Epublishing and Ebooks: A revolution in waiting?

July 2006

Ebooks are about to cause havoc amongst traditional publishers in the same way that MP3s hit the CD music corporations. True or False? Probably false.

But the ebook business is about to get a shot in the arm thanks to the Sony Reader, due to go on sale late this year (2006). This new device is about the same size as a paperback and uses a reflective screen, rather than the familiar light-emitting screen of a computer, PDA or mobile phone. (BBC article on Reader)

At around $400, Sony's new gizmo will be too expensive to have an immediate affect on the traditional publishing industry. That will come later, when competing devices arrive on the market and the price comes down.

Rocky Ride

I've been following epublishing for more than six years, after publishing my own fiction on foxglove.co.uk in 2000. It's been a rocky ride for the new industry.

The ebook publishers I've followed most closely are Boson Books, Online Originals, and free-fiction.com (now defunct). There are hundreds more epublishers, these are just a few that I took a liking to. They've all struggled and free-fiction.com has lost the battle and gone under. Boson Books appeared to go out of business at one stage, then came back to life. Online Originals is now charging its authors. The problem all epublishers have is selling enough copies to make money.

Traditional publishers have the same problem when they enter the ebooks market. "In 2001 Barnes & Noble, Time Warner and Random House closed down their eBook divisions (Mighty Words, iPublish.com and AtRandom respectively), after making only a fraction of their expected sales." I believe this is a quote from the Open ebook forum which has now transformed into the International Digital Publishing Forum and the quote has disappeared along the way.

On March 8 2006, The Times in the UK published an article about www.lulu.com, the latest epublishing kid on the block. "A Lulu bestseller is regarded as a book that sells 500 copies. Some have sold in the low thousands but Young [the entrepreneur behind the site] is reluctant to give exact figures."

Compare this with the traditional publishing industry, where 2,000 sales for a first novel is seen as a lack of success.

Stephen King once published a partially written book on the Internet, and said if he could get $100,000 (peanuts, for him) in voluntary contributions, he'd pursue the idea further. He didn't.

Why doesn't epublishing work?

Here are a few reasons:

Money. Internet users are notorious skinflints, they expect everything for free. The MP3 business got off to a flying start with the old free Napster and similar Peer to Peer sharing of illegal music. Young punters liked free MP3s and many have been happy to move with the times and progress to paying for them. The same will probably apply to literature. My fiction on www.foxglove.co.uk now gets over 100,000 readers a year. This is a higher readership than many traditionally-published writers get, but the key is that it's free.

Technology. Who wants to read a book on their laptop or PDA? The answer is in the paragraph above – lots of people, as long as they don't have to pay for it. The move from cathode ray screens to flatpanels has made reading on-screen easier, but it's still not as comfortable as reading a book. The question is, will the Sony Reader change this? In the medium term, I think the answer is yes. You have to remember that when the MP3 format first appeared, lots of people said it would never work because there'd be no sleeve notes and covers, no added value in the emotional experience. They were wrong.

Nervous traditional publishers. Sometimes I wonder if traditional publishers want ebooks to succeed, or whether they would prefer to drown epublishing at birth. My main reason for saying this is their pricing policy. How can anybody justify charging $7.99 for a regular ebook? The distribution costs are minimal, there's no printing charge. At a stroke, 80% of the costs of publishing a book have disappeared. Bear in mind that books are sold to retailers at around 50% of cover price, and printing might be 10% of cover price, and distribution costs a bit more. Epublishing is dirt cheap, yet mainstream publishing houses are often charging just 25% less than they would for a hardcopy book. Only the specialist ebook publishers get their pricing right, at less than $6.

Digital Rights Management. Trying to control an ebook so it can't be ripped off is a troublesome business. And too often it's the customer who suffers the trouble. Who wants an ebook that can only be read on one computer – the one where it was originally downloaded? And possibly can't even be printed? It's difficult to find the balance between allowing customers their freedom while at the same time making sure they don't turn into free distribution houses.

More TinHat articles related to DRM:
For customers, a view on the temporary nature of ebooks, mainly caused by copy protection (DRM).
Digital Rights Management (DRM) from an epublisher's perspective.
What can epublishers learn from digital music downloads?
Details about how the Apple FairPlay music system works. It's very similar to copy protection (DRM) for ebooks.

What happens next?

Good question. My personal opinion is that epublishing will become bigger than traditional paperback publishing – in terms of readership but not in terms of money. New authors and specialist genres will find a natural home on the Internet. But mainstream fiction – "airport novels" – won't. At least not in the medium term. And the overall effect will be a reduction in income for the publishing industry as a whole, combined with an expansion in choice and availability for readers. Pretty much the same as what happened to music.

Thoughts on The Future for the ebook industry.

More TinHat articles on Ebooks and Epublishing