Amazon and e-books
Aug. 11th, 2014 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeThe Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle is back in the blogosphere attention span, all tangled up with people's views on e-books generally, plus self-publishing.
I use Amazon relatively little; occasionally for myself and once or twice a year to order presents for family; I do prune my recommendations and keep a wish list for the convenience of others. I've posted before on the recommendation system and how poorly it functions compared to browsing in a good bookstore.
I use only non DRM'd e-books, mainly in the public domain; I have purchased only one e-book, and that was because it was not available in hardcopy.
I buy only books which I think I would be ready to read more than once; even on that basis I have a large to-read pile. For that reason I want books that will last years or decades. Non DRM'd e-books are a conceivable choice, modulo the effort involved in backing them up and preserving them across changes in digital devices; but for practical purposes this means hardcopy.
Also note that because I do have a long to-read list I'm rarely so impatient that I have to get a book now rather than just put it on a books wanted list.
I have a very short list of upcoming books I am willing to buy in hardcover or trade paperback; a rather longer list of books I would buy new in mass-market paperback; and some broad criteria for what I will buy remaindered or second-hand. A reasonable fraction of what I read is scholarly enough that there are no electronic versions available.
This means in general that I'm reasonably happy with the model Hachette is following: books are not interchangeable, different price points make sense, and I place a fairly high value both on filters which remove as much drek as possible from my purchasing purview and on mechanisms - the only good one I know being browsing. Naturally, I am in no way a fan of Amazon's digital publishing initiatives which have the effect of launching an avalanche of unedited crud at the consumer (a bit like a plot to make Sturgeon's Law even worse) mediated only by a defective recommendation system.
So how does this work out as an approach compared with the "value" on Amazon which I hear many commenters extolling? I thought I would take some titles from my recently-read and to-read lists and look at Amazon alternatives.
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus - not available electronically. I purchased this for $8.00 second hand; at Amazon the paperback is available for $36.83; through second-hand affiliates it can be purchased for $6.00 plus 6.50 shipping. This was a chance find while browsing which I would never have found at Amazon. Verdict: Amazon loses, and the lack of a digital version points towards a massive problem with (at least) Amazon's digital publishing model - it breaks for books with notes and apparatus which are expensive to convert in an inexpensive manner.
Hodder, Spring-Heeled Jack - I picked this up at a second-hand bookstore for $5.99 after running across it while browsing -- another serendipitous buy. It has never shown up in my Amazon recommendations list. Also, the Amazon price is $9.59 for the Kindle edition; it is available via Amazon second-hand associates for 0.01 plus $6.49 for shipping. Like the Landes, this is a triple failure for Amazon -- it doesn't support real browsing (and the level of "check inside" I needed to decide to buy the book; it costs more; and it has never even been recommended to me.
It's worth noting at this point that it is very relevant to this whole discussion that the second-hand market is dependent on paper books; the e-book model would erase the second-hand market (as opposed to antiquarian). So far, it looks as though second-hand prices beat out Kindle prices -- and note, even the $9.99 price point Amazon is waving around -- handily, so the argument that the Kindle makes book acquisition cheaper has some big holes in it.
On to more cases.
Wexler, The Thousand Names. This I picked up new in MMPB at $9.99. Amazon sells this for $8.99 in Kindle, and it has showed up in recommendations. So far it looks like an Amazon win. However, I note that I bought this only after having the opportunity to check it out thoroughly in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and would not have bought it based only on the information available on Amazon. Also, theKindle version is DRM'd, which makes it something I would not buy electronically under any circumstrances.
Bear, Queen of Angels -I had this on a list to get as the result of a personal, not Amazon, recommendation and found it for $2.99 as a used Mass-Market MMPB. Amazon has it for $7.99 as a DRM'd Kindle edition. (The current paper edition is trade paper for $12.40 at Amazon.) Amazon loses again.
By the way, it makes sense for publishers to reprint novels as trade paperbacks which were once available as cheaper MMPBs, even though that seems to violate the general dropping-prices model from HC to Trade PB tp MMPB. A couple of decades after a book's first publication, there just isn't liklely to be the mass demand to make an MMPB run reasonable, but there may very well be enough of a demand to keep it in print as a trade PB.
Page, History and the Homeric Iliad - I had had this on a want list for some time and picked it up for about $10 second-hand. It is out of print. This has no Kindle edition (e-books once again fail spectacularly in even a quasi-academic market). Amazon offers a second-hand trade paperback via an affiliate from 31.42 plus $6.49 for shipping. Boo, hiss Amazon.
Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome - I picked this up for $7.99 second-hand in a Penguin edition. I had had another book on a closely allied issue by Wickham recommended by Amazon, so it gets a small point there; but the Kindle edition costs $13.79. Also, I bought after inspecting the book -- I have enough books on this general topic that I don't just want the same old information again. So, no, this would not have been an Amazon sale.
Danielewski, House of Leaves - I picked this up for under $20 in a near-mint hardcover copy second-hand (I can't remember the exact price, but it was above $15 and below $20.) Amazon offers no Kindle edition (surprise, surprise); it does offer a paperback for $17.33 (about what I paid; the hardcover I have costs $30.06). Call this a wash for a reading edition, but with a slight edge to second-hand because of the better quality of the book.
Vol 2 of Euripides' Fabulae, OCT edition ed. by Diggle - I keep my eye out for good editions of classical texts I don't have; this showed up for $13 second hand. Available from Amazon for $19.68. No Kindle or Paperback edition available (again, what a surprise). Amazon loses.
There's a theme showing up here.
Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol IV: The Passage of Power - This one never shows up second-hand. (Volume 1 sometimes does, cleraly from people who bought it without realizing exactly what they were getting. My copy of Volume 1 is second-hand...) It did come from Amazon - by way of a Christmas present based on my wish list. One plus for Amazon: it makes it easy to give accessible lists of books you want to other people for giving to you.
Williams, Aristoi - I picked this up for $2.99 for a second-hand paperback. It's out of print in paper; Williams has obtained the rights and now made it available digitally (it wasn't when I bought the paperback), and Amazon has it at $5.00 on Kindle. (It's actually available at $4.96 on Kobo, Baen, and Smashwords.) Amazon's may be DRM'd: the versions available through Baen and Smashwords are certainly not. This one's a close run for the e-book -- I'd pay the extra couple of dollars to support the author with a purchase from Smashwords -- but only so-so for Amazon, because their cut to the author is not as good.
Mieville, Embassytown -- I picked this up as a remainder in HC at $6.99. Amazon has it as $12.99 on Kindle. An HC is available via an Amazon affiliate for $1.42 plus $6.49 shipping, but that's still more than I paid.
It's not that Amazon always loses. If I want a new hardcover -- which is a very small subset of my buying -- they offer a nice discount. But ... their e-book prices are generally similar to those from other vendors and they are committed to DRM. I read e-books on my phone; I have no hardware loyalties and can choose whether to use a commercial reader app like Kindle or Kobo or a free app and avoid DRM (I do the latter). And I don't want e-books; if something is that good, I want something that will last.
*****
OK, more generally. The promised apocalypse with regard to e-books in the market has not come and sales seem to have levelled off (for at least a while) at about 30% of the market. A lot of readers -- the ones who pick up books casually and occasionally -- continue to pick up paperbacks rather than invest in an e-reader. A lot of other readers object to buying a licence where they used to buy a book. Much of the current fighting -- the thing that gets people riled up on the Internet -- now centres around self-publishing. (I also suspect that the current fights between Amazon and Hachette or Amazon and Disney may have to do with that levelling-off -- that their business plan called for more sturdy continuing growth.)
You know what? Only a fraction of traditionally published novels are appealing to me, and there's plenty of stuff which on a general description I ought to find appealing, but where a quick inspection leads me to put the book back on the shelf (clunky prose, flat characterization, Eight Deadly Words, etc.). If an author can't get a book through a publisher's slush pile, why should I expect that he or she is going to be good enough to appeal to me if he just pushes the book onto Amazon? (For the record, I do not find Hugh Howey's books appealing.) If an author has a published track record and is self-publishing a backlist (WJW, DKM) or is extending a set of existing works because he/she got the short end of the stick as a midlist author by a publisher who wouldn't provide enough support (DKM; see also LWE's Ethshar), I'll pay attention. But absent those traits, I have no good reason to wade through the sea of sludge that is Amazon Digital Editions to find the few rubies that might be in the dung-heap.
The gatekeeper role that traditional publishers play is important. It's even better when it has layered on top of it a good bookstore which selects based on quality and which provides judgements you can trust to be somewhat isomorphic to your own tastes. Book reviewers, ditto: and I don't mean Amazon, but reviewers with a reputation and a track record (including a record which shows that their tastes match one's own). The ultimate check -- the one that really allows for serendipitous finds -- is low-effort ability to check the contents carefully (the sort of opportunity you get by browsing in a bookstore.
Even if a self-published author makes a good chunk of his/her work available for free, without a really good reason to check it out, it's not going to get to me. I miss even a lot of traditionally published works; there's too much out there; that's why one has serendiptous finds in the first place while browsing.
