I'll be chatting in the Yahoo group of author Savannah Chase tomorrow. If you have some time, please drop by and join us. Feel free to ask questions about the publishing industry, science fiction and fantasy, my books, or anything else. (If I don't know the answers, I'll make something up!) The url is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/savannahchase/. (You'll need to join the group before you can ask a question, so please allow a few minutes for approval.)
I'll be online from 7-9 p.m. (U.S. eastern time; GMT -5 hours), but if you can't be there during those hours, you're welcome to leave a question beforehand and I'll respond when I "get there". Or feel free to follow the discussion later when you have time.
See you there!
Mark.
My previous blog entry received by far the most feedback of all I've written so far. I thought I'd respond to some of the objections readers posted in a discussion group I follow:
Comment: Until there is an e-book reader that is actually convenient and reasonable to use (Kindle is close, but who will pay $300.00?) e-books are going to be a fringe market.
My response: I agree, but that's changing quickly. The quality of the screen, the battery life, and the ease of use are already much better than they were three years ago, and the prices will keep dropping. (Probably under $50 in a few years. Look at DVD players, which were over $500 a few years ago) I think within the next five years ebook readers will reach the tipping point, where they're good enough and cheap enough that people will buy them in droves for the convenience. Look at iPhones. They're ridiculously expensive, but people buy them because of what they can do. A few years ago, iPods were the same way. But now there are lower-end models that are affordable, and everyone seems to have one. eBook readers will be the same way.
Comment: People want to do what they want with things they buy.
My response: Of course. And they should be able to, within reason. But I think being able to sell 500 copies of something they paid for one copy of is unreasonable, yet some pirates are doing exactly that.
Comment: Educating people is never going to work as long as people believe they
have the right to the product they bought
My response: That's exactly the point of the education, to open people's eyes and get them to understand that what some people are doing is wrong. The PETA ads and others of that type have opened people's eyes to animal cruelty. Fur sales are down, and animal testing of cosmetics has pretty much been abolished.
You know what they say about locks only keeping honest people honest. If everyone thinks it's okay to share ebooks with everyone they know (and some they don't), then the book industry is done for, because eventually all books will be sold that way. The revenue stream will dry up if books are routinely pirated. But if we can make readers understand that they are hurting the book industry (authors and publishers alike), most people (the honest ones) will stop posting ebooks to websites for widespread distribution. The publishing industry can take action against relatively few pirates, but not against millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who each upload a few books.
Objection: I've seen e-books for $25, so they're not even cheap. I guess the author and/or publisher figures people will pay $25 for a hardcover, so why shouldn't they charge the same?
My response: I'm sure there are exceptions, but most ebooks are significantly cheaper than the equivalent print book. Check out fictionwise.com.
Comment: E-books are not going to make large printing houses go away from still offering the book in actual paper. The profit to cost is still great enough to warrant printing of books.
My response: I agree that ebooks aren't going to make large publishers stop printing books. The cost of printing and shipping them will do that. In the past year, many of these publishers had to lay off employees, merge with other publishing houses, and even cut mid-list authors, because they were losing money or barely getting by. The picture isn't as rosy as you seem to think. The publishers can't keep laying people off to save money, because a certain minimum number are required to do the job effectively. (If you've read any books lately, you've probably noticed that the editing quality of some of them is aready suffering, with frequent grammatical and spelling errors that I never used to see from the big houses.)
As a result, they'll start offering ebooks as a cost-saving alternative to print. Oh, they'll bill it as a way for consumers to save money, but it'll really be to save them money. Costs will be ower and profits higher. And they'll start promoting the hell out of ebooks.Consider the various costs incurred by publishers: editing, designing covers, printing (printing machines, paper, and toner/ink), shipping, advertising, etc. All of these are incurred by print books. But with ebooks, you can eliminate the printing and shipping costs. Everything else should remain the same. We all saw what happened to the cost of food and almost everything else when fuel prices skyrocketed last year. A large part of the price increases was due to the higher cost of shipping. (After all, trucks, airplanes, and ships all use that expensive fuel.)
