As well as keeping prices high, publishers are also insisting on restrictive digital rights management (DRM) technology. Piracy is a major concern with e-books because text files, unlike music and video, are extremely small, meaning they’re easy to share illegally. But DRM is not the answer; real pirates always end up finding a way to crack the technology, while honest customers, who cannot even lend an e-book to a friend, end up with an inferior product.
If high pricing and restrictive technology sound familiar, it’s because they are exactly the same mistakes the record labels made when digital music first became popular. The music industry’s failure to sell well-priced, unrestricted MP3 files played a huge part in pushing otherwise honest customers onto illegal file-sharing sites. At least the record labels, which were dealing with something unprecedented, had the excuse of ignorance. Publishing houses don’t.
Even if publishers do get their act together, the e-book still has the potential to disrupt their business model, especially if authors decide to bypass them altogether. Typically, a writer gets around £1 for every book sold. Big-hitters like J.K. Rowling and Stephen King could instead release an e-book; even if they sold it for £2 or £3, they’d still be earning much more money than they do under existing arrangements.
There is, however, a way for publishers to capitalise on e-books. Instead of responding to change, they should become the innovators. They should start offering the first 20 pages of every title as a free e-book in the hope that it boosts sales, and could also start letting customers buy e-books chapter by chapter. For some titles, particularly those by fledgling authors, the whole work could be given away for nothing online to boost the writer’s profile. To its credit, Faber & Faber is already experimenting in this area, copying Radiohead’s tactic of letting customers pay what they want. The experimentation needs to be more widespread.
The great Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon told us that the term ‘book’ was exceptionally broad. ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.’ Publishers should remember that, and discard their one-size-fits-all approach to bookselling.
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