It’s pretty common to hear people from outside book publishing speak at length about the things publishers do badly, and the stupid choices these dinosaurs make. But publishing execs tend to be very smart people. Why are they doing such obviously stupid things?
Maybe they’re not. You see, book publishing is an unusual industry. Our products are relatively distinct, but they’re sold in both low volume and at a low price, or more specifically, with a low profit margin. That determines some of the stupid looking choices.
For example, it seems unbelievable that we have so little market research. But you can’t apply the focus groups on one combination of cover and contents to others. And you can’t afford to do much research for a single title, since the research costs more than you’ll make from the book.
Other peculiarities of the business have influence. We have hundreds of thousands of titles annually, thousands of retail outlets to serve, and tens of thousands of small presses. That results in very high transaction costs for each order, invoice, payment, etc. Other industries, faced with even higher numbers automate. (Think about the origins of the UPC system, for example.)
Why doesn’t the book industry do something similar? Those trade partners that do thousands of transactions (big NYC publishers and Ingram, for example) do automate. But it just doesn’t pay anyone to extend that automation down to the mom and pop level. And much or most of the book business is at that level (bookstores, authors, free-lancers and publishing companies all included). There are aggregators, but every extra player in the game means someone else drinking from the shallow pool of profit.
Why don’t authors sell their work electronically or by POD directly to the reader, as musicians are beginning to do?
This one is more complicated. Stay tuned for another post on that topic. In the meantime, what’s your favorite aspect of the industry that seems really stupid?
Supporting e-books in a methodical manner, such as actually releasing the first book in a trilogy as well as the second and third.
Don’t get me started on e-book pricing or DRM.
I agree that ebooks need to be supported in those sorts of ways, if they’re done at all.
I also agree that DRM is probably counter-productive on fiction and most light non-fiction. More expensive titles (made so by the costs of production and the limited market) such as reference, specialist professional books and such, probably benefit in the end from DRM. And titles that folks may want a small amount of information from, such as cookbooks or travel guides, probably not only shouldn’t be released without DRM, they also shouldn’t be in programs such as Amazon’s Look Inside the Book, or Google’s Book Search.
As for e-book pricing, the techniques for pricing books, and the costs underlying the minimum acceptable price would be a great topic for future posts. Thanks for a great idea!
Returns! I know it’s meant to do good, allowing bookstores to keep in their shelves books they’ll have a tough time selling. But in practice it wastes everyone’s time and money. The idea still holds if we’re talking about obscure books, but I really don’t see the point in giving booksellers the right to return the latest Stephen King, for example.
Returns aren’t actually as bad an idea as they seem, in my opinion. I’ll amplify on that in a post very soon.