We in the literary world like to have something to wring our hands over. We’re worriers by nature, perfectionists, and absent something abstract to fret about, lots of us are in danger of, say, picking scabs or biting fingernails. At present, the thing a whole lot of us seem to be worrying about is the proliferation of the eBook.
I mean, how many essays have you read in the past, say, year, lamenting the prophesied death of books on paper? 10? 12? Any that made an argument beyond nostalgia in favor of actual printed books? Or did they all more or less stick to the party line?
One good argument in favor of print books, particularly paperbacks, is their relative affordability. Sure, eBooks are generally the same price as or cheaper than their printed counterparts. But I know a hell of a lot of people who manage their budget by only buying one roll of paper towels at a time, and a bunch of them read. This is a shitty way to budget, of course, if you ever have enough cash on hand to buy your paper towels by the bale and enough storage space in your apartment to tuck them away. But the fact is, a huge portion of the population is never going to spring for a Kindle or a NOOK or an iPad*. I’m not particularly interested in living in a culture where only people with enough disposable income to purchase cheesily-named electronic toys can afford a good story. So there’s that.
Another is the way in which some presses seem to be using the profitability of eBook, with its minimal production cost, to line their own pockets while failing to line their authors’. This is also a fair point, and probably the premise of an essay like this one from The Millions, which is charming and funny and more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but which also takes as a given the desire to Kindle-proof your book. That all writers wish to do so–or that we should–is a premise verging-on-movement in writerly circles. The essay’s appendix of examples helpfully contextualizes this resistance as non-traditionally narrative, an aesthetic that holds resistance close to its heart. (That’s admiration right there, not critique, btw.)
Meanwhile, I’m not sure I see the point of giving up the chance to reach any reader. As you may remember from my recent math outbreak, it’s entirely possible to make more profit off an eBook than a paperback while still sharing that profit equitably with authors. But once again, we come back to a discussion of an industry that seems bent on adhering to archaic practices to the detriment of the very people who provide the meat in its sandwich, and one that seems to be throwing everything it can at the wall with no sense whatsoever if any of it will work.
Take for example this idea, from that same interview with Algonquin Books Executive Editor Chuck Adams:
“We talked about — we only talked the possibility of starting… because Algonquin has become kind of branded a little bit and people who like Algonquin books…. of trying to start an eBook-only online publishing where we could bring in more experimental books and try to develop writers and find them an audience through virtual books and not have all the expense involved — actually warehousing housing and transit are the greatest expense as we have.”
Adams then continues to explicate on the overhead expenses of publishing.
Let’s please hope they stop at the talking stage. Because creating an eBook ghetto for new authors, whose work is evidently not worth the expense of actual publishing, is just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard. It’s true that presses don’t really develop authors these days–they tend more often to give you one shot and hang you out to dry–so finding new ways of making that possible, practical, would be great. I write here as an editor and publisher. But like most people working at small presses, I’m a writer, too. And hell would freeze over before I would sign an eBook-only deal, a deal wherein the publisher would invest almost nothing–really, almost no funds at all–in support of work they are supposedly supporting in order to produce a product I can happily produce myself, without sharing the income from that product with a publishing company. And if your first book’s audience doesn’t overlap 100% with the technology-haves, well, tough shit, don’t bother writing the next one, because after poor sales nobody will publish it.
The notion that a press should invest less scratch in new or experimental authors than established ones resides in the same mental swamp as the conventional wisdom that says that story collections don’t sell. Note to publishing companies: People paid money for pet rocks. I shop at a grocery store that sells $18 slabs of pink salt. You can sell people anything. I’ll say that again: You can sell people anything. But only if you bother to try.
A week or two ago, I had a great conversation on Facebook with some friends about these issues. We wondered if eBook sales would plateau at some point, once everyone who is inclined to buy an eReader has one, or whether their exponential growth can continue. We wondered what would happen to publishing, and to writing, in either case. Where, dear reader, do you think we’re headed? Do you eRead? (If so, are you ashamed to admit it? Why?) What can we say about the value of printed books, beyond the nostalgic–though undeniably true–love of their smell and texture?
*Could someone at some point please release an eReader with a non-humiliating name? The NOOK e-reader? Really? The Nooky Reader? And it doesn’t begin to approach the awfulness of iPad. You pad what? Your bra? Is this fifth grade, and have the boys been teasing you again?
I agree that marketing “experimental” authors by e-books only is ridiculous. You’re basically marketing to 20% of the book-buying public. How do you reach the book’s target audience that way? (20% of the book-buying public is a current statistic–it will no doubt change in time.)
