Last call for publishers!
Flight to prosperous future is leaving in 15 months.
Please board immediately.
Lets discuss this:
More Books Published This Week Than In 1950 – eBookNewser.
“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950″
“Kindle book sales have passed print”
“books that are shared among readers have higher sales”
Now, publishers and book retailers, lets first split you to half: To the blue side go the ones who had in 2011 more than 25% of ebook sales, in units sold, on your area than Amazon sold ebooks there. To the red side: the rest.
The blue side: You can continue as is. You need to price aggressively, more aggressively than Amazon, to grow the market share, but you’re pretty fine.
The red side: You are about to die. You need to start offering significantly better deals than Amazon, comparable or better ease of getting samples, sharing with friends and buying, and do it in next 12 months.
The “better deal” means you need to offer more value to money. Amazon offers selection of one million titles and sells them around $9.90 per book, and the cheapest reader device is around $100 without ads. The books come with annoying DRM, but reader software is available for PC, smartphones, tablets and the already mentioned dedicated reader.
Now, in order to make your deal better, you need to have an edge and no deal-breakers. DRM that restricts your books to one obscure line of ereaders is a deal-breaker. So, offer DRM-less epub-format books at $9.90 and we have a deal already. If you insist on DRM, unless you have wider selection of books than Amazon, a format that is supported by at least two different manufacturers on their sub-$150 models is a must, and even then you need to push price lower than Amazon to get sales.
So, you’ll be selling DRM-free books. Like the ones on dead wood – books that are _mine_ after I have bought them, not just leasing them. Now you can ask the $9.90 that Amazon asks and still have an edge.
Then the last part: Obscure languages. One way to have an edge is to offer your books on my local language. I could pay $15 for ebook if it was in Finnish, DRM-free and a book I am already trying to get.
I’m eagerly waiting for your offer,
-Jari Juslin
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I am going to send this as email to couple of Finnish publishers. Because I really would like to read books in Finnish, but I am done with buying books on pulp bricks.
UPDATE:
Teen tästä suomenkielisen käännöksen illalla 26.1. Tarkoitus on lähettää tämä sähköpostina kustantajille perjantaina 28.1. Jos haluat nimesi mukaan, lähetä osoitteeseen zds@iki.fi sähköposti, jossa otsikkona on “Avoin kirje kustantajille” ja viestin rungossa nimesi ja kotipaikkakuntasi.
Tero Y
January 26th, 2012
I’m fully behind the idea. But it could be argued by your logic that ‘in Finnish’ already qualifies for the ‘better deal’, and therefore DRM-free is not needed. (Although DRM is a deal-breaker for me, I think Amazon has effectively proven it isn’t for the masses.)
zds
January 26th, 2012
I can be argued, yes. However, Amazon was able to pull it of because they were the first to offer reasonably priced books and readers, and their selection is huge.
Theoretically, if we think of people who read only/mainly books published/sold by Finnish companies they could pull it of, if they could offer *all* books sold on Finnish market as ebooks at reasonable price (less than 15¤), cheap readers, good usability and working ecosystem, and offer it within next year.
However, lacking any of those elements, you need to offer something else to sweeten the deal. Active young Finnish readers already read in English a lot, and order their books aboard. You need to make a solid deal, to attract them back to you.
And here dropping DRM helps: It not just means you can sell your books even without selling a device or having huge selection, and it gives customer more value for the money.