I’m approaching the home stretch on the dissertation front, so let’s blog!
Things I’ve been thinking about…
How publishers can best make use of the resources available to them.
I started writing about the fairly bold proposal of merging bookshops with the libraries (by incorporating the library’s stock for browsing and lending as per, and POD systems for printing new titles to sell). This is reliant on many impossible things coming into fruition – a fully digitized catalogue of all the books, some fairly massive construction projects, and the purchasing of many thousands of POD machines. It was my way of encouraging a ‘literary culture’, boosting jobs, having my own pet PFI – all the good political stuff. We would also have to reconcile corporate and civil interests under one roof – although the systems would run separately. It would create some kind of super service for readers but it wouldn’t really benefit the booksellers any more than the current system. So it won’t happen
Tim Hely-Hutcheson, the CEO of Hachette Livre, fairly described this plan as ‘too hard’.
This was a dreamer’s plan but what it does bring to mind is that, no one seems to be talking about what will happen to the libraries after the ebook revolution has taken hold. At the moment companies are trying to cash in without, as Clay Shirky put it, ‘breaking the wheel’. I’m personally against Chris Anderson’s ‘free’ model being applied universally, and I’m wary of advertising models, so that leaves rental as a profitable model for providing content of varying worth. Be it in the form of virtual libraries or subscription apps.
I set out in writing a dissertation to combat the discount culture that has taken over bookselling, what I realised is that publishing is haunted by inherent demand uncertainty in its pricing.
No reader can really put a price on the cultural, educational experience of reading a novel. The general public can only base their expectation of value on what is available. And the producer can only base their product’s prices on the expectation of demand.
This is why publishers and booksellers are making moves to establish a closer relationship between their readers and themselves. At the same time, moves can be made to capitalise on the uncertainty of books by making the channels to purchase easier. And this is why digitisation is so attractive to publishers, if a reader can be purchasing books with the click of a button (books that they will never read); and have them immediately; then the total number of booksales will rise. There is money to be made from both the mists of confusion that surrounds fiction and the closer relationships of start-ups like BookArmy. The problem for publishers is that they are the only party involved in the process interested in having high prices for the ebooks, they have both the most to gain and the most to lose.
My, this thing meanders… Have a look at BookGlutton and Readernaut for ideas on how communities are popping up around books online, and should help publishers clear some of my ‘mists of confusion’. *Embarassed for such metaphor addiction.
