As digital technology evolves, the practice of bundling – packaging physical books with their e-book counterparts – is now coming into focus as a commercial option for publishers.  Though the goal of one-click delivery is far harder than advocates wish – as Rachel Deahl makes clear in a recent Publishers Weekly article Is the Time Right for Bundling?, the technical and commercial challenges will eventually be overcome.  When they are, we will be faced with the question, How much to charge for a print/e-book bundle?  In an effort to start the dialogue, one industry leader, Bloomsbury USA’s Evan Schnittman (describing the bundle as an “enhanced hardcover”), suggests a price of 25% over the price of the hardcover.  “The consumer wins,” he says.

We’re far from sure about that, and we also wonder if anyone else wins, either. In the summer of 2010 we raised the question in Bundling: Publishing’s Next Battleground.  We re-post it here to push the dialogue where publishers may not want to go.

Richard Curtis

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The following question is deceptively simple, and we urge you to take your time responding. How much time? Three or four months. You’ll need that much. A lot rides on your answer.

Here’s the question:

When you purchase a print book you should be able to get the e-book for…

• a) the full combined retail prices of print and e-book editions
• b) an additional 50% of the retail price of the print edition
• c) an additional 25% of the retail price of the print edition
• d) $1.00 more than the retail price of the print edition
• e) free

The subject of this little quiz is bundling, a common marketing tactic in which two or more products are packaged and sold at a single price. In this case the package is a printed book plus its e-book iteration.

As simple as it sounds, bundling is shaping up to be the battleground for clashing publishing philosophies, and the time will soon come when publishers will have to choose one of the above strategies and put it into effect. Misjudging consumer attitudes could prove to be a big mistake and possibly a ruinous one.

The essence of bundling is to offer customers a discount for selecting the combo instead of the individually priced components, so choice a) above is a non-starter. But choices b), c) and d) reflect just how aggressive a discounter wants to be and the various thresholds at which consumer resistance is expected to melt. A good argument can be made for each and as the bundling issue warms up you can expect to hear them all endlessly debated.

Yet even the cheapest package – a dollar or even less than a dollar over the cost of the print edition – may not suffice to capture the consumer’s fancy. Why? Because many people believe they’re entitled to get the e-book free with purchase of the print book. How large is public support for that position? We need to take a poll to find out, but if anecdotal reports are any indication, they may be in the overwhelming majority and they are unquestionably the most vocal. You will certainly hear their outpouring of joy when one publisher steps up to offer a print and e-book combo for the price of the print edition alone. Our own prediction? Free will become the standard, and even ten cents above free will be a competitive disadvantage.

Economic factors aside, consumer negativity toward double-charging is a contributor to piracy. Comments sent to us in response to postings about piracy strongly suggest that the public expects digital versions of books to be tossed in for nothing when a printed book is sold, and if it isn’t tossed in, many of those customers will feel no compunctions about downloading an unauthorized copy. They simply feel entitled to it. Libertarian spokespeople like Cory Doctorow have articulated this sense of entitlement, and though some feel that their arguments go too far, there is a solid core of realism in their position. We can condemn the immorality of consumer attitudes ’til the cows come home; and we can (quite reasonably) complain that if people were willing to wait for the paperback reprint they should be willing to wait for the e-book reprint. It makes no difference: the public’s sense of entitlement creates an environment susceptible to the allure of piracy.

With so many sound arguments in support of heavily discounted bundles, why have we seen so little of it in book marketing? The answer is that it is harder to assemble print/e-book packages than it looks. Publishers that control both formats are in the best position to do it but the technology is not yet in place. Customers purchasing the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts novel in a bookstore have no simple way to download the e-book in the same transaction. The publisher might offer a discount coupon but that requires a number of steps and clicks that discourage a quick and easy procedure.

What is wanted is a one-click experience: “Click here to order the print and e-book.” Such a deal might best be offered by a publisher on its website. However, the price of that bundle might undercut the prices offered by retailers or e-tailers for the individual components, and for publishers to compete with their own retailers is to cut their own throats.

