One of the world’s largest book publishers isn’t happy about what Google and Amazon are doing to the publishing industry:
Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy profits and kill the lucrative trade in hardback editions.
He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 (€7) for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright books online for public use in a digital library.
“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.
As a free market bibliophile, I love the idea of living in a world where every book is sold at “between zero and $9.99″ (and since my own book doesn’t sell for much more than that, I’m fine with it as an author too). My favorite format is the trade paperback, though I now read ebooks on my Kindle and iPhone. Hardcovers have always been too bulky and expensive. And I hate paying $10-15 more for a book when I know that in a few months it will be released in my preferred form.
Large publishing houses like Hachette Livre may suffer in the short term because of technological changes and market pressures, but the end of the hardcover would be a boon to authors, publishers, and book buyers. By reducing the distribution cost—and reducing the cost of entry into the world of publishing—new companies could enter the market, providing a range of new opportunities and options for writers and readers.
But maybe I’m missing something? What would be lost of the era of the hardcover were to end?
(Via: Tim Challies)
September 1st, 2009 | 5:27 pm
Innovation is always a threat to established interests that are too trapped in bureaucratic inertia to adapt.
September 1st, 2009 | 6:24 pm
I prefer trade paperback, too. It’s not as heavy to hold and often takes up less space on my bookshelf. Hardcover looks better and lasts longer, and that’s what you’re paying the extra $10-$15 for.
The publishers may be able to cut costs merely by shrinking hardcover books down to a more reasonable size. Why do hardcover books these days have to be so big? Book clubs usually publish smaller size hardcovers (at least the ones I’ve belonged to), and at a lower price.
September 1st, 2009 | 6:27 pm
I’m sitting here in my office looking at my shelf and my eyes falls upon a hard cover book. It’s an 1895 3rd edition of “The Foundations of Belief” by Arthur Balfour. Inside I see marbled end papers and gold embossing informing me that the book was bound by E. H. Wells in London. Another label tells me the book was sold by W. Whiteley, Scribner and C., located on Westbourne Grove (London as well.) I flip through the book and I notice it is rock solid. Even after 114 years not a page is loose and the spine is perfectly intact. But mostly, it feels like a book, a real book. It feels like it is meant to last, and not simply a commidity to be consumed.
Near this book I see another book, a paperback; a good quality paperback. It’s a Dover paperback, printed sometime after 1966, “Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings”. The back of this book solemnly informs me, “The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.”
I notice the binding is split in two places. The front and back covers are creased, and a small piece has been torn from the back cover (the result of one of too many moves probably.) There are no loose pages (despite the cracks), so there is no thought of replacing the book. It still can provide everything it provided me when I bought it in the 1980′s. Yet…there is nothing beautiful about this book. If I lost it tomorrow I could just buy a new one and that would be that. It is merely a thing. Yes, it contains interesting ideas and theories, but, as an object, it has no history, no connection to other human beings. Consequently, it feels like less of a book then the bound volume.
As I look at my shelves in general I see a pattern. The book I really love are in hardcover, regardless of the format I originally read them. I didn’t do it on purpose. I’ve just seen them in a used bookstore and thought, “Oh it would be ncie to get this.” Why? They contain the same words. I could just go home and pull out my old trade or mass market paperbacks and it would be exactly the same experience, right?
Yet, there they are. William Dalrymple’s “From the Holy Mountain,” Richard Adams’ “Watership Down,” Pope John XXIII’s “Days of Devotion,” and many others. Now, I could chalk it up to my being nothing more than a profligate spender…but, for the life of me, that doesn’t ring true.
September 1st, 2009 | 8:18 pm
“What would be lost [if] the era of the hardcover were to end?”
Just the past, nothing more, and we would have lost that anyway.
September 1st, 2009 | 9:17 pm
What would be lost. Just the format, that’s all. Just the art. Just the joy. Does Tim Challies love books, or ideas? They are not identical. As for more books, don’t they publish far too many already. Much rather see fewer, better looking, better bound books than all the ‘current’ books cranked out to further stuff our minds. Let blogs and the net supply the paperbackers needs. Why even print for that mindset?
September 1st, 2009 | 10:25 pm
I might buy the argument that hard-covers are needed for permanence in a throw away society.
Yet,consider that:
1) Books, even most hardbacks, are now made with cheaper acid paper and poor quality materials which won’t last.
2) Most books (in terms of the numbers of titles) are trash.
3) Library bindings will still be in demand, but your typical public library doesn’t keep books for posterity. If a book isn’t checked out for a year, it’s chucked.
Even so, books (as opposed to E-Books) can’t be surreptitiously edited or modified, or recalled off of your kindle in the middle of the night.
September 1st, 2009 | 11:18 pm
I think Mark C is quite right. It makes a lot of sense to have hardcovers as crafted books — leatherbinding, marbled endpaper, careful attention to typography, woodcut prints, stitching, the embossing, etc., etc. There are thousands of different ways a book can be made a lasting work of art, and very few of those are as paperbacks. And there will likely always be some market for such things, for collectors and special editions; Kindle will no more eliminate this market than paperbacks did. But most hardcovers aren’t works of art by any stretch of the imagination; they’re cheaply made books framed with cardboard instead of cardstock: you’re literally paying all that extra money merely to have cardboard covered with colored paper. William Morris once said we should have nothing in our houses that is not either genuinely useful or genuinely beautiful; I think one could say that everything about our books should be either genuinely useful or genuinely beautiful. And there’s a lot of neither in current hardcover publishing. When you buy a paperback, you are getting more or less what you’re spending money for: pages kept together in a fairly cheap way. But when you spend that extra money to buy a hardcover, it could be anything from an excellently designed book to — pages kept together in an only slightly less cheap way.
September 2nd, 2009 | 12:16 pm
Heh. Only recently, Amazon “disappeared” an ebook it had sold, due to legal restrictions. Now, I have no problem with that – everything seems on the up and up. That being said, though, think about it. Suppose some time in the future we have a government that is more restrictive than we presently prefer, and they decide that book A is politically unacceptable. Blam…book contents are sucked out of all kindle editions. Heck, I can even consider the possibility that hardback books will be made illegal – they’re too permanent, and not subject to retraction. Frankly, I can’t see an end to hardbacks, although I think Kindle and ebooks might be good for a first “run-through” to decide which ones I wanted to spend more money on. Some books really aren’t worth spending more than ten bucks on. At the most.
Of course, Rich Horton’s comment resonated with me and sent a chill down my back. I can’t stand getting rid of books. We probably have a disease…!
September 2nd, 2009 | 12:27 pm
I should clarify that I’m not against hardback books in general. I would just like to see the default swapped: trade paperback comes out first and if the book is popular enough, then release it as a hardback.
September 2nd, 2009 | 1:01 pm
I agree with Rich Horton above. I have tended over the years to replace the trade and mass-market paperbacks of my favorite authors with good quality hardbacks. Not all of them, but the books I return to most often for re-reading.
In general I do like the trade format for lightness of weight, smaller dimensions, and portability, etc. But, for favorties and books I return to most often for re-reading, I do love having them in nice, high-quality hardbacks. I’m particularly fond of the Everyman’s and Library Modern Library editions (Curiously, those publishers do use a smaller format hardback dimension-wise, which strikes me as not only easier to handle, but more aesthetically pleasing. I wonder why newly published books tend to come in the larger size hardback, which is a good bit wider and longer than Everyman’s or Modern Library’s editions?)
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