Sure, fuel prices have dropped back to more reasonable levels, but for how long? The next mid-East crisis or whatever can send them up again. And fossil fuels will only get dearer as the supply diminishes. But those are costs that go away entirely with ebooks (along with the costs for paper and those multimillion-dollar high-speed printers).
The consumers won't be quick to switch--many of them won't unless forced to. But eventually the only way they'll be able to find certain books will be in electronic form, and they won't have any choice but to do so. When that point is reached, it's just a matter of time until all books are only offered that way.
And it's not a bad thing. All those back-list titles that are out of print can be reissued, because with no printing costs (they've already been edited and the covers designed), there's no reason not to offer them if there's even minimal demand.
All this won't happen in five years, perhaps not ten. But I don't think we'll see any more print books (except possibly special edition hardbacks) 20 years from now. (Do you buy many albums on cassette tape these days? I don't think video tapes will be sold much longer, either.)
Everything's going digital: TV, music, movies, cellphones, and now books.
Mark.
There's a thriving business in the resale of used books. It's a great way to clear our shelves of books we no longer want, and these sales can generate some cash for the purchase of new books. Even though the resale of these books deprives the author of royalties for the additional sales, no one really minds. This is because resales are a small percentage of total book sales, and may open new markets (to readers who hadn't previously read a particular offer). The same is true if you lend or give a book to a friend.
The same dynamic should apply to ebooks (books sold in various electronic formats), right?
Unfortunately, no. When you give or sell a printed book to someone, they get one copy and the most they can do is resell or give away one copy. But with ebooks, the one copy you give/sell can be copied hundreds, even thousands of times. So, instead of the author losing the royalties for a single resale, he or she potentially can lose thousands of dollars in royalties--and that's just from a single copy. Think about the impact on that author's income if hundreds of readers each give away copies that are passed on to hundreds of others. (Not to mention the losses suffered by the publishers and those they employ.)
Before you say, "But authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling make millions from their books. They won't miss it.", consider this: For every author who's a millionaire, there are hundreds of authors who barely make a living from writing, and hundreds more who write as a second income because writing alone won't pay the bills. If they made more money, perhaps they could quit their day jobs and write full-time (producing more of the books you love).
And before you say, "But my reading an ebook that a friend gave me won't make a difference.", consider this: There are pirate websites and blogs whose sole reason for existence is the sharing of ebooks, CDs, DVDs, and other copyrighted materials. Thre are literally thousands of people trading thousands of books, albums, and movies without paying for a single one. Collectively, that's many millions of dollars in income the artists never get. So it's not just you, it's many people depriving a lot of hard-working artists of the money they've rightfully earned.
Because it's not just you doing it, it won't matter whether you keep doing it or not, right? Sure it does! By participating in this illegal activity (breaking federal and international copyright laws and perhaps illegally trafficking in stolen merchandise across state lines**), you contribute to the problem and even encourage it.
So what can you do about it? Simple:
1) Stop selling/sharing ebooks. If you can't help yourself, and you just have to read the one a friend gave you, fine. When you're done reading it, delete it and buy a copy from a legitimate source. But whatever you do, don't share your copy with anyone outside your immediate family. Certainly, don't post them to the internet or sell them on eBay.
2) Point your friends who buy/sell/share ebooks to this blog, so they can be educated, too.
3) If you know of websites and blogs that share ebooks, report them to the AuthorsAgainstE-BookTheft group on Yahoo.
Remember, the selling and sharing of ebooks without compensation to the publisher and the author is ILLEGAL and harms the industry as a whole. Do you really want to contribute to a publisher laying off employees or even going bankrupt (and perhaps depriving you of the latest work from one of your favorite authors?)
Unless we all (authors, publishers, and concerned readers) work together to stamp out the illegal sharing/selling of ebooks, the problem will only get worse. Think about it.
Mark.
** WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this or any copyrighted work is illegal. File sharing is an International crime, prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice and the United States Border Patrol, Division of Cyber Crimes, in partnership with Interpol. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is punishable by seizure of computers, up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 per reported instance.
