Bad Electronic Publishing Ideas

Here is an essay written by CEO Curt Matthews of IPG (CCC PUblishing's distributor) that will run in a future Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) newsletter that may be of interest.

Four Really Bad Electronic Publishing Ideas that Are Finally Going Away

Information Wants to Be Free

Not being a person, information cannot want anything at all. Consumers would like valuable things to be free, but they have not been and will never be. The best sources for business information, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, now charge online readers a fee, and the New York Times has announced that it will soon join them. Will making a book available for nothing somehow sell more copies because more potential customers will find out about it? This is the argument made by people who want your content for nothing so they can make money by surrounding it with advertising.

An E-book Is a New Thing Under the Sun Because It Is Electronic

No, an e-book is just another edition of a book like the cloth version, or the trade paperback, or the mass market edition. A book is essentially a collection of words, and perhaps images, of a certain length, put together by an author or authors who have spent a great deal of time trying to tell a compelling story or make a compelling argument, and enhanced by a publisher through editorial attention and interior and exterior design. It is about content, not a delivery mechanism or method. Is an e-book like a movie made from a book? No. Is it like a video game made from a book? No. It is a book.

E-book Rights to a Work Remain with the Author Unless the Agreement Says Otherwise

If this is the case, authors are free to produce their own e-book editions or to sell rights to such editions to third parties, and this would surely apply to the tens of thousands of titles still in print but published under agreements that could not have dealt with electronic rights specifically because the technology had not yet been invented.

This however is nonsense, for two reasons. First, author/publisher agreements have almost always specified that the publisher has the right to produce the work in multiple editions. Second, almost every agreement specifies that the author cannot publish or allow publication of any competing product that might injure the sales of the book contemplated by the agreement.

Conceivably, an author could argue that he or she should be allowed to put the crude, word-processed, unedited, badly spelled, first draft of the work into an e-book format and sell it; but no publisher in his right mind would do the hard editorial, design, and marketing work that goes into a book and then allow the author to exploit all that effort and expense without sharing the profit. (Authors too are attracted by the idea of something for nothing.) Random House has taken a firm stand on this issue and we should too.

Print Books and E-books Do Not Compete with Each Other

This is another half truth, like the idea that an e-book is a new thing, employed by those who want your content for free. There was perhaps a time—when electronic devices were available only to a small group of early adopters—that e-books did not compete with print editions. But there are now, according to Amazon.com, more than a million Kindles in the hands of book readers. Can it really still be true that the $9.95 Kindle edition will have no effect at all on the sales of your $24.95 cloth-bound edition? Either the price of e-books must be higher, or their publication must be delayed so they do not undermine the sale of more expensive print editions.

These very bad electronic publishing ideas all have one sticking feature in common: they fly in the face of basic common sense. Why have they been taken so seriously? In part the reason is the old, sad one that we are all too likely to believe something if we would like it to be true. Free music, free movies, free books. A free lunch.

A deeper reason however is that some very accomplished snake oil salesmen have been espousing these ideas in order to "monetize," as they put it, your content without paying you anything. And we have been less skeptical than we should have been because there indeed have been huge changes in the way information is gathered, stored, and disseminated. These changes have undermined our confidence in our good judgment.

But how much has the act of reading a book changed? It still takes hours, real concentration, and an active imagination. I sometimes read my Kindle in bed, just as though it were a real book.