> When movies on cassette became practical, think of what it would have done to the Hollywood model if movies could be rented at the same time they hit theaters allowing people to see a movie for far cheaper than going to a theater?
> That’s what publishers did. They allowed a far less expensive version of their books to be available right away, undercutting the sale of hardcovers with the cheaper e-version
This is a fraught analogy and in a way shows the lack of forward thinking of lots of people in the book and publishing industry.
The problem is that from a customer perspective, an ebook == hardcover in nearly all ways. It has the same story, it is written by the same author, you can read it at home or on the bus. There's no difference. In fact, some might argue ebook > hardcover since it takes up no space and you can use a Kindle and all the features it has.
Watching a movie in a movie theater is about the experience of being with others with amazing sound and video quality as well as the actual movie. So movie theater > movie at home for most people.
Forward thinking would be the Steam way which Amazon has tried to do with ebooks: sell for less but make up for it with huge volume. Yet publishers often price ebooks higher or equal to physical copies.
It's sad to see this bookstore go and I wish I would have visited it since I live in Seattle. But this is a pretty poor analysis on the "changes in the over-all economy".
>The problem is that from a customer perspective, an ebook == hardcover in nearly all ways. It has the same story, it is written by the same author, you can read it at home or on the bus. There's no difference. In fact, some might argue ebook > hardcover since it takes up no space and you can use a Kindle and all the features it has.
The problem is that despite that being so, ebooks also have zero incremental costs. People recognize that, and so they resent eBooks costing as much as hardbacks. If eBooks were only and explicitly > hardbacks, people would happily pay more, but there's more to it than just value.
> The problem is that despite that being so, ebooks also have zero incremental costs. People recognize that, and so they resent eBooks costing as much as hardbacks.
Thats more of a perception problem than an actual fact. It turns out that hosting/supporting ebooks does have incremental costs and people dramatically over estimate how much the price of a hardback is the physical copy. If they just priced the difference in physical production vs ebook support into the price, I think most people would be surprised at how little the discount would be.
Now there is a difference of course but the greater part of the price of a book comes from the creation of the intellectual property (including subsidizing all those books that don't get sold) and the sales process.
The bigger issue is that publishers have lots of expertise in selling physical books (100s of years) and ebooks are brand new. Further, the biggest platform for ebooks is run by a company that is not in anyway aligned with the publishers business interests and is in fact a competitor. This is not true of traditional book sales channels.
Thats more of a perception problem than an actual fact. It turns out that hosting/supporting ebooks does have incremental costs and people dramatically over estimate how much the price of a hardback is the physical copy.
The publishing industry can blame themselves for that.
Back before ebooks, a typical paperback would run between 8-12 dollars whereas a hardcover would easily be 20 dollars or more.
This gave the perception that printing and binding is a significant portion of book price.
Of course, we all know that's crap. In practice, they were simply charging a premium markup for a product that was perceived as being superior.
But now who can blame the consumer for having the same basic expectation, but in the opposite direction, when ebooks are considered?
Prior to the advent of the 40% discount bookstores (Borders/Barnes & Noble) they always actually get cheaper over time.
Those stores used economies of scale to make the 40% discount (basically selling for cost) on blockbusters to drive business into the store, with the hope that people would also pick up higher margin items (toys, coffee, etc).
But the more traditional bookstore model was to stock the blockbuster hardcovers at full price, then move them onto discount shelves as time from release went down, until they had to return them to the publisher right before the soft cover release date neared and the books became a liability (as the people that were willing to pay the premium for early access had already been exhausted).
There are still places that have heavily discounted hard covers. The entire business is called 'remainders' and the publishers sell giant warehouses full of hard cover books for pennies that they deem unsellable as they are too far from release date. Soft backs don't go through this process as they are even less valuable, the publishers pulp those, sometimes at a loss.
[edit] another more obvious way to think about this is, why do hardcovers and soft backs come out at different times? If it was just about the 'premium' product vs the lower end one, they'd be released at the same time. But they aren't. They are release about a year different.
The fact that paperbacks didn't come out until months after the hardcover came out? I mean, this is what my parents told me the deal with hardcover books was in the 1980s, but it's not like it's hard to figure it out.
* The fixed costs of publishing a book dwarf the marginal price of each printed book. Those fixed costs are dominated by the salaries (or 1099s) of human experts.
* Like most products, books aren't priced from their (minimal!) marginal cost basis. They're priced based on utility and market substitutes.
* If ebooks were priced "too high", nobody would buy them. But in fact, so many people buy ebooks that they're putting bookstores out of business.
The "resentment" you're referring to is I think maybe mostly a creature of message boards.
