Information Squid

There are advantages to being famous. Not many bands can challenge the whole worldview of the music industry with one act. Radiohead is releasing their new album in a rather unusual way: as a digital download for which fans can choose their own price. They’ll certainly undercut piracy. They’ve gotten plenty of press attention. But they won’t be succeeding because they’re famous. This will work because the internet is still psychologically a gift economy. If we find your contribution valuable, we want to give in return.

Jonathan Coulton can make $3000-5000 a month with a website that explains

There are lots of ways to get music from me, whether you’re a cyborg from the future with an iPod in your skull, or a little old granny in Idaho with nothing but an antique “CD Player.” Lots of it is freely available depending on how technical you are - you can get all of it for free if you really try. But please remember I do make a living this way, so you like what you hear I’d certainly appreciate you throwing a little payment or donation my way. If you can’t afford it, for goodness sake please send copies of everything to all of your friends.

John Scalzi wrote a novel to prove he could and then decided to post it online. The Agent to the Stars introduction says: “People could read it, and if they liked it, they could send me a dollar, or whatever sum they liked (even if that sum was zero). If they didn’t like it, well, clearly, they wouldn’t have to send me anything.” He made about $4000 over six years, and today the introduction says, “I’m no longer soliciting a dollar if you enjoy the novel; the story has long since proved its worth in that respect.”

So you don’t have to be famous to survive on voluntary contributions. You just have to be a little bit famous. You have to have fans who not only will give you money for your creations but also will spread the word. The free sample that proves someone should buy is the entire work. Not so different from a book sitting out on a bookstore shelf.

Interestingly, according to Charlie Stross, in the old shareware scene they expected about a 4% registration rate out of the people who downloaded software. According to his sales increase after Accelerando was posted online, about 3-4% of the people who downloaded it then went and bought a copy (Time Traveller Show, 4/22/07: Stross, Scalzi and Buckell on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day). In this case the audience demographics are probably similar (others might vary considerably); opportunities change, people’s willingness to give back doesn’t.

ETA: Wired’s take on Jonathan Coulson and giving music away, 10/12/2007

ETA part 2: NYTimes on how creating and releasing the album affected the band, 12/9/2007

ETA part 3: Wired interview with David Byrne and Thom Yorke, 12/18/2007

Ebooks seem to be hot again, at least for slightly warm values of hot. I’ve seen more articles mentioning them in the past month than I had for quite a while before that. Most prominently, both the Washington Post and New York Times had survey-of-the-industry articles, the Post’s pegged to a review of the Sony Reader.

The more interesting development was that the Times article and a BloggingStocks post bring up the idea of iPhone as ebook reader. One of the difficulties for the industry has been that current devices and before them the Rocket eBook cost real money, $300 and $500 respectively. Most people don’t want a separate, expensive device just for reading on pixels. iPhones (or future iPods with a similar screen) could make ebook readers widely available - at which point more people would start using them.

Then the problem becomes the cost of the books. Charles Stross, science fiction writer, pointed out in March that “the economics of the commercial ebook market are sick”. Ebooks are sometimes being sold for almost the cost of hardcovers, which is crazy. Audio editions I can understand being worth that much, since they have added costs in the form of voice actors and sound editing, and they still have media and packaging costs. Ebooks? The simplest way to produce an ebook is to distribute the Word document you’re working from. You’ll still have costs for editing, promotion, distribution channel, etc., but none for paper and printing. How can that require charging as much as for a hardback?

I like physical books because I can see them and be reminded to reread, which (even with something like Apple’s CoverFlow for book covers) is unlikely to happen with ebooks. I like physical books because I can decorate my apartment with them. I like physical books because I can easily loan them to friends - and given the fog of DRM around most ebooks (there are exceptions like Baen), that’s not going to be possible any time soon. Ebooks aren’t worth as much to me as dead-tree editions, and I’m not sure what price would be right.

Some publishers are starting to think about the price problem. Baen’s ebooks cost a little less than paperbacks. Toby Buckell notes that Stross’s publisher was persuaded by his arguments to price his books’ electronic editions at three pounds. And of course the romance e-publishers have consistently kept their prices comparable to series romances, less than single title paperbacks. But most traditionally published books aren’t available as ebooks for anything like an appropriate price. Hopefully that will change soon.

Note: this is about ebooks-as-purchased-content rather than ebooks-as-freely-distributed-marketing. The latter strategy is going strong, with HarperCollins expanding its sample pages program to an iPhone-compatible website, authors posting first chapters on websites, and ebook authors expanding their work for traditional publishing deals.