Why You Should Be Cheering for the Ad-Subsidized Kindle

It's so easy to predict the reaction of the literary web to some stories. Combine the specter of Amazon with inserting advertising into the reading space, and you have yourself a sure-fire whipping boy. Which is too bad, because the new ad-subsidized Kindle is a really, really good idea.

For some, the idea of advertising in literature is anathema; it contaminates the sacred space of art-writing. The publishing business, literary historians, and writers themselves have long gone to great lengths to keep the business of books outside the realm of literary discourse. It is devilishly difficult to know much, if anything, about the economics of literature: how much writers are paid, how many copies a particular book sells, and the other ledger items of publishing seem to be actively obscured. This has, in turn, created the illusion that money and literature are somehow separate.

The division of "writing" from the literary-publishing economy has been a real obstacle for the ongoing viability of the publishing business. Thinking that literature exists beyond the pale of economics allows and excuses a variety of practices and beliefs that are detrimental to the maintenance of a healthy, diverse literary economy. For example, in what other business can you borrow, subsidized by state and local government, the products of an entire industry? That literature exists in an imaginary space outside of financial pressures makes it even more subject to economic forces.

So that's one reason to be interested in the new ad-subsidized Kindle. When you now flip on your Kindle to read the new David Mitchell, you see a Buick ad first; it will be difficult to maintain an artificial separation of the business of writing with the texts themselves. Some argue that introducing advertising into literature will cheapen it. I would argue just the opposite; commercializing the literary space will reinforce the idea that that space has financial value, just as the annual ritual of tracking how much a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl costs reaffirms the value of the Super Bowl.

I think advertising in e-readers is exciting for another reason; it has the potential to open up channels of discovery. Book advertising is notoriously difficult, to the point that most people don't see any book advertising in their daily life. That "word-of-mouth" is the most powerful force in the industry speaks to the ineffectiveness of literary publicity. That said, the kind of reader-centric, targeted opportunity that integrated literary advertising presents is unprecedented.

Say I am the publisher (or, increasingly, author) of a novel about race relations in the South. Buying and crafting a specific ad that would appear to the tens of thousands of people reading Kate Stockett's The Help on their e-reader would seem outrageously appealing. From a reader's point of view, this might even be helpful; finding titles like a book you are currently enjoying is usually a task you have to take to your local bookseller, as long as they know what they are talking about. For most readers, this is a friction point that will not be surmounted. In this new scenario, a sample of the advertised, related work is just a couple of clicks away. (And if you don't think this can work, remember that Google's empire is built on accessible, contextual advertising.)

It is somewhat unfortunate that this effort is starting with Amazon, since most interested in publishing look upon them warily. I don't particularly care if this new Kindle sells, but I do think that it is in the best interest of publishing if something like it succeeds.
_______________________________

Through April 15, I am donating all referral fees generated through The Reading Ape to an effort to buy Rock City Books up in Maine. So if you have a little Powell's, Indie Bound, or Amazon shopping to do, click through the below links and a percentage of your purchase will go towards the effort.

VIDA and Amazon: Charting Gender Bias in Reading and Reviewing

VIDA's study of gender bias in major review publications has put in numbers to what many of us have long felt: women writers do not get a proportional amount of attention from the mainstream press.

The study is well worth a look for all interested in contemporary literary culture, and I would also recommend reading Bookslut's on-going follow-up discussion about the matter. Frankly, I'm not surprised at VIDA's findings, but I am indeed surprised that anyone would be surprised about the findings. There's quite a bit more to be said about these matters, and I'm still mulling it over myself.

I will say, though, that VIDA's lede caught my attention: "Numbers don't lie. What counts is the bottom line." First, numbers may not "lie," but that's not the same thing as telling the truth. There are a host of reasons that these numbers might be misleading (though I don't think they are).

Second, and more interesting to me, is the idea of a literary "bottom line." VIDA suggests that review ratio is the ultimate measure of cultural attention, but is that the most telling barometer? I'm not sure that it is. Measuring the activity of the gatekeepers is interesting, but isn't what people are reading just as important, if not more so?

