A monopoly believes it is a permanent fixture in its industry. An Internet e-commerce company worries obsessively that it can be destroyed at any time if it doesn’t stay fast and smart. The contrast between Amazon and big publishing could not be more stark.
The Passive Voice

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

Here’s why: Gollancz is also acquiring the ebook rights to thousands of out-of-print sci-fi and fantasy classics, and will start offering them for sale this fall. The launch list includes over a thousand titles, and the publisher plans to have around 5,000 titles available by 2014.

According to the press release (PDF) on Gollancz’s new website Science Fiction Gateway, “direct links between the Encyclopedia and the Gateway will provide easy access to eBook editions, for sale through all major online retailers.”

As for which authors will be included:

Authors featured in the launch include such names as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Alice B. Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr), Robert Silverberg, Kate Wilhelm and Connie Willis. A full list of authors so far under contract is appended to this announcement; negotiations are in an advanced state for many more.

Via “Thousands of SF classics return to earth as ebooks” [The Guardian]

The full story along with device specs is over on Teleread, but here’s my interview:

What was the inspiration for this?

Susan Edwards: Although our books are or will shortly be available through all the major ebook vendors, we do still have a lot of loyal customers who buy almost solely from our website. We wanted to provide them with a non-proprietary reader that they could use for all their ebooks, but that would also make it easy to continue to buy directly from us, where they still get the best price and can take advantage of all of our sales and purchase incentives.

Plus, we do a lot of conventions, trade shows, contests, p.r. and giveaways. We had been purchasing proprietary e-readers for those purposes and thought, why not have our own e-reader? It’s great advertising and it, again, makes it easy for people to come to our site and buy directly from us.

This model, which we’re calling the eCave C71, is a very limited edition test run that we are rolling out at our RomantiCon convention. We will give many of them away as prizes, and so will be able to work closely with a limited population of users to make sure the device does everything they want it to before deciding on future models and functions.

Can you provide some details on the device? It looks like the Prology Latitute T-701.

SE: It’s very similar to that one. It wasn’t manufactured by them, but has very similar specs and does use the same operating system.

This first model does not come with a cover, though it fits the sleeves available for the Nook and the Kindle 3. Right now, we’re testing the water with the device to gauge interest. If we decide to go larger scale, we will probably have a selection of our own covers to choose from.

You mentioned a “vibrating key” functionality. What!?

SE: It’s a tactile feedback function, like the clicking sound you get when you tap keys. We chose the vibration rather than the usual click mostly just for fun. We are, after all, primarily an erotic romance publisher, and we like to have fun with that, so we often inject a note of fun around the sexuality of our content.

Have you set a price?

SE: We are still working on determining an exact price point. We would definitely like to sell it for less than other e-readers, with some built-in purchasing incentives: something like a combination of free e-books preloaded on the device and a discount on the purchase of additional e-books. We are looking at different models in a range of prices for the future.

How does EC plan on handling warranty and service issues?

SE: We have a great customer service department, so most of the support issues will be handled via that existing department. Any problems we can’t solve through that avenue, we will work directly with the manufacturer on and we will replace any faulty devices. That’s part of the reason we are starting out small, to make sure we are getting dependable devices from reliable manufacturers who stand behind their products.

The similar Prology and Digma models seems to offer a lot of extra functionality, like a radio, photo viewer, voice recorder app, calculator, and so on. Will those things be in the EC model, or is it going to be customized to work solely as an ebook reader?

SE: The ECave C71 features photo, music and video functionality. It truly is a multi-media device at a fraction of the cost of most tablet PCs. It does not feature wireless connectivity but can be accessed via the usb cable provided or by loading various media onto a separate MicroSD card.

Do you see this as a way to exert some control over your market segment when it comes to ebooks, which is currently dominated by huge companies like Amazon, Apple and B&N?

SE: Many of our customers have been buying, downloading and reading our books on their computers and other digital devices for years. We have always worked to keep up with their preferences by providing our books in whatever format they prefer so that we can retain them as customers. This is really just an extension of that practice, and it very definitely does help us to retain direct access to our market segment.

I found out about the offer through literary agent Janet Reid’s blog. Reid made her purchases from a local bookstore and reported back that the process is unnecessarily complicated, with each store bringing a different level of online competence to the transaction. I foolishly tried it out myself after reading her post, and I think she’s being too polite; I was stunned at how awful the purchasing experience was. I think Google is more to blame than any of the booksellers, though, because of how clumsily it integrates its Google Books service with each store.

