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A new kind of hello
Now is the winter of my desk content, and I have been trying to catch up on some overdue reading.
In November 2010, Forrester published the results of an e-book survey, “eBook Buying is About to Spiral Upward”. The full report is available for $499, and author James McQuivey offers a helpful summary that can be downloaded for free.
The survey first tried to establish how readers get books today. Asked “In which of the following ways have you acquired a book in the past six months?”, those responding most often said “A friend gave/loaned me a book” (50%).
The next most frequent answer was “Got a book from the public library” (38%). Chain bookstores (38%) and Amazon (28%) were third and fifth on the list, with “Found an older book in my personal collection” (28%) coming between them.
So three of the four most likely ways someone gets a book are: loan, borrow or revisit – not buy. This got me thinking about digital books.
If the Forrester survey holds up, and it does feel right, the way we most often acquire books doesn’t mesh well with how e-books are sold. Most e-book files and services have not been configured to readily support giving away or loaning digital content.
There are some limited exceptions: you can share books across devices linked to a common Amazon account, for example. But doing that gives someone access to every book in your collection. You’re probably going to be careful about who you offer that option.
There have also been some recent efforts to let readers lend e-books once, but retailers like Amazon are slow to expand the service. Publishers don’t care that much for used books and libraries.
Still, publishing benefits when people want to read. “Fewer people read these days” is a meme, but what if the move to locked-down digital content was part of the problem?
That is to say: If sharing books is part of what encourages us to want to read them, then not being able to share books risks reducing the size of the market we’re organized to serve.
In various forums, I’ve made the claim that the challenge for editors is migrating from determining what will be published to figuring out how what is published will be discovered. If two of the main ways people acquire content involves lending or borrowing, e-books may need to find a new kind of hello.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Thank you for that link. With at least one major publisher looking to limit library lending and two other publishers not selling eBooks in the library space, the debate about what makes for a good lending ecosystem is both timely and in full swing.
Posted by Nathan Russell
While loaning an ebook is not an easy proposition, recommending them is. You can download a free sample of most (all?) ebooks on Amazon. In my experience this has been enough to let me decide whether I want to hand over the money to read the rest of the book. I know this doesn’t solve the library “issue”, and I do wonder what our libraries will look like in the future.
Posted by ctaig brown
There is also the new pricing models and the diminishing market share of publishing superpowers to consider here.
$42 v $1.42
Posted by Joshua Mullineaux
Great writeup. Publishers large and small are already embracing social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), and will continue to do so to promote their ebooks. If the industry goes away from DRM for the most part and indie publishing becomes even more commonplace, I believe social media and online book clubs will be the ‘New kind of hello.’ Online recommendations from those you trust.
Posted by gorongo
Great insights. I wonder if Amazon would use a depreciated value model to allow the handing down of books where they handle the transaction and share with publishers. Gifting and handing over a book in a physical sense has some aspect of gratification, and I might feel the same if I could de-license my version, hand it over to a friend for a minor fee, and once they are done (if ever) they would return it to the original owner. Just a concept.
Posted by Michael Gardner
Thank you for sharing some valuable information and posing excellent questions. As a publisher, and avid reader, it seems that one reason we so frequently give books is because once we’ve read them they have considerably less value. There are few books I care to read again and again. Which is also why I’m content to read books taken from the library. I want to experience/learn from them but have no need for them to clutter my shelves. Look at the used book market. Unless a book is quite popular it’s used price is substantially less than it sells for new. Often the shipping cost is equal to or greater than the book cost. For electronic books in any form to be both an asset and a commodity they will need to develop an aftermarket, which I’m guessing, based on the economics of electronic creation and distribution, will sell books for substantially less than they currently fetch.