tooth soup

photo credit: grytr

Hello all and

welcome to the second edition of ‘Untangling The Web’! UtW’s aim is to become a semi-regular blog built to provide you with some of the trending topics across the Internet that relate to writing and publishing. Hopefully in doing so we’ll be able to generate some discussion and opinions about what’s going on in the world of words. So without further ado, let’s take a look at what’s been going on since last episode!

News–

Infinite supply vs. wavering demand: the cost of e-Books

In the last episode of UtW, I explained the bitchfight disagreement between Macmillan and Amazon in the pricing and distribution of Macmillan’s titles through Amazon’s e-bookshop service (which, incidentally, caused Amazon shares to take a bit of a fall). Essentially Macmillan got what it wanted and Amazon was forced (however willingly or unwillingly) to instate an agency model, whereby Amazon receives a cut of the profits as an e-book selling agent. Shortly after those events, Rupert Murdoch (news giant and owner of Harper Collins) experssed his dislike for Amazon’s default way of doing things and stated he was in talks with Apple to get a better deal through their iBook store in their newly released iPad. A week or so later and we’re starting to see the ramifications of all the dealings, in that both the Harper Collins and Hachette publishers have switched to agency model like Macmillan’s.

So what does this mean for consumers? Well, in general it means that those publishers will be charging higher prices for the privilege of obtaining new-releases that are hitting stores at the same time in hardcover form. This makes sense if you think about the average price of a hardcover being AU$40-50. E-book reader owners will still be able to get their new-release fix, albeit at a more ‘market-appropriate’ price (compared to the flat $9.99 that Amazon was paying) and without delays. Publishers are putting a ‘preserve the value of the words’ spin to this increased pricing, citing Amazon’s scheme as being detrimental to the value of e-books overall and insulting to the authors who may feel their words are worth more. This is, of course, just another way of saying that they think they can charge more and not lose sales.

All this activity has generated a lively amount of discussion on the pricing of e-books, and what sort of level is appropriate. So this week I’d like to focus on the scuttlebutt of how much a patron of e-books should be expected to pay. And let’s start with what some may consider the best price of all: free!

The blog of Smashwords, an e-book publisher and distributor, recently posted an entry that showed the collected statistics for a pricing option in their catalogue called ‘Reader Sets The Price’. With this option enabled, people looking to buy the e-book can pay whatever price they choose, which includes downloading it for free. The results were surprising, indicating that despite the large number of users that chose to download the book for free there was still a decent amount that chose to pay money. Spurred on by this discovery, they took a larger survey of all book sales in order to try and find the ‘magic number’ price that might maximise sales. Their data showed a tendency for more expensive books to yield better profits. Of course, there was the disclaimer that the poll took no account of quality, length, marketing, etc. so there could be various errors applied to the results. But the obvious interpretation to make is that a reader will prefer to pay good money for a book they believe will be good. Time is a precious resource, and if a book is priced at a mere $2, who’s to say that it will be worth the effort?

That’s one example of what a smaller publisher is currently investigating. The reactions to the giant houses’ move to an agency model and the more expensive books that may result has been somewhat tumultuous. Consumers have accused publishers of trying to extort money from early adopters, and publishers have responded with the suggestion that consumers are dopting too much of a ‘Walmart mentality’. That is, thinking that low prices are a right. The main issue for both sides seems to be one of value. What value should an e-book have? Publishers and authors are up against dozens of other possible entertainment avenues: T.V., cinema, games, sport, etc. It seems to be the case that if publishers don’t find an apt price point, the sale of e-books will remain a small market.

But is this necessarily a bad thing? While doomsayers have been predicting the downfall of paper books for years, it’s been a case of trundling on for the paper publishing industry. Analysts often point to the current downfall in readerships for print newspapers as a precursor to books, but the two cases couldn’t be more different. News items inherently fit the Internet mode of delivery; small, easy to digest snippets of information with a couple of pictures or video for added dimension. A novel has none of these attributes, and has therefore necessitated the creation of the technology e-book readers in order to deal with its peculiarities of length and required concentration. The subsuming of print books by e-books is still a long way off, and the price point tug-of-war that is currently being waged could result in that being delayed even further.

