Publishing has been in a transitional state of being ever since Stephen King released his short story Riding the Bullet online in 2000 as his debut on the Internet and an experiment and shifted in a week more downloads than any publisher could have hoped to have shipped copies in a year.

This made the publishing industry sit up and take notice (and close ranks and bury their heads in the sand as it later turned out) and just about anyone with a computer, acrobat distiller and a half-baked story to sell think that here was something which was going to level the playing field and bring everyone’s story worth telling to a deserving public.

Fast forward almost a decade and the eBook story has yet to take off in the way that everyone was so sure it would at the beginning of the millennium. The reasons why, though long, are important because they also define what is most likely to happen next.

Everyone’s a publisher

The moment the concept of e-publishing hit home there was the expected explosion in terms of who and what. Just about anyone who thought that their writing was the next best thing to sliced bread (which means almost everyone who could put anything longer than a paragraph together) and could buy an acrobat distiller became convinced that the only thing which had been holding them back from finding an audience of adulating millions had been some faintly understood but nonetheless real conspiracy on the part of the global publishing industry.

While just about everyone who thought they were a publisher (and shouldn’t have had perhaps) felt compelled to bring out eBooks the publishers themselves who should have wholeheartedly adopted the new medium as an exciting new channel to bring down the costs of publishing and broaden the capabilities of publications, took a distinctly different view. Few publishers thought that eBooks and the web provided a viable publishing business model. Few publishers offered anything except second-tier, out-of-print or slow-selling titles in order to test the novel. Few publishers bothered to understand the dynamics of the market, the demographics of those making purchases or the potential for follow-up sales and profits.

The result was that the commercial organizations which had been trusted, up to that point, to act as a certain filter for quality and viability (not to mention marketability) of a title shied away from it citing reasons which we shall examine in a moment and, as a result, there was an uncontrolled, and possibly uncontrollable, explosion of eBooks which fulfilled the worst expectations of the pundits of the medium.

In a very short time ten-page publications along the lines of  ‘How to become a journalist’ which were a thinly disguised rehash of the application form criteria for offline journalistic courses were selling for $9.99 alongside volumes of poetry which should never have seen the light of day.

To make matters worse the format of eBooks itself was also varied and confusing. Some were in PDF (still the most popular form of eBook), others were in propriety format .exe files which executed a program on your Desktop which then allowed you to view the eBook and others still were in a wide variety of competing formats which tried to recreate the page-turning book experience using Flash technology on the reader’s desktop.

Why did not publishers adopt eBooks more quickly?

As this is being written publishers are still not wholehearted in their embrace of eBook technology. New titles still do not come out in eBook format as a matter of course and when they do come out their distribution and accessibility is still a point of much debate.

Why?

The innocent alien observer who might be duped into believing that printing is information and (in fiction) talent and as such deserves as wide a publication as possible will be hard-pressed to understand why publishers are so reluctant to move from the stone-age to the future of publishing. Then again the alien observer will be forgiven in thinking that publishing is about information and its distribution. This has never been the case ever since educated monks and some errand scribes in the Middle Ages were the only possible way of copying or creating a book.

Publishing is about money and the control which the ability to bring something to the market gives you. Publishing houses create trends (as well as follow those they failed to perceive) and their models have always been about tying the possible avenues of dissemination of books in such a way that they created automatic ‘lock-in’ clauses. Bookshops, for instance, accounted for up to 65% of a book’s price. In Britain, for instance, this created the Net Book Agreement – essentially a price-fixing policy which allowed publishers to dictate a book’s price and refuse to supply any bookshop which did not comply.

Started in 1900 it stood undefeated as a practice for almost a century and then it became acceptable primarily because publishers, belatedly realized that getting supermarket chains to sell specific titles for them was actually leading to more not less sales and increased penetration and accessibility to the book buying market.

This paranoid and perhaps megalomaniacal approach to controlling publishing has also led them to shy away from any innovation which they feel they could not control. The examples are telling in their own right.

1. When newspapers starting with The Times attempted to promote reading (because it benefited them as well) by setting up low-cost borrowing clubs in 1905 publishers obtained a court injunction to stop them from doing so.
2. When in 1962 the Restrictive Practices Court decided to look at the market the publishers presented en masse a body of testimony which served to convince that the restrictive practice regarding price and selling points was actually good for the public because it allowed publishers to bring to the market unpopular works or books from unknown authors.
3. When in 1999 eBooks first began to look like a viable means of making books accessible to the market publishers voiced concerns over intellectual rights and the piracy of books and issued statements which, in effect, described how no new titles and no current works would be released by any of them in any format.
4. As 2000 made them sit up and take notice two other things happened in tandem – First, they failed to agree on a standard for eBooks allowing, instead, the market to try and sort itself out as software companies brought out a wide variety of eBook makers. Second, the began to put in motion the insistence for Digital Rights Management (DRM) which would effectively begin to give them much greater control over copies of eBooks than they had ever enjoyed over paper books.
   

