RANT 'O THE WEEK:
by WritersCollege.com Director Steve Morrill
Last week I ranted about communication companies, Verizon first and then Brighthouse/Roadrunner. For the two of you who do not avidly follow every newsletter I send out, the Brighthouse guy was due the same day I was writing the newsletter for last week. By coincidence (and it really was) I had the Verizon FIOS web site up on my computer screen when the Brighthouse guy walked in.
I can report that he seems to have located the problem. Seems the previous Brighthouse guy simply didn't screw some leads together properly out on the side of the house. So one of them shorted and burned away its wire.
How could that happen? I asked, examining the cut-off and obviously burned-out connection in his hand.
It happens a lot, he tells me, when people get in a hurry and don't make sure things are all screwed together properly.
Were you in a hurry when you replaced this? I ask. No he assures me, he did it right.
We shall see. If I had a nickle for every time some Brighthouse guy said he had the problem all fixed—and then the next Brighthouse guy said the first one had screwed it up—I could skip a month's payment on the thing.
I have a long essay this week, so I'll go short on ranting. Read on about my take on e-books....
SCHOOL
NEWS: Nothing special happening this week.
ESSAY: E-books. One tool for today's writers
E-books (or Electronic Books) are all the rage. Used to be you have a book and you had a book-on-tape that you could play in the car. Now you have the book (usually) and an e-book that you can display on your laptop, desktop, a reader or even a cell-phone. Some come with the audio option too, so you can still play it in the car.
(And how many accidents will soon be caused by people trying to read e-books while they drive? They already read newspapers, fold maps and watch TV—all while adjusting the incomprehensible GPS and talking to people on the cell phone while eating their Big Macs.)
Some e-books are sold online through various systems and you just read 'em on your computer screen or Blackberry or iPhone PDA/cell phone. Others require a "reader" which is a handheld device designed specifically for that task.
First, let's look at the hardware: What has held the e-book back for almost a decade is lack of agreement on a standardized reader. I've seen several hand-held readers proposed since the 1990s. Nothing came of those prototypes because nobody wanted to make the investment in production and marketing without some guaranteed buyer base. Remember the old truism that you can recognize the earliest pioneers because they're the guys lying dead on the ground with arrows in their backs. So everyone held back, perhaps remembering the startups of home tape recorders (I can think of four different kinds of tape formats, three of which fell by the wayside after expensive investments) or how Sony's far superior Betamax was deep-sixed by cheaper VHS format video recording tape. Perhaps they were waiting for some industry leader to just step in and dictate the standard, much like people waited through a dozen different early home computer operating systems for IBM to finally make up its mind to get into that game.
And Kindle, Amazon.com's device, is a dictated standard. The first version came out of the starting gate with a whoosh, thanks to being part of Amazon.com's immense stable of products. But the new Kindle revealed last week is still $600 (same too-much price as the first model, though it can hold ten times the books and has speakers so you can play it, like a book-on-tape). Kindle is already trying to create a captive market, with offerings exclusive to its device only.
That strategy might work briefly, but how many people are going to hand over $600 to be able to read a few books only available in Kindle and not in stores everywhere? How many world-famous authors (so far limited to only Stephen King) are going to look at $2 royalty checks and keep on writing books only for Kindle?
No, the floodgates seem to be opening, driven to great extent by the fact that the problem of a standard device may be solving itself by becoming irrelevant. When a book can be sent to any display device, much as music and movies can be sent now, and as more and more people invest in cell phones/PDAs like Blackberry and iPhone, then publishers no longer need to produce a book reader just so their customers can read their books.
I predict three generations of Kindles: the first is now passing, replaced by today's second generation. In a year or two there will be a third generation of Kindle. One of those is destined for New York's Museum of Modern Art and there will be no fourth generation unless Amazon.com can make it competitive with a cell phone.