But before I show you how it went down, let’s look at the good news here. These are the lowest prices you’ll find for these books. I chose three titles at random from Unbridled’s list and looked up their prices on the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores, and here’s what they’re currently going for:

So it’s clear that 25 cents is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately, while the price is terrific, the actual process of purchasing the books is almost comically painful, especially when compared to how seamlessly you can buy music, apps, ebooks, subscriptions, and basically anything else online these days from other vendors.

Here. I took screenshots of every screen that I had to go through to buy two ebooks from one of the participating booksellers:

At this point, you can either log in to this new account you suddenly have with this particular bookseller, or you can say to hell with this, as I did, and just go over to the ebooks section of Google Books and find your purchases there. Either way, you’ll then be able to read your new ebooks online or download EPUB versions that are locked with Adobe Digital Editions, which should work on both Nook and Sony Reader—right after you’ve authorized it through ADE on your desktop, sigh.

If you choose to read it in your web browser, at least Google has made sure that the experience is fairly pleasant:

So that’s what you have to do to get these discount ebooks. If you want to give it a shot yourself, then the easiest way to proceed is to look at this list of available titles at Unbridled Books, then jump directly to Google Books, bypassing any indie bookseller, and buy the ebooks from Google. Of course, that shuts your local bookstore out of yet another transaction, so if you don’t mind the extra hoop jumping you can do this instead:

1. Choose a local indie bookstore from this list of stores that sell Google Ebooks. (You don’t have to choose a local store, but it’s probably a nice thing if you do.)
2. Visit the store’s website. If you’re lucky, the store you picked was thoughtful enough to promote the 25-cent sale on its home page. (See WORD and Greenlight for good examples.) If you chose badly, you won’t see any mention of the sale and will have to search for the titles yourself—or just hit your back button and try another store on the list until you find one that’s easier to shop from.
3. Take a deep breath and get ready to run the checkout gauntlet as shown above. Be brave!

Either way, good luck. Imagine how much more you’ll enjoy reading something that you had to hunt down and kill yourself, the way people had to do it back before all this one-click-purchase nonsense made us all fat and lazy.

Note: The downloadable versions won’t work on the Kindle.

[via Janet Reid, Literary Agent]
(Barbed wire: Eusebius@Commons)

The idea — to essentially crowdsource the slush pile (or to “make it social” if you prefer), and thereby turn it into a form of cheap, high-volume/mixed-value content — is the same as what some bigger publishers are doing; Harper Collins has authonomy, and last month Penguin revealed its new site Book Country. All three sites assume you will join to share your own writing as well as read, and although they make no promises, there’s a chance an editor might discover you and offer you a contract.

I don’t have an issue with this approach, and it certainly seems like in theory it could prove more accurate than the current system at helping publishers find marketable books.

But I’m not personally interested in spending too much time on any of these sites right now. The larger the slush pile grows — and let’s face it, the slush pile is now pretty much everything, including the ebook stores from Amazon and Barnes & Noble — the more I want and need some decent curation. The problem right now is that the volume of published work is far too great for current levels of crowdsourced curation to be effective. For example, a Smashwords title might have three reviews, all three of which are from people who know the author. More commonly it will have no reviews at all. Without a publisher’s stamp of approval or some proof from the marketplace that the work is of sufficient quality, the reader has no idea whether to bother.

Red Lemonade might address some of this in the coming months. There’s a Featured section where presumably Red Lemonade’s staff passes an editorial filter over submissions and chooses worthwhile titles to promote, and I’m optimistic that this could be a good source of free new works by new authors.

At launch this morning Red Lemonade has only 54 titles, which seems very manageable from a crowdsourcing perspective. By contrast, over the weekend Smashwords announced that it has now published two billion words from authors. You’ll need a lot of battle-hardened readers to sort through that many words to find the good pieces.

I think the challenge for Red Lemonade and its social slush pile competitors, assuming they grow popular enough, is to create a better ranking and filtering system that helps customers find great things to read — and I suspect the solution will require something more than just crowdsourced free labor. The publisher or website who invents that is probably going to enjoy a huge, and deserved, advantage over competitors in the near term.

(Photo: Hryck.)

How many e-books did the traditional publisher say I sold? 30. That’s right. 30.

When the novellas, which had worse sales rankings from Amazon, sold 300 each.

That 30 number didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I talked with other writers who have books in the same genre with the same company. The writers I talked with also had some e-book savvy.