One could measure this in several ways (library lending, NY Times Bestseller Lists, Indie Bound Lists), but since Amazon will eventually do most of the bookselling in this country, I thought it would be a good place to start. So I looked at the 100 Bestselling Books, both overall and for Literature and Fiction, and here's what I found.

Of the Top 100 selling books, 47 were written by men, 39 by women (14 multiple-author books had an author of each gender or an institutional author).  

Of the Top 100 selling literature and fiction books, 54 were written by women and 46 by men. 

This suggests to me that what we see in the VIDA statistics is not overt gender bias on the part of readers and publishers, but by the literary-critical establishment, of which The New York Times, The Atlantic, et al are the most visible members. I don't have a totalizing explanation for why this might be, but I do have an idea for some part of it: the way we think about literature and literary history.

Literary criticism tends to be interested in influence and connection: we measure the greatness of today's work through what past great works it seems to be descended from. And the riverheads of literary history are overwhelmingly male. (Just as one example, The Modern Library's list of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century includes only six works by women. Time's list has 16. If we were to form lists for earlier centuries, this number would certainly decline). It stands to reason, then, that male writers are more likely to seem descended from the great (male) writers of the past.

What I am suggesting is that there is a bifurcation in literary "attention" between the male-centric world of capital-l Literature, and the habits and tastes of today's readers when it comes to gender (and probably a litany of other things). Which of these "bottom-lines" is more indicative and of what? I don't have an answer, but I suspect each individual's answer to that question say something about their position in the reading world.

Are Book Blogs the Next Big Threat to Independent Bookstores?

First it was Barnes and Noble. Then Amazon. Then Target and Wal-mart and Oprah's Book Club Then the Kindle and iPad. So what's the next major threat to independent bookstores? Here's a hint: you're reading one right now.

I've been thinking about the relationship of bookstores and book blogs for a few months now, ever since I openly thought about how best to spend $100 on books. The long and short of it was this: you can get more for your money through Amazon, but patronizing a local bookstore has significant, if difficult to quantify, benefits as well. Depending on whom you ask, these benefits range from supporting the local economy to supporting new and emerging writers.

Last year Praveen Madan and Christin Evans, writing for The Huffington Post, outlined the three qualities that separate independent bookstores from their big chain brothers and online retailers: provide a cultural experience, provide an outlet for new and lesser-known writers, and enable positive social change in their local communities.  Their article is definitely worth a read, but the thing that struck me about the functions they described was how much book blogs do these things as well. Let's have a look:

1. Provide a Cultural Experience

 Madan and Evans: Like a wine sommelier, good independent booksellers are valued by readers for their thoughtfully curated selection of books and personalized service.  Good independent bookstores facilitate discovery of new books and provide a life-long means of education and learning for their customers.

To be blunt, book blogs are amazing at this. Not only will your typical book blog be open and accessible to readers, but book blogs are also extremely well-networked. I know of a book blog for every kind of book I can think of and that book blog will be connected to many other book blogs in the same niche. Recently, I was perusing the new fiction wall at my local bookstore and realized I had already heard of all of the books there--and noticed the absence of some others.


2. They Provide a Nurturing Environment for Lesser Known and Emerging Writers

Madan and Evans:  Independent booksellers are valued by authors (and their publishers) for their skill at promoting new books and emerging writers.

I'm not sure there is anything most book bloggers like to do than tell the world about an unknown gem. From what I can tell, it's not clear whether the book blogging community can move the needle on a particular author or title, but if my buying habits are any indication of what's possible, then book blogs have the potential to do everything an independent bookstore can do to promote a book. And, given the book blogging world's use of social media, there's a upside of distributed promotion that has yet to mature.

3. They Enable Positive Social Change in Local Communities

Madan and Evans: Another function independent bookstores have historically served has less to do with books, and more to do with thought leadership and good citizenship. Many independent booksellers have been the catalysts of enabling positive social changes in their communities.

