SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Lagardère Publishing (the parent company of Hachette Book Group), gave an interview to Scroll.in in which he claims, "the eBook is a stupid product."
In the US and UK, the ebook market is about 20% of the total book market, everywhere else it is 5%-7% because in these places the prices never went down to such a level that the ebook market would get significant traction. I think the plateau, or rather slight decline, that we're seeing in the US and UK is not going to reverse. It's the limit of the ebook format. The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it's electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We've tried. We've tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn't work. We've tried apps, websites with our content – we have one or two successes among a hundred failures. I'm talking about the entire industry. We've not done very well.
For an in-depth explanation of Arnaud Nourry's comments, we go to The Digital Reader:
Hachette's sales are low because Hachette keeps their ebook prices high. If you check the Author Earnings report, you will see that ebooks make up a significant part of the market. And it's not just a tiny group of readers who like ebooks; almost all of romance has gone digital, as well as around half of the SF market.
This guy understands so little about ebooks that it is almost frightening.
[...] They've tried enhanced ebooks, ebook apps, and even ebooks on websites, all because Nourry doesn't understand ebooks as a product. And soon they will be trying video games.
Let me say that again so it sinks in.
The CEO of a major multi-national book publishing conglomerate does not understand his company's products or his company's markets.
This point is so mind-boggling because it is really not that hard to find out why consumers like ebooks: just go ask them.
Consumers like ebooks because we can change the font size. We like ebooks because we can carry a hundred ebooks on a smartphone. We also like being able to search the text, add notes that can later be accessed from a web browser, and easily share those notes with other readers.
Here's an editorial rebuttal from The Guardian:
[...] The built-in, one-tap dictionary is a boon for Will Self fans. And as an author, I'm fascinated by the facility that shows you phrases other readers have highlighted; what is it about this sentence that resonated with dozens of humans? It's an illicit glimpse into the one place even a writer's imagination can never really go: readers' minds. And Kindle's Whispersync facility lets the reader fluidly alternate between reading a book and listening to it. What are these if not enhancements to the reading experience?
And then there's the simplest, most important enhancement of all: on any e-reader, you can enlarge the text. That in itself is a quiet revolution. Page-sniffers who dismiss ebooks out of hand are being unconsciously ableist. For decades the partially sighted were limited to the large print section of their local library, limited to only the usual, bestselling, suspects.
[...] Finally, Nourry claims there is no digital experience. Isn't that the point? If it's got graphics, noise or animation, it's no longer a book – it's a computer game or a movie. Just as I write disconnected from the internet and in silence, I don't want my books to do other stuff. The beauty of the book, in a world of digital noise, is the purity of the reading experience – and there's nothing stupid about that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday February 23 2018, @03:56PM (8 children)
Yeah, of course a big publisher doesn't understand eBooks. They want to charge the same price per-unit and provide the same royalties even though the manufacturing and distribution costs became basically 0. All of this "enhanced" crap is their way of trying to justify the extra cost and has nothing to do with what customers want.
Ultimately, eBooks are a threat to the publisher itself. Because if the manufacturing and distribution costs are basically 0, there's nothing stopping a self-published author from reaching a global audience. And that's terrifying.
If the publisher can't figure out how to sell authors on signing old-style book contracts for eBooks where they don't make sense, they only have one thing left: marketing. And they should be rightly scared of losing their marketing edge in the age of social media. Authors, by themselves or with a single friend with social media experience, can self-publish and run a successful large-scale marketing campaign all by themselves. No publisher necessary.
That's what Nourry thinks is "stupid".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday February 23 2018, @04:58PM
Agree. The problem for me is cost. First, they want to charge the same price for something that has lower distribution costs, then I have to pay for a separate reader, and third I can't easily resell the files (DRM and compatibility issues). So until they drop ebook prices below that of used paperbacks, I'll continue to buy physical copies and resell them when I'm done.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday February 23 2018, @07:40PM (4 children)
Distributors are always this way. I have to disagree with the idea that ebooks shouldn't come loaded with enhancements though. Lots of linking to other reading, pop up dictionaries so you can remember what floyds algorithm is or the difference between a zensunni and a zenshiaate, or maybe a map to Mordor, or could you just read this word outloud so I don't sound stupid? My current e-reader lets me annotate my books and my annotations show up on every device I have. I haven't seen it yet but I'd welcome some well-done FMV and animations like the books in Myst or harry potter.
And of course search, searching not only text but tags, keywords, character introductions, concept introductions. Building good search into books makes them so much more useful. We've known this for a long time and so we include a table of contents, glossary, and an index, which I'm sure brought quite a bit extra expense in the 1800s but they still did it.
But distributors never fucking change, remember right before MP3s made a splash, cds were more expensive than ever despite the economies of scale, despite the cost of cassettes being extremely low even though they're no doubt more expensive to manufacture. Sure they cried about napster, about cd-rw, about electronic distribution in general. But they did very little to make CDs more appealing. In fact in Sony's case the XCD drm fiasco had me asking myself why the fuck I even bother trying to buy them when I could just as easily get them for free and never try to toothpaste another scratch for the rest of my life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Friday February 23 2018, @09:39PM (3 children)
I recall a band I listen to actually switched label over that CD DRM thing, because their label did not ask or even inform them about the scheme. For the unaware readers, here's more information than even I had known [ritholtz.com], including the bizarre fact that apparently Sony did this just to make it annoying to put the music on your iPod specifically to poke Apple, not to make it difficult to pirate.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday March 01 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)
Their XCD bullshit wrecked havoc with some industrial control systems. You pop it in, push play for some jams while you're doing work and now you've created an expensive outage.
I don't know how many places this happened across the country but I'm sure the total loss of productivity would have completely sunk the entire sony enterprise if it had to personally endure the turd they shit out on the rest of the corporate world. Remember this incident any time you consider actually paying money to sony when you have the option not to.
"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."
If you're going to hack people to preserve a revenue stream you might as well stop selling music and diversify into identity theft, extortion, DDoS for sale. If you're going there why not have 10 revenue streams?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday March 01 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
Do you have a source for that quotation?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:20PM
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/23/we_will_block_napster/ [theregister.co.uk]
Sony Pictures Entertainment US senior VP Steve Heckler, Keynote address, Americas Conference on Information Systems (2000)
Only slightly related but also interesting. The company that developed the Sony BMG rootkit has pivoted over to the legal marijuana industry so be careful who you buy bongs and nugs from. I can just picture one of those pricks at a pot trade show, everyone totally unaware of the bad vibes in the room.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:40AM
Yes they are idiots for charging the same for dead-tree and e-book versions, but the difference is not as big as you think,
Production and shipping on a paperback is a max of $2, more likely under $1.
For a large format 1000 page hardcover textbook with a print run of 5000 copies, the cost per unit would be under $20. If you have time to get it printed in and shipped from asia, probably under $10.
Not sure about the cost of retail handling, but since shops near me can apparently make a profit on a 69 cent bottle of water that is heavier and and more awkward then it can't be too high.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:08PM
The other thing that is often provided by publishers is editing. If you think that doesn't matter, then you don't know any real authors. There is a reason most author intros thank their editors, and it is because a good editor will vastly improve an authors work. Everything from spelling and grammar errors up to pacing, with instructions to cut this, expand that, drop this crap altogether, and pointing out inconsistancies in motivations, anachronisms in timelines, characters not knowing or knowing things when the rest of the story says they should or shouldn't.
A good author can write a good book. A good author/editor combo can turn it into an excellent book.