Guess what? They had been shocked by how low their e-book numbers were as well, especially in comparison with their indie published titles. The indie books which had Amazon rankings indicating fewer sales sold more copies than the traditionally published books by a factor of ten or better.

Rusch has done some off-the-record digging and says she’s pretty convinced that the problem is industry-wide, and that it’s caused by inadequate reporting methods that don’t work with today’s global ebook market.

Or rather, the problem is that cash-strapped publishers, who must answer on a quarterly basis to their corporate overlords, can’t or won’t justify the expense of upgrading outdated systems.

And it’s only going to get worse as ebook sales climb in the coming years, which means authors could lose money — lots of money — as their actual sales figures slip through the cracks.

Rusch makes some detailed suggestions about how authors need to work together to fix the problem before it gets any worse:

Writers organizations need to band together and order group audits of e-book sales on behalf of their traditionally published authors. One organization cannot handle the cost of this group accounting alone. It’s better to have all of the writers organizations work in concert here.

A group audit of all the traditional publishers in various publishing divisions will force an accounting change — and that’s all we need. But we need it before e-books become the dominant way that books are sold.

Although the topic of royalties and publisher statements is a little beyond this blog’s scope, I think this particular issue deserves as much publicity as it can garner. As Rusch notes, it’s not that publishers are crooks — they’re stuck with legacy systems and no budgets, for the most part — but rather that they won’t fix the problem until they’re forced to.

“The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements [Kristine Kathryn Rusch]

(Photo: LifeSupercharger)

1: “The customer is the enemy.”

Last night I called Amazon and, after making sure the problem wasn’t a glitch, got a refund on a Kindle book I’d bought the week before. Why? Because Hachette, the publisher, had disabled all clipping and highlighting functionality. That’s right, everything. The best part was that this was a new development, because on kindle.amazon.com I could see that other past Kindle edition owners had highlighted and shared sentences from the book.

2: “Don’t make a peep, piracy is under the bed!”

On the same day that I was discovering I’d had my fair use rights secretly stomped on by Hachette (yes, secretly: there’s no info on clipping limits on Amazon product pages), David Shelley, the head of Hachette’s publishing group Little, Brown and Company in the UK, was at the London Book Fair trying to convince authors that piracy justifies low royalty rates:

“Money spent on print and paper will be spent on specialists to fight piracy and that is a team of many people. Piracy websites are proliferating, and we are scanning the entire web, and investing in software too. The costs of this are only getting more expensive, and could spiral way out of control. There are also legal costs, when sites refuse to take down content.”

The most important part of this statement is what’s missing: Shelley provided absolutely no evidence to back up his claims. At least one author in the audience told Shelley she didn’t believe him, and Magellan Media, one of the only companies trying to seriously study ebook piracy, has pointed out that until publishers actually start to measure piracy and share the data, they’re just spreading FUD to serve their own needs.

3: “We think it’s best to be reactive, not innovative.”

The reactive company makes every decision from a position of fear, and consequently chooses rigid and conservative paths that limit future growth. The innovative company explores the edges of the market to look for new ways to create revenue.

Check out what the senior vice president for digital products at Hachette US told the Boston Globe last week:

“We were the first to engage the anti-piracy service Attributor,” Thomas told me. “They go out and find pirated copies on peer-to-peer networks, and they send automatic takedown notices to the websites. Generally, we get good compliance.”

And compare that to what a Random House exec said in the same article:

“I suppose it’s a growing problem, but it hasn’t yet made a serious impact on our business the way it did on the music business.”

Random House reported its digital sales grew 250% in 2010 (The Financial). Hachette’s digital sales grew by 138% (eBookNewser).

What would explain Hachette’s fear-based approach to ebooks? I have a feeling it has a lot to do with where Hachette’s executives are getting their news from these days. Attributor’s business model depends on selling anti-piracy services and consulting to publishers. To sign up new clients, it has to convince them that piracy is one of the four horsemen on the apocalypse. Here’s a different take from someone who tried to check out the company’s findings, and who concluded that “Attributor ebook piracy numbers don’t add up.”

I don’t earn or lose money on Hachette’s business model, so other than having to get a refund on a crippled Kindle edition, I guess I shouldn’t care too much. (The taking away of fair use functionality really irks me on a more fundamental level, however.)

Dang, I was totally going to pirate about 20 lines from this book. Foiled again!