As for which mode of book-delivery is better: I prefer e-books for reading in bed and reading on airplanes. It’s just physically easier to turn a page, to hold the book, to carry more than one in your purse. But the most compelling reason I like e-books is the impulse purchase: wide selection and instant gratification. I decide at 9:30 p.m. that I want to read X book, and at 9:31 p.m. I’m reading it. (This is probably why, according to surveys, e-book readers are only 20% of the book-buying public but they buy more books–they don’t hear about a book they’d like and then forget to buy it.) Downside for me but not for the publisher: If I really like a book I’ve read electronically and want to teach it, or write about it, I need the print book, so I end up buying both versions. I expect that fact to change as reading devices improve. Right now the note-taking and search function are too unwieldy. But they won’t be for long. Remember the cellphones of 15 years ago?
I have nostalgia for books as objects. But I also give away about 30-40 books a year because I can’t possibly store every book I read. I am also middle-aged and I initially resisted email: not an “early adapter.” The next generation of book readers will have cheaper, better reading devices, and they will have grown up reading on-line. I think e-books are inevitable. I also know, as a writer, that when my book wasn’t available electronically, I was losing readers. People googled my name and wrote to me at my work address saying they only read electronically, and when would my book be available to them.
For now, we need both modes of delivery.
Everyone owns a computer. Everyone owns a cellphone. I don’t think reading devices are prohibitively expensive. They are the price of 5 hardcover books. And prices will come down in years to come.
Here’s something that freaks me out though. Why are the major houses in NY charging $13-$14 for e-books and $14-$15 for paperbacks when we know the production, transport and storage costs make e-books really inexpensive to produce? I guarantee you that the author is not seeing that greedy, gratuitous profit.
On your last point: My understanding so far is that the major NY houses are paying the same royalty rate–10%? 12%–for eBooks as for printed books. So an eBook that sells for Kindle at $14.99 would yield $8.69 for the publisher and $1.80 for the author (at 12%). That’s dirty, no matter how you slice it.
I’m worried about publishers treating eBooks the way they treat a lot of things: Generically. (One example of what I mean is the suggestion bordering on requirement that authors have FB pages, a web site, a blog, and a Twitter account, no matter who they are or what their books’ likely audience looks like.) At present, an eBook audience means middle class readers with disposable income and not much by way of anti-consumerist tendencies. How does that make sense for all possible books?
I recognize that eReaders aren’t that expensive and will get cheaper. But people who live the way I grew up, hand to mouth, will never buy them. (They don’t buy hardcover books, either.) Even if it makes much more sense to buy the eReader and then consume cheaper books to us, there’s a different logic at play in that kind of budget. And I want those people to always have books, too.
Oh, something else, everybody: What is up with the proliferation of YA and kids’ stuff for eReaders? Do lots of kids & teens have them? Are parents buying them on their own, or are kids actually asking for them? This sort of blows my mind, and if it’s the latter, is pretty damn exciting.
I don’t know about younger teens, but I noticed last year, at my second teaching job (a small, private college), an explosion of e-readers in the freshman English classroom, both Kindles and Nooks. No iPads, that I could see, and no Sony E-Readers, etc., and when I asked students about them, they were excited about reading in a way they hadn’t always been before — and glad that some of my texts for class (Winter’s Bone, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, etc.) were available in e-formats.
But I also noted that a higher percentage of those students stopped coming to class and eventually dropped or failed. I note the correlation, but can’t explain any causation. Maybe they had other e-toys that kept them from caring about any of their classes?
I like e-books for all of the reasons Debra names. I’ve only had my iPad for a few weeks, but I have been reading up a storm — not just books, but long-form Internet articles and essays from the present and past, and also comic books, which offers a strangely *more* intimate reading experience than comics on the page, as the e-reader zooms in to specific panels, or parts of panels, by design, if the consumer so chooses. While I’ll never abandon print books and will always want my own books to be available on the page, I can’t help but embrace some of these exciting new options. But I, too, fear an e-ghetto emerging. POD technology can provide a balance, though, so that print is still affordable for publishers, even if it means they make less money per book than if they did offset printing.
And, yes, publishers who charge more than $9.99 for an e-book are just seeing what they can get away with. It’s not smart business, in the long run, and I sure hope that the price point doesn’t settle where some of the big publishers want it to — even Amazon realizes you have to first build it [making the easy, seamless process of reading and buying e-books the new normal] so they [readers] will come, which is why Amazon more or less takes a loss on a lot of their Kindle-related business moves — for now. Or maybe they’re moving out of that mode now that so many of us have e-readers, 30 million e-readers in America alone.
I do take issue with the “everyone has computers and cell phones” statement–or rather while that may *mostly* true in the States, in other parts of the world this is not the case. Ereaders give chances to increase global readership but I still believe the good old paperback should be available in as many places as possible. In poorer societies these paperbacks are passed around from one person to another because they are relatively expensive for them. Also, backpackers are forever leaving their paperbacks behind in hostels for another person to pick up and read–this is one way books might travel that ereaders can’t.
That said I do have a Kindle and use it a lot when I’m traveling or when I it’s more convenient. When I’m writing about or teaching books I still need the hard copy–my Kindle is last year’s version and doesn’t have page numbers, which is necessary in both situations.