The future of publishing (part three) . . .

. . . giving it away

Book publishers are where the record companies were before the Ipod & Itunes were announced. The technology for a revolutionary music machine was almost there. People could almost see it. And then, within a year or two, it was the way that a large number of people were getting their music. It didn’t eliminate CDs or record stores, but Apple (and of course everyone on the same bandwagon) changed the business dramatically, cutting those sales dramatically.

Recently, a number of book publishers created a mini-flurry inside the industry by giving away ebooks. All of the reported comments that I’ve seen have been positive. None of the authors I’ve spoken to about it, however, think it’s anything like a good idea. They don’t blame the other writers for going along with it – and that’s the way they tend to put it – but to a person they believe the thinking behind the program is flawed. As do I.

It may be argued that giving away ebooks will help publishers do #2, make the publishers known to their customers. It would be a good argument if the giveaway was part of a comprehensive program to drive readers to their site. As it stands now, the activity is very passive – you go once, give them your email address, and have no reason to return, even if you like the books. The publisher’s identity is not going to stick in the reader/user’s head, or even necessarily their favorites list.

Worse, they’re teaching readers that ebooks should be free.

One illustration of how flawed the thinking is on so-called “new” media and how to deal with it was the reporting on the effects of giving away Suze Orman’s book as an ebook as part of-in the wake of publicity from Oprah. The stories claimed that there had been no decline in sales – and they did this by citing the book’s ranking on Amazon.

Of course, anyone who has ever sold a book through Amazon knows that the numbers are not exactly a scientific measure of anything in the real world. Putting that aside, the fact of the matter is that Orman’s book benefited first from the Oprah connection, and secondly from the wave of publicity relating to the giveaway. Surely those are the reasons it sold well.

(to be continued)