 

But what I’d like to point out, one more time and just in case someone from Hachette reads this, is that every pirate isn’t a customer, and every customer isn’t a pirate.

Although sometimes, if you do everything wrong, you can make those two groups overlap a little more.

(Photo: takomabibelot)

Callaway Digital has published two “Miss Spider’s Tea Party” app books on Apple’s iOS platform, among other titles. Although his company started off in the ’80s publishing traditional books, it now focuses solely on iOS app versions. The interactive app version is the primary and only in-house instance of the work, with all other formats, even print editions, licensed out to other companies.

What’s cool about Callaway’s story is although he started out as a traditional publisher, that was due to the limits of technology. He seems to always have approached storytelling as something that is shaped, but never completely defined, by format. He tell Reuters:

“You can tell a story in a book. You can tell a story in a game, in a film. You can tell a story in a watering can… No one in publishing was doing this. People wondered, ‘What is he doing selling watering cans?’ In essence, we were building ownership of intellectual property across many different forms.”

That’s a philosophy entertainment giants like Disney (and maybe only Disney) figured out a long time ago, but I think it still doesn’t gain much traction for many publishers and authors, even now that digital publishing makes it relatively affordable to refract a story through multiple media.

But storytelling is about more than just merchandising, obviously, and this is probably where he really parts ways philosophically with most publishers. Callaway partnered with “Miss Spider” creator David Kirk, instead of just offering a royalty agreement in exchange for publishing rights. The two split profits, and they work together to create new forms of content around the popular kids’ book character. A lot of publishers talk about their “gatekeeper” role in culture, which seems to naturally assume a hierarchy of publisher over storyteller. Callaway’s partnership approach is more democratic.

I really like that Callaway is an optimistic geek at heart: he tells Egan that he’s been waiting since 1972 for the right tablet platform for ebook apps. That’s when computer scientist Alan Kay published his template for the DynaBook, which has informed much of the One Laptop Per Child program and seems to be the template for much of the iPad’s UX.

His advice for other publishers (check the bottom of page 4 of the profile) is to get out from under the costs of being in the distribution business, and instead focus on the triad of the author/reader/publisher.

The last half of the article expands to talk to other publishers and developers, and is dotted with one-off examples of success stories in digital publishing. But the Callaway story is enjoyable because it reminds me that, despite the grumblings of some, not every first mover in a new market is simply an opportunist who is deliberately hyping a new bubble. Sometimes they’ve been waiting all along for the marketplace to catch up with them.

Gerard Lagana interviewed Callaway last year about his iPad-only shift. Here’s the clip from that post.

“Dumping print, NY publisher bets the ranch on apps” [Reuters via The Mac Observer]
“Miss Spider’s Tea Party for the iPad, and an interview with Nicholas Callaway.” [Macgasm]

In other words, this isn’t just about slightly recouping the cost of current bestsellers. It’s also about creating a way to slowly delete ebooks from library collections, so that new licenses have to be purchased on a regular basis.

That’s good for HarperCollins, but as one commenter named Eileen puts it, it’s bad news for her library and its patrons:

The sad conclusion is that the titles in our collection most likely to be affected by your new policy are not high demand titles at all. They are titles we’ve owned for a while but have never been in high demand. They circulate well but don’t have waiting lists.

We already buy high demand eBooks in sufficient quantity. If your new policy was applied to our existing collection of HarperCollins eBook titles, the titles we would lose access to are titles that have never had sufficient demand to require us to purchase additional copies.

Marwell also makes vague promises that for older titles, the price to libraries will be pegged to paperback costs, which sounds pretty good as long as you don’t ask about the details. (We’ve seen how well that promise has worked at the consumer level.) Oops, another commenter, Sarah, does indeed ask about the details:

While going through your catalog on Overdrive, I’m finding the majority of titles reflect trade paperback cost. Since many of these titles can be purchased in mass market format, I do not understand why we must pay trade cost.

Sarah also points out that at current prices, a new release will cost a library about $1 per loan, which “is not reasonable nor comparable to anything else we circulate.” She asks HarperCollins to at least bump up the circulation limit to 40 or 50 uses per license.

Amid all the corporate-style justifications, Marwell admits that libraries help publishers by letting patrons discover new readers. But it seems he’s making it pretty clear that from now on, he wants libraries to pay dearly for providing that service to HarperCollins.

“Open Letter to Librarians” [Library Love Fest via GalleyCat]
(Photo: Salim Virji)