Ideas for e-book pricing models:

Moving into fantasy thinking mode for a while, I think individual authors and small-run e-book publishers have the advantage of being able to engage in more creative pricing schemes. Here’s a couple I’ve thought up:

Limited run and sliding scale: In this scheme, as more books are sold in a limited run (of say, 2,000 e-books) the price creeps through a range. Not a huge range, say $1.00-$5.00, but enough to induce a bit of motivation in the buyer to grab their copy before the price increments. This would suit an author who has already released a book and has a small but stable readership.

Marketing by numbers: Your average E-book author generally doesn’t have a huge amount of money to spend on marketing. What they do have (at the risk of sounding slightly judgemental) is a bit of time to spend spreading the word of their creation. This scheme would involve inviting users to spread the word in a number of ways, with each particular method earning points towards a discount. So let’s say a blog post announcing the release of the e-book would earn 5 points, while a Twitter message would earn 1 point. Each point earns you $0.25 off the price of the e-book. Verification of the achievement of the posts would take a lot of time, hence why it might suit someone who is time-rich and money poor.

Rant–

Genre-bender:

Last week the Manjin blog asked a question that’s been posed time and time again, without a solid answer: does genre still matter? Do the walls that separate science fiction from crime or romance still exist, or are they being broken down in an ever expanding catalogue of mashups? After all, a lot of the most popular books are mashups between genres. The Twilight saga is a cross-breed romance/horror, Stephen King often combines fantastical and science fiction elements with crime and horror to great effect, and The Road was a post-apocalyptic love story between father and son. Even smaller publishers are finding success through such categories as ‘dystopian coming-of-age’. And how could I not mention this lesbian crime novel (which was actually produced for a PhD project and is therefore likely to be exceptionally well-written). Once reviewers start trying to describe these genre-benders, the question becomes how finely grained can the classification of genre descend? By the time we get down to describing something as ‘a Norse-influenced post-apocalyptic steampunk noir fantasy series’, how useful is such a label? Not bloody very, in my opinion.

The great yardstick that these genre-benders and indeed genre books in general are measured up to seems to be the ‘literary’ novel. What Meanjin asks is whether there remains a concrete definition of what a literary novel is, what with the silent acceptance of genre writers such as McCartney and Atwood into the literary sections of bookshops everywhere. And to be honest I find it hard to answer such a question. I think that it is certainly a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Like a crack in a pressured pipe, what starts as a small leak will eventually become a gush until the pressure is equalised. Readers growing up now and reading books that are classified as ‘literary’ but contain ideas that aren’t traditionally viewed as being such will be more inclined to include such ideas in their own work. They won’t feel limited to the style that often defines literary novels; the style that everyone knows but still can’t seem to define.

Other opinions:
Neal Stephenson on sci-fi as a literary genre
James Bradley on our inability to define the bounds of literary genres as being a result of deeper, politically and educationally founded, issues

Further links of interest:

Jason Ensor talks to SPUNC on his Twitter tour-de-force of literature links and the usefulness of such a resource (a view which I obviously completely agree with).
Leila at Enemy of Chaos talks writing, feeling, and gaming.
Daily Tech on Google defending its Google Books service.

Let me know what you think! Do you see the increase in price as preserving the value of books? Or do you agree it’s a grab for cash in a so far relatively niche market. What price would you pay for an e-book ? Do you have any more ideas for creative pricing schemes? Make your voice heard in the comments! As always I would like to thank the sources for many of these news articles: @AustLiterature, @Meanjin, @OverLand, and all the myriad people I chat to that provide me links to squirrel away.

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