The Big Publishing Houses Must Embrace E-Books

E-book readers, and the e-books to read on them, are a very recent phenomenon. However, the public seems to have taken to them very rapidly. A lot of the thanks for that has to go to the Amazon Kindle reader – in particular the Kindle 2.0 which was launched in February of 2009. Amazon’s upgraded third generation Kindle was unveiled in August of 2010 and, despite doom laden predictions for the Kindle following the launch of Apple’s iPad, is selling more quickly than ever. There’s little doubt that it was the Kindle 2.0 that helped e-books to really take off.

Equally important was the large selection of Kindle books on offer. Amazon has always had a lot more titles on offer than the chasing pack. At the moment they have more 750,000 Kindle books available on their website – and those are just the paid titles. There are over 1.8 million titles which are out of copyright and are now available for download free of charge.

However, whilst the public may have adapted to e-books very quickly, it remains to be seen if the main publishing companies have got their corporate heads around the concept yet. The traditional publishing cycle has been totally modified by the introduction of e-books. E-books are not only cheaper than traditional printed books – there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be released alongside the conventional printed hardback version. The e-book version is available immediately – no need to wait months for the paperback to be released.

Obviously, having a cheaper version available at the same time as the hardback is something which could impact upon the sales of hardback books. According to Amazon, they are currently selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. This seems to have given many of the big publishers cause for concern. They have already crossed swords with Amazon regarding the pricing of e-books.

Publishers like Harper Collins, Penguin and Hachette recently moved to the “agency model” for their e-books. What this means is that the publishers set the price rather than the retailer (Amazon). This has seen e-book prices rise – in some cases to the point where they cost more than the hardback version.

Kindle owners quickly retaliated by awarding “one star” reviews to books where they felt that the Kindle book price was too high. Some fairly blunt comments were left on the Amazon website – aimed at the publishers for the most part – and some irate readers went so far as to suggest that potential customers boycott both Kindle and hardback editions until prices are set at more reasonable levels. Some prices have now been reduced.

It seems to be an almost suicidal tactic by the publishers to adopt such an artificial method of raising prices. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that e-book readers owners read a lot of books. If you only read a book a month then you would hardly invest in an e-book reader would you? In other words, e-book reader users are the major publisher’s target audience.

It seems obvious – just even – that e-books should cost less than traditional books. In addition to the lack of paper, ink and bindings, they have virtually no delivery fees associated with them. They are also more environmentally friendly – even allowing for the materials used in the e-book readers themselves. It seems probable that e-book reader owners would not only be able to work this out for themselves but would, quite naturally, anticipate that the price would reflect this fact.

The publisher’s tactics may help to keep their profits up in the short term – but they risk alienating some of their best customers in the process. Artificial price fixing is likely to antagonise the buying public and, after a series of one star reviews and public calls for boycotts, authors would most likely also be discontented. Publishers have every bit as much to gain from the e-book revolution as the public. Publishers will also have reduced expenses when producing and selling e-book versions – and customers will expect the selling price of e-books to reflect these lower costs. Publishers who adopt e-books, in just the same way that the reading public has, will be successful going forward. On the other hand, if their desire for short term profits inures them to the possible opportunities offered by this new medium, they will be rejected by both their authors and their readers.