Kenny Hemphill
In a recent online poll on The Guardian website, 83% of respondents said they would rather read a printed book than an electronic one. Given that the poll was only conducted on the site’s Comment is Free section and heavily promoted through its Technology front page, it’s fair to say that most of the respondents were more technically literate and so almost certainly more open to the idea of eBook readers than your average paperback reader.
In other words, had the poll been conducted offline, say in the street, and been designed to include a representative sample of book readers in the UK, that 83% would have been significantly higher. And yet, shortly before that poll was conducted, Amazon reported that for the first time, sales of eBooks had overtaken sales of hardbacks.
Amazon has, of course, been working hard to promote its Kindle reader over the past year or so, and it deliberately made it as easy as possible for owners to download books to the device, wherever they happen to be at the time. Equally, hardback sales make up only around 23% of the sales of books in the US, according to the US magazine Publisher’s Weekly.
Amazon’s choice of words when its CEO, Jeff Bezos, made the announcement, is interesting. He said: ‘Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.’ While that looks impressive, it’s a very specific, carefully chosen comparison, and it’s done without releasing any numbers for either format. And Amazon has never revealed how many Kindles it has sold.
Despite those caveats, and the response to The Guardian’s poll, it’s clear that eBooks have very quickly become an important channel for book publishers, in the same way that music downloads did for the music industry a decade ago, and movie downloads have done for Hollywood more recently. And like those two industries, the book publishing world is struggling to come to terms with what that means for its current business model. For most publishers, that model still revolves around two or three heavily promoted and discounted blockbuster releases a year, supported by hundreds of releases that sell a fraction of the number of copies of their best-selling siblings. Key to that model are the deals that publishers strike with authors and agents which are set up to reward the authors of those blockbusters handsomely while barely allowing the writers of the rest of their portfolio to make a living. That worked well for publishing houses for decades, but the signs are that it’s about to change.
Just as removing CD pressing and retail outlets from the distribution chain allowed lots of artists to bypass traditional record labels and sell their music directly, so agents and authors are realising that selling eBooks need not involve publishers of the printed page. This was starkly illustrated recently when agent Andrew Wylie announced the launch of its Odyssey Editions, eBooks that it will sell directly and exclusively to Amazon. Wylie’s authors include Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Evelyn Waugh, among many other big names.
Random House, which has the contract to publish Wylie’s authors on paper, was apoplectic. In a letter to Amazon, it disputed Wylie’s legal right to deal with the company directly saying that the books in question were ‘subject to active Random House publishing agreements’. And the publisher announced that it would not be entering into any new English language business with Wylie until the ‘situation is resolved’.
There’s no doubt that Wylie’s move is being monitored by other agents. It is, however, a blow to independent booksellers, and bad news for authors and illustrators, according to Macmillan US CEO John Sargent, who blogged: ‘Independent booksellers across the country are making plans to launch their eBookstores this fall. Now they will not have these books available and Amazon will.’ Macmillan, of course, has, like Random House, a great deal to lose if agents and authors deal directly with eBooksellers.
The deal will also have been noted by Apple. Amazon exclusivity means that Odyssey Editions will not be available on the iBookstore. That’s a significant blow as Apple tries to grow its eBook business to match its music store, and makes it clear that Apple will not have it all its own way in the eBook business. In Amazon, it has something it didn’t have in music or movies: a formidable competitor.
It needn’t panic yet, however. Amazon’s Kindle is a terrific platform for reading novels, but the iPad beats it hands down for children’s books, cookbooks and manuals. If Apple focuses on those types, where the iPad’s colour screen and multi-touch interface give it an advantage over the Kindle, its book store could yet match the success of iTunes and the App Store.
