Google Book Search–Yes! 650,000 Free Online Books As Promos–No!
Thank you Grumpy Old Bookman for sending me to read Cory Doctorow’s ”Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google“ on boingboing.net.
Doctorow, a Canadian journalist and science fiction author, hauls off and punches the publishing industry in the nose (in the nicest way, of course) for their hissy fit about Google Book Search. Let’s hope Google makes lots of money off its Herculean effort to scan in millions of books, convert the scanned images of the pages into text, and index the texts. Google deserves all the money it can get for having yet another brilliant idea and, although it is somewhat embarrassing to admit, an idea originating from a bunch of left-brainers.
And who is going to benefit from this mindboggling effort without lifting a finger or possibly even a book? Authors, publishers, researchers, entertainers, librarians; you, me, posterity, humankind in ways we can’t even anticipate. And the worst price we pay? Well, for the first time, vast amounts of the deserving as well as the dreadful in publishing will be equally available to all with a click. I’m just sorry a lot of the people involved are not around anymore to hear readers say: “What a great book!” or “Someone actually agreed to publish this?”
What gives me pause in Doctorow’s article is letting 650,000 digital copies of his first book be downloaded at the same time his book reached bookstores. His comment “…it’s no foregone conclusion that free electronic copies of a book will substitute for sales of physical copies of that book” makes me want to put a call into Tor Books, the publisher. (But perhaps the editor no longer works there.) Doctorow’s rationale for the free 650,000 copies is that he feels the “majority of …readers who fail to buy [his] book will do so because they have never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy.” His novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is now in its sixth printing. Is that because the free downloads sent people into the bookstore in droves to pay retail for the book or on to the Internet in a frenzy of online purchase power?
Six printings sound good, but that statement, without the figures attached to it, is worthless. How many books per printing? 10,000; 150,000; 500,000? It’s important to know that figure so the industry can weigh the advantage or disadvantage of seeding the marketplace with so many free digital books. I’d have to be convinced that 650,000 free reads is the best way to reach an audience. And as a publisher, I might be wondering where my piece of the action was with these free downloads, and whether my author had saturated the market or even undermined it if he held the digital rights. Regardless, as either an author or a publisher, I would have liked to have gotten a dollar for each book read online. I do so covet that red Jag my neighbor has for sale.
February 18th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Wow…. where DO you get your energy and insight? Someone should be paying you A LOT OF MONEY for your wisdom, thoughtful observations (o.k. sometimes criticisms…) great ideas and solutions. What DID the publishing industry do before the Wicked Witch was keeping tabs on it?
February 20th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
I don’t think that Cory Doctorow’s case can be taken as a reliable example of what will happen for the whole industry, even if you take just the subset of fiction publishing, because his audience and his market are not the same folks who are making Dan Brown, etc. multimillionaires.
His appeal is to SF fans and computer geeks, but the argument could be made that those people are more likely to the be the sort who are gadget-oriented and just as happy to read a novel on screen, on a PDA, or on their phone. These are formats that are available for free (and only for free). From that perspective, if you have an audience that’s N% more likely than the average book buyer to be satisfied with the electronic version and they’re still buying the books, then that’s significant.
The same could be said for other authors who are going the same route, like Charles Stross, whose novel Accelerando is available for free. The book is published by Ace in the US and Orbit in the UK.
I don’t hate my eyes enough to read an entire novel on screen, but being able to read as much as I want, and not just a five-page excerpt, helps me as a consumer know whether I’m making a reliable purchase. The last thing a reader wants is to spend $24.95 on a hardcover and feel like it’s a waste of money.
Of course, that may all become immaterial once someone comes up with an e-book reader that’s actually reader friendly, which will certainly happen in the next couple of years. (Sony’s new one certainly isn’t it.)
February 28th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
There’s also the audience to consider. Just as there are some books for whom e-books are likely to flop, there are other audiences who would rather read books on their cellphones than carry around paperbacks. The conclusions from this may not be self-evident, though. As I wrote in a recent comment elsewhere: I don’t think that Cory Doctorow’s case can be taken as a reliable example of what will happen for the whole industry, even if you take just the subset of fiction publishing, because his audience and his market are not the same folks who are making Dan Brown, etc. multimillionaires.