I breathed a sigh of relief  this morning. The blurb in my inbox declared that publishers yearned to change the $10 price point for eBooks. Finally, I thought in my pre-caffeine naivete: a remedy to overcharging! $10 is a deal if you’re buying John Adams or The Family, which sell for a pretty penny even in paperback. But a Terry Pratchett novel that retails for $7.99 at Barnes & Noble? Yep, $10. Wasn’t the elimination of the printing press supposed to make books cheaper?

Oh, foolish, foolish Jay. Wired reports that publishers think $10 is too low. They want to jack up the price point for select titles – the same ones, I presume, that are already great deals. Not to make more money for themselves, of course. It’s all about paying the poor authors what they deserve. Hachette Book Group’s sound bite about why they want to pressure Amazon and other e-tailers to charge more for their wares is ingenious in its disingenuousness:

“In the long run this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors’ careers — from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer.”

Spare us. Mainstream publishing doesn’t care about new voices unless they’re blockbusters. The midlist has been perishing for years, prior to the arrival of Internet The Business-Model Slayer. The blockbusters aren’t the next great authors of our generation. They’re trash factories – the Dan Browns and Stephenie Meyers. Publishers are drowning, and gouging consumers is their latest life raft.

Higher price points for eBooks will have one and only one effect: to slow their adoption just as the market is poised to take off. It’s galling when you realize that publishers want these prices, not to sell you a book, but as Cory Doctorow pointed out, to license it to you. You don’t own an eBook; you’re borrowing it for a fee. An Kindle or a Nook is a library fueled by your credit card.

Argh, I sound like a Luddite, I know. Which I’m not. I love the digital age, and I have high hopes that electronic publishing will kill the middleman and bring authors in closer contact with their readers. And we’re so close that we’re thousands of miles away. The adoption of eBooks is retarded by the restrictive licensing models, inability to share, and the cost of the readers. Hell, even I don’t want a Kindle yet. The Seattle Public Library still serves most of my book needs. They even offer some titles electronically. (I’m reading Jeff Sharlet’s The Family in a separate window on my laptop.)

But I’m more pessimistic than I used to be about Internet publishing. Some authors – the Doctorows of the world – will thrive at online promotion and distribution. Many authors will prefer to focus on their writing, and let others handle the messy legwork. As for publishers? They’ll stay fixated on blockbusters, because “the Long Tail” is bullshit.  As Anita Elberse demonstrated, media companies continue to make the bulk of their profits off of their hits.

Two years ago, New York Magazine ran a long piece by Boris Kachka on whether the publishing industry is ready for a pine casket. To put it mildly, it’s in deep shit. Sales are down; trash is triumphing over talent; retail outlets are shrinking; employees are miserable. Publishing will live, Kachka concludes, but as a pygmy version of its former Amazonian glory. I think he’s right. Writing and reading will evolve, shaped by the Internet and digital publishing. Publishers will stick around to skin profits off trash and, perhaps, promote the odd genius or two.

Yeah, that’s my best-case scenario. And as the impending eBook price war demonstrates, the power-structure will fight like hell on its way down.

Uncategorized amazon.com, books, ebooks, kindle, publishing, seattle public library, writing

Me: We should buy a Kindle.

Me 2: What, that ugly dull-gray slab of plastic? What the fuck for?

Me: It’s cool.

Me 2: Oh, that’s subpar even for you. You’ll have to do better than that.

Me: Okay, smartass. It’s a revolution in reading. We can carry thousands of books around with us at any one time.

Me 2: Okaaaay…but we can only read one at a time. Right? Or did we purchase a new set of eyes recently?

Me: Oh, like we don’t walk around Seattle with 10 lbs. of books strapped to our back on any given day.

Me 2: Yes, but when you drop a book, nohing happens to it. You drop a Kindle, and you lose those thousands of books.

Me: I would never drop my Kindle!

Me 2: Need I remind you that we’re the same person who dropped our new Palm Pilot within two days of purchase?

Me: You had to bring THAT up…

Me 2: Or remind you what happened to our Dell MP3 player? Or the five cell phones we had prior to our current craptastic model?

Me: Look, you’re missing the bigger picture (as usual). Thousands of titles, instantly accessible over a fee-free cellular link. Think of all of the paper that saves!

Me 2: Ah, the environment. All right, point awarded for tree-hugging.

Me: And wouldn’t it be cool, whenever we needed something to read, to download it in under a minute? Without paying the penalty of forced interaction with other human beings?

Me 2: All right, your appeal to my darker instincts has not fallen on deaf ears. Let’s bring this thing up on Amazon’s site and see what…um, hello? It costs $250?!

Me: It’s an investment.

Me 2: In what, the greenbacks used to stuff Jeff Bezos’ mattress?? Let’s see what the Internet says about that…

Me: Since when are you so concerned with what the Internet thinks?

Me 2: Since you want to spent $250 of my money on a dead-tree replacer, that’s since when. Hmmm, here’s one of the Most Ironic Moments of 2009 – after Kindle customers downloaded 1984 from Amazon, the company deleted it from their devices without their consent. So much for ownership of digital content, right?

Me: Not fair – Bezos himself admits that was stupid. Besides, it was an illegal copy. Should customers be allowed to keep books they have no right to own?

Me 2: But that’s the thing – you don’t own any of these books. Like Cory Doctorow says:

They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.

Me: That’s a bit hysterical. Plus, it hurts my feelings.

Me 2: Suck it up, buttercup. Holy hell – you can’t even share books with other Kindle users? At least Barnes & Noble’s contraption lets you lend out books to other Nook readers. Why don’t you want a Nook instead?

Me: Nook’s not even available yet. They were supposed to have it out by Christmas, now it’s not hitting until January. You want to invest in a company that can’t ship its hardware on schedule?

Me 2: Okay, look – I’m vetoing this. It’s expensive, it’s Orwellian, and it’s early-adapter. What’s wrong with carting around physical books for a few more years? Besides, you know that if we get this, we’ll never use the library again. We’ll spend ten times more on books than we’d normally waste. Which I guess is great for the authors we love, but not for our bank balance.

Me: So…no fucking way?

Me 2: No fucking way.

Me: How about we get an iPod Touch instead?

Me 2: Okay, but only if we load it up with DRM-free MP3s from Amazon.

Me: Deal.

Uncategorized amazon, cory doctorow, electronics, kindle, nook, technology