I'll have to admit that positive social change is not something I readily associate with bookstores, but it seems that some do. From what I can tell, activism in the book blogging world is present, but in it's nascent stages. Recent conversations around banned books, gender bias in reviewing, and the funding of public libraries shows that there is room and interest in book blogging for issue-oriented activity, but this seems a tertiary concern at the moment. The physical location of independent bookstores is something that would be difficult for a blogger or group of bloggers to replicate in a local community, but the potential for regional, national, and possibly international activity is largely untapped.  
_______________


I'm not sure if this congruence in the functions of bookstores and book blogs is good or bad...or even for whom it might be good or bad. There's more to be said about how they are different, of course, but it does seem that, at their core, good book blogs and good bookstores are in much the same business. 
________________________________________________________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

How should I spend my next $100 book dollars?

I do most of my book buying on Amazon. There. I said it. I try to throw some business at my excellent local bookstore, BookCourt, but I probably only buy one out of every ten books there.

The reasons for this are as familiar as they are compelling: cost, convenience, and selection. Amazon has everything I want at the best price, and my order gets to me in two days. It is simply impossibly inexpensive and easy. And therein lies the problem.

Because I also know that Amazon doesn’t play nice. To say they lean on publishers for lower prices is a bit like saying Michael Corleone “played hardball” with the five families. These concessions trickle down to lower the pay of editors, agents, and writers (I would like to know more about this, so if anyone knows of an article or essay that gives some insight, I’d LOVE to see it).

For Amazon, books are a commodity and a piece to their business puzzle. They are not romantic objects. They are not vessels for knowledge and beauty. They are consumer goods, packaged, priced, and bought as such. And part of me is alright with that (more on this in a minute). But there’s part of me that isn’t.

I’ve rationalized my Amazon buying to this point like this: if I buy from Amazon, I can buy more books with the same amount of money. So while each individual purchase doesn’t provide that author and house with the same return on a full-retail sale, there are more people getting something, albeit in smaller amounts.
Now, however, I’ve read and heard to many Amazon stories to keep my head in the sand, and I need to at least reconsider how I deploy my literary dollars. So I’ve done a little comparison shopping and crunched some numbers—now I ask you, dear readers, to help me think this through.

How should I spend my next $100 book dollars? 

First I need data and a control group. I decided on $100 since it makes on the spot comparison easier and can be multiplied out to figure out what my purchasing choices mean over longer periods of time, say, a year. I then picked a selection of titles I very well may buy over the next month or so (I don’t keep a TBR pile. At most, I have two books waiting to be read at any given time. This, from what I can tell, makes me a little unusual in the book blogging world, but I enjoy picking out what to read next too much to subject myself to starting down a stack of waiting titles). I may not read a few of these, but they are all books I might read, so they’ll do for our purposes.

Here are the titles:

• Kings of the Earth by Jon Clinch
• American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
• The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• American Rust by Philipp Meyer
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody
• Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey

Four of them are hardbacks (Kings of the Earth, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Four Fingers of Death, and Perfect Reader), and all but one are by living authors (Fitzgerald, of course, being the one exception. As he often is).

I then priced them out by retailer: Amazon, Barnes and Noble online, my local BookCourt, New York indie giant The Strand, and Powell’s.

Here are the results:

Full Cover Price: $145.84

                                     Amazon: $99.35

Barnes and Noble: $102
BookCourt: $130.29
The Strand: $126.23
Powell’s: $130.26

(If you’re interested in the full breakdown, here’s my spreadsheet)



As you can see, the divide is as predictable as it is impressive. The big boys are about 30% cheaper than the upstarts (Does anyone know the relative evil of B&N compared to Amazon? Amazon is today’s whipping boy, but there was a time when all the heat was headed toward the brick and mortar chains).

At first glance, thirty bucks doesn’t seem like that much to pay for goodness, truth, and beauty (ahem), but I could use that thirty bucks to buy about three new paperbacks from Amazon. That’s another sale for three more authors, for three more publishers. And if I apply the difference to my full year of book-buying, which includes not only my personal reading, but also my academic purchases and gift-giving, buying only from independent bookstores will probably cost me about around $1000 over twelve months.

(And I could go a step further. I looked at the lowest cost of buying these seven titles, including used, remaindered, or review copies. The total there: $82.03, of which only $27.09 would ever find its way back to authors or publishers. By this measure, I am already paying about 15% more than I, as a rationale consumer, should. So there.)

So now we come down to it…should I allocate my dollars differently? I cannot really, from a strictly budgetary perspective, just fork over $1000 extra dollars a year. But how much am I hurting this industry I love by buying mainly out of my self-interest? I really don’t know.

