Ebooks

A grad student at U of Tennessee is conducting a survey about the viability of ebook tech for people in their 50's.

He named it Kindle Questionnaire, which I think is annoying, but I still encourage ebook readers in their 50's to go fill out the survey. I'll see if I can get my husband to go through it.

I originally wrote this for Shane Jiraiya Cumming's blog a month ago, during his Grand Conversation about ebooks; it was posted there a month ago. The conversation is fascinating series with input from many authors and publishers, and I encourage people to go read it. (And try out his books; he's got a couple of freebies and a set of very reasonably priced ebooks at Smashwords.) This essay was intended to be "a blog post;" Shane wound up posting it in 3 parts because blog posts shouldn't be 4500+ words long. But since this is DW that allows *cough* 50k word fanfics in a single post, I'm posting it all together here.

( Part 1: Customers in potentia )

( Part 2: Sell something worth buying. )

( Part 3: Make them pay. )

Nifty article at Mobile Opportunity blog: The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. His five points about why they failed, in brief:

1. Not enough ebooks.
2. Ebooks too expensive.
3. The hardware form factor was wrong.
4. Periodical problems.
5. Poor marketing.

In my opinion, 2 & 4 are still serious problems; 3 & 5 are nuisance slowdown factors. #1 has mostly been fixed--not that everything's available as an ebook, but there's *plenty* of ebook content--some of which smacks into 3: it's nearly impossible to read a detailed tech manual with graphs on an iPod's screen.

( Thinky thoughts go behind a cut tag. )

Background: Amazon has been clashing with big-name publishers for a while now, over its $10 bestseller prices. Publishers are unhappy because they don't want the public thinking new bestsellers should only cost $10. (They are not, it should be noted, losing money--Amazon pays them the full value, and takes a loss on those sales.)

So. Recently, Macmillan (who owns Tor books) apparently insisted they put bestsellers up to $15. Not necessarily all of them; just that they have a max cost of $15, not $10, for bestsellers. In response, Amazon pulled Macmillan books from its virtual shelves. Among the drama-bits involved is the factoid that Macmillan is partnering with Apple to be involved in something iPad-ish; details are, of course, unknown, so speculation is intense.

Details are blurry and ranty at Scalzi's Whatever, BoingBoing, The NY Times, Mobileread, VentureBeat and several individual LJ's. Comments at the more bloggish spaces include a lot of standard clichés and confusion about ebooks. (Bits about whether ebooks are, or are not, "worth" more than $10. Misconceptions about DRM, and polite corrections thereof. General bitching about Amazon. General bitching about the publishing industry. Anti-piracy ranting. Pro-torrenting ranting. "Authors deserve to get paid for their hard work!" ranting.)

I am *so* not up to entering this debate and playing Ebook 101 Informer at the same time.

Most of me is cheering about this. Not about the authors getting screwed out of sales because the companies who publish them are in a fight with the company that owns the store that sells their work; that part sucks. But only through this kind of megacorp posturing (really, could someone write the Macmillan/Amazon hatesex slash already?) are we going to get the kind of *change* that will let consumers & creators find ways of connecting that make both groups happy. Right now, the corps are getting in the way, because they're trying to use business models that no longer work. Their marketing departments are panicking, trying to figure out how to force the public and the authors to continue to use those models, despite obvious options that work better for everyone... except for stockholders in the megacorps.

Let Amazon & Macmillan bash each other to little *shreds*--a plague on both your houses!--and let a dozen small digital publishing-sales houses appear in their wake, ready to sort slushpiles, edit writing, and promote new books. Let authors start insisting on keeping their ebook rights so they can sell those to the company best able to exploit that market, just like they do with their foreign sales rights. Let readers learn to shop at a dozen stores because shopping at Fictionwise, Baen, Freya's Bower, and Smashwords is *four mouse clicks*, not four drives-to-store, find-parking-places, pack-purchases-in-back-seats. There are plenty of ebook stores other than Amazon... let us find them, browse them, and use our dollars to let them know which of them are doing it right.