Amazon is in a good position to offer print/e-book bundles but hasn’t done so yet, probably because it recognizes the complexity of the issues. Book pricing is already fraught with so much angst that adding bundling to the debate will undoubtedly induce cardiac infarction among book people already near apoplectic with worry.

For the record, we at E-Reads strongly support the position that the e-book version should be included free of charge with the purchase of one of our print editions and are working to overcome the technical obstacles to implementing our conviction.

We invite your comments and look forward to seeing the debate over bundling heat up on the next stretch of road to the future of books.

Richard Curtis

Can you be so zealous in defense of freedom that you behave like the despots you deplore? This question plagues us when we consider the activities of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit organization purporting to be a staunch defender of our civil liberties. Among those liberties are the rights of file-sharers to upload books.

Its website is filled with advice and offers of assistance to those receiving takedown notices from copyright owners or their designated representatives, whom EFF calls copyright trolls. This counsel is provided by a board of advisors packing heavy legal heat. They seem dedicated to making it as hard as possible for aggrieved authors to protect their property. Among the copyright trolls displayed on their “Takedown Hall of Shame” are such abusers of freedom of speech as National Public Radio, CBS News, Warner Music Group and Yahoo!

You can read on the EFF website how
* EFF has created a list of subpoena defense resources for those targeted by file sharing suits.
* EFF helped establish legal protections for privacy online, including the privacy of P2P users.
* EFF has assisted Internet users mistakenly caught in the industry’s dragnet.
* EFF has helped P2P users sued by the RIAA and MPAA find legal counsel.

A recent example of EFF’s zeal is an attack on a company designated to collect fees for unauthorized use of copyrighted material:

Dear Friend of Digital Freedom,
Here’s your chance to help EFF topple a troll! Over the past two weeks, EFF has won the dismissal of two bogus infringement lawsuits filed by notorious “copyright troll” Righthaven LLC. In the first case, a federal judge ruled that Righthaven had no standing to sue an online political forum for a five-sentence excerpt of a news story posted by a user, because EFF sleuthing revealed that Righthaven did not own the copyright. Last week, the court relied on the evidence presented in the first case and dismissed Righthaven’s lawsuit against a non-commercial blog that provides prosecutor resources for difficult to prosecute “no body” homicide cases.

These victories are sweet, but Righthaven and copyright trolls like them have filed thousands of additional lawsuits across the country, using the threat of massive damages available under copyright law to pressure defendants into quick settlements. One copyright troll is attempting to subpoena the identities of thousands of BitTorrent users and sue them collectively to minimize their own court costs, while another is targeting alleged adult film downloaders with hopes of exploiting the additional threat of embarrassment associated with porn. We need your financial support to bring an end to this awful business model.

EFF’s hard work has provided the facts and precedents needed to dismiss even more lawsuits. Please support EFF today, and help us topple a troll!

A prominent “EFF Fellow” is Cory Doctorow, a highly regarded author and outspoken advocate of free speech described on the EFF site as “A former EFF staff member and recipient of EFF’s 2007 Pioneer Award.” His name and picture are displayed on the organization’s page soliciting funds for the EFF.

Some time ago, in covering an organization that partnered with the EFF we ruminated:”We’re sure they’re well meaning and have done their homework in the letter of the law, but the spirit seems to have eluded them, and we have to wonder if they’re familiar with the definition of a liberal as someone who’s never had his pocket picked.” (see Is This Watchdog Guarding the Bad Guys?)

On this 4th of July as we exercise our hard-won freedoms and the Constitutional amendments that endow us with the right to speak freely, it is not unreasonable to ask whether efforts to frustrate the legitimate claims of victims of copyright theft exemplify the very abuses that organizations such as this were created to protect us from.

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of E-Reads articles about piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Cory Doctorow’s long day’s journey into self-publication has at last reached its terminus with release of his story collection With a Little Help. For over a year he has been recounting in Publishers Weekly his triumphs and travails and, because we feel that every professional author and editor can benefit from his account, we’ve been reporting on his progress. (See What Can Publishers Learn from Cory Doctorow?)

