- Share This Post
- submit
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
The past couple of weeks have been filled with the buzz of a great publishing battle starring the hardcover vs the e-book. Lines are being drawn in the sand and the two sides are butting heads with the intensity of a pair of cranky mountain goats.
Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins and Hachette Book Group have all decided to delay the publication of some e-books for several months after the hardcover release. Of course they aren't doing this for all releases because that would be too easy. They are doing it for selected releases, which means that in some cases the e-book will be available at the same time as the hardcover. Chances are, for that blockbuster release you'll just have to wait, assuming by the time it comes out in e-book format that you even remember you wanted to read it, let alone buy it. Amazon's response to this was to slash prices on e-books even lower, selling some popular new e-book releases for $7.99. No doubt the Walmart-Amazon price war will continue and I'm expecting a press release stating they've lowered the price of their hardcovers any minute now. Meanwhile, Random House is claiming digital rights to its backlist, including books that were published before the internet was even a gleam in someone's mind.
If you think it's all a big mess, well, I'm with you and we're not alone. Joanna from Comics Worth Reading finds Simon and Shuster's decision to delay e-book releases quite simply stupid.
When will publishers learn that trying to force customers to act contrary to their interests in order to benefit publishers is not a smart strategy? Note that “publishers currently receive the same wholesale price for an e-book that they receive for a print book”. They’re not losing any money by being more customer-friendly. They’re just afraid of the future, especially if it includes more format and price flexibility.
People who read e-books enthusiastically tend to be Readers, yes with a capital "r." Sure, we can get into how much we love the experience of reading a book, from the feel of the pages in our hands to the smell of a brand new book, but even a book lover like Jennifer Hudock admits that when it comes to frequent traveling and convenience nothing beats an e-book.
No matter how much I love the smell of a brand new book fresh off the shelf, I tend to travel a lot. Let me tell you, lugging a bag of books across country is a pain. If I can download it onto my device and toss it into my purse on-the-go, no one needs to ask me twice to download. The Digital Age is upon us. No one can deny that times are changing, and it is completely understandable that old-school publishers feel threatened, but instead of breaking with the wind, they might find alternatives and bend just a little.
The decision is hard for many of us readers to understand. I know many who are asking the same questions as Emily at the Erotic Romance E-Publisher Comparison website.
Sometimes I wonder whether large publishers want to fail at epublishing. Or do they think that if they screw up at epublishing, nobody else will do it? We have publishers charging hardback prices and paying paperbck royalty rates on e-books. And now there seem to be more and more major publisher providing e-books versions sporadically, and after a significant delay.
When something like this comes up, I know I can always count on Kassia Krozser for a post at Booksquare that digs down into the issues of all things publishing related. She certainly didn't disappoint me on this latest e-book issue. There's been a lot of talk about "distribution windows", something that I really only know a tiny bit about. She describes it simply as "the concept of moving a product through specific retail channels for specific periods of time." Readers are familiar with this - we are used to hardcover releases and then paperback ones. Movies have theatre releases and then come out on DVD months later. She questions if a movie distribution window is a good comparison for book publishing. Publishing needs to figure it out, she says, because they only had a year or two to get it right.
I’ll be absolutely frank about one thing: publishers have already lost the pricing battle. They’re being subsidized by Amazon and Barnes & Noble
