Graduation

No, not the Kanye album.

Me!

w00t, as they say…

photo CC licensed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/isabisa/

Why E-Books Won’t Fly

As mentioned before, the biggest impediment to e-books really taking off is economics; more specifically, the pricing model just doesn’t work.

Last weekend’s NYT added some perspective, from the publishers point of view:

Publishers and authors say it is much more complicated than the cost of paper and shipping. The lower e-book price “is not sustainable,” said Mr. Baldacci, whose novels regularly rise to the top of hardcover best seller lists. If readers insist on cut-rate electronic books, he said, “unfortunately there won’t be anyone selling it anymore because you just can’t make any money.”

Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same.

“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”

I’m not in the publishing business, so it’s difficult to verify whether or not it’s true that most of the cost of book publishing is outside of the paper-printing and distribution of the product. But there are two problems here.

First, the product is, in the end, digital, and user perceptions are that buying something immaterial should fundamentally cost less. In other words, getting consumers to believe that producing a product that no longer requires you to physically product the product is a very difficult sell. Furthermore, if you look at Amazon’s site, many paperback versions of books cost even less than the Kindle version. For example, Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough is 11.99 for Kindle, and 11.20 for the paperback. A small difference, but one that makes it difficult to square the “it costs just as much to make an e-book” argument.

Next, listen to the arrogance in the quote from the exec from Simon & Schuster: “The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with.”

Oh really?

Isn’t that the same condescending tone we heard from newspaper publishers who laughed away blogs, and music executives who ignored the Internet, and Hollywood studio heads who paid no attention to digital video back in the day?

The truth here is digital technologies tear down gatekeepers — that is what is central to the recent history of the newspaper industry, and the music business, and Hollywood, and it’s true for book publishing as well.

It’s the story of the old guard trying to hold off the new.

Maureen Dowd: Plagiarist

Oh this is rich.

I never understood why Dowd even has the job she has. She hasn’t been relevant for many years. Mostly, from what I can tell, she writes a gossip column.

Lately, there has been a lot of consternation about the demise of the newspaper industry. And some really, really stupid ideas to save it.

Newspaper journalists, you really need to get over yourselves. Not that we don’t need newspapers, but it seems like people in the newspaper have a very difficult time with the whole self-reflection thing.

Kindle Broadsheet

Apparently this week, Amazon will release a new, larger Kindle, the first of a series of products that are supposed to save the newspaper industry:

…these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

…But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but the reason I haven’t purchased a Kindle is not at all because it’s not big enough. It’s because the pricing model is ridiculous. Beyond the $350 need to buy the device, it’s the monthly subscription charges that really push it over into the “early adopter only” category. Or maybe it’s the “rich people” category.

Now, part of this is the conundrum facing the newspaper (and magazine) business — there are now so many places to the get “the news” for free, online, that paying $13.99 for the Times when you can read it online for free, just seems wrong. Granted, I pay for the paper-based Sunday edition, but here, I feel like I’m paying for the experience of reading the Times on a Sunday morning. The tactility of it all…

That aside, the pricing model just doesn’t make sense. I’ve found paperback books at Amazon that cost less than the Kindle version — huh? And to read blogs on the Kindle, you need to subscribe, at $.99 per month per blog. I currently have 256 feeds in my reader — even if you take 1/4 of that, that’s a lot of monthly cash to read blogs.

Another problem — and maybe a bigger problem — is spelled out in the Times article quoted above:

Subscribers get updates once a day over a cellular network.

Once a day?

That’s way out of place with the world in which we live today. Life is real-time.

(This, incidentally, is the main downside of the “reading the Times on Sunday morning” experience — I’ve read many of the articles already, some days earlier, as the NYT seems to start posting weekend articles as early as Wednesday…)

Finally, there’s another concern, one that’s the thesis of Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but the short of it is, the more we buy into closed technology models like the Kindle, where one company acts as a gatekeeper of the technology (the iPhone is exactly this model as well), the more we are shutting out what Zittrain calls the “generative” qualities of digital media.

These are the concerns and problems with the Kindle. Somehow, the execs at Amazon seem to have convinced themselves the size of the device is a limitation. And if the newspaper industry is hanging its hopes on this particular electronic broadsheet, I say, good luck to that.