I used to be a professional editor (professional rather than trade publishing, though), and I also know the amount of work that goes into making a work presentable. Self-published authors _can_ hire copyeditors and substantive editors and proofreaders, but I'm betting most of them don't.
Sooner or later some mechanisms will emerge which will help; at present the only obvious one is that really good (or popular) self-published authors tend to be picked up by traditional publishers, which is somewhat ironic. (Correia, Scalzi, Howey -- okay, popular, at least.)
There are occasional visible failures of the system. Consider The Vorrh, by Brian Catling. This is published by a very small press in the UK; it has received very favourable critical attention. DRMd versions are available in North America. However, the PB, which came out in 2012, shows as unavailable in North America (I don't mean that you can't find it on North American sites like Amazon; it shows up but it is simply not available to order). It is available on amazon.co.uk. Something has clearly gone wrong -- international rights disputes, perhaps? the HC and Kindle/Kobo versions are available in North America. (Or maybe it's the publisher, Honest Publishing -- it has a net presence, a sporadic presence on Twitter, but they show up as having a negative net worth and clearly don't have much in the way of resources, being run by a very tiny staff -- the next closest thing to self-publishing with a filter.)
Clearly there are serious issues affecting both publishing and book retailing related to both e-books and online selling of paper books. But Amazon is not the solution, and (even if it were) its current model is clearly not extensible for the long term from a financial point of view. I expect that the general publisher-preferred model -- higher prices on e-books at launch with a declining price at later sales points -- will end up being successful as opposed to Amazon's model of an arbitrary ceiling on fiction e-books; it matches the economics of book creation much better, and it responds more flexibly to different markets for different authors.
And as for wanting books cheap: unless you are willing to live in a world where authorship is almost always a spare-time activity, some form of mechanism which provides adequate revenue up front is needed (whether today's author advance model or the serialization model of the 19th Century), and some mechanism which gets books to market effectively so that their success can be determined effectively is desirable (long experience has shown that you can't spot selling effectively ahead of time). Both of those mechanisms cost money. If you want a sizeable flow of novels from mid-list authors, self-publishing is probably a very bad way to achieve it. You get what you pay for.
Another way of looking at this is to invoke the project management triangle. You can have any two of good, cheap, and fast, but generally not all three. If you want the lastest book by author X as soon as it comes out (good and fast), then cheap just isn't something you can realistically expect.
I use Amazon relatively little; occasionally for myself and once or twice a year to order presents for family; I do prune my recommendations and keep a wish list for the convenience of others. I've posted before on the recommendation system and how poorly it functions compared to browsing in a good bookstore.
I use only non DRM'd e-books, mainly in the public domain; I have purchased only one e-book, and that was because it was not available in hardcopy.
I buy only books which I think I would be ready to read more than once; even on that basis I have a large to-read pile. For that reason I want books that will last years or decades. Non DRM'd e-books are a conceivable choice, modulo the effort involved in backing them up and preserving them across changes in digital devices; but for practical purposes this means hardcopy.
Also note that because I do have a long to-read list I'm rarely so impatient that I have to get a book now rather than just put it on a books wanted list.
I have a very short list of upcoming books I am willing to buy in hardcover or trade paperback; a rather longer list of books I would buy new in mass-market paperback; and some broad criteria for what I will buy remaindered or second-hand. A reasonable fraction of what I read is scholarly enough that there are no electronic versions available.
This means in general that I'm reasonably happy with the model Hachette is following: books are not interchangeable, different price points make sense, and I place a fairly high value both on filters which remove as much drek as possible from my purchasing purview and on mechanisms - the only good one I know being browsing. Naturally, I am in no way a fan of Amazon's digital publishing initiatives which have the effect of launching an avalanche of unedited crud at the consumer (a bit like a plot to make Sturgeon's Law even worse) mediated only by a defective recommendation system.
So how does this work out as an approach compared with the "value" on Amazon which I hear many commenters extolling? I thought I would take some titles from my recently-read and to-read lists and look at Amazon alternatives.
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus - not available electronically. I purchased this for $8.00 second hand; at Amazon the paperback is available for $36.83; through second-hand affiliates it can be purchased for $6.00 plus 6.50 shipping. This was a chance find while browsing which I would never have found at Amazon. Verdict: Amazon loses, and the lack of a digital version points towards a massive problem with (at least) Amazon's digital publishing model - it breaks for books with notes and apparatus which are expensive to convert in an inexpensive manner.