Doctorow has been unsparing in self-criticism as he reports mistakes and misjudgments made along the path.  We have noted that many of his miscues were rookie blunders that most tyro editorial assistants would have avoided, but what kind of fun or instruction would there have been for us if Doctorow had hit the ball out of the park without a lot of strikeouts, popups and weak grounders?

In his latest PW journal entry he recounts how the book was untimely ripped from its womb. “At the time of my last column, I was in a three-quarters panic about the book: negotiations with Lulu and my agent had bogged down in miscommunication; Christmas was fast approaching; and I was about to go in for hip surgery. So, what happened? Literally a day after writing that column, I simply launched the book. I made the site live, uploaded the book to Lulu’s servers, and set up the sell pages.”

The results of this premature release were predictably mixed:”The good news: I’ve made some money, and I didn’t turn into a ravening monster on a blind quest for fortune and sales. But I’ve also discovered a lot of tiny errors—and two gigantic ones.”

You can read details in With A Little Help: The Early Returns, but we do feel compelled to question whether he has in fact made some money or any money at all.

Doctorow has accounted to us to the penny on the hard costs of producing his book, a bit under $17,000. The soft costs are not, however, accounted for. For instance, the expenses that publishers list in the column called “Overhead” when they do their Profit and Loss projections – rent, electricity, office supplies, salaries and the like – are absent from his calculations.

And let’s linger on the item called salaries. Doctorow is blessed to have the fealty of many friends, friends who offer the “little help” in his title.  The friends charge nothing for proofreading, and neither for that matter does his mother to perform services that cost at least $25 an hour when performed by professionals. “My readers have sent in 123 typos to date, about the same as I turned in for the second printing of my first story collection, which was proofed by my editor. With a Little Help was proofed by my mother, who routinely scores on par with professional proofers who do my novels.”

Doctorow has discovered one solution to the doldrums in which publishing companies suffer: don’t pay employees.  If Penguin could prevail on friends, or perhaps on Mrs. Penguin, to do its proofreading gratis its bottom line would certainly spike dramatically.

And then there’s this statement: “I’ve made a ton of money on the $275 limited edition.” How much? $31,000 before subtraction of the $17,000 it cost to produce the edition. That comes to a net of $14,000.

If I were to survey a thousand professional authors and ask them to define a ton of money, I can’t imagine any of them answering $14,000.  Subtract from that his overhead and the value of free labor and I would guess that brings us down to zero, or even minus.

What Cory Doctorow has reaped a ton of is experience, and what he has given us is a ton of education, entertainment and excitement. We’re satisfied with the bargain and hope that he is too.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Do authors make good publishers?  The answer is No. But it’s fascinating to watch them try.

Years ago as the e-book revolution dawned, we said that in order to keep pace with the new digital culture, authors would have to become more like publishers. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with,” we wrote, “a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media.” (See Author? What’s an Author?)

Unfortunately, in order to master publishing skills, authors face the prospect of abandoning commitment to their muse.  Digital technology has given writers the key to the funhouse, and few have been able to resist the allure of all those glittering tools empowering them to steal fire from Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Random House.

In the past year a number of prominent authors have accepted the challenge with varying degrees of success. We’re thinking in particular of Cory Doctorow, Seth Godin and J. A. Konrath. Whether their move to the other side (as publishers ourselves we’re in no position to call it the dark side) proves detrimental to their writing careers is a question that will play out in time.  But because their experiments are being watched and emulated by other writers, these adventures are worth noting.

Cory Doctorow. Publishers Weekly has been chronicling Cory Doctorow’s noble self-publishing venture for a year, and only Doctorow himself is more relieved than we are to see the book he has labored over, With a Little Help, completed. Though he applied the full measure of his genius to beat establishment publishers at their own game, he has paid a high price to achieve that goal. For one thing, he has wasted time, taking over a year of it to bring one book forth while (by his own admission) neglecting others projects. He made numerous mistakes in the course of learning truths that just about any tyro at a publishing company knows. For another thing, even though he expects to make money on his book, when you amortize the time he’s spent you on it you will see that he could make far more had he turned the job over to a professional organization. He also reports that the ordeal has taken a toll on his body as well as his soul.