Let’s examine that last one for a second. When you buy a paperbook you have given money for a product which you own outright. You are free to read it and then bin it, leave it in a hotel room for someone else to read, loan it to your mum or give it to a friend or give it to a second-hand books charity shop which will sell it at a greatly reduced price to raise money for a charitable event. Any and all of these actions are yours to make as long as you do not directly benefit from any sale or re-sale of the book, do not copy it (thereby infringing the copyright) and do not make money from its contents. Each of these actions, with the exception perhaps of binning a book, generates a momentum of its own which has an economic impact on the greater world, promotes reading and the use of books and acts as a viral marketing aid for the publisher and the author. The moment you buy an eBook with the kind of digital rights management (DRM) protection publishers are happy with you can read it only on the device you have downloaded it on and, at best, one more. Should your computer crash or your hard disk get damaged you will have to buy the eBooks you love again as there is no DRM-approved way of making copies or backing them up.

The fact that a medium which is used to promote reading and the buying of books to a much wider audience at a much reduced delivery cost (no inventory, no warehouse, no manual delivery system, no storage facilities, no postage and no packing) at a price which is equal to that of a paper book is then used to actually restrict its use and general movement defies common sense. In fact by 2004 publishers had become fixtures at Software Tradeshows with the intent to promote the use of digital rights management in as wide a spectrum as possible.

The pricing structure of eBooks also defies common sense. Publishers have, quite rightly, explained that a digital title costs as much as a paper one to produce in terms of editing, design and preparation and have then used this to cover the fact that the adherent costs involved are then either negligible or non-existent.

I am aware that this article is already longer than I visualized but the subject is complex and warrants it. So summing up on why publishers have not encouraged the uptake of eBooks we see:

• Fear of losing control of the industry they are in.
• Incomprehension of the advantages of the new medium.
• Attempts to use it to more tightly control the use of written content.
• Greed, as evidenced by their pricing policies (in most cases an eBook is the same price as its paper format).  The issue on pricing alone is important enough to merit thousands of words. It has already been covered ably by Charlie Stross on his Blog ‘In Print’ and anything further I could add here is simply reiterating and perhaps refining parts of the argument using more recent data. If you really want to go this deep in the greed which has driven publishers to strangle the eBook market I urge you to check out his article on the subject.
  

EBooks as a viable option

As we are getting deeper in the 21st century and devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eBook Reader (not to mention smartphones such as the iPhone and Blackberry) allow the carrying, reading and transportation of your favorite books with you. This has led to a resurgence of interest in the eBook market which at $300 million a year and growing at a steady 15% year on year (still a tiny fraction of the net worth of paper publishing where the release of a Harry Potter book nets more than that) has began to capture publishers’ interests in expanding into new, lucrative markets (see the Press Release issued by Penguin).

This has made some self-published eBooks more viable than ever. Three things have contributed here:

• First the fact that it is easier to have blog than to write an eBook has helped many of those who simply felt the urge to write to get it out of their system.
• Second online visitors, these days, are make sophisticated choices on their online purchasing decisions which also help sort the wheat from the chaff.
• Thirdly the eBooks which succeed, these days, are every bit as professionally produced in terms of writing, editing and interior design that the only thing to set them apart from mainstream publisher efforts is the fact that the author is behind the distribution and marketing efforts rather than a large publishing team.
  

Print On Demand (POD) increases the distribution channels available

Publishing, in terms of its structure, restrictions, opportunities and challenges has in many ways been always about distribution channels and who controls them as has been ably well-described in the About The Book blog. Until relatively recently print on demand, essentially the printing of a book only after it had been ordered was simply an interesting footnote but nothing which publishers could worry about and nothing which would get self-publishers or the public excited.

The reason for the apathy lay in the cost. Print-On-Demand (POD) facilities existed as an extension of digital delivery channels (after all a digitally stored title would be downloaded to a machine printed on paper, bound and delivered) but the cost made it prohibitive (unless there was a really good reason for it such as an academic work) and the quality was so-so.

Print-On-Demand fulfillment channels have changed. These days it is possible to have a book you have written, professionally edited, designed and digitally processed for printing, made accessible to a global audience through online points of sale and still price it competitively, without skimping on quality.

Our Self-Publishing services detail both the process and benefits. Authors such as Jamie Edwards who brought out the Amazon best-seller, Mental Ketchup and Alisa Miller whose Ultimate Guide to the Perfect Relationship netted her sales from both sides of the Atlantic are just such trailblazers who have something of value to say and are looking for the right delivery vehicle to reach their audience.

The ability of POD to deliver titles is expanding beyond the confines of online websites to digital point-of-sale machines which have been called Espresso Book Machines (EBM). Here, digitally stored titles are available to access through an interface where they can then be selected, paid for, and the EBM will print, bind and deliver a paper copy there and then.

The model, has been correctly described by its creators ad nothing less than a mini-revolution:  “With the book business facing dramatic changes and challenges, we believe the timing of the EBM couldn’t be better.  Publishers, retailers and libraries alike see the appeal of the machine that collapses the supply chain, boosts backlist sales, matches supply with demand, eliminates returns and powers new, high growth sales channels for publishers.”

We are clearly in a state of transition which has been a long time coming. Publishing will remain about distribution but the balance of power is slowly shifting from the corporation (which is the Publisher) to the individual (which is the author).  Where this will lead us now clearly remains to be seen.

The Web Direct Studio company Blog is penned by a number of our in-house staff from our different areas of activity. They write anonymously in order to free their range of expression, particularly when it comes to criticizing their sector of activity or making observations about their job. They work under a simple edict: What you say must make sense and must fit in with the tone of our online business. Apart from that they are the ones who choose the topic they write about in each Blog post.