Motoko Rich

Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as “sales.” That paradoxical scorekeeping was the lead for an article by Motoko Rich in The New York Times on Saturday that quoted a lot of people, some apparently disagreeing with each other, but none of them necessarily wrong.

There really are three separate questions to consider, which get elided in these conversations.

1. What is the impact of giving away ebooks as a promotional device, either to boost the word of mouth on the book being given away or to promote an author’s other titles?

2. What is the potential impact on the industry overall of ubiquitous giveaways of ebooks that would apparently have commercial value?

3. When ebooks are given away, how should that sale be “scored” in any measurement of the book’s popularity?

The answer to the first question appears, anecdotally but just about universally, to be that giving ebooks away boosts sales of that title and related titles. Rich’s piece sites numerous publishers attesting to that. She apparently found no publisher that is skeptical about whether giveaway promotions work or has seen the tactic fail. And that would confirm my experience: I don’t know of one.

But as we’ve noted before, this effect could change over time. We’re still in a period where ebooks are not an acceptable format to most book readers. That means the benefits of giving them away is not confined to the word-of-mouth from the recipients, it can result in a print book purchase by the very person you gave it to! As ebook reading becomes more popular, particularly if we go to a DRM-free universe, the impact of cannibalization from giveaways could grow dramatically from what it is now.

The second question is what is apparently paramount to David Young of Hachette (as quoted in the Rich piece) and is influencing the policies described at Penguin. As more and more ebooks are given away, it offers a wider array of choice to people who prefer to select from the free offerings and just never pay. For the last 15 years of his life, my father, Len Shatzkin, refused to buy anything except remainders. He shopped from several mail order catalogs and, if he was in a bookstore, shopped at the bargain tables. His position was that if publishers were going to be dumb enough to reliably give the books away six months or a year later, he’d just wait and choose his reading from among what had been marked down. With free ebook marketing the way it is today, sometimes you don’t even have to wait!

And that’s obviously what was on Young’s mind when he said the tactic was “illogical.” It is illogical if you take a long-term, industry-health view of the situation. It is totally logical if you’re trying for short-term advantage to break a new book or build a particular author, as most of the other authors and publishers were trying to say.

There was a long comment string on the HarperStudio blog about this question six or eight months ago. I said at the time that I figured that if these giveaways kept spreading, one of our more industrious web entrepreneurs would create an ebooksforfree.com site which would be a consumer directory to “free” offers at various publishers and web retailers, title by title.

It’s a classic Tragedy of the Commons. Each person giving away ebooks succeeds in their intentions to boost their sales, but everybody will pay for the overgrazing in the end.

The third question is a tricky one. It is worth noting that the App Store makes it very easy to for the consumer to decide whether to shop the free apps or the priced apps. I think Amazon is hurting themselves by not at least sorting their bestseller pages that way. And they don’t. Amazon says the Kindle bestseller listings change every hour: I just checked the Top 10 and found one 25 cent book, one book at a substantial price (higher than $9.99), and eight free. Some of the eight free were self-promoters like the lead in Rich’s story; some were public domain; some were multi-book authors from established publishers. But only one of the Top 10 was elected with votes paid for with dollars from the Kindle clientele, which is what I think most people looking at “best sellers” would be looking for.

This raises a question I don’t know the answer to and my way to do the research will be to see if somebody with knowledge posts a comment. Kindle reports to the USA Today Bestseller List. This is, as far as I know, the only reflection of ebook popularity in the public domain. It would be interesting to know if USA Today has a standard for that reporting. Of course, most of the “weight” of the USA Today list, quite properly, would be print sales so whatever Kindle reports might not move the needle much. Most sales today are still print sales. But we’re headed for a crazy world if the concept of what “sold best” is expanded to include what people were willing to take for free.

On the other hand, if you try to separate free from paid, you will still face the question of where to draw the line. If publishers sell a $20 hardcover as a $5 ebook, should those units count equally in determining bestseller status? How about a dollar? How about a penny?

A tip of the hat here to my sometimes colleague Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media, who hinted at what I have said at length in this piece in his brief turn in Rich’s article. Brian has done extensive research that tends to confirm what Rich’s interviews and my anecdotal information suggest: that giving away ebooks boost sales in the present marketplace. But Brian managed to bridge the enthusiasm of the giveaway marketers and the incredulity expressed by David Young with his observation that there was a risk that free reading could eventually “supplant paid reading.”

And that wouldn’t really be good for anybody.

