Making eBooks Work, Part 1: Baen29 April 2002 Despite the gloom and doom over ebooks in the popular media, some epublishers are doing brisk business selling ebooks. What's the secret of their success?
Ebooks are big news these days mostly for what they aren't. They aren't popular. They aren't cost effective. They aren't the wave of the future for the reading public, who, if you believe everything you read, will always prefer reading on tree pulp. Ebooks, basically, don't work. Or so you've been led to believe. In fact, there are a few companies out there who are doing thriving business with this "dead end" medium. Ebooks are alive and well, if you know the secret. What's the secret? Let's look at those selling ebooks and see. First up is Baen Books, a paper publisher first and foremost and one of the few independents left after the large-scale buy out of the giant media conglomerates. Jim Baen has a particular taste in what he publishes, almost exclusively fantasy and military science fiction. Baen carries some of science fiction's heavy hitters, including David Drake, Lois Bujold and David Weber. Baen is also a pioneer, of sorts. Instead of selling ebooks individually, Baen offers what they call "webscriptions." For $10, you can download all the books that Baen publishes for a particular month. They average sixty books a year, so that comes out to $2 a book if you read them all. Baen makes it even more interesting by offering the books in installments online before hardcover publication. If you really want to read the latest Honor Harrington book as soon as possible, you can get the first 25% two months before the hardcover release, the second 25% one month before, and read the whole thing as an ebook when the hardcover hits the shelves. None of Baen's ebooks are locked with DRM. All are offered in Rocket, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket (readable on Palms and Pocket PCs), RTF and HTML formats. Aside from the compiled formats -- Rocket and Microsoft Reader -- none of the ebooks use any DRM at all. Despite this openness, surely suicidal if you believe what the New York publishers have to say about piracy, Baen books rarely appear on pirate sites. The sentiment often expressed to explain this is that Baen is one of the few "white hats" and they deserve to be paid for trusting their customers. As further enticement, Baen has established what they call their Free Library. This section of their website offers books absolutely free for anyone who wants them, in the same formats as the paid-for books. These are complete works by big name authors, usually the first book or two of a series. For example, the first two books of David Weber's Honor Harrington series are there, and the rest are available for sale via Webscriptions. This offering the first taste for free seems to work well, as many people attest to buying Baen ebooks after getting hooked on a series via the Free Library. According to Eric Flint, a popular Baen author and the keeper of Baen's Free Library, "that's exactly what ebooks are (regardless of origin or distribution control): library books. Free samples for trying out authors we might otherwise never read; free use for people who can't afford to buy books in ANY form. Either way, future sales for any author who gains new readers. Take away the library, and it DISCOURAGES reading now and in the future." In fact, Baen's position is that the industry's conventional wisdom is wrong. Authors are not hurt if freely available ebook editions, sans encryption, are floating around. Flint has yet to see any evidence of the "lost sales" other epublishers assume occur if they don't keep a tight lid on distribution. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. Sales of Flint's first novel, rather than declining over time as is the norm, doubled after he made the ebook version available for free to anyone that wanted it. This runs counter to everything the rest of the industry has assumed about ebooks, mostly because most of the industry assumes that people are dishonest and more control is better. In Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas, Lessig tells a story of a young executive showing videotape technology to Disney for the first time. Knowing that Disney, like most film companies, feared video at the time, the tapes were equipped with a locking mechanism that would prevent the tape from being rewound and played again until it had been returned to the video store. The Disney executives were aghast. "We'd never let our movies be distributed on something like that!" they said. Why? Too restrictive? No. The Disney executives thought the rewind lock was a good start, but they had no way of assuring that the tape would be viewed by only one person, or that they'd receive rental revenue from everyone that watched it. Baen has a different approach. Rather than insist on total control of the use of their "intellectual property", they assume that if ebooks are essentially library books, then an author's sales will increase due to library exposure. Readers will have the chance to "try out" an author with whom they're unfamiliar without plopping down $7-$28 every time they do. If they like what they read, they'll be more likely to buy that author's paperbacks and hardcovers later. I know this theory panned out for me. Although David Weber's Honor Harrington series had been recommended to me by a lot of my friends, I didn't bother to buy any paperbacks until after I'd "sampled" the first book in the Baen Free Library. Eric Flint offers his own numbers to back up his claim. For more information, check out Flint's essay proving his point here. Are Baen's unencrypted, reasonably-priced Webscriptions and the steadily-growing Free Library just a marketing ploy to sell more paper books or a viable model for selling ebooks that the rest of the industry should adopt? I think it's a little of both. Although I rarely read paper books anymore -- those I do buy are usually for "archival" purposes -- I don't see paper books going away anytime soon. Even "ebook-only" publishers would be well-served to offer both ebooks and Print-On-Demand trade paperbacks. Using Baen's model of giving away (or selling inexpensively) ebooks editions to bolster print sales could be a great way to sell more books and gain more exposure. Flint points out that the biggest threat to most authors today isn't piracy, but obscurity. The more people that read you now, the more people to buy your books later. Jeff Kirvin
|