It’s Time For Publishers To Get A Clue

Those of you who have been dropping by this blog for a while know that I’ve written several posts about the publishing industry and its consistent failure to accept that things are changing (see The Future Of Books, More Bad News For The Publishing Industry, and More Amazon Disruption). Now, Jon Evans over at Tech Crunch takes up the same theme with Dog Bites Man; Pope Condemns Violence; Publishing Still Doesn’t Get It.

Evans mostly discusses the publishers’ and Authors Guild’s reactions to Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library but also touches on the publishers’ treatment of ebooks in general. The picture he paints isn’t pretty. It’s a picture of ignoring what their customers want, of refusing to acknowledge that the future is coming, of lost opportunities, and, in general, of behaving stupidly.

He notes all the usual problems: failure to deliver a subscription model desired by their customers, inflated ebook prices, petty behavior when an author shows “disloyalty” by signing a deal with another publisher, and a general failure to deal with the reality of ebooks.

The failure to take ebooks seriously is, to my mind, one of their worst shortcomings. Just as Borders failed to take Internet sales seriously and paid the ultimate price, publishers treat ebooks as a slightly disreputable stepchild, not to be taken as seriously as “real” books; as a problem to be dealt with rather than an opportunity to be seized.

Case in point: the deplorable production values in ebooks. It’s hard to understand how they could do so poorly. The ebook process starts with the same files as a dead tree book but somehow comes out the other end with missing words and letters, poor spacing, fouled up typography, and inconsistent capitalization. Neal Stephenson’s Reamde was so poorly done that it was withdrawn from the Kindle store. Sadly, Stephenson’s book is not a fluke. Thomas Rhiel has a blog post that recounts other examples. (Be sure to follow the ebook typography is terrible link in Rhiel’s post for some graphic examples.)

Rhiel’s post makes a telling point about the publishers’ failure to leverage the opportunities afforded by the ebook format. Historically, publishers print photographs on glossy paper and bind them in the middle of the book because it’s too expensive to bind the individual glossy pages in the proper place. But there’s no excuse for doing the same thing in an ebook. The photo should appear in the logical place in the book or, as Rhiel says, at least at the end of the book in its own section instead of the middle of a chapter to which they bear no relationship.

Clearly, these books are not receiving proper editorial scrutiny. Meanwhile, the publishers are telling us that they have to charge high prices for ebooks because, after all, it’s not the printing and shipping that costs the money but the editorial effort. Please. Produce a competent product that shows some of that editorial effort and we’ll talk. In the mean time you’re just looking clueless and indifferent.

Publishers can continue to pretend that everything is the same as it’s always been, that customers have nowhere else to go, and that there’s no reason—no reason at all—to change their business model but the truth is that things are changing. Amazon is not just threatening to eat their lunch but to steal the crown jewels. Tired of dealing with publishers who don’t want to do anything new or different, they are now offering authors direct deals as I recounted in the More Bad News For The Publishing Industry post. Among the defectors, by the way, is Neal Stephenson. Perhaps he’ll finally get a clean ebook out of the deal.

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