This is absolutely the last post you will see promoting Digital Book World 2010, which is on this Tuesday and Wednesday at the New York Sheraton and which is turning out to exceed my fondest hopes when we started out planning it this summer. But we have a panel on the very subject of this post called “Ebook challenges: competing with free and getting the timing right.” Brian O’Leary is moderating, and the panelists include agent Robert Gottlieb of the Trident Group; marketing director Mindy Stockfield of Hyperion (which published Chris Anderson’s book “Free”); ebook retailer Kobo’s VP Michael Tamblyn, and Steve Ross, who has been a publisher at both Random House and HarperCollins. There’s another panel on “Ebook pricing: what should they cost and why?” which includes the head of Penguin’s ebook publishing efforts, Tim McCall.  I enjoy having The New York Times stamp the topics we selected last August as “current” 72 hours before our show begins, even if just implicitly.

If you like this blog, I know you’ll enjoy Digital Book World. I hope to see you there.

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The Wall Street Journal was the first to announce, on Monday, (behind a pay wall, but Google “Publisher Delays E-book Amid Debate On Pricing” and you’ll get it) that Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah was holding back the ebook publication of a new hardcover YA novel, Bran Hambric, scheduled for release this September. Raccah’s explanation to the Journal was that she was trying to preserve the perception that the $27 hardcover price was reasonable. Since she knew that any ebook would hit the street at just under $10 (the Kindle promotional price is $9.99 and B&N has suggested that their promotional price will be $9.95), Raccah felt that sales of the hardcover would be undermined.

What was left unsaid in the Journal piece was that Raccah might have been leaving money on the table with this decision. After all, the publisher still sells ebooks on roughly equivalent terms to printed books and has lower costs. So, depending on the royalties Raccah is paying the author, she is (most likely) realizing more margin for Sourcebooks on the ebook sale than on the printed book sale, regardless of how the retailer prices it.

Even more startling (in this day and age) is the possibility that the author’s royalty is higher per copy on the hardcover, so Raccah might be protecting author royalties, to the extent that withholding the ebook restrained cannibalization and resulted in more hardcover sales. I mention that possibility because the agent for author Kaleb Nation is Richard Curtis, one of the most ebook-friendly agents in town (and, indeed, the owner of an ebook publisher called EReads), who was quoted in the Journal supporting Raccah’s decision.

On Wednesday, Motoko Rich and Brad Stone published a piece in the Times on the same story (in which I was very briefly quoted.) Rich and Stone added some nuance to the story. The Journal said that agent Robert Gottlieb resisted simultaneous ebook publication “when he can prevent it.” In the same graf, they said that only one book of the Times’s Top 15 fiction bestsellers was not available in the Kindle store. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Kindle editions were available at any particular time in relation to the first release of the hardcover, just that they are available now.

The Times reporting went further than the Journal, speaking to several publishers of upcoming major books about their ebook timing plans. Doubleday hasn’t decided yet about Dan Brown’s book but acknowledges that the impact of ebook sales on the hardcover was a consideration. S&S won’t reveal their ebook release plan for Stephen King’s November novel, Under the Dome. Ditto from Hachette imprint “Twelve” on the Ted Kennedy autobiography, True Compass, coming on October 6.

So the fact that everybody is thinking hard about this is confirmed by the Times’s reporting.

But Cader, who as an industry expert and blogger has more scope and credibility to report unattributed information than reporters at WSJ or the Times, went further in Publishers Lunch on Thursday. He ridiculed the notion that Doubleday was (according to a spokesperson)  ”[more] worried about…security…than particular vendors” and he sees the motivation from publishers being to control the behemoth, Amazon. As Cader reports it, Kindle sales surged when the new device(s) came out, becoming as much as 50% or even 70% of Amazon’s sales of many important books.

Everybody (in the industry, but maybe not outside of it) knows that Amazon pays a standard discount for ebooks, which is about 50% off publisher suggested retail, and that Amazon actually takes a loss on a $25 or $27 hardcover book it sells through Kindle at $9.99 (as B&N will do if they follow through to sell books like this as ebooks for $9.95.) Nobody expects Amazon to do this forever although, as Cader points out, they are temporarily subsidized by the profit they make selling the Kindle devices. The widespread fear among the big publishers is that Amazon will soon demand lower prices for the books they put on Kindle so they can keep the $9.99 price point profitably.  As the Kindle unit sales grow, of course, the muscle behind such a potential demand would grow right along with it.

