authors will continue to create e-books and charge low prices for them, but the low price will signal readers that the book is a poor quality book. Even before Kindle came along, you could get e-books and read them on the Sony Reader, but they were formatted poorly so they never really caught on. Amazon could force e-books into prominence as they did when they launched Kindle, but they have tried to do this and have lost. Amazon recently negotiated a new contract with Simon and Schuster, and they backed off their insistence that e-books sell for $9.99 or less. Even if they are allowed to price the books lower than that and pay the publisher based on the publisher’s more expensive price point, that business model based on a loss to Amazon will force Amazon to cease that mode of operation. E-books simply don’t exist enough to survive: They are only rented, never owned. They have no material substance; they are only magnetic potentials in a computer’s memory. They must have operating e-readers to be read, or they disappear entirely. They deflate in price if not artificially propped up. They can’t be handled, given, or signed. And readers are starting to feel this. The fad and promise of e-books is fading. In fact hardbacks are showing an increase in sales as e-books are showing a decrease. forbes/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/11/19/hardcover-sales-growth-outpacing-ebooks-in-2013/ This should have never happened. Even now, e-books only account for 30% of sales of books. forbes/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/10/amazon-vs-book-publishers-by-the-numbers/ They should have taken over by now, just like CD’s very quickly wiped out vinyl records, but they didn’t. The drawbacks to e-books are just too great to overcome paper books.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 17:41:02 +0000
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