> So movie theater > movie at home for most people.
I'm really wonder if that's true for most people. Sure, there are people that would rather watch in the theater, but there are also people who'd rather hold a hardcover to read.
I'm not sure that the movie analogy works all that well from the position of either the article's author or your parent. For years theaters have been losing their edge as their experience degrades with price increases and the addition of advertising, and people's home watching experience continues to improve with bigger TVs and easier access to media.
But even so, theaters have been amazingly resilient to the digital age. I'd chalk this up to the fact that they provide a shared social movie-going experience that's not quite something you can replicate at home (i.e. it's something to go do with your friends), and in some cases, you want to see certain hits with a certain timeliness so that you can talk about them at school/work/with friends.
Hardcovers are just not like this at all. Even if you'd compare them favorably to an ebook, you'd be hard pressed to find one person on Earth who would say that they provide a superior experience over a paperback (except that they look more handsome on a bookshelf). They are, and always have been, quite simply a way for the publishing industry to squeeze a few extra dollars out of consumers who were willing to pony up the money so they could read a book early. This is exactly the sort of wrinkle that you'd expect to be ironed out in the Information Age — people's tolerance for this kind of profiteering decreases as access to media broadens.
The article's author is right that diminishing the edge of hardcovers is certain to cut into the margins of bookstores like his own, but he's wrong that it's a bad thing (directly). It might cost him money, but it's better for literally every single book buyer.
> Hardcovers are just not like this at all .... you'd be hard pressed to find one person on Earth who would say that they provide a superior experience over a paperback
I like hardcovers better than paperbacks. They are easier to read, larger usually, they stay open with less force, they don't break as easily.
The printing is higher quality, the paper is brighter.
There is a thing called (I think) a trade paperback which is a hardcover quality book with a paper cover.
Not really, the issue is that with digital, there are different formats and readers, some just suck and others are better. You can't just put all e-books under one umbrella because the experience varies greatly.
For example, I've totally boycotted Kindle format and devices, it's horrible for so many reasons, if I want an eBook, it's now PDF or nothing.
Kindle for me was always missing or broken TOCs, bad user interfaces, no copy and paste (if you have digital, why not?),no portability between devices (Linux etc), hard to share, dynamic page numbers, missing or poorly formatted images and diagrams, no off-line backup (you never own the media), no thanks.
I was also a person who, in earnest, wanted to go completely digital with my library, I just loved the idea of it and gave away a lot of printed media, I regret this now. I really gave it a good try, but give me a hard copy any day.
Don't all of those apply to poorly published hardcopy prints too?
If publishers put out official-grade softcopy EPUBs — like O'Reilly used to do until recently — they'd be just as good as the same publisher's hardcopy prints.
Side note: I really hate that I can't buy any EPUBs of O'Reilly's titles. I don't want a non-portable, non-saveable, online-only subscription; and their supported method of getting non-subscription digital copies are all on Amazon and Google Play Books, neither of which provide EPUBS and suffer from the same problems you highlight.
If publishers put out official-grade softcopy EPUBs — like O'Reilly used to do until recently — they'd be just as good as the same publisher's hardcopy prints.
Pragmatic programmers do this and it's an absolute joy to use their digital books, you can have ePub, Mobi or PDF format. The quality of their eBooks over that available from Amazon is much higher.
I think O'Reilly is fairly interesting because they were about the best case for non-DRM standards based ebooks. Their content was very time limited in value, customers were savvy, shouldn't be too price sensitive, and were 'saying' they wanted the unencumbered ebooks.
But the market didn't actually behave that way. They had trouble selling ebooks and piracy was a huge issue.
The next one to watch will be Tor. If they back off of their DRM free stance we'll know that its basically an untenable model.
> That’s what publishers did. They allowed a far less expensive version of their books to be available right away, undercutting the sale of hardcovers with the cheaper e-version
This is a fraught analogy and in a way shows the lack of forward thinking of lots of people in the book and publishing industry.
The problem is that from a customer perspective, an ebook == hardcover in nearly all ways. It has the same story, it is written by the same author, you can read it at home or on the bus. There's no difference. In fact, some might argue ebook > hardcover since it takes up no space and you can use a Kindle and all the features it has.
Watching a movie in a movie theater is about the experience of being with others with amazing sound and video quality as well as the actual movie. So movie theater > movie at home for most people.
Forward thinking would be the Steam way which Amazon has tried to do with ebooks: sell for less but make up for it with huge volume. Yet publishers often price ebooks higher or equal to physical copies.
It's sad to see this bookstore go and I wish I would have visited it since I live in Seattle. But this is a pretty poor analysis on the "changes in the over-all economy".