King's RansomClick here to print or here to read in Microsoft Reader. 23 October 2000 I don't know what to think of Stephen King. On the one hand, he's done more than any other author to legitimize ebooks as a medium in the eyes of the general public. "Riding the Bullet" was a runaway success, and The Plant should have New York publishers scared blind. It should, but it probably doesn't. Although the fourth installment of The Plant is due out today from King's website (for an increased price of $2 for an installment three times as long as previous installments), King doesn't seem to fully understand the ebook business, and those misunderstandings could make this experiment less successful than it could be. I don't have issues with King's pricing (unlike others); it's his business model that concerns me. The first issue I have with the way King is handling things has to do with percentages and free redistribution. King has stated from the beginning that he wants a 75% pay-through on The Plant in order to continue. He calculates this 75% as the number of payments received divided by the number of downloads from his site (installment #3 achieved 75.6%). There's just one problem with this little equation; those two numbers don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. The Plant is available without encryption, and in a wide variety of reader formats. I've seen it show up on "pirate" websites, I've seen it posted to alt.binaries.ebook on Usenet. If someone downloads the book from one of these places instead of King's website, he'll have no idea whether they pay for it or not. Additionally, if someone downloads a book from one of these sources and then goes to King's site to pay him, he's got a payment with no corresponding download. The 75% number is meaningless, since he knows only how many people have paid, but has no idea how many copies are actually in circulation. A better way of handling it would be to use a quota of payments. He could say he wants at least $2 million per installment (over eight installments, that would give him the same $16 million he gets for a print book), and if he gets fewer than that then no more installments. Then he's setting a goal based on the only data he really has to work with: the number of people that pay. The second issue is that King insists on paying for each copy downloaded, even if you've already paid for that installment before. His reasoning is that you can't walk into your local Barnes & Noble and say, "I already paid for this book in hardcover, so give me the paperback and audio versions for free." This is true, and in the context of King's hypothetical example it makes sense. Both the paperback and the audiobook are physical products that took time and resources to produce. There's a certain base cost of manufacture for each that is greater than zero. This breaks down when you apply it to ebooks. An ebook is simply a downloaded digital copy of a book that exists on the server, a rearranged pattern of bits on the hard drive you already have. In downloading the ebook you have not cost anyone anything, you have not taken anything from anyone. The original is still on the server. So if the copy you have costs nothing to produce, deprives the seller of nothing, and you've already paid the creator once for the material, why should you have to pay again? King will have to learn that ebooks are not only a new market, they're totally different from anything that has gone before. As far as ebooks are concerned, I don't believe readers should have to pay the author again just to get the same words in a different digital format. I'm even prepared to go as far as saying it shouldn't be wrong to download a "pirate" ebook of a book you already bought in paper. If I have the hardcover of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land up on my mantle (and I do), it should be completely permissible for me to download the HTML version from a website without paying for it again. I'm not getting a physical edition that cost anything per copy to produce, and I've already paid for the words once. The old rules no longer apply, and neither does the old logic. Case in point: Writing On Your Palm is easily my best-selling ebook, selling more copies than all of my fiction combined (much to my chagrin). Part of that is the subject matter, but part of it is also that the book is about a year old and I'm already working on the fourth edition. Forgetting for a moment that a print book couldn't possibly be revised and reissued so frequently, this would be a very expensive proposition for my readers if I approached things like King, expecting a new payment with every download. As far as I'm concerned, if someone's already paid me, they can read every new edition of Writing On Your Palm that I release at no cost and guilt free. If they want to pay me again because they find the new and revised information useful, they certainly can (and some have), but I don't expect or require it. For me, it's enough that they paid me once. I'm sure these issues will be sorted out over time. People have been living with this print mentality for centuries, and it takes a while for new thoughts to take hold. Allow me to finish here by saying what I've been saying for a year now: ebooks are a completely new medium, and as such will require completely new ways of thinking about writing, reading, publishing and marketing. The sooner everyone comes to terms with that and quits trying to apply print solutions to ebook problems, the better off we'll all be. Thank you and good afternoon. |