February 1st, 2010 at 4:00 pm

And the E-Book Wars Begin

Welcome to the robber baron days of  book publishing.  The New York Times reports:

Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site.

Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99.

Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week.

Jacket Copy at the LA Times lets rumble the different sides of the conflict.  On the one hand, sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow argues that “the incremental cost of selling an e-book is zero” once the production and marketing of the book have been accounted for.  John Scalzi, another author, advocates a graduated price structure, where new books cost, say, $15, with paperback-priced rereleases down the line. But neither focus on the fact that, as far as big-market books go–and your blogger is no expert here, obviously–”the pricing in publishing has very little to do with manufacturing costs and most to do with the cost of author talent“.

Disclosure: That quote is from an anonymous publishing house chief.  Maybe he offered it in bad faith–it’s not to be put past an executive to do so.  But as much as I’d love for that to be the case, and for e-reader competition to lower prices like paperbacks did, I’m afraid the executive is right, and that we’re at risk of entering another iteration of systemically underpriced electronic content, like we’ve seen with newspapers.  The end result is harmful to consumer choice, if beneficial in the short-term.

I hate to stick up for The Man when I can’t even fully source his argument, as with the quote above.  But this process of e-bookification is going so fast; I’m afraid the fleshing-out of things is grossly asymmetrical, with all the power on the hardware-providing side.  Because the big boys–Amazon, Apple, Sony, B&N–have such massive purchasing power (especially as e-readers drop in price), publishers will have to cede ground–or they won’t have an outlet to sell through.  The result is that, with price negotiations going at the current pace, publishers will have to agree to unsustainable prices; and consequently shrinking budgets will force them to take on less authors. And those will be their big starts–their guaranteed sellers like Evanovich, Mantel, and the like. Lesser-known and lesser-selling authors will get dropped.

That’s just the e-book market.  As electronic copies gain a steadily-increasing share of the market, so will their share of publisher profits.  This can lead to a combination of outcomes which likely include: the already popular title-oriented e-book operation drives further in that direction, where the profits are, in a positive feedback loop; the increasingly boutique print side of major publishing, no longer worth reviving, is left to disintegrate; and so on.

None is good for the future of thoughtful literature.

(via Jacket Copy)

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