I want it now. In paperback. And if you won’t give it to me, I will be stealing it.

Posted: April 14th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Media | 6 Comments »

Is the publishing industry making the same mistakes the music industry did?

The marketing has worked a treat on the new James Gleick – I’ve read the reviews, and a few extracts, and now I want it the way I wanted Optimus Prime when I was six years old. But Random House aren’t going to let me have it in paperback until March 2012.

This is what the music industry did 15 years ago. A new album by your favourite artist got several months of promotion, while on sale at a vastly inflated price. Finally, 18 months after the buzz had died down, it came into the HMV sale rack at a price you could afford.

It was a miserable experience for teenagers, and the result was that when an alternative came along – Napster, and then iTunes – they changed their habits instantly. It took just a decade to wipe out a 20 billion dolllar industry.

chart of the day, recorded music revenue per capita, feb 2011

Books, I’m assured by friends in the publishing industry, are different. They’re intensely desirable objects in themselves; you get a better quality experience with the real thing than with a digital version; they can’t be split into tracks, and sold off as highlights. It all sounds very like the kind of thing record companies were saying about albums in 1998.

When publishers make life difficult for consumers, it creates a situation where people are on the lookout for a way to bypass them altogether – and given that the whole of War and Peace takes up less computer memory than one second of a Justin Bieber video, that’s a dangerous thing to do.

  • http://behindblueeyes.co.uk Blue Eyes

    Completely agree that publishers seem to be intent on shooting themselves in the foot with this. I have more than once wanted a book only to find that it is only available in hardback. I don't buy hardbacks for two reasons: cost and convenience.

    Each time this has happened I have ended up not buying the book at all.

    (Obviously you should not steal books or music).

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    Marketing people sometimes have a shaky concept of the difference between 'building buzz' and deliberately frustrating their customers – it helps build a big opening weekend, and gets you into the bestseller lists, but for the long-term health of an industry, it can't be all that great.

    The music industry has finally decided to go 'on air on sale'. When you can click an Amazon link right next to a review, it strikes me as the only sensible route for publishers as well.

    (And at least give me credit for calling it 'stealing', rather than 'sharing')

  • http://twitter.com/CorinnaHarrod Corinna Harrod

    Ok – not that i'm defending it completely – I much prefer paperbacks (B or A… i hate trade paperbacks if we're going to get technical) and indeed I've waited a year for the new Jilly Cooper sticking my fingers in my ears and shouting when yet another of my friends starts talking about it (yes we're cool) I've had it on pre-order for about 6 months (any day now it'll turn up) BUT … quite often the format that the book is originally published in depends on what slots we get in the shops, what marketing opportunities we will get and indeed what's been agreed in the contract with the author. Many authors would be furious if we didn't publish in hardback first and indeed quite a lot of reviewers will only look at the hb edition.
    Maybe we should be getting you a Kindle so you can get the ebook which should be out at the same time as the hb but for now if you are talking about The Information by James Gleick I think you'll find it's published by Fourth Estate… and I know their managing editor.

  • http://behindblueeyes.co.uk Blue Eyes

    Apple (oh yes!) manages to create buzz and have its products in the shop the day after the announcement. It then gets double buzz because of the queues of adoring fans get on telly. Obviously I realise that most books don't get people to queue up for several hours for the opportunity to plunge themselves towards bankruptcy but I agree there must be a trade-off here. Why not release the hard back as a kind of limited edition with the paper back on sale the week later or something? Give the reviewers and collectors what they want and then make money out of us plebs.

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    Hm. You have several good points. It's easy for me to pontificate from the sidelines about this, while the publishing industry gets on with a system it's carefully honed over a very long period, and which works very well.

    It's interesting, though, that from what you say, it's a system that's also tied in with the way the booksellers and reviewers operate. That suggests that it may be very hard to turn round if cheap digital distribution does, somehow, become the norm.

    (And, yes please – free hardback is better than paid-for paperback or stolen digital version in anyone's money!)

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    It's an interesting idea – make the hardback a collectible by limiting supply, and thus build further buzz. The comics industry does similar stuff all the time.