I don’t believe the e-book “conspiracy theorists” who think publishers don’t care about readers at all. It’s silly to think that, because the readers are the ones who eventually buy both their print and e-books. There’s not some kind of secret conspiracy going on to “kill” e-books in order to protect paper books (and the paper book supply chain) for as long as possible.

On the other hand, as PNH says, publishers are still trying to develop the skill sets necessary to interact with readers as customers well, which has led to enough missteps and sour notes to give those conspiracy theorists plenty of material for their haywire mental pattern-matching algorithms to attribute to malice instead of incompetence.

For example, in early February 2010 as the Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle was going on, when consumers were at their most concerned and uncertain over the future of e-books, Macmillan President John Sargent posted an announcement on the matter aimed at “Macmillan Authors and Illustrators”, calling Amazon “a valuable customer for a long time,” with not a word to concerned consumers for almost a whole month afterward until he made a post on the matter to his blog. This caused a number of those concerned and uncertain consumers to see red, as it seemed rather clear who Macmillan cared about and it wasn’t them.

So yes, I believe publishers do care about readers, but they haven’t been doing the best job of showing it. But if they keep trying, sooner or later they’ll do better.

I will now have to wait until Amazon stocks all publishers again before I spend it.

Not that anything Amazon do would make me purchase a Scalzi book… I won’t be doing that again (well not until a new one is published anyway)

Doug

And what the Macmillan CEO is saying is not that his industry is stagnant but that it is not going to grow in that way, that if you do new ways, it’s not going to magically quadruple the demand for books. Book publishing is a boutique operation with mainly one product, no advertising revenue, that will continue to appeal to a minority of the populace. He’s saying that e-books are not a panacea, and they’re not. They are a great opportunity that will make a percentage of the population — the privileged percentage — more aware of books and will sometimes buy them, but they aren’t going to change the way that people buy books.

The conversations in the various threads have been interesting because not only were people complaining that they think e-books are cheap to produce — an error I already knew about — but I’ve learned about all sorts of other weird beliefs, (which I’m not saying you espouse Kevin,) such as:

That book publishing is dying. This one seems caused by the staff layoffs which happen during recessions, and Borders’ mismanagement leading to financial difficulty, but what’s happening now is that book publishing continues to have a slow rate of growth, has increased its youth market (future readers) by incredible leaps in the last decade, and the wholesale vendor market — which shrunk in the 1990′s and oughts — is now expanding again. And Apple and Sony and all these companies like us and want to help publishing sell things. They never liked us before.

That big publishers and big book retailers care nothing about books and only about making money. (Oh, if only.)

That big publishers and their authors have an adversarial relationship and that big publishers beat up authors and cheat them of their money and dare the authors to say a word. (Um, no.)

That big publishers will collapse and become smaller publishers (this seems to be confusion that publishers are like banks or possibly influenced by spiel from tech business gurus who are ironically using it to sell their books.) Oh, and that small publishers are sweet and wise people who give authors unicorns.

That because big publishers hire freelance copyeditors as contract employees so that they don’t have to pay them health benefits, that this somehow means publishers don’t do anything. (Apparently, the employees play ping-pong all day while counting all that money they make.)

That the solution to every issue in publishing is for authors to perform the work of the hundreds of people involved in producing and selling print and e-books or spend thousands hiring others to do it for them, then selling the books individually like one big craft fair, and that this will magically be efficient and successful. (This again may be coming from taking too seriously tech business gurus who again ironically are trying to sell books to the tech people, not authors, possibly some published by Macmillan.)

In reality, publishing will remain a narrow margin, low growth, highly visible boutique industry of varying efficiency and deep connections to schools and Hollywood, with large publishers, medium ones, and small ones. There was a flourishing self-publishing sector before the existence of the Internet, and there will continue to be one using both print and the tools of the Internet. Some self-publishers will sell lots of books and get offered reprint deals by publishers, which they may or may not take. Others will sell a few hundred copies, just like someone doing a small jewelry craft business. Print will not die. E-books will grow rapidly. Prices will vary, but will not be dirt cheap, and there will be lots of free stuff for promotion.