Here’s how Doctorow put it in his latest PW posting: “With a Little Help has helped me realize something: whatever I do next, I don’t want to be in charge of all these moving parts. I can’t be both a Zen, let-it-all-happen-at-its-own-pace writer and an aggressive, deadline-pushing publisher. If I were realistically going to keep up this publishing stuff, I would need to outsource every task that requires the virtues inherent in agents, editors, sales, marketing, distribution and retail, especially that willingness to tithe a large portion of my working day to logistics, follow-ups, and calls.”

You can read our monthly coverage of his tribulations in our Corywatch Chronicles here.)

Seth Godin. Godin has set out to redefine authorship, and he’s done it so radically he’s become a publisher. And not just a self-publisher; a publisher of other authors.

In August 2010 he posted an announcement on his blog that now that he has a direct relationship with his large audience, he would no longer “publish in a traditional way.”  The traditional way, he decided, creates unnecessary layers of infrastructure that hinder the process of getting his words directly to readers.

Amazon.com, which has partnered with Godin on other projects, recognized that his approach offers an ideal showcase for its author services. Collectively known as Powered by Amazon, this system “enables authors to use Amazon’s global distribution, multiple format production capabilities, including print, audio and digital, as well as Amazon’s personalized, targeted marketing reach.”

If Godin stopped at publishing only his own work it would probably turn out fine, as it’s kind of like what J. A. Konrath is doing (we’ll get to that in a moment). But the venture he calls The Domino Project is geared to helping other writers achieve what he has achieved. “My goal in working with authors,” he writes, “is to offer them a relationship that eliminates some of the frustrations authors feel when working with the traditional publishing world.”

This is a noble goal but accomplishing it is far easier said than done. Just whom does he plan to relieve of their publishing frustrations? Branded authors? They don’t need him to help them find an audience. So that leaves the self-published unknowns and wannabes for whom there already exists a vast network of self-publication facilitators like Author Solutions. (See: You Got That Right, Ecclesiastes!)

It’s hard to believe that Godin would set aside his valuable time and literary gifts to devote himself to discovering, assisting and promoting these writers, but if that is what he has in mind, we will not be surprised to learn one day that his operation has generated the same layers of infrastructure that his manifesto decries. Because whether or not you’re “powered by Amazon”, being a publisher is damn complicated, even when you’re not trying to be an author too. Ask Cory Doctorow.

J. A. Konrath. We wonder if Konrath has the most sensible approach. He packages his own works but unlike Godin he’s smart enough to be disinclined to publish the work of others. He has a large following that enables him to self-publish successfully but unlike Doctorow he doesn’t sweat the small stuff, sensibly leaving details of cover design, formatting, uploading and website maintenance to professionals. That undoubtedly cuts into his profit margin, but the time he saves enables him to write more books.

He’s made the publishing process look easy. And it is -  if you’re J. A. Konrath. If your name is not familiar to the reading public, however, emulating him will flop. You will become a publisher, yes: a vanity publisher. Here’s how Konrath states it on his website:

Q: You’ve had a lot of success with ebooks. Should I forsake finding an agent and a print deal and release my book as an ebook?

A: I get asked this a lot. I’ve done pretty well with ebooks, and my sales aren’t slowing down. But I also have a known name (two known names if you count Kilborn) and this is no doubt helping my ebook sales. So while I’m able to pay my mortgage with my Kindle profits, I don’t know of many other ebook writers who can say the same.

Right now, the best way to begin a writing career is to find a good literary agent and sell the book to a well-respected print publisher. In other words, don’t do it on your own unless you completely understand what you’re doing.

Then again, if your goal is to simply have your book available, and to maybe make a few bucks, then visit Smashwords.com. You can upload your ebooks for free, set your own price, and they’ll upload them to Amazon, B&N, Sony, Apple, etc. I recommend keeping your price under $3. I also recommend using pros to do the art and formatting. Expect to pay a few hundred dollars for cover art, a few hundred for ebook formatting, and a few hundred for print formatting.