Cader makes the very important point that sales migrating to ebooks, and particularly to Kindle, weaken the brick-and-mortar channel that publishers depend on for most of their sales and profits. The Times reported that publishers could well be making bigger unit profits on each Kindle sale than on each printed book sale (a fact that I explained to them when I was interviewed and which appeared not to be clear to them before I did). Cader (who of course knew that without needing to be told by me or by the Times) makes the point that publishers do this because they are “looking out for what they believe to be their long-term interests — and are trying to protect the entire system of physical book retailing which supports the whole industry.”

While this was happening, Dominique Raccah posted her thoughts to Peter Brantley’s Amazing List and Kassia Krozser, on that list and proprietor of the Booksquare blog, turned her space over to Dominique for a version of that post. Dominique made it clear that she considered what she was doing with Bran Hambric to be an experiment. Her focus was on a “sustainable author/publisher model”. She made the point (again, clear to most people in publishing but perhaps not to those outside) that the music business continues to present inapplicable analogies, but one of the most egregious is that authors should give it away like musicians to get performance bookings: in publishing, there are no performance bookings (and few t-shirt sales…)

Raccah made it clear that she supports early ebook releases and her house is going to a workflow that will enable that. But then she gets to what is really the heart of the matter. “Etailers are suggesting that the ‘right’ price point for an ebook is maximally $9.99.  And they are proselytizing the price $9.99.  We can’t control what retailers charge for books or ebooks.” The publisher’s choices are whether and when to make it available and whether to sell to any particular retailer.

From there she explains that exploiting formats with “windows” is an old book business strategy (hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market paperback) and a common film strategy (theatrical precedes DVD release, with TV licensing once part of that picture as well, but not anymore.) And she concludes by saying that publishers need to make these decisions on a book-by-book basis (”strategically”, she says, although I’d call that “tactically.”)

My quote, by the way, was to the effect that ebook readers and print book readers are increasingly separate markets, which I believe to be true but cannot prove. A C-level friend at a large house disagrees with me, as I’m sure many others do, and my evidence on this is highly anecdotal (including myself: I have read one printed book of the 50 or so I’ve read in the past 18 months.) But my friend would have no more evidence than I to support his contrary position, so publishers will have to make decisions without really knowing, for now, whether they can push a Kindle or Shortcovers or Ereader consumer back to paper by denying or delaying a book.

That concludes the summary. I have a few thoughts of my own to add on this. I’ll be posting those shortly, probably over the weekend. I hate going much over 1000 words on any single day, and I’m already past 1200.

An  earlier version of this post had a couple of errors misconneting agents and authors which have been repaired. So if somebody tells you about a mistake they saw that you can’t find, that’s what it’s all about. Thanks to Michael Cader for setting me straight.

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There has been a lot of discussion about ebook pricing lately. I did a post following Motoko Rich writing about this in the Times, but Rich’s post itself was a sign of the discussion taking place, not the catalyst for it. Today in Publishers Lunch, Michael Cader runs through some calculations to demonstrate that when publishers shed the costs of printing the books they sell as well as the costs of warehousing them, printing books they don’t sell, and handling returns on books they thought they’d sold, they can reduce retail prices by 40-50% and still be taking in the same number of margin dollars.

Cader points out that there is a different problem of unintended consequences: if a lot of business shifts to ebooks, then the critical mass requirement for many brick-and-mortar stores might not be met and we’ll develop a downward spiral of printed book exposure and sales. That’s an accurate point, but I can’t see too many people trying to slow down the growth of ebook sales to address it.

We have suggested here that publishers should be reducing the discounts offered to retailers because, as much as publishers’ costs go down moving from print to digital, so do retailers’. And because retailers have a (sensible) penchant for turning excess margin into consumer discounts, the discounts being offered lead to a very tenuous situation for publishers. Many retailers are living with just the margin they probably need, but they’re doing it voluntarily.  The low price the consumer is getting is because of retailer policy, not publisher policy. If the publisher sells downloads directly at the same price, the retailer is (justifiably) going to say “hey, the discount you offer me is supposed to be off the publisher’s price, so if you sell at discount, don’t you owe me some money?

The widely-remarked on Amazon Kindle pricing underscores this point. Amazon is buying ebooks (for the most part) at 50% of the publisher’s suggested retail. But then they’re giving away much of, all of, or even more than that margin to give the consumer a lower price (often the billboard price of $9.99.) Nobody expects Amazon to sustain this sell-at-a-loss strategy forever. And few expect Amazon to raise prices to the consumer. That leaves one alternative: use the leverage of all those Kindle owners to get reduced prices from the publisher.

