Internet Ready Fiction (IRFiction.com)

I can’t imagine anyone reading this isn’t aware of the ebook price war raging between Amazon and Macmillan, but if you aren’t you should certainly follow along (start with the NYT coverage; move to John Sargent’s letter to Macmillan authors, editors, and agents; finish with a good long read through #amazonfail and #macmillanfail on Twitter).

Pricing debates are nothing new to the ebook world. There are four deeply invested parties in book sales–digital or otherwise–and any decision has to take all four sets of interests into account.

1. Consumers/readers want ebooks to be cheaper than print books–and cheaper than Amazon’s $9.99 price point if possible. The cheaper the book is, the more books they can buy.
2. Booksellers–Amazon, B&N, Borders, Indies, reader-specific sellers like Sony, and now Apple’s iBooks–want ebooks to make them money. They may not have to pay for warehousing and shipping, but they need to pay for server space, e-commerce support, and maintenance. Super-cheap e-books won’t keep any of them afloat. It’s not free to sell an ebook.
3. Publishers want ebooks to make them money too, and they want to set the prices for each (print or digital) book separately. Sure there are not printing/shipping/warehousing costs, but some books are more expensive than others because of costly photo permissions or because extensive editing was needed or because an author needed a larger payment (see #4 below). And on top of that, publishers also need to pay for the tech infrastructure booksellers need. AND they need to make money after ensuring booksellers and authors get their respective cuts.  It’s not free to publish an ebook.
4. Of course authors want ebooks to make money: if people are buying ebooks instead of print books, authors still need and deserve compensation for their work. Imagine that it only takes a year to write a book (oh how wonderful that would be!), but then it takes a year to find a publisher, a year to edit it, and then another six months till it hits the shelves: and THAT’s not a bad timeline for a newer author. It’s no wonder it can take a decade to get a book published. So book sales–again, print AND digital–must pay for the author’s past four years of work. It’s not free to write an ebook.

So how can publishers give consumers what they want? Well some consumers–especially those in the Chris Anderson “information should be free” camp–won’t be happy to hear it but ebooks will never be given away without thought to profit. Not by booksellers, publishers, and authors that need/want to make money, anyway. But publishers can survive selling books at $9.99 or even lower. It’s truly possible, I promise!

My master’s thesis posited that publishers can streamline the production process, making it cheaper and faster to produce ebooks in house, by taking advantage of digital workflows like XML. I’ve since been introduced to CS4’s design-to-ePub capabilities that make a scaled-down digital workflow just as possible.

But without the right people to make these changes it’s impossible to create any added value. I can’t possibly imagine that most book editors are ready to think about chunking and disaggregating and re-purposing the same way Mike Shatzkin and his fellow StartWithXML-gurus suggest they should. India Amos makes a good point about the vast differences between digital design and traditional book design in a recent post. There is increasingly less and less room for close-minded publishing professionals crippled by their nostalgia print and their hatred for digital books.

The people driving the industry will soon be those who are prepared to think about two worlds at once, about several uses and markets for the same text, and about ever-more-efficient means of creating/editing/producing that text; these are the people who will make it possible for publishers of all sizes to make the necessary and revolutionary changes without facing financial failure.  These people do exist already, but we have to be ready to inspire more of them as they arrive straight out of school. We have to train savvy and enterprising digital revolutionaries and publishers need to take the right risks to hire them.

I believe an old-gen/new-gen collaboration would inspire a new golden age of publishing–one that rivals that long-lost era we all idealize. So publishers, take this pricing battle and turn it into something constructive, into a real game changer for the whole industry.