By now most of you reading this blog probably know about the latest dust-up over ebook prices. For those of you who haven’t been following the news, here’s a brief synopsis followed by some thoughts on the history of book pricing.
A couple of weeks ago officials at Macmillan, one of the largest global book publishing firms, decided to put the screws to Amazon.com. For over two years now the retailer has insisted that $9.99 is the decisive threshold at which consumers will begin trading reading material composed of atoms for stuff made of bits. Reportedly it’s managed to sell three million Kindles and who-knows-how-many e-books, but still Macmillan begs to differ on the matter of pricing. Management there believes that a more flexible scale would be preferable to Amazon’s flat-rate, with new e-titles starting at $15 and older works listing for around $6.
Well, Amazon got so miffed by Macmillan’s proposal that it temporarily suspended sales of any new books published under its imprimatur, which includes such venerable labels as Farrar, Straus & Giroux; St. Martins Press; Henry Holt; Tor Books; and others. Macmillan responded by calling Amazon’s bluff, knowing full-well that Amazon’s decision to de-list the publisher’s capacious catalog ultimately would hurt the retailer’s bottom line more than it would help its cause of ebook pricing. With the door now open, other presses are jumping on the higher-priced ebook bandwagon.
This is a fraught issue, to be sure. As a frequent book buyer, I’m grateful to Amazon for doing its part to keep ebook prices low for as long as it could. The company clearly understands the psychology behind the pricing of digital goods. Consumers intuitively grasp that the marginal costs of producing any given copy of an ebook is next to nil, and so we’re understandably reluctant to buy up e-titles and expensive hardware when paper books can be had for a comparable enough price. On the other hand, I recognize that the promise of advances and royalties gives professional authors incentive to continue producing new work. Accordingly, they have a compelling interest in maximizing their return through healthy (read: inflated) prices.
We could go around and around all day about who’s right and who’s wrong here. As someone whose paycheck comes primarily from my work as a university professor and only secondarily from my publications, selfishly, I’m inclined to side with Amazon.com. But really there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys here. The whole situation reminds me of a recent dispute between physicians at my local hospital and a major health care provider, each of whom accused the other of excessive greed and bullying. In the end, the only party who suffered was the people who, for the duration of the quarrel, had to drive 50 miles to get the health care to which they were entitled.
Anyway, this may well be the first major conflict over the price tag for ebooks, but it’s surely not the first time the book industry has gone to war over book prices. This has happened at least a couple of times before, first in the late 19th century and then again in the 1920s/30s. In both instances, a bunch of young, brash publishers decided to slash their prices as a strategy to gain market share. Older, more established firms responded by digging in their heels and waging a clever PR campaign designed to convince the public that it was in their best interest to pay more than they actually needed to for books. (You can read more about this history in chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print and in volume III of John Tebbel’s magisterial A History of Book Publishing in the United States.)
What might these earlier price wars tell us about the present situation? Anyone looking to establish themselves as leaders in digital publishing would do well to undersell their competitors by offering electronic editions at or below the $9.99 price-point. The goal should be to sell as many copies as possible, by finding a price so attractive that no one can resist. It’s funny: we hear all the time about how book reading is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere. Could it be that the falloff is attributable not only to the usual scapegoats (electronic media, waning attention spans, etc.) but also and significantly to publishers’ greediness over book pricing, electronic or otherwise?
Indeed, if history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that publishers who’ve made their mark selling low can succeed in the long run. Just ask Simon & Schuster and Farrar & Rinehart (yes, that’s the same Farrar of Macmillan’s Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux). They were among the upstarts of the 1920s and 30s whose decision to sell books for a buck sent the old-timers into a tizzy.
On Wednesday of last week, Apple made the long-anticipated announcement about its new tablet computer, the iPad. Ever since then the media sphere has been abuzz with debate about the virtues and vices of the device.
