SF novelist Charlie Stross has written an insightful commentary looking at the reasons why the commercial e-book market has not taken off, and suggesting that the threat of “piracy” is greatly overestimated. He points out that many of the reasons traditionally given for the failure of e-books (such as people not wanting to read off a screen) don’t hold a lot of water. Instead, he suggests, people want books for the sake of having a “cultural artefact”—something that can be bought “in signed, slipcased, limited editions.”
Stross draws the following conclusions:
- Most current e-books are grossly overpriced relative to their utility to the reader. eBooks are actually disposable literature, like mass-market paperbacks only more so.
- We are not going to see cheap e-book readers any time soon because publishers need them, but consumer electronics manufacturers don’t.
- Readers won’t buy expensive e-book readers because they’re reluctant to pay over $25 for a novel at the best of times. Only bundling a metric shitload of high-value content with a reader will make it attractive.
- Insofar as there are no lending libraries or second-hand bookstores for e-books, e-book piracy is the equivalent niche to those traditionally tolerated outlets.
- The pirates are not motivated by profit but by a poorly-understood social phenomenon connected to status in a gift-giving forum.
- We do not know what e-books are worth to readers, but the relative lack of Baen product in the usual places suggests that if unencrypted e-books are readily available at an affordable price (i.e. less than an MMPB) then demand for the pirate edition will be reduced.
I suspect he is very close to the mark in his conclusions—depressingly so, in some cases. The idea that the electronics industry does not see a profit in creating cheap e-book readers sounds very gloomily accurate.
I think most of us at teleread accept these conclusions generally. Things I think he overlooks:
a lot of recent publishing is “ebook-only.” There will reach a point where people will buy ebook readers only to read commercial ebooks.
The Chinese government’s drive to bring ebook readers into the hands of students could drive the US market as well.
Universities are under pressure to cut prices for textbooks; this may lead to scattered adoption of specialty devices for textbooks.
Google’s PDFs of public domain works (in addition to PG works) offer a considerable amount of free content.
Later today or tonight I’ll have my own response to Charles Stross’s thoughtful critique of commercial e-bookdom. Meanwhile, Robert, I think you’re on target. I hope others join in. – David
Some people on the ebook mailing list are saying the same thing, that the article is too dismissive of the indie “ebook only” market. Generally, a lot of ebook prognostication articles seem to be; they look at ebooks in terms of “transcription of existing printed book” and disregard any indie publication.
Why is that? I can think of two reasons; either they aren’t aware of the indie “ebook only” market, or else they’re lumping it in with self-pub ebooks (i.e. the slushpile that is the unfiltered Internet).
I have no way of knowing how well ebook-only publishers are doing for themselves, but at least some of them claim to be making a decent living at it. Still, if most ebook prognosticators have either not heard of them or else don’t realize that there are actual professional non-vanity publishers doing their thing amidst the slush, one wonders how great their influence on the overall market can really be.
Stross wrote,
“Interestingly, Baen’s webscription titles are under-represented on the ebook warez newsgroups. I don’t think this is an accident. Books that come up most often are either scanned and OCRd paper copies, or cracks of DRM-locked ebooks. If you look at the posters’ activities in terms of proving status within a gift economy this makes sense; OCRing a book or cracking DRM takes time and effort, and is a demonstration of putting effort into something — it’s a high value activity. Whereas posting something you grabbed off Baen’s library of for-free books, or paid $5 for is just stupid — it’s like turning up to a a wine and cheese evening your friends are running on a “bring a bottle” basis with a bottle of Buckfast or Mad Dog 20/20. It’s cheesy, tasteless, and looks cheap, and that’s how the ebook pirate elite will view you.”
I don’t really buy this at all. Obviously plenty of pirates do no more than buy CDs, rip and upload — and most of the Baen material can be found on warez sites (I don’t follow the ebook binaries newsgroups, so I don’t know about those).
I suspect ebook piracy is, like ebooks in general, a niche market which explains the behaviors Stross observes. If e-book readers were as widespread as mp3 players, I think this would change.
