People don’t give away printed books. Well, almost never. Even second-hand, a printed book is worth something – usually several times more than most brand new e-books.
Why should this be? Just as much work goes into writing an e-book, editing it, designing the cover, and so on. Yet so many people believe that e-books should be free, or at least very, very cheap. And I’m talking about commercially published e-books here, not self-published ones.
e-Books that are published by ‘real’ publishers have had exactly the same amount of effort spent on them; editorial effort, design, production, sales and marketing. A publisher makes just as much investment in an e-book as in a printed book. The only difference is they don’t have to spend money on having it printed and shipped to bookshops. And that’s not a huge slice of the cost. The biggest single cost element in the price of a printed book, is the chunk the bookshop takes (around 40%) but online retailers also take a sizeable cut in the sale of e-books. There really isn’t much of an argument for them being a lot cheaper than their printed equivalents. Cheaper, yes, but not massively so.
Yet that’s what everybody seems to want. A book that is $20 as a paperback in the bookshops, people expect to get for five bucks or less online – preferably for free.
Partly this is down to the expectation that everything on the Web should be free. If everything on the Web were low-quality rubbish, that people produced in their spare time, as a bit of a laugh, or to feed their own egos, this might be a reasonable expectation. And, since 99% of everything on the Web is low-quality rubbish, that people produced in their spare time, as a bit of a laugh, or to feed their own egos, people are not often disappointed. And, let’s face it, we live in a time of disposable entertainment. Yet to produce something of quality, for skilled craftspeople to create works of art and entertainment, takes time and care, and a lifetime of study and practice. Isn’t something like that worth something?
Aparently it is if it’s on paper, but not if it’s on a screen.
Partly, I believe, this is also down to an ingrained sense that only tangible, physical things have intrinsic value. Ephemera, bits and bytes, aren’t the kind of thing you can really own. Not really. Because, sooner or later, they will evaporate and vanish. A book is for life. An e-book is for the life of the technology that displays it – which will probably be obsolete in five years. This is a reasonable viewpoint too. To me, it means that e-books with DRM should be worth far, far less than e-books in open formats, with open access. If you can’t preserve your investment in an e-book by copying it, re-selling it, moving it to different platforms and different formats as technology changes, you need to factor it’s very short usable life into its purchase price.
And writers have colluded with the peopel who are devaluing their work. So many of them give away electronic copies of their works in an attempt to boost sales of the printed equivalents. It’s just as if the work has no value in electronic form, only in physical, printed form. It’s a big mistake they’re making. Printed books will disappear completely one day and then where will writers and publishers be?
Trying to make a living from free books.
