Why print books are like zombies
By Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords
Print books are like zombie pirates. They don’t die easily.
When I told my wife Lesleyann I was considering titling this post, “Why Print Books Must Die,” she flashed me an icy stare that said, “Don’t you dare!” In deference to Mrs. Smashwords, I changed the title.
Don’t get me wrong. I love print books. Lesleyann and I collect them. Every Friday, we do date night at the book store. Books form narrow hallways in our house. I’d say I’m cursed by print books except it’s really more of a blessing, as anyone sharing our affliction will tell you.
I don’t want print books to go away. The real purpose of this post is to make a point about DRM. More about that in a second.
From an early age, we’re taught to respect books. We know and love them as receptacles of knowledge and entertainment, and as artifacts and souvenirs. They’re expressions of personal identity and personal desire. It’s quite amazing, really, how books can envelop our lives like, uh, mossy green zombie goo.
There’s a dark side to these zombies of the printed page. We never throw them out, so they’re difficult to kill. We pass them on to friends who read them, and then they pass them on again. We sell them, or trade them in for credits at a used bookstore, or we donate them to a library and they change hands again and again and again. Each time they pass from the previous owner to the next, the author and publisher who invested so much effort to create the book don’t see a cent. I’m not the first person to raise this point, and I won’t be the last.
What do book Zombies and DRM have to do with one another? Quite a lot, actually. DRM, or digital rights management, is a scheme designed to prevent ebook customers from illegally copying and sharing ebooks (most ebooks are licensed like software – you’re not legally allowed to share them with friends, or resell them). There’s a big debate in publishing circles about whether or not books should be protected (afflicted?) with DRM.
I, and many other progressive book people, think DRM is a bad thing. It treats law abiding customers like criminals by limiting their ability to enjoy their book their way. Others, like a concerned author who emailed me the other day, fear that without copy protection, customers will pirate their books and soon, millions of unpaid copies will be in the hands of ungrateful readers.
Lost in this debate about whether publishers can trust their customers to do the right thing is the zombie elephant in the room. Each time a zombie book passes to a new owner, it’s a form of piracy. It’s not exactly piracy because a book is property like a car, but you get the point.
While I think piracy is a bad thing, and chronically under-compensated authors and their publishers deserve more money for their work, it bears remembering that book piracy pre-dated ebooks.
Ebooks, even DRM-free ebooks, could help mitigate the book piracy problem.
Here’s how:
Assuming publishers continue producing zombie print books, the incremental cost to create an ebook is infinitesimally small. Smashwords, for example, will convert a finished Microsoft Word manuscript into nine ebook formats at no cost. Many free conversion tools to do the same.
Once in ebook form, ebooks cost virtually nothing for the publisher to print (duplicate) and ship. Unlike Zombie books, ebooks have no inventory, no returns and theoretically (if customers for the most part are trustworthy, as I think they are), no sharing or reselling.
Ebooks are cheap to make, so the publisher can offer them to customers at a lower price. By lowering the price, publishers expand the affordability of the book to a wider potential audience, including folks who can now purchase the book as opposed to seeking out a pirated copy. Bigger market, bigger profits, cheaper books, no zombies. It’s a win/win/win for author/publisher/customer.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am
There are a lot of false things in this post. For instance, ebooks aren’t cheap to make. The difference on production between an ebook and a paper book it’s just the paper and the print, wich costs arround 1 $ per copy (and that means just 1 $ less).
Analogies between paper books and ebooks are full of missunderstandings. For instance, you can lend an ebook to a friend. The only problem is that just like with paper books, you will not be able to have it at the same time. It seems fair, doesn’t?
Zombies, dying… i don’t see quite seriousity in the writting of that.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
“Each time a zombie book passes to a new owner, it’s a form of piracy.”
This one ridiculous statement blows your entire argument. Too bad, it had promise.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Hi @joseph @jack – To borrow a phrase, apologies for not calibrating my words properly.
re: cost: the cost associated with getting an ebook into a customer’s hands is much less than print, considering no paper & ink, no warehousing,no shipping/fuel/labor, no packaging, no unpacking, shelf stocking, no book returns, no remaindering fees from your distributor. Granted, if ebooks continue to grow in market share, then it’s only fair that a greater percentage of the cost of producing the book (acquiring the rights, editing, cover design, marketing/sales) should be allocated to the ebook, so its fair share of pre-print production expense will increase relative to print over time.
re: lending. ebooks don’t lend themselves well to lending, unless DRM is involved.
re: ridiculous statement… Right, it’s not piracy, though it does deny the author further compensation. I thought the next sentence clarified.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
“Each time a zombie book passes to a new owner, it’s a form of piracy.” On the face of it it does sound ridiculous, but the content industries have a long history of acting like the believe it is so. I had read Marks argument as “if content providers think of it that way then they will price to factor in all that ‘piracy’”, which sounds reasonable to me – the same dynamic is playing out with new vs used computer/console games.
