Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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the first print edition, though typically at a lower price than the print edition. Some attempts were made by publishers to window ebooks in the early stages of the ebook take-off, in 2009 and 2010, partly as a way of trying to minimize the cannibalization of hardcover sales, but these attempts didn’t last long – publishers came under enormous pressure from ebook retailers, including Amazon and Apple, to abandon ebook windowing, and all of the major publishers soon did. But the fact that ebooks were now available at the same time as the first print edition was published, and generally priced below the print edition, meant that the windowing rationale for the remaining print editions was now significantly weakened. Why wait a year or more for a cheaper paperback edition if a cheaper edition was available at the same time as the hardcover edition, albeit in a digital format? In format terms, it was the cheaper paperback editions, released at later dates and lower price points, that were hardest hit by the non-windowed ebook upstart.
So ebooks may turn out to be no different from the trade or mass-market paperback: a new format, hugely significant as such, but not a new form. And if that is how it turns out, then it is likely to be far less disruptive for the publishing industry than many commentators thought and many insiders feared. Despite initial anxieties that ebooks might be the harbinger of a much more radical disruption in the publishing industry, many in the industry have now come to the view that ebooks are just another format in the sense that I’ve described here, albeit one that comes with an array of special features. This is how the CEO of one large trade house put it in 2017:
Fifty years after Allen Lane’s invention of the paperback we received the gift of a new format and, with it, we received the gift that people could, all of a sudden, read everywhere without having the book at hand because they had their reading device. And the gift was also that someone had developed an ecosystem that was so compelling that people were willing to actually pay for that experience – it was not something that started free like music and the Napster experience. So we had a paid ecosystem that was extremely compelling and convinced people that it made sense given the convenience not to steal books but actually to pay for them in a digital format.
This publisher has always been of the view that ebooks were more of a gain for the industry than a threat: publishers were lucky because others went to the expense of creating an ecosystem in which it was attractive for readers to purchase books in a digital format, thereby opening up a new revenue stream for publishers while obviating the need for consumers to acquire digital content illegally.
But will it turn out like that in the end – a revolution in format but not in form? There are two reasons why we can’t yet give a firm answer to this question, and one reason why the picture we’ve painted so far is incomplete at best. The first reason is that the stability of the current sales patterns, and in particular the levelling off of ebook sales relative to print sales, is dependent on the continuation of the current retail environment, which, despite the bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 and the closing of many Barnes & Noble stores, is still characterized by the existence of many bricks-and-mortar bookstores, both chain and independent. While Amazon has become the single largest customer for many trade publishers, the continued existence of a multiplicity of bookstores provides a vital shop window for publishers’ books – and that means, of course, their print books, which continue to get retail exposure thanks to the display space and shelf space of bookstores. Were this retail environment to change significantly in the coming years – were, for example, Barnes & Noble or Waterstones to scale back dramatically or even close down, or were bookstores forced to close for other reasons – then this could have a significant impact on the sales of physical books. We simply don’t know what would happen in that case to the relation between physical book sales and ebook sales, and how the different categories of book would be affected by this change. The second reason why we can’t give a firm answer to this question is that we simply don’t know what the future holds in store. On the basis of the evidence so far, there is a good prima facie case for saying that ebooks are best understood as another format rather than a new form of book, but only the future will tell whether this judgement holds in the long run.
The picture we’ve painted so far is, however, incomplete in one very important way: we’ve been relying on data from one large trade publisher, and, given the centrality of this publisher and the nature of their list, it is reasonable to assume that their experience will be similar to that of other large trade publishers. But the book market is populated not just with the output of large trade publishers: it is also populated with the output of many small and medium-sized publishers and, crucially, with the output of many self-publishers and many authors using self-publishing platforms of various kinds, from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to a plethora of other platforms (we’ll examine these in more detail in chapter 7). The experiences of many small and medium-sized publishers may not differ greatly from the experience of large trade publishers like Olympic, but the world of self-publishing is another matter entirely. Many of the self-publishing platforms, including Kindle Direct, are publishing in ebook only,13 and some self-published ebooks have become bestsellers.14 So the patterns in the world of self-publishing are likely to look quite different from the patterns of the large trade publishers who are publishing in print and ebook formats, and for whom print remains a key revenue stream. They are also likely to differ from the patterns that appear in the data supplied by professional organizations like the Association of American Publishers (AAP), since these data are drawn from traditional publishers and therefore don’t take account of self-publishing. So there is likely to be a substantial body of material, a high proportion of which is being published as ebooks, that is not being factored into these calculations about the patterns of ebook sales. How big a body of material? Nobody knows. We can try to estimate its size – we’ll return to this in chapter 7 – but any estimate is going to be a very rough guess. What we can say with some confidence is that it’s not small. Self-publishing is the submerged continent that could, if we were ever to know its true extent, put all of our calculations so far in a very different light.
There is one other reason why this point is important: in the wake of the Department of Justice case against Apple and five of the large trade publishers in 2012 (see chapter 5 below), these publishers were obliged to adopt for two years a modified version of the agency agreement that allowed retailers to discount ebooks to some extent. When this requirement expired in 2014, all the large trade publishers moved to full agency agreements, which meant that they set the prices of ebooks within agreed bands and retailers were no longer allowed to discount. This meant that new ebooks from the large trade publishers were – especially from 2014 on – typically selling at much higher prices than self-published ebooks. The difference might be as much as $13–$14 for the ebook of a newly released title from a large trade house compared to $3.99, $2.99 or less for a new ebook from a self-published author. And when you take account of the fact that a large proportion of books self-published on Kindle can be accessed for no charge by joining Kindle Unlimited for $9.99 per month (with a 30-day free trial), the cost per unit read of books self-published on Kindle becomes a small fraction of the cost per read of ebooks published by traditional publishers. Of course, there is the question of whether you want to read that material, however inexpensive it may be. But the fact that the price differential is now so great is likely to have the effect of driving down ebook sales from traditional publishers while self-published ebooks take a larger and larger share of the ebook cake, however large (or small) that cake may be.
We simply don’t know at this stage how the overall picture of ebook sales relative to total book sales, in both units and dollars, would change if we were able to take account of all books published and sold in the US in any particular year, including self-published books, and how the picture would vary by category of book. We might still see a plateau effect, though the levels at which ebooks begin to plateau might be quite a lot higher, especially in certain book categories, such as romance and mystery, which are popular in the world of self-publishing. Indeed, it could be that some of the decline we see in traditional publishers’ ebook sales in certain categories, like romance and mystery, attests not to an overall decline in ebook sales but rather to a revenue flight from traditional