If I go to a hybrid model, in which I moderate the largest differences in price between my local and Amazon, I can buy the seven for 112.97 with about half that going to my local bookstore. Over the course of a year, this would run me an extra $400 or so. This is better, but still kind of hard to swallow*.



What exactly is a hand-wringing book buyer to do?

(Regular readers will notice that I've stopped linking to book pages on Amazon; this has all caused me to rethink my affiliate relationship with Amazon. If anyone out there has any ideas for me on this front, I'm all ears.)

*I guess it could be worse. I could check them out from the library.  

The Trouble with "The Trouble with Amazon"

Colin Robinson, writing for The Nation, offers a consideration of Amazon’s massive influence in the publishing world. It’s a complicated picture to be sure, but Robison gives a lucid if somewhat incomplete (more on this in a minute) snapshot of how Amazon’s dominance, business practices, and worldview are shaping the books being written, sold, and read.

There’s a lot here, and, using our earlier consideration of The New Yorker’s e-publishing state-of-the-union coverage as a model, we’d like to think about several of the specific points in detail.
_________________________________


1.    Nervous more than scared

[R]eaders and writers may ultimately not be best served by Amazon's race to become the biggest, cheapest and most convenient bookseller around.

Takeaway: This is as close to an argument as Robinson offers, and it seems to capture the tone and equivocation of much concern about Amazon. One thing to note here: writerly and readerly interests are aligned here, which we’re not so sure is either helpful or accurate.



2.    Distasteful insider baseball, Amazon-style

In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville's distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of "co-op," money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as "kickback."

Takeaway: So this clearly isn’t at all cool. That said, we’re not sure how much to care about this. The internecine warfare among publishers and retailers is nothing new really, though Amazon has definitely taken a page out of Wal-Mart’s playbook. Are these kinds of stories earth-shaking or just really irritating? Who is really being squeezed and why does that matter to the average book-buyer? Hard to know.



3.    What should the price of books be?

…an industry worried that low prices of electronic versions would undermine profits from printed books and generally lower the perceived value of the product.

Takeaway: The people who seem to care about publishing profits probably don’t care about the profits of Pfizer or BP or Coca-Cola. Why should a book-buyer care about “undermining” (read: lowering) the profits publishers make? This isn’t a rhetorical question, but a critical one. Also, “perceived value” of the product feels to us like just so much hand-wringing.



4.    It is a zero-sum game.

Amazon gave in with a statement revealing contempt toward the very idea of a publisher. "We will have to capitulate," it said, "because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles."

Takeaway: Amazon and publishers are fighting over who gets the profits from publishing. This is the main story, though perhaps not the most important one from The Ape’s point of view. What we care about is that the kinds of books we want to read are still available, no matter who is publishing or profiting from them. We’d like, if possible, for the people most responsible for writing and championing great books to enjoy some reward for their efforts. But, if we are honest, this isn’t as important to what we care about as the availability of quality books, especially literature. Professional writers are, in a historical perspective, a relative recent phenomenon, and we’re not sure that it’s the case that engrossing, meaningful literature will vanish if author’s don’t get six-figure advances or can give up their day jobs.



5.    Ah yes, the fetid waft of parentalism.

…a number of studies have shown that when people are offered a narrower range of options, their selections are likely to be more diverse than if they are presented with a number of choices so vast as to be overwhelming. In this situation people often respond by retreating into the security of what they already know.

Takeaway: Let’s say, for a moment at least, that this is true. Tough. That’s how ideas work. The suggestion that we should therefore somehow limit choices for readers’ own good seems both cynical and short-sighted. Who is to say that we should trust the people doing the limiting? We think it’s worth the extra effort of consciously selecting the ideas we consume if it means the full range of ideas are open to us. If some people retreat into intellectual solipsism, so be it. That’s the price of doing business in a free society.



6.    Apparently, book buying is magic.

The loss of serendipity that comes with not knowing exactly what one is looking for is lamented by ex-Amazon editor James Marcus: "Personalization strikes me as a mixed blessing. While it gives people what they want—or what they think they want—it also engineers spontaneity out of the picture. The happy accident, the freakish discovery, ceases to exist.”