And publishers will work out and constantly adjust their operations with vendors, with different strategies used for different types of vendors — what is used with Amazon for e-books will not be what is used with Amazon for print books and with Barnes & Noble for brick and mortar stores. Some of it will work and some of it will not and require retrenching.

The agency model is used extensively in retail, including for electronic equipment. It does not render vendors helpless and many of Amazon’s other suppliers use it. If it’s not working for vendors and sales fall off because of it, they’ll change it, just as they’ve done with other systems before. You, the customer, were going to have to pay more for some e-books as soon as the market expanded, at least when they first came out, and less for other e-books as that expansion increased the number of titles available. So those $20, $30 e-books will be mostly gone. And Amazon, who was only doing the $9.99 dance on some e-books as a promotion, will now have new releases at a slightly higher price, which was again going to happen anyway. What Macmillan maybe gets from the agency model is not having to deal with the demands on wholesale prices of hundreds of different vendors, which ran up the price in many places, and it can drop the price below $10 as needed.

The idea that Macmillan is never going to do this is unlikely, especially as they’ve been laying out the whole sliding price scale in the media. Book publishing has never been able to seriously overinflate or undercut its prices because of how people buy books, narrow margins, etc. They know that people will only pay so much for books at certain times, and they can’t afford the losses of underselling like some other industries — music, Hollywood, electronics, Internet, etc. E-books were expensive because it was a tiny market outside of publishers’ usual operations that were very expensive to produce and had no decent consumer infrastructure. Now we’re getting more infrastructure, publishers and electronic vendors with platforms are finding ways to make production easier and cheaper, rights issues are being worked out, etc. It’s all very normal.

I’m glad to hear that Amazon got the titles back up. I suspect future developments in e-books will be less dramatic.

Just to provide full disclosure — I’ve been an Amazon customer since the time when they sent Christmas presents to all of their customers (hey, kids, there was a time when people thought the internet grew money like candy-trees!). I own a first-generation Kindle, but I’m not that thrilled with it. Honestly, I liked the Kindle app on the iPhone better (when I still used an iPhone).

So, anyway, I have to say that I come down on the “a pox on both your houses” side. Which sucks, because it’s boring. But seriously, these are giant corporate entities battling for things that don’t matter to us. And by “us”, I mean readers — despite some readers’ conspiracy theories, most of us here are not, in fact, authors…. Anyway, it’s not like Hotlzbrinck cares about books. They want to make money.

I realize that observing that corporations exist to make money is neither an insightful or important observation, but it is true. It’s not bad, either — ideally, that profit-seeking desire will lead them to publish books that we readers want to drain for all their succulent word…ness. You know what I mean.

Also, of course, I recognize that many of the people who are involved with publishing your books, whether they are you, your agents, your publisher (by which I mean Tor specifically, in this context), and even Macmillan or Holtzbrinck probably love books and want fluffy bunnies to sing them to sleep. Just because the corporate imperative is for maximum profit, doesn’t mean that individuals within the machine aren’t acting (at least partly) out of love.

I guess this brings me to “I Hate Your Arguments About Ebooks” (with apologies to, eh, I don’t know, some guy) — I’m going to limit myself to two here, but the flat out lies and flim-flam (yeah, I said it — flim-flam) I’ve seen on comment threads here and on other places just infuriate me.

First (and I know you’ve tilted at this particular windmill yourself, Scalzi, but damn! It’s tenacious) for #deity’s sake, it takes more than an author to make a book! I’m not going to go into why that is, but please read Cat Valente’s thoughts on the matter — she speaks sense, in more detail than our host has.

Second, please stop saying that the Kindle is a “closed” platform — it supports several open formats — including the ultimate one “.TXT” (for English language books at least — although it supports several other formats that support other languages). The Kindle as a device is not tied to Amazon’s business decisions. Yes, they’ve provided the greased path with their “Whispernet” (which is brilliant, by the way), but seriously, people! Getting other content onto it is no harder than syncing your fucking iPod!

