World's Second Largest Publisher: $9.99 eBooks Will Kill Hardcover Books
Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of the world's second largest book publisher, Hachette Livre, says that the current pricing trends for eBooks may soon kill the hardcover book as we know it. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nourry says that he worries that the combination of the $9.99 price for bestsellers and the fact that Google now offers millions of out-of-copyright books for free could destroy profits for traditional publishing houses. Nourry is especially worried about the fact that Amazon is currently selling eBooks at a loss and that the company will soon demand that publishers will lower their prices so that it can actually make a profit from selling eBooks in its Kindle store.
Will eBooks Really Kill Profit Margins for Publishers?
Based on this interview, we can't help but think that Nourry doesn't quite get the opportunities (and cost-savings) that electronic books will bring, though there can be no doubt that Amazon has now established $9.99 as the price for bestsellers in the US and all of its competitors like Barnes & Noble and Sony have followed suit (though it is not clear if Amazon's competitors are also currently subsidizing their eBooks).
Publishers obviously incur costs when producing a book and only a small number of bestsellers make up the majority of most publishers' revenue. In the eBook marketplace, however, where distribution costs are negligible and publishers could even cut out middle-men like Amazon and Sony if they wanted to, the profit margins for most publishing houses are more likely to go up than down, even if they have to price the majority of their books between $0.01 and $9.99.
Maybe We Won't Need Traditional Publishing Houses in the Future?
When we talked to Mark Coker from self-publishing house Smashwords last week, he argued that as traditional publishing houses start to reign in cost as the traditional business model in the industry starts to collapse, publishers will start to offload some of their costs to authors (copy-editing, design, etc.). Coker also thinks that publishers will start to look at self-published authors as a sort of farm-league for their big imprints. That could very well be true, and if this happens, then publishers will see even higher profit margins than today.
Or Maybe Books Will Just Hang On For a While Longer?
Of course, there is also still a chance that readers will just hang on to their regular books - after all, they have served us well for hundreds of years now. As GigaOm's Jordan Golson puts it, "There's nothing quite like going into a bookstore and browsing the shelves looking for your next great read, so the electronic revolution won't affect books as much as it has music and movies." There is some truth in this, of course, but every eBook vendor offers free first chapters of almost every book and the same argument was probably made by music aficionados whenever another local record store closed in the last few years.
For ReadWriteWeb's in-depth analysis of the changing face of publishing, read Bernard Lunn's series: Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business.
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So what will the prevalence of eBooks do the the public library system?
Will the public still be able to check out books for free? What about an eBook-only publication?
@David Sanger: Some libraries offer ebook readers for patrons to check out and/or downloabable ebooks. Here's a link to the New York Public Library's ebook section to use as an example: http://bit.ly/1YHwC
Can you say Bu11shit?
Now print it in a book.
This is called positioning, and it is filled with non-organic BS.
Perhaps one should be worried about the material used to print out the books... but not the existence of the printed word.
re your point about the music industry: Music is a purely auditory experience, while reading a book is tactile, visual and even olfactory (you touch and feel a book, you read it, and you even smell it!)
So, I doubt if the exact parallels will apply.
Still, if publishers act merely as middle-men, their time has passed. There are so many innovative ways they can redefine their roles - such as becoming owners of tribes of book readers on various genres, to which they'll 'introduce' the next new author, for instance.
All success
Dr.Mani
(who just published his first print book after YEARS of doing exclusively ebooks - because it was more profitable that way!)
it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this. Amazon and Google are becoming (or have already become) the new book aggregators. Google scans books while Amazon sells them digitally. It's true that publishers could leave these aggregators out of the equation entirely, but I'm not sure they're aware of that or whether they feel they can do it without them. Will this end up like the newspaper vs blogs and other aggregator conflict?
About books as products, it's still unclear to me whether the touch and feel sensations are an unseparable attribute or not. After all, people already listen to voice books which don't even require reading...
Ever sat down at night to read a bedtime ebook story to your kids? Childhood is a magical time, and physical books with great big pictures are magical for kids. The death of paper book publishing is a long, long way off so long as children are born in this world.
Want to kill the printed book? Build a 24 inch Kindle for children's picture books; that matches the resolution of the printed page; and doesn't break when it's thrown into the corner; and never runs out of power; and you might pull it off. As for me, reading for pleasure will always include the touch, smell, look, sound, taste, and memories associated with the printed page.
Fred,
All positive things about E-Books aside, the printed books will only go the way of the dinosaurs, when E-Books bought online are delivered to the buyer.
If an International Buyer pays for a book, but does not receive it and despite repeated phone calls / emails to the publisher, fails to elicit a response from the publisher, then the future of e-books does not seem that bright.
Regards
I have no connection to the publishing industry other than an avid reader so I can say without bias that it is stubborn, bankrupt buggywhip thinking such as that demonstrated by Arnaud Nourry which has led numerous once proud companies in once lucrative industries right over the proverbial cliff.
Clearly we are witnessing a massive power shift in the publishing industry, and these things are always messy as history has shown. For some it will be bloody but the nimble will thrive. Having endorsed the inevitable, I have to say that should the demise of major publishers leave us without books on our bookshelves, I for one will miss them greatly. Who has not spent time leafing through books in an old fashioned or even one of the new mega bookstores. Or who for that matter has not had pleasant reminiiscences of times past lolking through books we oncre read our children or as children ourselves.
But you can't deny progress, even thought I doubt I would have the same emotional response to reading mys son's favourite nursery rhyme on my Kindle.
Even though I run my own Ebook store I don't think that ebooks will take over from the traditional Book. Have you ever printed out an ebook? It doesn't feel like a book its just paper.
I think people are fine with ebooks just for information on whatever they are looking for but not for a noval or story, an ebook version of your favourite story would just take away the fantasy.
Wouldn't be the same.
(linkback) Believe or Doubt? Publisher: $9.99 eBooks Will Kill Hardcover Books [VOTE] - http://www.pikk.com/b8630
Google scans books while Amazon sells them digitally. It's true that publishers could leave these aggregators out of the equation entirely, but I'm not sure they're aware of that or whether they feel they can do it without them.
Ebooks are a serious threat to the big publishers, but not to all publishers. Like dinosaurs, the huge corporations react slowly, have trouble turning around, are too large to be humble, and need a large quantity of nourishment to sustain themselves.
There will some significant shifts in the publishing landscape. But I believe that paper books (softcover and hardcover) -- published by individual authors, and by small presses, and by co-operative publishing ventures -- paper books will be with us for a long, long time.
Michael Pastore, author
50 Benefits of Ebooks
There will some significant shifts in the publishing landscape
have no connection to the publishing industry other than an avid reader so I can say without bias that it is stubborn, bankrupt buggywhip thinking such as that demonstrated by
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