Hodder, Spring-Heeled Jack - I picked this up at a second-hand bookstore for $5.99 after running across it while browsing -- another serendipitous buy. It has never shown up in my Amazon recommendations list. Also, the Amazon price is $9.59 for the Kindle edition; it is available via Amazon second-hand associates for 0.01 plus $6.49 for shipping. Like the Landes, this is a triple failure for Amazon -- it doesn't support real browsing (and the level of "check inside" I needed to decide to buy the book; it costs more; and it has never even been recommended to me.
It's worth noting at this point that it is very relevant to this whole discussion that the second-hand market is dependent on paper books; the e-book model would erase the second-hand market (as opposed to antiquarian). So far, it looks as though second-hand prices beat out Kindle prices -- and note, even the $9.99 price point Amazon is waving around -- handily, so the argument that the Kindle makes book acquisition cheaper has some big holes in it.
On to more cases.
Wexler, The Thousand Names. This I picked up new in MMPB at $9.99. Amazon sells this for $8.99 in Kindle, and it has showed up in recommendations. So far it looks like an Amazon win. However, I note that I bought this only after having the opportunity to check it out thoroughly in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and would not have bought it based only on the information available on Amazon. Also, theKindle version is DRM'd, which makes it something I would not buy electronically under any circumstrances.
Bear, Queen of Angels -I had this on a list to get as the result of a personal, not Amazon, recommendation and found it for $2.99 as a used Mass-Market MMPB. Amazon has it for $7.99 as a DRM'd Kindle edition. (The current paper edition is trade paper for $12.40 at Amazon.) Amazon loses again.
By the way, it makes sense for publishers to reprint novels as trade paperbacks which were once available as cheaper MMPBs, even though that seems to violate the general dropping-prices model from HC to Trade PB tp MMPB. A couple of decades after a book's first publication, there just isn't liklely to be the mass demand to make an MMPB run reasonable, but there may very well be enough of a demand to keep it in print as a trade PB.
Page, History and the Homeric Iliad - I had had this on a want list for some time and picked it up for about $10 second-hand. It is out of print. This has no Kindle edition (e-books once again fail spectacularly in even a quasi-academic market). Amazon offers a second-hand trade paperback via an affiliate from 31.42 plus $6.49 for shipping. Boo, hiss Amazon.
Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome - I picked this up for $7.99 second-hand in a Penguin edition. I had had another book on a closely allied issue by Wickham recommended by Amazon, so it gets a small point there; but the Kindle edition costs $13.79. Also, I bought after inspecting the book -- I have enough books on this general topic that I don't just want the same old information again. So, no, this would not have been an Amazon sale.
Danielewski, House of Leaves - I picked this up for under $20 in a near-mint hardcover copy second-hand (I can't remember the exact price, but it was above $15 and below $20.) Amazon offers no Kindle edition (surprise, surprise); it does offer a paperback for $17.33 (about what I paid; the hardcover I have costs $30.06). Call this a wash for a reading edition, but with a slight edge to second-hand because of the better quality of the book.
Vol 2 of Euripides' Fabulae, OCT edition ed. by Diggle - I keep my eye out for good editions of classical texts I don't have; this showed up for $13 second hand. Available from Amazon for $19.68. No Kindle or Paperback edition available (again, what a surprise). Amazon loses.
There's a theme showing up here.
Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol IV: The Passage of Power - This one never shows up second-hand. (Volume 1 sometimes does, cleraly from people who bought it without realizing exactly what they were getting. My copy of Volume 1 is second-hand...) It did come from Amazon - by way of a Christmas present based on my wish list. One plus for Amazon: it makes it easy to give accessible lists of books you want to other people for giving to you.
Williams, Aristoi - I picked this up for $2.99 for a second-hand paperback. It's out of print in paper; Williams has obtained the rights and now made it available digitally (it wasn't when I bought the paperback), and Amazon has it at $5.00 on Kindle. (It's actually available at $4.96 on Kobo, Baen, and Smashwords.) Amazon's may be DRM'd: the versions available through Baen and Smashwords are certainly not. This one's a close run for the e-book -- I'd pay the extra couple of dollars to support the author with a purchase from Smashwords -- but only so-so for Amazon, because their cut to the author is not as good.
Mieville, Embassytown -- I picked this up as a remainder in HC at $6.99. Amazon has it as $12.99 on Kindle. An HC is available via an Amazon affiliate for $1.42 plus $6.49 shipping, but that's still more than I paid.
It's not that Amazon always loses. If I want a new hardcover -- which is a very small subset of my buying -- they offer a nice discount. But ... their e-book prices are generally similar to those from other vendors and they are committed to DRM. I read e-books on my phone; I have no hardware loyalties and can choose whether to use a commercial reader app like Kindle or Kobo or a free app and avoid DRM (I do the latter). And I don't want e-books; if something is that good, I want something that will last.