Assuming that you want to read a book (and here is where Mr. Stross ignoring the indie market is quite right- first you gotta want to read the book and right now the indie market is way too undeveloped to make an impact), price/usability are the most important factors and again Mr. Stross is quite right that e-books being the most disposable of book formats should be the cheapest, and also that not being able to read the book an all of your devices is a big negative and turnoff even for otherwise dedicated e-book readers.
However he does not (at least yet) carry the argument to its logical point that cheap mass e-book selling and 50% take distributors/sellers are hard to coexist. The rarely mentioned but to my mind as crucial as drm-free reason for Baen’s success with e-books is direct-selling, so they afford to keep low prices and pay high author royalties.
Funny, I keep reading things like this:
2001: ‘eBooks will never catch on – they’re only 0.5% of the market’
2003: ‘eBooks will never catch on – they’re only 1.5% of the market’
2005: ‘eBooks will never catch on – they’re only 5% of the market’
and now Charlie: ‘eBooks will never catch on – they’re only 20% of the market at most’.
I have no way of verifying the figures, but frankly if I was involved in an industry that was roughly tripling in value every two years, I wouldn’t be beating myself up about what a failure I was. Perhaps we’ve all been overexposed to the iPod, so we don’t call something a success unless it hits 60% market share overnight.
Obviously there are plenty of people who would like to see the industry fail, but for the rest of us, let’s not mistake the occasional speed bump for proof that eBooks are doomed.
I do think that Charlie has fallen victim to a common fallacy, however, which is that all pirated books can be bought. The only pirate books I think of downloading now are those which I can’t buy anywhere — except on eBay at $50 for a used copy. Once ePublishers start mining their backlists then they’ll become a lot more attractive to me.
Charlie also remarks on book clubs as a way to get discounted-devices into readers’ hands. He dismisses this on the basis of his own sales via book clubs.
But maybe we could get devices discounted, even down to free-with-subscription if the duration of the subscription is long enough, for newspapers (which are having their own problems, especially with younger audiences). The tech-coolness of an Iliad, Sony Reader, or even the Nokia n800, might interest 20-somethings enough to subscribe to the NYTimes, WSJ, Washington Post. Magazines might then come online (as it were) with compatible editions.
Maybe a 2-year sub at standard delivery rates could cover a lot of $400 US?
I don’t know if it’s “insightful”, but it’s a reasonable summary of what we’ve been talking about the last few years.
Chris, this is just the books-as-fetish argument again. I think there’s something to it, but not a whole lot. And it’s not really what he’s saying. He’s saying that ebooks don’t offer much value to readers (“Most current ebooks are grossly overpriced relative to their utility to the reader.”), for a variety of reasons — the lack of a tangible form is just one of them.
I think his other arguments about ease of reading, and the unwillingness of consumer electronices manufacturers to make bare-bones devices if they can avoid it, are pretty accurate.
The points he makes about DRM are interesting. There seem to be two of them. One is that using DRM lowers the value of the ebook to the reader (“…readers’ natural aversion to DRM (if you change mobile phone or laptop, why should your entire library evaporate?)…”), so they are less willing to pay the prices that publishers demand for those ebooks. But the other is that DRM prevents the normal secondary uses of books — trading, forwarding, re-selling, etc. Which makes piracy spring up as a way of re-enabling those uses. And he further says that authors should just suck it up and assume that they won’t get any compensation for three-quarters of the uses of their book!
There’s even a further point, which is that using DRM on e-book versions of a book apparently harms sales of the p-book version: “…one thing even the proponents of ebook DRM agree is that it doesn’t seem to have had any [positive] economic impact on the sales of dead tree editions. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence from research into music file sharing that people who use “pirate” ebooks actually buy more of the real thing…”. Are authors suing publishers to prevent them from using DRM on the e-book versions of their books yet? Shouldn’t they be doing that?
The essay of Charlie Stross is perceptive in many respects. Yet the comments on the price e-book hardware seem odd. He appears to ignore the existence of $100 e-book readers. He points out that “publishers don’t manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does” and he continues as follows:
Below are the prices of some hardware that can be used for reading e-books. The prices do not meet the $50 price point suggested by Stross but they are considerably less than the $350 price point he mentions. Also, Gutenberg titles and other text files can be converted so that they are readable on the devices:
(The prices were recorded from the eBookwise website and Amazon. Shipping not included.)