For authors, the lesson to be learned from these examples is that you must distinguish between writing and publishing your writing and weigh the goals and satisfactions of those two vastly different processes. In this age of instant gratification and entitlement the idea of long, uncompensated apprenticeships seems to be a relic of another age, But the rigors of artistic achievement are no different from those of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. Talent and hard work will out, but they must be leavened over time.

Publishers too have a lot to learn from the efforts of these authors, particularly from Cory Doctorow who has more and fresher ideas than an army of old-line publishers. A review of his Publishers Weekly articles detailing his innovations will generously reward every editor young or old.

Richard Curtis

Tim O’Reilly famously said, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”  That’s very witty, but anyone who’s had their property hijacked by pirates will fail to see the humor. Take Colleen Doran, a cartoonist and illustrator with hundreds of major credits. She would gladly opt for obscurity if it meant getting compensated for the 3000 hours of work stolen from her.

“Like many artists,” she blogs in The Hill.com, “I’ve seen my sales figures chipped away as the print market shrinks due, in no small part, to rampant online piracy. I tried to count the number of pirate sites that had my work available for free download, but when I hit 145, I was too depressed to go on.”

Doran’s poignant story is all too familiar to a surging list of authors, artists and musicians. She spent two years – she calculates 3000 hours -  researching and drawing a graphic novel for DC Comics/Vertigo. “The minute this book is available, someone will take one copy and within 24 hours, that book will be available for free to anyone around the world who wants to read it. 3,000 hours of my life down the rabbit hole, with the frightening possibility that without a solid return on this investment, there will be no more major investments in future work.”

Though her ire is directed at pirates, she has some choice words for file-sharers and other enablers. “Distribution is the only concern. Readers care about the gadget that gives them the goods, and have no connection to the goods at all, or who made them. But without desirable content, there’s nothing to distribute.”

She saves her best shot for those who promulgate a culture of entitlement: “Pirates and impecunious fans inform me that pirating my work is great publicity, for piracy isn’t nearly as dangerous to an artist as obscurity.”

It’s easy to mouth witty platitudes about the benefits of piracy when your pocket has never been picked – or you can easily afford a team of high-priced bulldogs to take perpetrators down. But for Colleen Doran and countless other copyright owners who have been ripped off, O’Reilly’s quip leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

Read The “real” victims of online piracy by Colleen Doran.

And for a complete archive of posts about piracy, visit our Pirate Central feature.

Richard Curtis

Reading Cory Doctorow’s serialized account in Publishers Weekly of his self-publishing venture is like watching a man walk across the United States.  We thrill to his courage and determination and root for him to prevail when he wanders down a wrong path or finds his way blocked. We know many people will extend a hand out of the goodness of their hearts.  When it’s over some will applaud his amazing achievement. Others will say he could have done it better, faster, and cheaper by driving an air-conditioned car from coast to coast.

Whichever way you look at it, Doctorow is – or says he is – weeks away from crossing the finish line with his book With a Little Help. We have been chronicling this pilgrim’s progress as he attempts to beat publishers at their own game, using every resource at his disposal to not just self-publish his book but make a profit as well.  So far he’s he’s done the latter: in advance of publication date he reckons “Total expenditures to date: $3,959. Total income: $10,000.”

When Doctorow announced his scheme we asked What Can We Learn from Cory Doctorow? Our answer then was: Everything. But now we’re not so certain.  Yes, we believe that With a Little Help will be published, and yes, we believe it will make money, and yes, it’s been an entertaining adventure.  What we’re far from sure of is whether it will yield any practical results, the kind that any publisher – major, minor, or one-person – can scale up. He has created his Spruce Goose with chewing gum and bailing wire and though we’re sure it will fly, it’s hard to understand what we can apply to our own processes that will make us better publishers.