And that’s why, in their own interests, publishers have to reduce retail discounts across the board.

Authors are facing a different margin pressure. Publishers generally find it easier to reduce the author’s take than the retailer’s so, even before putting pressure on retail discounts, they have been reducing author royalties. Just a few years ago, there was bold talk from the author side that a 50-50 split of ebook revenues between publisher and author made sense. But it seems that the “standard” for ebook royalties has settled in at 25%, or even 15%, of publishers’ receipts. Since discounts are about 50%, that amounts to 7.5% to 12.5% of retail, which is hardly a bonanza for the authors. And remember, many informed voices are clamoring for that suggested retail price for ebooks to come down!

It is because the market is young and the flux is still great that I suggest that publishers should be rethinking intermediary discounts. For the same reason, it is also time for authors and their agents to be rethinking the royalty rules. Expressing royalty as a percentage of either retail price or net receipts is a concept that makes a certain amount of sense in the physical world, where the cost of manufacturing creates an anchor for pricing. There is a certain minimum price below which publishers won’t go when they have to pay to print books. And bigger, fatter books, which cost more to print and would drive up both retail price and royalty, also imply a greater contribution of IP by the author. 

But in the virtual world, perhaps it would work better for everybody if authors negotiated to get a flat number of dollars (or cents) per unit sold. Publishers should really have no problem handling this: they’ve been working with pricing with a known cost-of-goods higher than zero for a very long time. And, for authors, it would eliminate the possibility that diminishing ebook prices will lead to royalties which by historical standards are laughable and for an author trying to make a living are unsustainable.

This practice will probably arise when agents see the need to negotiate a mimimum dollars or cents royalty per ebook sold to protect against overly-aggressive promotional pricing, which is already proving to be a temptation for publishers with no physical cost of goods and with author royalties that decline with price. With Scribd offering 80% of the retail price and Smashwords offering 85%, authors will calculate very quickly how low their prices could be to yield the same return (or maybe, twice as much return) for each copy sold than what is the standard offering now. When Scribd and Smashwords files are as easily secured for the iPhone as anybody else’s, the agents will have a very hard time convincing their authors to accept things as they are.

Posted this originally without a reminder about Thursday, May 28 at BEA: “Stay Ahead of the Shift.” AND there are two panels I’m moderating you’ll want to see. On Thursday at 3, Brian O’Leary, Laura Dawson and I are doing “XML for Editors.” And on Friday morning at 9:30, I’ll moderate “Digital Debuts Tool Time” with the leaders of at least three great new propositions on the stage with me: Hugh McGuire of BookOven, Mark Coker of Smashwords, and Peter Clifton of Filedby.

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I love and value The New York Times. But I have to admit that every time they write about something I know a lot about, it makes me wonder whether they’re complete and accurate when they write about the things I don’t know a lot about.

There’s nothing wildly inaccurate in Motoko Rich’s “Week in Review” article of May 17 headlined “Steal This Book (for $9.99)”, but there sure is a lot left out. And more that is misinterpreted.

We start out with an eye-catching but pretty phony premise: that author David Baldacci took it on the chin from his reading public because Amazon briefly priced his new $27.99 list hardcover for $15 instead of $9.99. In sadly typical fashion, a few posts from protesting readers become an undocumented “hundreds more” who have joined an “informal boycott” of “digital books priced at more than $9.99.”

Most customers for most products understand that the retailer sets the price they pay. For those who think they know more about the publishing business and think beyond the retailer, they would know the publisher sets the suggested retail price (which is one reason it is to the bookseller’s advantage that publishers have traditionally printed that price on the book itself so the publisher can take some of the blame.) I won’t say there is nobody in the world that wouldn’t blame Baldacci (or any author) for his book’s price, but that would be an ignorant and relatively rare reaction that shouldn’t be suggested as a widespread fact in any story’s lead, particularly not in The Times.

Rich does a superficial analysis of the economics. She is accurate in saying that Amazon is taking a per-unit loss on many titles in the Kindle store because doing so a)  helps them sell more devices and b) helps them “lock in” their Kindle audience. And she accurately reports the publisher’s fear — and the common-sense likelihood — that Amazon will, at some point, insist that publishers bring the prices they charge Amazon into line with what Amazon is charging the consumer. The choice for publishers then would be painful: either give up a growing army of Kindle owners as customers for a book or lower prices to a point that would make ebook margins a fraction of the print book margins they are replacing.

From that point on, we need to add facts and nuance that the article didn’t cover, and we have to discourage one pretty peculiar suggestion that is floated as though serious from a professor of economics.