Mix in things like tablets you write on interactively and that replace home computers (and the MacBook Air is an early entry here, though not a tablet per se) and I see people reading online news, online magazines, books, watching movies and TV or playing music, all on phones or on tablets the size of small legal pads.
Now to the media itself. E-books are only part of the huge revolution in publishing—and a logical outgrowth of the development of better ways of reading them. Some of us have been looking at POD (Print-On-Demand), for example, as the new wave in publishing. And, yes, it is making it possible to anyone to publish a book, be that for good or ill. But it is also making it possible for popular authors, the rare few who can sell books, to bypass the archaic and uneconomical traditional publishing route. Why settle for 10-15 percent on a book cover price (if you're lucky enough to get cover price royalties) when you can get half and set your own price?
But we may have been shortsighted in assuming that POD was the wave of the future. In fact, why settle for half of the price when you can produce, for less effort, an e-book, and keep all of the price, or at least even more of it?
Let's briefly recap some of the major publishing costs for three kinds of publishing:
TRADITIONAL:
- Printing requires offset presses and huge investments and the process can take months to a year.
- Warehousing is expensive. Books are soon remaindered and sold in bargain bins at bookstores or online.
- Distribution is by UPS, with huge monthly invoices.
- Shelf space in bookstores is bought or wrestled for and limited in all dimensions including time. Not uncommon for a book to be on the shelf for a matter of a few weeks.
- Returns plague the publishing industry, with up to half of all books returned by the distributors.
POD:
- Printing is one-by-one on photocopy machines. This is more expensive, per-copy, than offset printing, so POD books tend to have higher cover prices.
- Warehousing does not exist.
- Distribution is by Post Office.
- Shelf space in bookstores does not exist though there are some exceptons. Barnes & Noble, for example, displays some POD books in each bookstore, but only because they are shareholders in a POD company (iUniverse/AuthorSolutions)
E-BOOK:
- Printing does not exist or the customers print it themselves.
- Warehousing does not exist.
- Distribution is by electronic means at no significant cost. But will not be in bookstores, either.
- Shelf space in bookstores does not exist.
Other costs:—editing, layout, marketing—are too variable and may exist with all these formats, so we'll leave them out of the formula for the moment.
I'm experimenting with an e-book now. You can see it at: http://www.vacationfunflorida.com and we sell it at three price points, one for electronic transmission, one for printing it out ourselves and mailing it hardcopy, one for selling it as hardcopy face-to-face (we leave out the cost of postage). Sales are poor but we do sell a few. I think more marketing and especially more linked-to type marketing will help in the long run. I'm not discouraged.
One reason for not being discouraged is that it costs so little to produce an e-book, it costs nothing at all to store it, nothing to ship it and the person at the other end of the wire pays to print it (though we also can do that for a fee).
I'm getting ready to produce e-book versions of abbreviated course materials for my own classes at WritersCollege.com. I'm writing a fiction/fantasy novel and am thinking of creating a web site and ongoing e-chapter system for that. Readers would be able to keep up via a newsletter and can offer feedback as I write the book. Is there any money in this? I will find out, but does it really matter? I'll have a completed book manuscriptat the end that I can sell in any of several ways.
E-books are certainly going to be a big part of the future of publishing. Whether they totally eclipse the offset printing press is not really the point. The point is that e-books are a relatively simple technology that can permit the author to reach the reader with fewer production steps and fewer people in the way—each of whom wants a financial cut.
Here's a comparison: Before 1850 or so, if you wanted a picture of a landscape on your wall, you hired a painter. If you wanted an image in your book or newspaper, you hired an artist. Today anyone can do this with a digital camera. An e-book is to publishing what a photograph is to the Mona Lisa. And, as with da Vinci's work, the ultimate test is not the frame or the paint—not the specific medium—but the content of the work.
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WEB LINKS: New York Times on the increase in fiction reading by adults.
MediaBistro is a good place for news of the magazine world.
The Writer Beware is a good place to keep up on the worst of the scammers out there.
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