As an avid iPod Touch user, I’ll admit to being rather intrigued by the iPad, despite the concerns many already have expressed about the latter’s lack of tinker-ability. I don’t want to dwell on that here, however. Instead, I want to focus on what Apple’s full-blown foray into the world of ebooks, via the iPad’s integration with the company’s new iBooks store, might portend for the future of books and reading.
Back in 2003 I published a piece in a fabulous online cultural studies journal called Culture Machine. (It’s edited by Professor Gary Hall of Coventry University, about whose Digitize This Book![University of MN Press, 2008] I cannot say enough positive things.) The essay was called “Book 2.0,” and it was a revised excerpt from the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation. In my book The Late Age of Print, I explore how ebooks have emerged in response to concerns about the ease with which printed books can circulate. “Book 2.0″ complements the narrative from Late Age. It explores how a persistent frustration with the material weightiness of printed books helped lead to the development of a variety of alternative book — eventually ebook — technologies over the course of several centuries.
When I was composing “Book 2.0,” there was, much like today, extraordinary optimism about the immediate prospects for ebooks. It was the heady days of the late 1990s/early 2000s, right before the dotcom bubble burst. At the time many people were claiming that we were in the midst of an ebook revolution. They pointed to a host of new devices — Rocket eBooks, SoftBooks, Everybooks, and more — as evidence of the upheaval. This was it: the moment when ebooks — finally, really — would stick.
Where are all of those “revolutionary” e-readers today? They’re nowhere to be found, except maybe in the odd collector’s corner over on eBay. Surely there are many reasons for their failure to launch, among them the economic downturn of the early 2000s. They were also pretty rudimentary, technologically speaking. But another reason for the lack of uptake, I’d contend, was the rampant proliferation of devices that happened to occur within a short period of time. Why would consumers want to trust making the leap into e-reading when they could not be sure of which reader or proprietary format would win out?
What the ebook mania of the early 2000s teaches us is that consumers get skittish when companies refuse to cooperate on interoperability and to engineer their devices accordingly. Rather than buying an e-reader and possibly getting burned down the road, book lovers want to see which one will win out in the end. Only the end never comes. Too many e-readers results a situation in which, rather than one or two rising to the top, they all just end up cannibalizing one another.
Life was relatively simple back in late 2007/early 2008, when the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader were pretty much the only kids on the ebook block. But today, again, we see a bunch of new ebook devices emerging on the scene — from the Barnes & Noble Nook to the Apple iPad, Alauratek Libre, Plastic Logic Que, Cybook Opus, and more. Now, I’m all for healthy competition in the ebook market. (Apple’s venture, for example, has pushed Amazon to improve its Kindle royalty structure.) Then again, if recent history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that these and other ebook developers need to figure out how to work together if indeed they really want e-reading to make it in the long term.
Thanks, everyone, for your patience during my few-weeks hiatus from The Late Age of Print blog. My partner and I are thrilled to have had a child in early January. Ever since then life has felt like something of a time warp. I should have anticipated needing to take a short break from blogging, but I guess the hubris of first-time-parenting got the better of me. In any case we’re all beginning to settle into something of a routine — to whatever extent you can call the first month of anyone’s life “routine.” As I write this, our little guy is chilling in a bassinet right next to me.
I’m not exactly sure what the immediate future holds for this blog, beyond the fact that I intend to keep it up, running, and active. I suspect that I’ll be making shorter (and hopefully more frequent) posts, but we’ll see. In any case, please be sure to keep coming back; more content will indeed follow shortly.
Until then, don’t forget that you can download a PDF of the complete text The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control for free by clicking on the DOWNLOAD link at the top of the page. Happy new year and enjoy.
This is the fourth installment in an occasional series reflecting on how the publishing industry might connect better with readers. You can read part I, on The Da Vinci Code, by clicking here; part II, on Oprah, is available here; and part III, on Netflix, is here.
