To a Scribe
Imagine you're a scribe in the 15th century. Imagine that you know what it means to sit by candlelight in the cold and copy books by hand.
One day, this groovy cat named Gutenberg shows up on your doorstep and tells you he's just invented this thing called moveable type, which makes the printing of books much faster, cheaper, and more efficient than it ever has been before.
Remember, you're a scribe...how do you react to this news? My guess is that it makes you uncomfortable, and you get that Gutenberg fellow the hell off of your front porch just as politely and quickly as you can.
You're not trying to be emotional about this whole prospect of a new piece of technology that changes what you do; you're just very cozy with things the way they are. You've built a lifestyle, a livelihood, and a batch of co-workers, with whom you can share the 15th century equivalent of Dilbert cartoons, around copying books with quills. And you know that if this goes away, your life changes.
So, you resist.
As the new technology proliferates, rumors (mysteriously) appear and spread that this new influx of books is going to tear apart the moral fabric of society.
I wrote a book last year, and more recently, a version was created and listed for sale on Amazon for the Kindle e-reader. (I wasn't told about this, I just noticed it happened one day, but that's beside the point.) The thing I'm confused about as a beneficiary of the book's sales revenue--albeit as a minority one--is this: why does the digital version of the book cost almost as much as the hard copy?
eBooks, as a medium, have a problem: people don't want to pay that much for them, because the value isn't clear. If you buy a print book, you can finish it and lend it to a friend. With digital books, that functionality isn't there, and it feels cheaper because you don't get a hard copy of a book that you can throw at the co-worker who's annoying you.
Despite the drawbacks to readers, this solves some problems for book publishers. They reduce the cost of spoilage, so that books that don't sell don't have to be shipped back to the manufacturer and destroyed. And they don't need warehousing, instead being stored as bits on a server, where the carrying cost is essentially zero.
And yet, most Kindle books cost almost as much as their physical counterparts. And book publishers hate them, and fight them tooth and nail. They're busy trying to defend the higher prices as being a function of the economics of their industry. Economics which, I might remind you, just fundamentally changed.
At most major book publishers today, there's a scribe at the helm. With that in mind, we can presume that the contention over the eBook format won't vanish anytime soon. It's not a good time to act like a traditional publishing house, because playing by scribe rules will only get you so far now that the game has changed.
It is, however, a great time to be an author, because we can all strive to be rogue Gutenbergs. And opportunities to do that abound in the world of the Internet and the realm of digital books.
One day, this groovy cat named Gutenberg shows up on your doorstep and tells you he's just invented this thing called moveable type, which makes the printing of books much faster, cheaper, and more efficient than it ever has been before.
Remember, you're a scribe...how do you react to this news? My guess is that it makes you uncomfortable, and you get that Gutenberg fellow the hell off of your front porch just as politely and quickly as you can.
You're not trying to be emotional about this whole prospect of a new piece of technology that changes what you do; you're just very cozy with things the way they are. You've built a lifestyle, a livelihood, and a batch of co-workers, with whom you can share the 15th century equivalent of Dilbert cartoons, around copying books with quills. And you know that if this goes away, your life changes.
So, you resist.
As the new technology proliferates, rumors (mysteriously) appear and spread that this new influx of books is going to tear apart the moral fabric of society.
I wrote a book last year, and more recently, a version was created and listed for sale on Amazon for the Kindle e-reader. (I wasn't told about this, I just noticed it happened one day, but that's beside the point.) The thing I'm confused about as a beneficiary of the book's sales revenue--albeit as a minority one--is this: why does the digital version of the book cost almost as much as the hard copy?
eBooks, as a medium, have a problem: people don't want to pay that much for them, because the value isn't clear. If you buy a print book, you can finish it and lend it to a friend. With digital books, that functionality isn't there, and it feels cheaper because you don't get a hard copy of a book that you can throw at the co-worker who's annoying you.
Despite the drawbacks to readers, this solves some problems for book publishers. They reduce the cost of spoilage, so that books that don't sell don't have to be shipped back to the manufacturer and destroyed. And they don't need warehousing, instead being stored as bits on a server, where the carrying cost is essentially zero.
And yet, most Kindle books cost almost as much as their physical counterparts. And book publishers hate them, and fight them tooth and nail. They're busy trying to defend the higher prices as being a function of the economics of their industry. Economics which, I might remind you, just fundamentally changed.
At most major book publishers today, there's a scribe at the helm. With that in mind, we can presume that the contention over the eBook format won't vanish anytime soon. It's not a good time to act like a traditional publishing house, because playing by scribe rules will only get you so far now that the game has changed.
It is, however, a great time to be an author, because we can all strive to be rogue Gutenbergs. And opportunities to do that abound in the world of the Internet and the realm of digital books.