Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a Seinfeld episode where Kramer goes to his local firehouse and offers the station chief a bunch of neighborhood shortcuts that will enable the firefighters to get to fires faster. However, the fire chief brushes Kramer off by telling him that “just about every week some brash young hothead like yourself saunters in here talking about faster routes and snazzier colors for the trucks. Well, fact is we feel things are fine the way they are.“

We’re of course we’re supposed to be rooting for Kramer. After all, what institution couldn’t use a little help and/or advice? And the shocked look that Kramer gives the fire chief is something we’ve all probably felt at least once when we had a great idea that we felt wasn’t appreciated. But later in the episode, when Kramer “helps” drive the fire engine on the way to a fire after he mistakenly knocks out a fire fighter, he ends up causing the fire engine to crash. Meanwhile, the building they were all on the way to save ends up burning down (all of which just goes to show that good directions don’t count as much as not crashing).

I thought of all of this when I saw a short article by Henry Blodget from last week that appeared on the website Silicon Alley Insider. Entitled, “How to Save the Book Publishing Industry,” Blodget’s glib advice is short and sweet. “How can publishers fix their business?” he asks. “Not by killing more trees. By radically retooling the business model.”

And what’s Blodget’s radical (if not just plain rad) advice? Charging less for eBooks. A lot less:

$4.99 for a first run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod — or simply readable on the Internet. The retailer keeps $1 or so, the author gets $1 or so, and the publisher takes home about $3. Some of that goes to marketing and some to overhead. And then you’re left with the typical publisher profit of less than $1 (no returns, manufacturing, or distribution costs).

As many others have already stated in their reaction to the piece, this is nothing we generally haven’t heard repeatedly since, oh, the late ‘90s. In addition, the always-smart Tim O’Reilly posted two comments on the Silicon Alley Insider website that make great sense, and hopefully will school Blodget a bit, including: “Overall, your figures seem completely imaginary. Seems to me that you picked numbers out of a hat to fit your argument, rather than figuring out real numbers and real implications.”

But this all just goes to show what publishers are up against. I mean, do people really think — in the face of enormously changing consumer habits and online trends — that it’s that simple? The fact is, many people do indeed think it’s as easy as just slashing prices. To go back to the Seinfeld episode mentioned earlier, Blodget’s idea is just about as helpful as Kramer’s usually were. That’s not at all to say that “we feel things are fine the way they are.” Not by a long shot. But we need to have ideas that do something other than just leave us and our authors with drastically reduced revenue.