IV. What can the publishing industry learn from Bullshit?
To begin, I should probably clarify what I mean by “Bullshit.” The capitalization here is purposeful. I’m referring to philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s notorious little book, On Bullshit, which was published in 2005 by Princeton University Press. It’s a 67-page stroke of genius. And I call it “genius” not because of the content per se; I’ll leave that to others to evaluate. It’s genius, rather, because of its diminutive size. What might the publishing industry learn from the form of this successful little book?
I remember well the first time that I stumbled across On Bullshit. I was trolling through the philosophy section of one of the bookstores here in Bloomington, Indiana, and there it was. It stood out from all the other volumes because of its compact size. They were weighty tomes: dense, intimidating — potentially intractable commitments. On Bullshit was something else: light, approachable — more like an enticing get-together than a long-term relationship. I couldn’t resist picking it up.
I’m sure the book’s success has had a great deal to do with the author’s reputation, the timeliness of his argument, and — let’s be honest — his decision to call the volume, On Bullshit. But I cannot help but wonder if its prosperity isn’t also and significantly attributable to its form.
There’s an analogous story to be told about economist Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It sold reasonably well in the United States upon its publication in 1944. What really launched the book into the stratosphere, however, was its Reader’s Digest condensation, released in 1945, which reached five million subscribers. The condensation was later republished as a small, stand-alone volume with an impressive initial print-run of 600,000.
More recently, Penguin released an abridgment of Adam Smith’s900-page magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations (1776). This charming little duodecimo volume, called The Invisible Hand, weighs in at a comparatively scant 127 pages and, like On Bullshit, costs just ten bucks. You could probably read the shrunken Smith in a couple of hours, if that.
People today are working longer for less, and they inhabit a media environment that’s more crowded than ever. We also have grown accustomed to “disaggregated” works, in which part and whole share a less necessary relationship than they did, say, 20 years ago. (Witness, for example the decline of the long-play album and the return to power of the music single.) If books are to continue to thrive well into the 21st century, then book publishers will need to account for, and respond to, these changing circumstances. And one way in which to accomplish this might be to release more inexpensive, “snack-size” books.
By way of conclusion, a caveat: my argument shouldn’t be confused for a one-size-fits-all approach to book publishing. I’m not suggesting that small books should replace large books, categorically. (Incidentally, what we have now is pretty much a one-size-fits-all approach, albeit one that, for adults, privileges the tome.) Instead, I’m interested in a publishing paradigm that would offer more choice than what we currently have — a paradigm that’s more sensitive to the diverse contexts in which people live their daily lives.
And that’s no bullshit.
P.S. Happy New Year to all of my readers, and thank you for supporting The Late Age of Print – both the book and the blog.
By the looks of things, 2009 is shaping up to be theyear for giving the gift of books…e-books, that is.
Take the Amazon Kindle, for instance. Amazon.com is touting the device on its homepage as its “#1 bestselling, #1 most wished for, and #1 most gifted [is that really a verb?] product.” Sales surely have been helped along by the catchy little advertisement for Kindle embedded above, which has been appearing regularly on TV stations throughout the United States since November. You may not know this, but the commercial is the result of a contest that Amazon sponsored last summer, asking customers to produce their own 30-second spots showcasing the e-reader.
Over at the other end of the post-Gutenberg galaxy, meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has already exhausted its supply of Nooks. Don’t despair, though. In lieu of an actual Nook, the bookseller is more than happy to ship a holiday-themed certificate to you and yours explaining that the “hottest gift of the season may be sold out, but with our elegant Nook holiday certificate you can still let loved ones know it’s coming.” Uh, yeah — on or about February 1st. Happy holidays from the Grinch.
Clearly, retailers like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are pinning their hopes for robust holiday sales significantly on digital devices, hoping that their customers will purchase not only the hardware but also an ample electronic library with which to fill it. The question, of course, is where are printed books in all this? Is all this holiday focus on digital reading yet another sign of the impending death of print — by which I mean not only of the technology itself, but also of the broader culture that surrounds it?