I have read figures like “1 in 5 books turns a profit” and “50% of books printed are pulped”. I’m not sure how printing, shipping, shelving, returning, & pulping of half the books printed can reconcile with the paper and print being $1 a copy on a new release. Does anyone have references to cost breakdowns in the industry?
August 7th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I would suggest reading a bit more about the Right of First Sale, which pretty much nullifies your piracy argument. Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
As others have pointed out, paper, print, binding, shipping, etc. is only a small part of the costs of creating a book. A good explanation is here:
http://theharperstudio.com/2009/02/why-e-books-cost-money-to-publish/#comment-1576
The idea that e-books are magically free because you’ve already spent to create the paper version is circular logic at best. You have to pay for that creation, otherwise you go out of business. E-book sales can certainly be part of your business plan, but you need to amortize the costs of creating the book over both the print and the e-book versions and price accordingly.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:10 am
“Each time a zombie book passes to a new owner, it’s a form of piracy.”
This is incredible non-sense. What about public domain books? Am I supporting piracy if I lend a Nietzsche book to a friend? Of course not. The only thing it happens here is that the person who I lended the book will not spend/waste money with something he don’t need. Is this bad?
When you sell a book, you’re not selling the knowledge in it. This is universal. What you’re selling (with profits) is the costs involved in making and distributing it, in the publisher side. This is another history in the author side. If you learn something by yourself, and another person learned the same thing by a book I published, can I charge for it? Can I charge you by this comment?
Music industry lost the way, a model to maintain their profits, just because Internet is a whole new thing, not just an electronic or digital way of doing the same thing.
I think the e-book industry hasn’t begin yet, but are already thinking the same way the old music industry.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I think the first sale doctrine took quite a bit of litigation to create/recognize. I recall examples like pre vinyl records with eulas printed on them that purported to prohibit re-sale.
Every new tech that comes out everyone is bound to try the same strategies to maximize their slice of the cake. This played out recently where ‘ebook’ rights were magically not part of ‘printing rights’ and people were litigating over who actually owned the ebook rights.
August 8th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
“Don’t get me wrong.”
your audience just skips right over this part, eh? it’s a marvelously imperfect article, the message is fairly sound but for some nitpicking- the errors are not as grave as the ones being made (and the fallacies justified) by the old guards of industry- i’m not sorry you wrote it. if it makes one person think and a few others keep their misguided position, it was worth it.
August 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
@tubejay “Marvelously imperfect,” I think, will go down as one of my favorite blog compliments ever. Thanks.
August 12th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Interesting article. I’m not going to attack or defend it in terms of the accuracy (or not) of the content.
What I do want to do though is just put an author’s point of view.
However, before I do that let me also say I believe the argument that e-books will cause the death of print books is fallacious. Radio, television and the internet haven’e caused the death of newspapers. They may have casued the industry to re-think its production and marketing strategy but, in the end, all can exist alongside each other because it is not an either/or situation.
Back to my main point. The issue concerning passing on copies of books whether they be print or electronic is, from the author’s point of view, based on two factors. The first is that an author wants to become as widely known and read as possible, so lending or donating to a friend a used copy is great. Illegal copying is a different matter – that’s what copyright law is intended to prevent, even though it remains clumsy and confused at present. So, from this author’s point of view, any act that effectively spreads my fame is great, any act that purposefully does me out of a sale by ‘cheating’ on me is not. The dividing line can be quite thin.
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings
August 14th, 2009 at 11:38 am
“It’s not exactly piracy because a book is property like a car, but you get the point.”
There is little difference between lending a book I own physically to a friend and sending them a copy of an e-book I bought.
Except that there’s no limit to the number of people that can get a free copy.
but then again as a writer, why is more people reading my book a bad thing? Of course, I’m just a part-time little bitty baby writer using smashwords and if I make one sale I’m thrilled! At this point I’ll take anyone who is reading my words- legally or not, paying me a damn dime or not. Perhaps in 10 years when I am a AUTHOR with some backing behind me.