What the article misses is that, because of the iPhone and App Store — and similar environments that will soon surround the Google Android phones and Blackberries, as well as just about all smart phones from just about all carriers — Amazon has already had to adjust its strategy in ways that will wean people off of their devices! A month or two ago, Amazon distributed a Kindle reader for the iPhone. That meant that Kindle owners could immediately access their entire Kindle library through their iPhone as well as their Kindle. There are two serious consequences of that action:

1. It exposes people who had formed the Kindle habit to reading on a different device, the iPhone. And, if they get an iPhone reading habit, then Kindle is no longer the only game in town. There are at least three other formats (Stanza, Scrollmotion, and eReader) that work just fine on the iPhone and we can be sure there will be more, just as we can be sure that what works on the iPhone will soon have to work on most, if not all, other smart phones.

2. It “unlocks” the content from being chained to a single device. That means that one “copy” of an electronic book can now be read by two people simultaneously: one on a Kindle and one on an iPhone. 

How does this work in practice? Here’s one man’s true story. I bought a Kindle in December 2007. I read on it almost exclusively until Kindle released their iPhone app. Then I started reading on the iPhone because I was reading the same book on two devices. That was in February. Last week I gave my Kindle to my wife and I am reading on the iPhone exclusively. But I’m not reading Kindle exclusively anymore. I have four books open in the four different readers I referred to above. And my wife is working her way through many of the 40 or 50 books I had purchased on the Kindle for myself over the past year. And when she buys a book (I just introduced her, ironically, to David Baldacci), I can read it too.

So this article misses the importance of the iPhone, and its strategic importance particularly in relation to Amazon and Kindle.

The second big thing the article misses is the sheer complexity of the ebook supply chain. There is this proliferation of formats and points of distribution. There is the fact, that Rich mentioned, that Barnes & Noble has bought Fictionwise (a big ebook retailer) and therefore now owns eReader, Fictionwise’s ebook platform. B&N has been the Sleeping Giant of the ebook space: the biggest brick-and-mortar book retailer, probably still the biggest player in the consumer book business, but not a participant in ebooks. The purchases they made were mentioned, but the strategic implications were not. B&N is rumored to be launching their own reader this Fall. Whether or not they do that, they are certainly going to be doing something to compete in the ebook space. That’s potentially a signficant counterweight to Amazon, but it isn’t mentioned in this article.

And if the looming problem for publishers with ebooks is their margins (and I think we can agree on that), then why not mention the ultimate solutions: publishers selling digital downloads directly to consumers and, at the same time, reducing the discounts off retail (the margins) offered to intermediaries? Rich does a nice job of enumerating how the publishers’ cost structure changes with ebooks; she neglects to mention that the costs for retailers evaporate as well when they don’t have to invest in inventory or handle physical goods (and handle many physical goods twice — purchase and return — without any revenue to show for it!)

The proliferation of ereading delivery options is not only not spelled out in this piece, its absence is magnified in importance by the article’s close. Some anecdotal evidence is introduced to suggest that lower prices might increase book purchases. Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins, is quoted as saying “if the overall market is bigger, then we should be O.K.”

Then Rich concludes with the punch line that sales might rise not just because of lower prices but also because of the ease of purchase. So we conclude with a former book editor who, after buying the first of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series and finishing it at 1 am, bought “the next installment on her Kindle from her bedroom”. Well, here’s my conclusion. She could have done the same thing from many different online locations and in many different formats using her phone. I think the Times should tell you that.

Oh, yes, the professor. Professor Fiona Scott Morton of Yale did entertain a market coming from Apple, based on the new Kindle-sized tablet they are reputed to be about to introduce. Morton says: “then the book publisher of Obama’s next book can say, ‘O.K., which of you is going to offer us the best deal?’”

Uh, probably not. That’s not how publishing works. Publishers don’t put their books up for bid between Barnes & Noble and Borders, and they won’t between Amazon and Apple, either. But what is true is that B&N and Borders are aware of their “market share” on major books, and neither wants to be without a book the other is successfully selling. That, ultimately, is the publishers’ protection against pressure from Amazon. Kindle got where it is largely by offering the best selection of any ereading platform. It is in the retailer’s DNA to try to get some exclusive product, but it is in the publisher’s DNA to put everything they have in front of the consumer in every way they can.

May 28 at 11 am: “Stay Ahead of the Shift”, at the Javits Center. A 20-years out view provides a context for viewing the changes we are likely to see along the way, and what publishers should do about it. 

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