Hardly. What we’re bearing witness to, in fact, is the very culture that printed books long ago helped to introduce.
One of my favorite books is Stephen Nissenbaum’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated history, The Battle for Chritsmas(Vintage, 1997), which traces the origins of the modern commercial holiday. It used to be that Christmas was a raucous affair in which members of the lower castes of society were given temporary license to make unusual demands on social and economic elites. Often their requests were for food, drink, or money, and typically these “gifts” were given as a result of the implicit threat of violence. All that started to change in the 19th century, Nissenbaum shows, with the growth of industrial production and the gradual enfranchisement of the working class. Slowly but surely the social- and class-warfare that had defined the Christmas holiday was displaced onto parents and their children. And although the holiday mutated in significant ways and tensions defused, one thing remained pretty much the same: the promise of gifts was held out as compensation for the recipients’ continuing good behavior.
These gifts, however, typically weren’t perishables or cash tips. More likely there were items that had been purchased at stores. And among the first and most popular commercial goods to be given as Christmas presents were, according to Nissenbaum, printed books. Books played a starring role in helping to make Christmas over into the commercial holiday that people know and practice today.
Books may be going high-tech this holiday season, but that doesn’t mean, as some fear, that we’ve abandoned the cultural and economic habits they’ve helped to foster. Our Kindles and Nooks may appear to be pointing toward the digital future, yet if anything they channel the deep structures of our analog past.
I’ve been fortunate to have received some really excellent reviews of The Late Age of Print in its first year of publication. Maybe even more exciting than all of this positive response has been the book’s inclusion on several top-ten of 2009 lists. A couple of weeks ago Michael Lieberman over at Book Patrol (hosted on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) included Late Age in his top-ten “books about books” of the year. Last week Chapman/Chapman’s Ryan Chapman featured the book in his “Best Books of 2009″ post, calling it a “foundational text.” And just yesterday Conversational Reading’s Scott Esposito gave the book a big shout by adding it to his “Favorite Reads of the Year” list.
So, with the end of 2009 almost in sight, I want to thank Michael, Ryan, Scott, and all of those who’ve supported the book this year, as well all of you readers out there who’ve been taking in, Tweeting about, and commenting on this blog. I also want to acknowledge the hard work of José Afonso Furtado, a tremendous supporter of The Late Age of Print in all its forms, whose Twitter feed I piggy-back on. Finally, I owe a heartfelt thanks to all the great folks at Columbia University Press and particularly my editor, Philip Leventhal, about whom I cannot say enough good things.
I realize that this post probably sounds as though I’m signing off for the year. Don’t worry, I’m not. I’ll be back again in 2009 with more dispatches from the late age of print.
I love it when something that you think will be good turns out to be even better than you’d hoped. Case in point: author Sherman Alexie’s visit to The Colbert Report last Tuesday night. I expected Alexie to chat up his latest book, War Dances. I didn’t expect to be treated to such an intelligent commentary on the future of book culture in America.
Colbert starts out by affirming the author’s decision not to allow the digital distribution of his book. Alexie cites concerns over piracy and privacy as his motivation for doing so. I’ve noted here on the blog how certain e-book devices can expose book lovers to all sorts incursions into their intimate reading lives. Alexie, for his part, ups the ante. “I’m an Indian,” he states. “I have plenty of reasons to be worried about the U.S. government” peering over his shoulder while he e-reads. Colbert — ever the (alleged) enemy of literacy — chimes in with his objection to digital books. “You can’t burn a Kindle.”
Alexie then notes how the revenue structure of the music industry has changed in the digital era. Here I believe he over-reaches somewhat, but in any case his claim is that the music is no longer what primarily makes money for top recording artists. Now, touring and performances comprise their primary revenue stream. He fears the same may one day hold true for book authors as well, suggesting a future in which the book-as-cultural-artifact will become incidental to paid-for author appearances. And here Alexie echoes one of Kevin Kelley’s predictions from his 2006 bombshell published in The New York Times Magazine, “Scan This Book!“, from which the late John Updike recoiled in horror.
