By Cathy Macleod.
IN THE Land Of The Rising Sun they’re putting the heat on Kindle. Twenty-one Japanese publishers confer in the month ahead, February, on how to stop threats to their earnings by Amazon’s global ebooks domain.
Eavesdropping on this vital meeting, and analysing its outcome, will be the major publishers of Europe and America, who suffer their own panic alert. The world’s biggest online bookseller is giving them heaps of strife. The problem, or anyway the biggest one, is that Amazon releases a cheap ebook version while publishers are still pushing the first-edition hardback at premium price.
Amazon also slashes, at will, the price of the physical books it handles. On top of this, recently, it has even announced reduction in delivery by post. The mantra becomes “Go Amazon for a cheap read” and this has affected physical bookshops as well as any publisher who retails via the online king.
Without viewing contracts that global publishers have with Amazon, I cannot know how badly the system cuts their profitability. But they are squealing, so it must hurt. Control of their market is again being gripped by the bookseller, only this time (as physical bookchains go broke) the ogre dominates online.
Traditional publishing overheads are enormous. They include printing, binding, warehousing, promotion, distribution, payment to authors, and inhouse overheads. All these costs, for many years, were supposed to be covered by 40 percent of a book’s retail price. Only mass-market bestsellers sold in sufficient quantity to suffice and, hopefully, to help finance less popular works of literature. There was also the invisible profit killer of “sale or return”, whereby a bookseller low on cashflow could simply return unsold stock to the publisher. This silly system broke many of the smaller publishers. Now a new market pattern, online retail, is beginning to dislocate larger ones.
Once typed into a computer, the digital version of a book costs little to distribute. Delivery direct to the reader, in any format, needs just a keytap. On price and availability there is no way paper-and-ink can compete. Which is why Amazon, disdainful of feeding a book progressively from hardback through paperback to eventual audio and digital, is giving the book trade such a headache.
To counter the problem, here is the obvious: let the publishers sell their books through one worldwide collective controlled by themselves. After all, they own the books.
Is this what the Japanese book trade will decide to do? Without publishers, Amazon and its monopolistic Kindle have no content to satisfy readers. Realising the danger, Amazon has recently edged into publishing. A few major authors have signed to sell future work through Amazon exclusively. Millions more, unknown or unsuccessful in the traditional bookmarket, are invited to self-publish on Kindle. Where is this heading?
Some trade sources fear the result will be a mountain of digital slush, where finding a good book becomes a marathon of clicking and sampling. Traditional publishers, alas, give us many a stinker too, but at least your chance of a good read is better when a book is vetted, groomed and presented by professional editors.
Clearly, to protect their trade and their quality content, publishers must themselves control the reading revolution. After all, they did it before when paperbacks swept the world. While diminishing hardback sales, the paperback multiplied overall profits. The same strategy applies to ebooks – an additional market.
The ebook is a wonderful medium that takes literature to new places and people. It won’t kill printed books any more than audio books have done. Traditional publishers must get together if they are to continue control of their trade. In Japan this fact is acknowledged. In coming weeks, that nation’s publishers will discuss how to keep hold of their readers in a digital world. Instead of growling individually at Amazon which, like themselves, seeks maximum profit, this is action the world’s biggest publishers should be applying too.
Happy reading from Cathy at Booktaste.
