Melissa Bikichky at DePaul University interviewed me recently for a project she’s working on. She asked me about e-books. Here’s what I said.
Q: What’s your take on the importance or place of e-books for your press and the future of reading?
A: To me, the point of e-books is to get a title into as many hands as humanly possible. People with eReaders read a whole lot, and they buy more printed books, too. I don’t think there’s any real chance that e-books are going to run printed books out of town—all of my titles have sold more print copies than digital, most of them substantially so. But I also don’t see the point of withholding titles from those readers who prefer to engage them digitally. Why turn away readers?
The real danger of e-books is their potential—well, their readers’ potential, really—to devalue literature monetarily. Anyone who says that an e-book should be free or nearly free is speaking from a position of profound ignorance regarding what they pay for when they pay for a printed book, especially if they are readers primarily of bestseller-type titles. Once a print run gets over, say, 10,000 copies, a paperback costs almost nothing per copy to produce.
When you pay for a book, you pay for the labor of the writer, editors, designers, and others who worked on that book. You pay for the content. Nobody argues that Adobe CS6 should be free because they’re only paying for a license to use it, not an actual physical product. (Well, some people use that as a justification to steal software/music*/movies/etc., but in the end, those users know what they’re doing is wrong.) What you’re really saying when you say that an e-book should be free or nearly free is that you place no monetary value whatsoever on the labor of writing.
That devaluation is one of the primary social dysfunctions of our culture, asserting, as it does, that people who invent imaginary forms of monetary exchange do work that’s worth 100,000 times as much as those who tell stories. (And the DOJ’s suit against Apple and the big publishers plays right into this idiocy.)
When you look at the bill for a car repair, you don’t argue that labor—a cost for which you take away no tangible product—should be free, do you? Do you tip at restaurants? (If not, you have no business going to restaurants.) What about a haircut? These are all costs for which substantial percentages of the overall price are allocated to labor. Why should the creation of a book—printed or electronic—be any different? Human labor is central to the value of any product participants in a market-driven society exchange for money. E-books are not an exception.
*With music, many have argued, perhaps dubiously, that the artist’s real income comes from touring, and that pirating files promotes that tour, so downloading benefits musicians in the long run. When anybody can give me an example of a debut author charging $75/ticket to attend a reading, maybe we can talk.