dear publishing industry

[dr_memory]

Today it finally happened: on my way out of the house this morning, I realized that I’d just finished the last book I was reading, and it was therefore time to pop the next one off the to-read stack.  The next one being a luscious-looking hardcover volume.  I looked at it, looked at my backpack, felt my shoulders a bit, took a deep breath…

…and

Comments

[cos]

Publishers aren't going to save bookstores. Bookstores can save themselves only through becoming something other than merely a place people go to find and buy books, because people can find and buy books so much more conveniently without going to the store in person - even if publishers do all the right things and people keep wanting to buy printed books. Bookstores will do other things

[huaman]

As far as keeping a local business from closing down, the answer to that is pretty straightforward regardless of what the business is. People have to spend money there. It's easy to cite obstacles to doing so; I would contend that if an individual does not in fact spend his or her money at a given business, he or she does not actually value its existence as highly as all that.

[cos]

The relationship is indirect enough that people make a lot of decisions that don't quite line up with how much they actually value things. In theory they wouldn't do that, if the feedback were more direct, but that's a complicated problem.

I know that part of the reason I usually buy books online from Powells and Harvard (rather than Amazon or B&N) is because I like the physical stores and want them to stay, but that takes conscious thought and is a deliberate habit I developed for a reason after some consideration. I have no faith that enough people will take enough thought to reflect what they value comprehensively; I'm sure I miss on many other things I haven't considered enough.

[huaman]

So if you lack that faith, what do you think is gonna be the long-term result? "Now all restaurants are Taco Bell?" Or something else?

[huaman]

Interesting stats:

http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm

It's odd

[drwex]

that you'd re-buy a book you already own under terms that basically mean you don't own it, can't do with it as you please, and that give much less money to the author than the printed form.

Yet clearly you do so, and accept these handcuffs as part of the price of the convenient carry factor. Other than the author getting screwed as a result of this situation I see no reason for publishers to do anything about it.

And really, authors are cheap - there are always more of them. The few whom you want to keep publishing can be bought off for far fewer dollars than changing a business model and distribution chain would require.

So what, pray tell, is the incentive for publishers here? You give them extra money for less stuff and they should be unhappy... why?

Re: It's odd

[huaman]

I think the suggestion he's making is that he'd cease to purchase print for a variety of products, and that lack of print sales would mean lost revenue for the publisher, but I don't think that's an accurate assumption. Certainly replacing a print copy with a digital copy improves the publisher's margin, assuming a similar price for the content

Re: It's odd

[vvalkyri]

The bit I was seeing was that it's much nicer to have the real book, but there is an added helpfulness to making it sometimes portable.

Re: It's odd

[awfief]

++ this is what I got out of the original post, too.

I'd add my own wish -- I'd buy stuff online (already do) and if I could then buy a print copy with a discount, that'd be great. That way I'd only own books I really would read over and over.

[kest]

A cd? How about some kind of scratch off code, good for a limited amount of downloads? Should be a no brainer.

[illspoken]

I don't think this discussion can be fruitful without at least some of what's discussed in here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html

Given what he says in there about the lion's share of the profit coming from hardback sales at the ever-eye-bulging-increasing prices, the real tension becomes "why are you releasing the electronic version at slightly below the paperback price on the same day and date as the hardback?" The "sensible" adaptation to that becomes "sell the hardback version until you think you've squeezed the all of the money possible out of the early adopters, and then release the paperback & electronic editions simultaneously".

(I do hate being put in the position of feeling that the best direct way to supporting the authors I particularly like means I should be saddled with forever moving a heavier and larger physical copy than I would rather buy.)

[huaman]

The gotcha there is that Charlie's analysis focuses -- as he says -- on one subsector of publishing, and the workflow he describes is one of a zillion workflows (though many things are pretty common across a lot of them). Not all books fit the hardback-then-MMPB model, even within a press or imprint's offerings