For instance…

• Contemplating the problem of shipping his $275.00 hardcover edition, Doctorow decided to wrap the books in burlap coffee sacks, and luckily came across a London coffee roasting firm that had a surplus of them and gave them to him for nothing.
• To affix an SD (Secure Digital) card to each book cover, a reader friend created a “quick and dirty duplicator app” enabling him to load cards onto the books. The price of the friend’s services? Free.
• Doctorow obtained another service by barter. “While on the road, I put out a call on Twitter for someone to help me tweak my launch template—after all, the different audio/hardcover/paperback/e-book choices can be hard to present in a clear way. I offered a limited edition hardcover in exchange… A designer named Andrew Crocker came through with a brilliant design and even put together the HTML/CSS template, saving my Web master, Mike Little, some time.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and it would be hard to find a more inventive improviser than Cory Doctorow.  But what’s the takeaway?  Can Hachette’s David Young cadge burlap sacks from a coffee roaster?  Can Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy get someone to design a launch template in exchange for a free book?

There is a lesson that all publishers can learn, and that is to think outside the box and seek creative solutions to difficult problems. Doctorow’s brilliant use of social media and network of devoted fans and friends point the way to approaches to the publishing game that conventional houses are clueless about or are just beginning to explore.  But for publishers to apply on a wholesale basis Doctorow’s one-of-a-kind experience – that just isn’t going to happen. When we’re talking about total expenditures not of $3,959 but a hundred times $3,959, creativity invariably yields to expediency, conventionality and risk-adversity.

Read how Doctorow’s book stumbles toward publication day in With a Little Twitter Help.

Richard Curtis

Okay, copyright mavens, it’s time to play Steal From The Stars. For a chance to beat the other couple and go to the playoff round, all you have to do is correctly rule on the following case:

Michel Houellebecq is a bestselling French novelist whose just-published thriller, La Carte et le Territoire, is “a runaway favorite to win the most prestigious of French literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt, this autumn,” according to John Lichfield writing in The Independent. However, Houellebecq has been accused of lifting verbatim several lengthy passages from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the collaborative Internet encyclopedia, using anonymous contributors, that has virally grown into a proleterian alternative to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

But here’s the wrinkle: Houellebecq freely admits that he lifted the passages,which include a word for 200-word Wiki piece about the sex life of flies. Furthermore, he does not consider what he did to be plagiarism. And neither does his publisher, the distinguished house of Flammarion. The author says the accusations are “ridiculous” and his use of the material was “artistic”; his publisher says Houellebecq’s lifted texts are stylistic eccentricities but not theft.

To understand their rationales you can read Lichfield’s article here. But don’t peek yet – you haven’t answered the quiz, remember?

The question is, did Houellebecq plagiarize?  Can Wikipedia sue him?

The answer is no and no. What he did may have been immoral, unethical or reprehensible. Or for all we know it was indeed artistic.  But it was not illegal.

The content published in Wikipedia is not copyrighted in the usual sense – that is, it is not covered by the US Copyright statutes designed to protect intellectual property.  That is because contributors are required to leave their claim to copyright ownership at the door, as it were, when their text is accepted for inclusion in the Wiki “book”.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes your right to use texts published on its website:

The licenses Wikipedia uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details)*. Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses.

* In compliance with the terms of Wikipedia’s license I am hereby linking back to the source of the above quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

Contributions to Wikipedia do however come under the provisions of another body of copyright law known as the Berne Convention, but it is “formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses including something called the “Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike”. You can look it up on Wikipedia but for a clear-as-crystal exposition you can read this essay by Cory Doctorow.

Finally, here in its entirety is Wikipedia’s statement on copyright. We’re not sure Monsieur Houllebecq and his publisher read it before undertaking to use Wikipedia texts because they did not attribute their source.  So, technically they violated their Creative Commons license. Do you know a good avocat?

Richard Curtis

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Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company or school or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.

The only WP content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about is the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission.

Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms (see below and Wikipedia: Mirrors and forks for specific terms). Images may or may not permit reuse and modification; the conditions for reproduction of each image should be individually checked. The only exceptions are those cases in which editors have violated Wikipedia policy by uploading copyrighted material without authorization, or with copyright licensing terms which are incompatible with those Wikipedia authors have applied to the rest of Wikipedia content. While such material is present on the Wikipedia (before it is detected and removed), it will be a copyright violation to copy it. For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of the text or illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author.

