With movies, the time windows don’t really make much sense because seeing a movie in the theater is often far more valuable than seeing it on DVD or streaming over the internet. For me, the fact that it’s available sooner in the theater barely matters: I only want to see certain sorts of movies in the theater and for the rest, I’m fine with waiting for them on DVD (usually rental).

With books, I don’t see any real additional intrinsic value to hardcovers over paperbacks (unless a lot of people will be reading the same book, e.g. in a library) and in fact I personally find paperback novels more pleasant to read. Really, the only reason to buy the hardback is that it comes out sooner.

It may still be in the publishers’ best interests (with regard to not sending their customers to piracy) to release ebooks at the same time as hardcovers; I’m just saying the situation isn’t entirely analogous.

I used to think business people were sharp and made good decisions. After working in the business world I now know business people are feeble, arrogant, ignorant, self-centered, egotistical, shortsighted and, in some cases, just plain stupid! Thus the fears of the book publishers are not surprising.

What I want to know is, why would anyone even charge for an ebook in the first place? it makes no sense to do so. Why, when instead a smart author could (and I believe, some do) make the digital version of their book(s) a simple PDF instead and distribute it for free, using that to promote POD sales of the printed version. PDF’s don’t need a special reader, they download fast, have no DRM, and are very easy to use. Why would anyone use any other format for their digital books? Profit-hungry corporate fatcats aside, that is.

TDR, I entirely understand the nature of digital. What you and others here imagine, though, is that the digital file just appears as if by magic and once it’s done all costs associated with creating, marketing, distributing, and accounting suddenly go away because all the consumer has to do is press a few buttons and it flows into their reader of choice. That is not the case. If a ebook backlisted for several years and recouped all its fixed costs and was only then contributing, like all backlist costs, to its upkeep, then people might have a point: it’s price should drop. (Whether this is good business depends on whether a publisher wants to use old books priced low to spur interest in new books or keeps the prices of old books high because new books drive backlist sales, will probably depend on specific books/genres. Books that sell tens of thousands of copies per month, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” will never see a drop in price because those sales are what fuel frontlist acquisitions.) But that hasn’t happened yet because ebooks are so new, and in five years it’s entirely possible that every ebook bought today will be obsolete as reader technology and reader programs advances (how many of your mid-90s word processing programs can still be read by Word?), DRM servers are shut down, etc.

Carolyn Reidy, who is an industry giant and a great person, is spinning like mad here. No publisher has control over an end price; if Amazon wants to sell ebooks at a loss, that’s their business. What Amazon is gambling on is that the price becomes so accepted and the Kindle so important to sales that they can then dictate either a better discount from the publisher or a lower msrp, which gets to much the same place: a lower initial cost for them. But here’s the thing: Amazon is will certainly raise that $9.99 price probably to $12.99 just like iTunes raised it’s prices to $1.29 once they have enough people sucked in. If publishers have caved to them previously, then that’s more profit for Amazon.

Daemon, no matter what path publishers go down, books will be pirated. The question is, Do they gear their business towards preventing relatively few copies people steal (and which might not be replacing sales) or do they gear their business towards servicing their customers needs while also servicing their bottom line? I say the latter.

Rooker

Let me go bottom to top:

Right after getting her MBA, a very good friend was part of a team auditing one of the major publishers. She was staggered to find that the publisher, like all of them, broke every rule and good practice she had just learned in business school. My favorite bad practice is that publishers take all the risk: they give an advance to an author with the hope of recouping it, then they essentially give their books on consignment to stores hoping they’ll sell, and if they don’t, the stores can just send them back. My second favorite bad practice is in the same vein: if agents are trying to sell editors their projects, why do editors pay for lunch?

Re HTML, that’s a perfectly good idea. Books are actually getting formatted in a such a way for production so that they can be put into XML and turned into ebooks down the production line. I would love for ebooks to be in this format myself. Why buy a Kindle (or Nook or some other casino device) that does exactly one thing and lets you shop in exactly one store when a netbook or handheld device would be infinitely more useful? I would bet the answer is the visual appearance of the book, that is, an ebook isn’t just lines of text on the screen but formatted to look like a book not a web page. Again, people are getting used to reading web pages for information. Ebooks have to let go of the book as a visual model. For one, why do they have pages, except to give people a tangible sense of progress through an ebook?

Ebooks often come out after the initial print edition due to the additional work that has to be done to convert them, then make sure they look good, especially if they have a lot of illustrations, graphs, sidebars, etc.

Hardcover and paperbacks aren’t sold at the same time for several reasons. And it’s been tried, btw, but to no lasting success. One, yes, they would cannibalize each other’s sales, and a hardcover is a publisher’s best chance to get an advance back (a $25 hardcover will earn against the author $2.50 at the standard initial 10% retail royalty; a $15 trade paperback, $1.13 at a 7.5% retail royalty; and a $7 mass market, $.56 at the standard initial 8% retail royalty). Two, if a hardcover fails, there probably won’t be a paperback, so putting one out simultaneously would be a waste of money. Three, consumers have gotten used to paperbacks coming out a year after the hardcover, and the only time you see the two together is when the hardcover is in the remainder bin. I would bet, given this expectation, a new book would seem old if both a hardcover and paperback format were available. Four, I wonder what the effect on placement in bookstores would be. All those tables and shelves at the chains for “new releases”: publishers pay dearly to get their books on them, and if each title had two editions that means half as many could fit, which doesn’t do the bookseller any favor, showing limited choice; and, because the placement fee for each title would double, which doesn’t do the publisher any favors, seeing as their marketing budget would be effectively limited to half as many books.

Five, don’t think of a paperback version of a hardcover as a reprint, although that’s the common publishing term, or, worse, a reformat. Think of it as a chance to republish the book–and remind people why they wanted to read it in the first place but didn’t buy hardcover for whatever reason. For instance, if it’s, say, a literary woman’s novel, you can gussie it up questions and other material for book clubs. Nonfiction titles are often updated. You can also pitch it to a different reader than the hardcover. Look at Joseph Heller’s misguided sequel to “Catch-22.” All his previous paperback were mass markets, but after the sequel failed the publisher put it out as a trade paperback both to help recoup their investment and also to show that it was literature and worthy of serious intention, not some novel for the masses, which of course it was.

As to the sales of ebooks, their currently meager sales are for more reasons than release dates and DRM, much of which less tech-issue folks such as ourselves could care less about. They just want the book. I think the reason is the various varieties of readers, all of which try to lock readers into one store. In addition, books are only slowly being geared to the handheld market, but those devices are tough to read on because we don’t read line by line; studies have shown that the eye jumps all over the page, and the constricted space of a Blackberry or iPod limits this, diminishing the reading experience for any book more complex than Dan Brown. I think the game changer will be the netbook.