The New Sleekness

You’re a publishing geek, which is why you’re here and if you’re anything like me those analogies from the SAT were practically fun. So lets have a couple publishing/film industry analogies to start things off:

1. Warner Bros. : Netflix as Random House : _______
a. library
b. Amazon
c. GooglePrint
d. all of the above

2. DVDs : movielovers as ebooks : _______.
a. booklovers
b. cheap people
c. misunderstood
d. all of the above

(My answers at the end)

Both of these analogies are problematic on several levels. For starters, Warner Bros. and Random House are not made equal and neither are Netflix and Amazon but Warner Bros. and Random House are both grasping for something within their content distribution  and that is the seed for this post.

The movie and publishing businesses could not be more different. But they have both, along with music, found themselves in a tricky, new, digital situation of content distribution in the past decade. Publishing is the stuffy older cousin to both music and movies. It has always been the quintessential “gentleman’s” business. For decades (in some cases centuries) the pursuit of scholarly and literary excellence was sought after and profits deemed not entirely necessary. In my tenure, I have worked at all types of publishers, a few of the “big six,” an indy publisher and a university press. They all function in fairly similar ways with, of course, marked differences in how they meet their ends. But with the decline of the independent bookstore and the rise of chains and Amazon, the digital revolution, and ultimately the “Great Recession” a fundamental change has occurred: the way consumers consume.

We have not entered a new marketplace, we are in the thick of it, and publishing is just joining the party after resisting for so very long. Ami posted here about the three jobs publishers need to fill this year. The reality is publishers needed to fill those positions five years ago and won’t fill them for another two in any real numbers. We continue to struggle, several steps behind the real technology game as have our film and music counterparts.

On January 6, 2010 Netflix and Warner Bros. announced in a joint press release that they would delay new releases of Warner Bros. DVDs and BlueRay discs for 28 days on Netflix. It is my guess that Warner Bros implemented a certain amount of arm twisting here. And it seems likely that a similar arrangement must be in the works with Blockbuster but no mention of that was made in the release. I believe this has some telling correlations for how publishers handle ebook publishing.

First of all, Netflix is an excellent business model and one publishers should be paying more attention to across all publishing platforms. But Warner Bros., like several publishers of late, has decided that they are missing out on sales because of the availability of their DVDs as rentals. Why this wasn’t a problem back in the Blockbuster heyday is beyond my understanding but movie rentals, not unlike library lending (which is simply funded by our tax dollars as opposed to a subscription model), has been around for ages and it’s never been a problem until now. So you ask what does this have to do with digital content strategy? Everything!

I know all the arguments, I’ve read Jonathan Galassi’s op-ed in the New York Times (which in a nutshell argues that publishers are contributors to books and should have some right to the edited work that they marketed, publicized, designed—but this is all fodder for another post…), and I know many in the industry vehemently disagree with me. But in my opinion, an ebook is a mass market paperback, plain and simple. You’re not going to put it on your bookshelf and save it, you can’t get it signed by the author (without getting snickered at) and chances are you want to leave it on a park bench or pass it along to a friend. So what is an ebook worth and what is the benefit of delaying its release?

Mass market paperbacks don’t publish at the same time as the hardcover. That’s true. But not all books make it to mass market paperback status: Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, Anne McCaffrey, these are the bread and butter of the mass market format. To the contrary, every book has the potential to be an ebook—from the scholarly monograph to genre fiction—so it is a completely different animal. As are the aforementioned modern day consumers. Convenience, impulse buys, easy access and above all, price are the order of the day to consumers in our recessionary economy. We don’t see as many movies in the theaters, we never buy actual CDs anymore, and book sales are declining. We all know it, no matter how hard we try to ignore the facts. Amazon has a strategy of $9.99 for bestsellers but I’ve frequently seen ebooks priced higher than their hardcover counterparts, I’m guessing at publisher list price, not Amazon’s. And every publisher has a different strategy.

I think it’s high time to come up with a group strategy.

We’re not dealing with a bookstore here, this is Amazon, and they care little about the health and welfare of the publishing world. We contribute product to one very small segment of a retail giant, no matter what their humble beginnings were. They care about selling Kindles, launching a new reading platform and giving consumers what they want—cheap content—in the most convenient, impulse-buying and lucrative way possible. Not unlike the time it takes you to purchase a song from the iTunes store for $.99, at $9.99 I don’t labor over the decision to buy a Kindle copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (but then again, Amazon has the hardcover discounted from $29.95 to $12.00). For your typical (non-Dan Brown) book at $27.95 I can easily wait for the paperback to come out, I have a million other things to read. Your hardcore fan on the other hand, wants it as soon as possible, can’t wait to have it. He wants to have it signed and will likely buy the Kindle edition too (if it’s available before he’s cracked the spine on the $27.95 copy or borrowed it from the library). That is all to say, that certain books warrant a delayed e-release and will lose significant hardcover sales to a digital edition but these are in no way the majority of books being published.

It’s a fine line for consumers. I know I won’t buy a DVD until I’ve seen the movie. Even say Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which I’m pretty much guaranteed to love. If I haven’t seen it in the theaters I’m going to get it from Netflix and then think about buying it. Either way you slice it, a content provider is delaying my purchase of a movie or book by delaying its “e-release.” Will I wait six months to buy a Dan Brown book as publishers change their ebook release schedules? Yeah, probably. Or maybe there will be something else I’d rather spend my $9.99 on when the time comes, or the pile on my virtual nightstand is already just a bit too deep to bother or even better I’ll just wait for the mass market paperback to come out for $6.95 in another six months which I can at least pass along. The fact is publishers are losing out on some sales whether they are hardcover or ebook by staggering release dates for the same content.

I may still buy my DVD from Warner Bros. but they now have to wait another 28 days for me to get my disc from NetFlix, watch it, order from Amazon… Same goes for readers. I won’t bother buying a hardcover unless it’s a book I have to have in my library, in which case, I want a reading copy anyway. Whether it is an ebook or a crummy little paperback is just a matter of what’s available to me at the moment I’m looking to buy.

So where do we go from here?

We start a real, constructive cross-publisher conversation, do some market research, talk to a futurist (or Dionne Warwick) and move forward! The indecision is getting us nowhere. Why not try a new innovative discussion and come to some concrete strategies for ebook pricing and release dates? Sounds simple right? I know it’s not simple, but it is a place to start.

Sarah’s analogy answers: 1. d; 2. a.

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