Ken Auletta is the author of an upcoming book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. Here’s an excerpt from an interview Ken Auletta did with Sergey Brin -
Google co-founder Sergey Brin told you that “people don’t buy books anymore” and that you should put your new book online for free. Your response?
Auletta: When Brin told me this I asked him a series of questions. Who, I asked him, would pay me a salary to work on the book? Who would pay for my 13 trips to Google, including airfare, hotel and car? Who would edit the book? Who would do the book tour and marketing? Who would prepare the index? Who would do the legal vetting?
By the end of my questions, Brin wanted to change the subject. The reason, I think, is that he has an innocent faith in the Internet and inadequate knowledge about how books are published.
Will we see “Googled” online for free?
Auletta: No. Writing is how I earn a living. For me “free” would send me to the poor house.
So Sergey Brin thinks people don’t buy books anymore and that books should be free.
Why then does Google have Google Editions?
Why would the head of Google tell Mr. Auletta to put up his book for free while Google wants to sell ebooks themselves and even add orphan works and sell them?
Perhaps it’s because Google’s intentions are slightly different from what Publishers and Authors are hoping.
- First, Google’s Customers are Advertisers, not users.
- Second Google’s Product are Users, not all the free products they are giving away.
- Google intends to turn Books into a means to get more users coming to Google.
- The best way to do that is to minimize the costs of books.
Google is almost certainly going to use its share of ebook prices as a discount, add in more discounting based on advertising, and sell ebooks at very low prices or give them away.
That gets it more and more people and more and more information and then it can turn around and advertise more effectively to these people.
Wouldn’t advertisers love to know a teenage girl is a Twilight fan 2 weeks before Halloween?
- Sale of a $50 Halloween costume is worth at least $10-$15 in advertising and acquisition costs to the costume company.
- That takes care of your ebook price right there.
- Add on the bonus of having that information for every other purchase decision that teenage girl makes.
The only wrinkle is that the perception of ebook price goes to Zero – which means only Google can still sell ebooks.
At which point they don’t need to pay publishers 50% of $10. They’ll pay publishers 90% instead – it’ll just be 90% of either $1 or $0.
Consider another example – the Free Turn by Turn Navigation
Its a model that works perfectly.
- Google says they want to organize the world’s information and so it makes sense to make GPS free.
- Customers feel – wow, it’s free. Google is a great company. And it is – a great company.
- Now Google knows where people are and can advertise nearby services to them.
- Google makes money from the gas station that advertised a special deal to you on the way to work.
Everyone’s happy. Its an advertising based model that’s no different from TV. It’s so cool that it’s all free and we don’t have to pay anything – advertisers cover that.
Here’s a chart courtesy Paul Kedrosky on debt to income ratio as TV penetration increased (complete report here) -
Advertisers turned people into cattle, i mean consumers
Google leverage reciprocation really, really well. They advertise really, really well too.
Free eBooks fit perfectly with the Internet’s attitude of entitlement
Business Insider catches the Brin ‘books should be free’ comment too, and the user comments are very revealing.
There’s a part of me that loves the deliciousness of people online writing things like this -
If you are supporting Ken’s argument that he should be compensated for his work then you don’t get it either. Books should be free and Sergey is right.
The business model behind creating original content has changed. Just like factory worker whose product no longer has value writers need to realize that people pay for the format by which they consume the content and not (or rarely) the content itself.
Ken’s job is obsolete. Nobody should pay him for his book and it should be online for free. If we wants to get compensated for something he enjoys doing, i.e., writing books, he must adapt to the new business model for publishing.
Wow. So now everything we write has no value and only the format by which people consume content is important.
Guess that’s exactly the sort of slavery the middle-men companies would want. Where people start thinking that writers and musicians and authors and actors are worth nothing and the ISPs and cable companies and the search engines should get all the money.
The beauty of it is – all the people who are happy to get stuff for free and think writers and directors should work for free are going to get hit too.
- Free is going to hit their professions too.
- Their free debt i.e. the advertising information they are giving up is going to kill them once targeted advertising becomes effective.
Publishers too have no clue how bad things are going to be once they give over their pipeline to a company whose best interests lie in making ebooks free.
Google, in an ideal world, wants free books so they have a ton of readers their customers (advertisers) can sell products to.