If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, first read the Reusers’ rights and obligations section. You should then read the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

The following question is deceptively simple, and we urge you to take your time responding. How much time?  Three or four months. You’ll need that much.  A lot rides on your answer.

Here’s the question:

When you purchase a print book you should be able to get the e-book for…

• a) the full combined retail prices of print and e-book editions
• b) an additional 50% of the retail price of the print edition
• c) an additional 25% of the retail price of the print edition
• d) $1.00 more than the retail price of the print edition
• e) free

The subject of this little quiz is bundling, a common marketing tactic in which two or more products are packaged and sold at a single price. In this case the package is a printed book plus its e-book iteration.

As simple as it sounds, bundling is shaping up to be the battleground for clashing publishing philosophies, and the time will soon come when publishers will have to choose one of the above strategies and put it into effect. Misjudging consumer attitudes could prove to be a big mistake and possibly a ruinous one.

The essence of bundling is to offer customers a discount for selecting the combo instead of the individually priced components, so choice a) above is a non-starter.  But choices b), c) and d) reflect just how aggressive a discounter wants to be and the various thresholds at which consumer resistance is expected to melt.  A good argument can be made for each and as the bundling issue warms up you can expect to hear them all endlessly debated.

Yet even the cheapest package – a dollar or even less than a dollar over the cost of the print edition – may not suffice to capture the consumer’s fancy. Why? Because many people believe they’re entitled to get the e-book free with purchase of the print book. How large is public support for that position?  We need to take a poll to find out, but if anecdotal reports are any indication, they may be in the overwhelming majority and they are unquestionably the most vocal. You will certainly hear their outpouring of joy when one publisher steps up to offer a print and e-book combo for the price of the print edition alone.  Our own prediction? Free will become the standard, and even ten cents above free will be a competitive disadvantage.

Economic factors aside, consumer negativity toward double-charging is a contributor to piracy. Comments sent to us in response to postings about piracy strongly suggest that the public expects digital versions of books to be tossed in for nothing when a printed book is sold, and if it isn’t tossed in, many of those customers will feel no compunctions about downloading an unauthorized copy. They simply feel entitled to it. Libertarian spokespeople like Cory Doctorow have articulated this sense of entitlement, and though some feel that their arguments go too far, there is a solid core of realism in their position. We can condemn the immorality of consumer attitudes ’til the cows come home; and we can (quite reasonably) complain that if people were willing to wait for the paperback reprint they should be willing to wait for the e-book reprint. It makes no difference: the public’s sense of entitlement creates an environment susceptible to the allure of piracy.

With so many sound arguments in support of heavily discounted bundles, why have we seen so little of it in book marketing? The answer is that it is harder to assemble print/e-book packages than it looks.  Publishers that control both formats are in the best position to do it but the technology is not yet in place.  Customers purchasing the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts novel in a bookstore have no simple way to download the e-book in the same transaction. The publisher might offer a discount coupon but that requires a number of steps  and clicks that discourage a quick and easy procedure.

What is wanted is a one-click experience: “Click here to order the print and e-book.” Such a deal might best be offered by a publisher on its website.  However, the price of that bundle might undercut the prices offered by retailers or e-tailers for the individual components, and for publishers to compete with their own retailers is to cut their own throats.

Amazon is in a good position to offer print/e-book bundles but hasn’t done so yet, probably because it recognizes the complexity of the issues.  Book pricing is already fraught with so much angst that adding bundling to the debate will undoubtedly induce cardiac infarction among book people already near apoplectic with worry.

For the record, we at E-Reads strongly support the position that the e-book version should be included free of charge with the purchase of one of our print editions and are working to overcome the technical obstacles to implementing our conviction.

We invite your comments and look forward to seeing the debate over bundling heat up on the next stretch of road to the future of books.

Richard Curtis

To Cory Doctorow, capitalism is something that other people are conspiring to do to him, and DRM is the weapon they’re doing it with.

