The UK take on US e-book sales prospects for Europe

Philip Jones on The Bookseller’s FutureEBook blog has taken notice of the Mike Shatzkin column about the idea of American publishers selling e-books in Europe that I covered the other day. (And even taken notice of my post here, which is a nice bit of validation for me.) I find it interesting to see the United Kingdom angle on this story.

The specter (or, in the UK, “spectre”) of American e-publishing taking more of an interest in European rights is starting to make some UK publishers distinctly nervous. (Jones says that “some [UK executives] even flinched” on mention of Shatzkin’s column.)

Jones brings up a territorial dispute over US vs UK printed books that happened a few years ago at the Frankfurt Book Fair over printed books. UK publishers have gotten used to owning the European English-language market for printed books, due to (as Shatzkin mentioned) the much wider pond between Europe and America than between Europe and the UK.

But what UK publishers are really worried about is reverse importation—that American books sold to the English-language market in Europe might make their way back across the channel into the UK and compete with the UK editions. And with American all-region e-books, there would be even less of a barrier to that than with physical books.

Of course, some publishers weren’t as worried. One said that Shatzkin was just trying to drum up controversy to promote the Digital Book World conference in which he is involved. Another pointed out that UK publishers routinely insist on the European English-language rights for new books, meaning they would be the only ones contractually allowed to sell those books in Europe. (Which I suppose answers my rhetorical question about where an American expatriate in Germany or Switzerland could order an English-language e-book of an American book.)

But there’s another way of looking at this. With US publishers currently stuck on the high price agency model, and with UK e-books cheaper than US e-books for all sorts of reasons (even with UK VAT included) why don’t UK publishers simply start to target US consumers direct. After all, as I understand it there is a growing e-book market in the US, and many consumers over there even read in English.

A survey of Amazon’s territorial controls (which Paul covered today already) shows that Amazon UK prices are significantly cheaper than Amazon US prices for many books. (Of course, this will change if and when Amazon caves to the pressure of English publishers to implement agency pricing over there, too.)

It seems like the history of the world’s march to digital is a history of increasing technological and economical protectionism. Remember that DVDs were implemented with region encoding, to prevent importation of possibly less-expensive DVD versions from other regions. (We’ve all seen how well that worked out—everyone concentrated on Region 1, letting the rest go begging, and after a while region-cracked players started popping up. I’m told that you can or at least could at one point buy region-hacked DVD players in UK (Region 2) supermarkets.)

And then there was the staggered release of Harry Potter books, where so many people simply imported the UK version in the weeks or months before the American editions were released that after the first couple of books the publishers started doing simultaneous cross-Atlantic releases.

They made a virtue of necessity by turning each one into a midnight launch party extravaganza, but make no mistake—they only did it because the inter-regional competition pushed them into it. The competition resulted in a beneficial outcome for the consumer.

And now we have the whole e-book territorial rights deal. I continue to maintain that it’s ridiculous that you can quite easily order a printed book from another nation, with the attendant delay, shipping costs, and fossil fuel use involved in getting a block of wood pulp from one side of the world to another—but you can’t do the same for an e-book, which can be delivered instantly with no shipping costs.

From a consumer standpoint, it largely doesn’t matter whether UK or US publishers serve the European (or Canadian, or any country’s) e-book market. Consumers just care about being able to get the book they want when they want it, which is one of the principal advantages of e-books to begin with. They don’t care who or where it comes from.

So if publishers are going to continue to cling to territorial rights and regional restrictions, that’s fine and dandy—but they need to make a better effort to get e-books available in all places at once the same way Bloomberg and Scholastic did with the Harry Potter print editions. Because if modern consumers find they can’t legally get the e-book they want, they’re increasingly likely to get it illegally. What’s the point in driving someone who was perfectly willing to pay you to go download it for free?