*****
OK, more generally. The promised apocalypse with regard to e-books in the market has not come and sales seem to have levelled off (for at least a while) at about 30% of the market. A lot of readers -- the ones who pick up books casually and occasionally -- continue to pick up paperbacks rather than invest in an e-reader. A lot of other readers object to buying a licence where they used to buy a book. Much of the current fighting -- the thing that gets people riled up on the Internet -- now centres around self-publishing. (I also suspect that the current fights between Amazon and Hachette or Amazon and Disney may have to do with that levelling-off -- that their business plan called for more sturdy continuing growth.)
You know what? Only a fraction of traditionally published novels are appealing to me, and there's plenty of stuff which on a general description I ought to find appealing, but where a quick inspection leads me to put the book back on the shelf (clunky prose, flat characterization, Eight Deadly Words, etc.). If an author can't get a book through a publisher's slush pile, why should I expect that he or she is going to be good enough to appeal to me if he just pushes the book onto Amazon? (For the record, I do not find Hugh Howey's books appealing.) If an author has a published track record and is self-publishing a backlist (WJW, DKM) or is extending a set of existing works because he/she got the short end of the stick as a midlist author by a publisher who wouldn't provide enough support (DKM; see also LWE's Ethshar), I'll pay attention. But absent those traits, I have no good reason to wade through the sea of sludge that is Amazon Digital Editions to find the few rubies that might be in the dung-heap.
The gatekeeper role that traditional publishers play is important. It's even better when it has layered on top of it a good bookstore which selects based on quality and which provides judgements you can trust to be somewhat isomorphic to your own tastes. Book reviewers, ditto: and I don't mean Amazon, but reviewers with a reputation and a track record (including a record which shows that their tastes match one's own). The ultimate check -- the one that really allows for serendipitous finds -- is low-effort ability to check the contents carefully (the sort of opportunity you get by browsing in a bookstore.
Even if a self-published author makes a good chunk of his/her work available for free, without a really good reason to check it out, it's not going to get to me. I miss even a lot of traditionally published works; there's too much out there; that's why one has serendiptous finds in the first place while browsing.
I used to be a professional editor (professional rather than trade publishing, though), and I also know the amount of work that goes into making a work presentable. Self-published authors _can_ hire copyeditors and substantive editors and proofreaders, but I'm betting most of them don't.
Sooner or later some mechanisms will emerge which will help; at present the only obvious one is that really good (or popular) self-published authors tend to be picked up by traditional publishers, which is somewhat ironic. (Correia, Scalzi, Howey -- okay, popular, at least.)
There are occasional visible failures of the system. Consider The Vorrh, by Brian Catling. This is published by a very small press in the UK; it has received very favourable critical attention. DRMd versions are available in North America. However, the PB, which came out in 2012, shows as unavailable in North America (I don't mean that you can't find it on North American sites like Amazon; it shows up but it is simply not available to order). It is available on amazon.co.uk. Something has clearly gone wrong -- international rights disputes, perhaps? the HC and Kindle/Kobo versions are available in North America. (Or maybe it's the publisher, Honest Publishing -- it has a net presence, a sporadic presence on Twitter, but they show up as having a negative net worth and clearly don't have much in the way of resources, being run by a very tiny staff -- the next closest thing to self-publishing with a filter.)
Clearly there are serious issues affecting both publishing and book retailing related to both e-books and online selling of paper books. But Amazon is not the solution, and (even if it were) its current model is clearly not extensible for the long term from a financial point of view. I expect that the general publisher-preferred model -- higher prices on e-books at launch with a declining price at later sales points -- will end up being successful as opposed to Amazon's model of an arbitrary ceiling on fiction e-books; it matches the economics of book creation much better, and it responds more flexibly to different markets for different authors.
And as for wanting books cheap: unless you are willing to live in a world where authorship is almost always a spare-time activity, some form of mechanism which provides adequate revenue up front is needed (whether today's author advance model or the serialization model of the 19th Century), and some mechanism which gets books to market effectively so that their success can be determined effectively is desirable (long experience has shown that you can't spot selling effectively ahead of time). Both of those mechanisms cost money. If you want a sizeable flow of novels from mid-list authors, self-publishing is probably a very bad way to achieve it. You get what you pay for.
Another way of looking at this is to invoke the project management triangle. You can have any two of good, cheap, and fast, but generally not all three. If you want the lastest book by author X as soon as it comes out (good and fast), then cheap just isn't something you can realistically expect.