His antipathy to kapitalizm is understandable in view of his Trotskyite upbringing, but history has demonstrated that beneath every socialist’s flesh beats the heart of a capitalist. The latest installment of his Publishers Weekly series tracing the odyssey of his self-published book bolsters the impression that if he could turn the tables he’d be as exploitative as any publisher that ever kneed an author in the groin.

His article is called Doctorow’s First Law, suggesting that his quest for truth in publishing has at last reached bedrock. What is the First Law? “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

We suppose that Doctorow’s discovery will seem like a blinding epiphany to some of his acolytes, but for anyone who has been around the book industry track for more than a decade it comes as something of a Duh. Warfare between author and publisher, and between publisher and retailer, has existed since the earliest recorded words. Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, reported in the New York Times Book Review that “Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.” (See In Ancient Rome, Every Author Was on a Roll).

Doctorow is blessed to have come into the publishing world long after the bitter campaigns of postwar 20th century when screwing authors was a blood sport. Perhaps a better First Law would be that 21st century publishing is a collaborative effort among three capitalistic entities: authors, publishers and booksellers. Though there are occasional imbalances, none of them can so dominate that they drive the others out of business. Such is the complex ecology of our enterprise that if you destr0y one you destroy all.

Doctorow writes that he is “more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, publishers have terms too, and if you listen to them long enough you come to understand why they need to impose them.

All economic systems are about control of capital.  Cory Doctorow is no different – he’s just more entertaining and colorful about it.  Robin Hood was colorful too, but withal he was an entrepreneur who happened to redistribute capital via the business end of a longbow.

Read Doctorow’s First Law.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

When he announced his self-publication experiment in Publishers Weekly we asked “What Can Publishers Learn from Cory Doctorow?”

Our answer was – everything.

Since then we have tracked Doctorow’s lurching progress toward publication of his story collection With a Little Help, and at times it’s seemed that he could learn more from publishers than they could learn from him. In his monthly journal in PW he has reported his mistakes with searing candor including one doozy that any rookie editorial assistant could have foreseen: he failed to notice that book publishing is a complex venture that relies on other people.

In his latest column, however, he hits paydirt with a priceless epiphany, one that every publisher should write over his office lintel.  It’s that “The Internet makes it cheaper to coordinate complex tasks than ever before.”  How much cheaper?

“Too cheap to fail,” declares Doctorow, and like the bumbling magician who misleads us into thinking he doesn’t know what he’s doing, the author pulls a rabbit out of mid-air.  We understand at last why his experiment will succeed: because he’s not in the least afraid to fail.  Why should he be?  Not only has it cost him almost nothing, he has in fact already made money on it.

“I consider With a Little Help to be a Silicon Valley experiment. My upfront costs are minimal. I’ve spent $2256 getting into production, and taken in about $14,400 in payments. I’ll probably spend another $200-$300 before I ship, and that’s the last money I should have to spend without taking in money first: every time someone buys an on-demand book from Lulu, I’ll get paid without expending any capital. I’m printing and binding my short-run hardcovers in lots of 20, after being paid for them. The audiobook CDs are also produced on-demand by a third party, which means no capital costs for me, either. Setting up the donation page took a few hours fiddling with PayPal, and even if I never take in a penny in donations, I’m not out a penny either.”

But if you think Doctorow’s achievement is in getting his book published or in making money, the joke is on you. Abandon your establishment thinking, he urges, and look at how Silicon Valley IT engineers regard experimentation. Whereas publishing a traditional book is fraught with such expense that editors quake at the prospect of making a mistake, book publication the Silicon Valley way is dirt cheap.

“Unlike New York publishing,” Doctorow reminds us, “Silicon Valley’s products remain experimental long after they reach the marketplace. Google can change its search layout in seconds flat, try it out on a million searchers, crunch the data, revise the experiment and do it again, a hundred times a day if they wish. And bad ideas can be just as interesting as good ideas, because when it doesn’t cost anything to find out how bad an idea is, you can afford to be pleasantly and enormously surprised when it turns out that, say, people really do want to play Pac-Man on their search-results page.”

Read New York Meet Silicon Valley and if you don’t get it, read it again.  Eventually you will,and you’ll be a better publisher for it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.