The rest of the interview offers something of a rejoinder to this vision for the future of the book. In a word, it is unsustainable. Alexie recounts how the experience of the book tour has changed for him over the last decade or so. It used to be that he would engage all sorts of local media and indy bookstores while traipsing around the country to promote his latest work. Today, Alexie complains, “the localized appreciation of books is gone.” Book blogs notwithstanding, what little coverage books receive in the media today mostly occurs in the national press — in exclusive forums like The New York Times and, well, The Colbert Report. Chain bookstores, meanwhile, now play host to the vast majority of author events. The result, he notes, is not only a diminished conversation about books at the local level, but also the elimination of untold numbers of book-related jobs that are ancillary to, yet nonetheless sustain, the book industry proper.
I can’t say that I agree with everything Alexie had to say about the past, present, and future of books in America, but his insights were provocative enough for me to air them here. I do agree with his final point wholeheartedly, though: “White folks should be ashamed that it’s taking an Indian to save part of their culture.” Indeed.
This week the blog In Medias Res, which is hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book, has gathered together a bunch of great contributions around the theme, “Books as Screens.” Definitely, definitely check them out.
On Monday Hollis Griffin of Northwestern University contributed a post called “Talking Heads: Books, Authors, and Television News.” There he explores the becoming-everyday of books and authors on TV, in an era of media deregulation and convergence. Yesterday one of his colleagues at Northwestern, Elizabeth Lenaghan, posted a provocative meditation called, “How Do you Hide Behind a Kindle?” She asks, “Apart from our ability to snoop on fellow train riders or pass quick judgment on a person’s taste, what are the potential consequences of fewer printed books in public spaces?” Today IMR is featuring my thoughts on “The Selling of Bookselling.” It’s largely a riff off of the themes I develop in Chapter 2 of The Late Age of Print, which explores the politics of retail bookselling in the United States. On Thursday we’ll see a post entitled “Possible or Probable? An Imagined Future of the Book” from Pomona College’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Capping things off on Friday will be New York University’s Lisa Gitelman, whose post is called “What Are Books?”
In Medias Res is an intriguing publication in that it asks contributors not to post per se but rather to briefly “curate” a film or video clip, often connected to some larger theme. I love that the blog is hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book, and that Hollis Griffin and Elizabeth Lenaghan finally connected the dots between books and audiovisual media to give us our theme, “Books as Screens.” Thanks, you two! And thanks to all of you, my readers, for hopping on over to IMR to post comments.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once mentioned an “eight year black hole” in his career, in which his publishing dwindled to almost nothing. Lately I’ve been feeling as though this blog has been sucked into the same black hole, since I haven’t posted anything in over a month. Sorry. Teaching and a host of other responsibilities have kept me from my running commentary on the past, present, and future of book culture. I’m back now, and hoping to sustain a pretty good push through the winter holidays.
Today I’m writing about Oprah.On Friday, November 19th, Winfrey announced that she’ll be pulling the plug on her daytime talk show in 2011, after 25 years on the air. You can read more about the details of the announcement here, in the New York Times.
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that this struck people as news. In 2006, I believe, Winfrey said that 2010-2011 would be the last season for Oprah. In any case, the real news — and what most likely prompted the public reminder of the talk show’s impending end — was Winfrey’s decision to launch a cable TV channel bearing her name. As if “Oxygen” wasn’t enough!
The cable channel got me thinking about a point that I raise in the conclusion to The Late Age of Print. There I examine how Winfrey seems to have inverted the usual strategy of branding. It used to be that products were branded as a means by which to differentiate them from other, similar products in the marketplace. No so with Oprah, who’s spawned TV shows, magazines, films, websites — indeed, a sprawling array of media and non-media products. As I observe in the conclusion, it’s not that Oprah products are branded; it’s more apt to say that the Oprah brand is “producted.”