Whew. Okay, that felt good. I do have other thoughts, but now that I’ve shoved this lovely knife into my spleen and let it vent, I suppose I’ll just go away now.

@coolstar #92

Right now, EVERYONE is pretty much guessing, and as is typical in data poor situations, EVERYONE thinks they have a better grasp on reality so EVERYONE is pretty much being snitty toward those that disagree with them.

Haha! I got a kick out of that; you’ve just described about half of the contentions I’ve seen on the internet.

Internet hell; coolstar has just described what passes for political discourse in America today. ;-)

“Wired’s proposal, which you were paraphrasing, is that Macmillan should come up with new ways to sell books, like a tech company, instead of dealing with technological issues in the current industry. Wired was proposing Macmillan be a creative tech company coming up with new tech solutions. Macmillan’s CEO was saying that this wasn’t a cost effective approach for them. So yeah, it is relevant.”

I don’t see how you get that from the excerpt that I posted. If you have a different quote, then I would like to see it, but from the stuff I read, the people at Wired were asking why Macmillan and publishers in general were reluctant to use the opportunities ebooks created in new ways to grow the business. I don’t see how you equate that to becoming a tech company. Some tech company already created the solutions: he/she/they just need to adopt and adjust to them.

And in response, the head of Macmillan said this:
“As the Internet grows, as all the other types of entertainment grow, it’s hard to imagine sitting here how we are going to convince everybody in this room to spend an extra six hours every week to consume another book. So in a way, if you look at the overall demand for books, it’s pretty hard to make that grow.”

That seems a pretty clear indication that he thinks books are not a growth industry. There was little hedging about how to make it grow faster than it currently is or any of the other “industry understood” things you said. That sounds very much to me like a man who doesn’t think he can grow his market under pretty much any circumstances.

All of which, by the way, is secondary to my point. You seem to think that I am arguing that the publishing industry must come up with its own technological solutions. I am not, and I don’t think that the Wired people were either. I am saying that Macmillan has a poor history of variable pricing on ebooks and that the head of Macmillan talks like a na who thinks he is in a stagnant industry. Combining those too facts, and it seems as if the agency model is pretty much nothing more than an attempt to soak the existing market for everything they can while it lasts AND, more importantly, to prevent retailers from coming up with business models that are outside the publishers control. It is that last that I have a problem with as a consumer and a reader.

A lot of people seem to think that it is an unalloyed good that Macmillan is moving to an agency model and allow the other big publishers to come along. I disagree because I think that such a model is a larger danger to the reading public.

At the end of the day I don’t really care whose behavior was putatively worse. In fact, I have already stated, multiple times, that Amazon;s behavior since the weekend has been unacceptable. But in the long term, Amazon and Macmillan are both corporations and both can and will continue to take advantage of their relative economic positions to screw authors and readers out of as much money as possible. My question now is which of the business models does the most to ensure books survive and grow. And I don’t think it is Macmillan’s.

The real issue, as John has defined it in his post – cause after all, he gets to set the agenda on his blog – and the real issue for me, too, is Amazon holding Macmillan, and even its print books which have nothing to do with this, and its innocent authors and customers too, hostage in favor of its pricing position. That’s not leverage, that’s petulance.

John, you suggested that we should go out of our way to support Macmillan authors from other retailers during this crisis. Fine, but it occurs to me that I had no idea what Macmillan’s imprints are. I mean, I’d known that Tor had something to do with St. Martin’s, but when this crisis started it was complete news to me that either of them was owned by Macmillan. I don’t keep track of these high-level corporate mergers. So I rooted around a bit on Macmillan’s website and here’s the list of Macmillan imprints if anyone wants it handy.

So to me part of the issue is either get the ebook on release date for more or wait and get it for less. It looks like Macmillan wants to have a simultaneous release with a higher price point and then would likely drop the price (which is generally the same model for most physical books — you pay more to get the book earlier).

Which raises the question – for everyone who is adamant that the price of an ebook not rise higher than $9.99, are you willing to wait months after the physical book release to pay that price on a delayed ebook release? And if you are willing to wait, what’s the difference if a publisher wants to charge $15 for the ebook initially and then drops it?