Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Take either Aristotle and the Greek Philosophy of the Golden Mean or the Buddha and his advice to follow the middle path and you get the same advice -

Take the middle path and avoid the two extremes.

Perhaps its time we did the same with ebooks.

Consider the two extremes -

1. Publishers make a ton of money and control everything. Readers are forced to pay high prices and suffer terribly to read what they want. 
2. Readers get to read everything they want for $1 to $2 an ebook and Publishers starve to death.

Customers are currently advocating 2. and Publishers are pushing for 1. – Neither side is realizing that with eBooks we have a chance to choose the medium path between these two extremes and create a Win-Win Solution.

Price of eBooks

The two extremes -

1. $24 ebooks – same price as hardcovers. This is just Publishers being unrealistic.
2. $1-$2 ebooks – Because a lot of customers are confused (or lying to themselves) about what ebooks should cost.

What would be the middle path?

A price that lets Publishers and Authors make a decent living – including letting exceptional publishers and exceptional authors make a more than decent living.

That would be in the $7 to $12 range.

Anyone who thinks ebooks should be $2 or $3 is being unfair to authors (and publishers) - There is no way you can spend 1 to 2 to 3 years to create a masterpiece and sell it for $2 or $3 and make a great living.

Price of eReaders

Only somewhat related to eBooks – however, it does factor in so lets consider the options -

1. $500 eReaders (subsidized or not) – eReader manufacturers could say they want a 50-100% mark-up. 
2. $100 eReaders – This is readers being unrealistic about costs and the state of the art in eInk.

The Current $250 or so prices are pretty reasonable given where we are with eInk, scale of production and other factors.

Availability – Release Date, Range of Books

Again we have two extremes -

1. People who want all books as ebooks – right now, and start bad-mouthing ebooks and eReaders when they don’t find their favorite book.
2. Publishers scared to let any books out as ebooks. Publishers wanting to delay ebook release dates.

The middle path is simple here -

• Publishers need to get as many books into ebook format as they can, and release them same day as hardcovers.
• Publishers cannot expect to charge $10 if ebooks aren’t available at the same time as hardcovers. Plus they should mark down ebooks to paperback prices when paperbacks come out. 
• Customers cannot expect ebooks at paperback prices when they are available at the same time as hardcovers.
• Customers should be patient – If you can find 50% or more of the books you want as ebooks, that’s a good start. Plus badmouthing ebooks and eReaders is going to decrease the probability of your favorite books getting digitized.  

DRM

1. Customers want zero DRM.  
2. Publishers want excessive DRM.

The middle path is simple – Enough DRM to ensure piracy isn’t more than 20%. At the same time, minimize inconvenience to users.

Any argument that assumes removing DRM will not lead to rampant piracy is misleading. At the same time Publishers need to serve their customers well and make things convenient.

Sharing

We have -

1. The current infinite sharing environment of physical books. This is the extreme customers want and it’s not going to happen.
2. The Publisher ideal of no lending. This is also extreme. 

The middle path is one or both of Kindle’s Family Sharing and a non-crippled Nook Lending to 2 friends.

An alternate solution Publishers should be looking at is to kill lending and compensate by adding other features that add value i.e.

1. Read To Me like the Kindle has. 
2. Sharing online and sharing of snippets.
3. 3 free chapter samples you can send to friends.

Used Books Market

This basically gets eliminated. Not sure what the middle-path here is.

From my perspective anything that makes middle-men a lot of money is a good thing to eliminate.

Formats

This is more of eReader companies. However, don’t know if there’s an easy solution here.

No company in its right mind would support ePub unless it was absolutely forced to. Its self-preservation - Who wants to turn their super valuable channel into a dumb pipe that another company can exploit?

Value for Money

This is where customers are being very unrealistic -

1. Customers want a lot more value than earlier, while they want to cut prices to 25% of what they were earlier.
2. Publishers want to provide 70% of the value they were providing earlier at the same or slightly higher prices.

Let’s look at what ebooks give us -

1. Portability.
2. Wireless Downloads.
3. Sharing – within the family for the kindle, with one friend on the Nook.
4. Free Public Domain Books.
5. Read To Me.
6. Search. 
7. Free Library Books from Sony.
8. iPhone reading, PC reading, and so forth.

Publishers need to stop limiting this value. Readers need to accept that this is worth $9.99 – its worth $9.99 even if there is only family sharing.

There are all sorts of misconceptions that are floating around -

1. That it costs Publishers $1 per ebook. No – it costs a lot more.
2. That Amazon pays Publishers $1.50 per book. No – Amazon pays half the list price which is sometimes more than the $9.99 you think is unfair. 
3. That bandwidth costs nothing. You pay $50 per month for your iPhone voice and data service and Amazon magically pays nothing?

Any reader who’s believing this nonsense is indulging in wishful thinking – good authors and good publishers will not stick around if ebooks are $2 each.

Cutting the prices of ebooks to $9.99 initially and $6-7 when paperbacks come out is very good value for money.

For both publishers and readers.

Why is Choosing the Middle Path Crucial?

If both publishers/authors and users let their greed guide them, it sets up the stage for other parties to exploit them.

All the savings and efficiency and progress goes out the window.

Not talking about eReader companies since they are providing the physical platform and in some cases an entire publishing platform.

The real problem are companies like Scribd that get a 20% cut for the irreplaceable technological magic that is hosting ebook files on a web server.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | future of publishing, the middle path