The announcement of the cable TV channel’s launch made we wonder if I’d actually taken the analysis far enough. I’m tempted now to say that the Oprah label isn’t merely a brand. It performs far work than this. If you’ll forgive a momentary lapse into geek-speak, it may well be that Oprah is a platform upon which to build things, including “hardware” (i.e., media infrastructure and institutions), “operating systems” (i.e., the milieu or “culture” of those institutions), and “software” (i.e., the content or programming to fill those institutions).
The announcement of the cable TV channel also made me wonder what else Winfrey may have in store for us once The Oprah Winfrey Show has wrapped. For my purposes, I’m most interested in the fate of the Book Club, which has been hosted on the talk show since 1996. I seriously doubt that Winfrey will abandon books come 2011, given how much notoriety her bibliophilia has brought her. But perhaps, rather than simply recommending books, she’ll venture into publishing them herself. Isn’t that the next logical step? After all, people already routinely refer to the books she recommends as “Oprah books.” Who’s paying the actual publishers any mind — other than, of course, other publishers?
For more than a decade Winfrey has been the darling of the book publishing industry. In the coming age of the Oprah platform, what would it mean for the established publishers suddenly to become her…competitors?
I’ve been meaning to weigh in here on Barnes & Noble’s recent announcement about its new e-reader, Nook. It seems to be getting talked about everywhere, including this NPR story that I heard a few days ago. My bottom line is that, while I have not yet tried the device (it won’t be released until the end of November, just in time for the holidays), I am more optimistic about it and its capabilities compared to the Amazon Kindle.
It would be easy enough to point to Nook’s feature-ladenness as the reason behind my optimism. If nothing else it’s got a color screen, which sets it apart from that of Kindle. I’ve described the latter’s inexplicably well-touted e-ink display as reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, although I’m also taken with Nicholson Baker’s description of it in the New Yorker: “[T]he screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.” Nook also has touch screen capabilities; Kindle does not. While I’m not a proponent of touch simply for its own sake, I recognize tactility as a key experiential dimension of the handling of printed books. The touch screen thus makes for some nice experiential “carry-over” from the one (analog) reading platform to the other (digital).
But it’s not all about the interface. More important to me are Nook’s sharing functions and its — bear with me on this one — lack of a backup feature. The sharing function is straightforward enough: the device lets your friends borrow your e-titles for up to two weeks. Here’s what the Barnes & Noble website says:
You can share Nook to Nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.
Now, what the site neglects to mention is that publishers can opt-out of making their Nook books circulable. Nevertheless, I appreciate that even a limited type of sharing is the default position for the device and its content. Too much DRM does not a happy customer base make.
My delight at the lack of a backup feature clearly requires some explaining. One of the chief selling points of the Amazon Kindle is its so-called “backup” feature. I say “so called” because its not only about user-friendly content protection. The backup occurs on the Amazon server cloud, where intimate details about what, where, how, and for how long you read get archived, presumably forever. That’s great if your Kindle gets stolen or crashes, but it does open up all sorts of privacy concerns that I’ve been addressing lately in lectures at the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, and tomorrow at Georgetown University.
All that to say, it pleases me that Barnes & Noble isn’t following Amazon into the cloud. Indeed its decision not to go there, it seems to me, is indicative of the company’s sense of its own identity. However much Barnes & Noble may venture into other areas, such as printed book publishing and e-book readers, at the end of the day it still recognizes itself for what it’s always been: a bookseller. Amazon, on the other hand, presents itself as though it were a retailer, but in reality it is, in the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, “a technology company at its core.” (Advertising Age, June 1, 2005). The two company’s respective — indeed, quite divergent — approaches to client e-reader data reflect these differences in their core missions.
I may yet pre-order a Nook to go along with my Kindle. I’m still on the fence, but I’m leaning towards giving it a try. I’ll keep you posted, but until them I’d be interested in hearing how others are weighing in.
