This piece originally appeared on the blog Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room
I have tried starting this piece a half-dozen times since Sunday morning.
My original intention was to write a about ebook pricing and to be done before the first pitch of the Milwaukee Brewers game against the St. Louis Cardinals. I had a target. I had ammo. I had an itchy trigger finger and a bad disposition.
It also turns out that I didn’t have the whole story. So I read every single article on the internet about ebook pricing, including all of the hostile exchanges on messageboards and comment threads.
Before I go any further, it’s probably worth pointing out some personal history on the subject of ebooks. A history, I should note, that is in no way flattering and that might suggest you take anything I have to say on the matter with a grain of salt.
A few years ago Publishers Weekly profiled me as part of a series they were doing about 50 People Under 40 in the publishing industry. Here is the first line of that article—
“Publisher Ben LeRoy calls himself a “traditionalist,” insisting he’ll never read an e-book…”
Whether or not it appeared in the article, during the interview I confidently said ebooks would someday be a part of the publishing landscape, sure, but not in any meaningful way and even then, not for a long, long, long time. I’d be dead and buried in the hard Wisconsin dirt before I gave up paper. And I wasn’t the only one.
And I meant it. Goddamn, did I ever mean it.
A book is bent pages. It’s that smell. It’s a cover to examine in the hopes of finding a clue to what will be inside.
Just seeing a book, even in its most generic form—on a library shelf, on my parents’ coffee table, in a reader’s hands on a crosstown bus—fills me, on an instinctual level, with incredible amounts of curiosity. I am excited about the possibilities of what could be inside, imaging, like I do, that some grizzled author on a distant shore has put an essential piece of him/herself into a bottle, and has, with the strength of Atlas, heaved the glass into the ocean. This is our rendezvous. The answers to the universe are between the covers.
If, at this point, you’d like to accuse me of being a touch dramatic about these matters, I’ll accept your charges. I will not apologize. I will drink the Hemlock. I will not deny books three times before the rooster crows.
Even if the whole of a book is so much more than paper and ink—the paper and the ink are, no doubt, an essential marrow. Right?
That Publishers Weekly interview was done in early 2008. By mid-2009 I’d left Bleak House Books to start Tyrus Books, where we made it a part of our plan to simultaneously release paper and electronic books for all of our titles. Sure, I wasn’t reading ebooks, but I wasn’t so blind that I couldn’t see there was a market, and maybe that market was growing faster than I had anticipated.
It wasn’t until this spring that I got around to purchasing an e-reader, mostly justifying it to myself as a necessary component of quality control. And I did so begrudgingly. A child choking down asparagus because it was good for me.
After a week or two of using the device—storing submissions, proofreading forthcoming Tyrus titles, reading books I hadn’t read in years—I understood that things I was sure I knew, were actually different, and that most of everything I’d confessed to Publishers Weekly, was a bunch of bullshit. What I loved about books wasn’t actually missing. The musicality of the words and the connectivity of the human experience were all right there in battery operated glory.
Ben LeRoy, traditionalist was dead. Mea Culpa and all of that.
Now that I’ve come around, evolved, whatever, I think it important that in the embracing of exciting new technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper to produce books, we don’t lose the essence of what has always made books special.
I believe in the power and necessity of a skilled editor to make a book as tight as it can be. I think written art needs to be presented in as visually appealing a manner as art art. I know I have an over-invested interest in promoting and upholding the sacredness of books, but I always have. As a reader. As a writer.
I don’t know how pricing is going to shake out, and I’ve already given ample reasoning for why I should not make proclamations about the future, but price points of $.99 or $2.99 seem absurdly low to me. Perhaps it’s oversentimentality, but I don’t think books should be competing with lottery tickets or a Snickers as impulse items.
The only way I can figure it, for books to be sustainable at $.99 or $2.99 would be to cut back on the costs associated with producing them. Yes, printing and paper are gone, but editing and design should not follow. They are necessary. So is promotion. And most importantly—authors should get paid for the work they produce.
I know one of the current arguments is that books at a $2.99 price point make up, in volume, what they miss in per unit revenue. I am skeptical of magic bullets and this is no exception. But I’ll bite my tongue this time around and spend my time collecting bottles on the shore, doing what I can to get them to the market.