Takeaway: This strikes us a literary romanticism. “Happy accident?” Really? This is what the traditional publishing industry is protecting? No wonder Amazon is eating their lunch. Media, publicity, and word of mouth are also given no quarter in this formulation, though these things, in our experience at least, are hugely important in the choice equation.



7.    You can buy more books if you buy from Amazon.

In addition to regularly offering bestsellers at more than 50 percent off, Amazon offers a wide range of titles for around a third off the recommended price.

Takeaway:  There’s no way to make this go down any easier; your book-buying budget goes farther at Amazon. If you save 50% off the cover price at Amazon, you can buy twice as many books with the same cost. What’s debatable is if the cost-saving Amazon provides is worth the hidden “prices” to the end-buyer.



8. Your concern would be more compelling if it didn’t align directly with your interests.

Responding to the effects of price wars last fall the American Booksellers Association warned, "If left unchecked...predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public."

We do not think that the availability of ideas is what is freaking the ABA out. We think this is what they think will scare book-buyers, who tend to be more liberal and educated than the general public, into buying books in ways that benefit the members of the ABA. Try again, please.



9. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

…a healthy publishing industry would ensure that skilled authors are recompensed fairly for their work, that selection by trusted and well-resourced editors reduces endless variety to meaningful choice and that ideas and artistry are as important as algorithms and price points in deciding what is sold.

Takeaway: When have ideas and artistry been the primary determinant of what is sold? How many book-buyers think about the trustworthiness and resources of editors? The case seems to be that Amazon is threatening the viability of things that don’t exist. Author compensation does seem to us to bear directly on the production of good writing, but little evidence is presented in this article one way or the other on the matter. (If anyone out there could point us to some information along those lines, we’d love to see it)

___________________

 We’re not arguing here that Amazon isn’t a problem; we’re arguing that we’re not yet sure how, as a reader interested primarily in the reading itself, how to deploy the finite book-buying resources we have. Would it really be better to buy half as many books from independents and fill out the rest of our library with used books, which don’t contribute at all to the health of the publishing industry? This is the question we’re interested in—how to make buying choices that balance our individual needs with the literary world as a whole.


There's quite a bit more of interest in Robinson's piece, so we encourage you to check it out for yourself. Here again, is the link.

The New Yorker's State of the e-Publishing World

In a recent New Yorker article, Ken Auletta gives a terrific overview of the recent and contentious e-book wars between publishers, Amazon, Apple and Google. Neither triumphalism or hand-wringing, Auletta’s recap trades in cold, hard facts. Rather than dispatch another missive about the whole business, the Ape would like to take a look at some of the realities Auletta chronicles and see what is worth caring about…and what isn’t.

1. The acorn that will be an oak:

E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold.

Takeaway: it’s time to stop worrying about whether e-books are going to supplement, dominate or eliminate print books; this is a tide that won’t be turned.

2. There’s a reason they put the Snickers by the register

Apple, through its iTunes and Apple stores, had access to a hundred and twenty-five million credit cards, which would make it easy for consumers to buy books on impulse. 

and

…superstores like Target and Wal-Mart, along with clubs like Costco, account for forty-five per cent [of book sales], though they typically carry far fewer titles.

Takeaway: The fact that so many books are sold at super-stores leads me to believe that people will buy books if they are in front of them.  Getting books in front of consumers, which the iPad and the Kindle do in a big way, would seem to be kind of the point of this all, no? Which leads us to…

3. The medium matters

Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. “On average,” he says, Kindle users “buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago.”

Takeaway: More book-reading options means more book reading. It may not mean more money for publishers and authors (more on this in a minute), but if we care about overall reading rates, then we should embrace digital reading.

4. There may be room for everybody, just less room for some.

“I think consumers, like publishers, are living in parallel universes,” Burnham [an executive at HarperCollins} says. “Consumers are educated to have a multiplicity of choices. They still like to go to a bookstore, while they also want everything available online.”

Takeaway: While people want cheaper goods, bookstores still provide a desired service. How many bookstores can be supported by the browser-buyers is unknown, but brick and mortars are going to survive. Publishers on the other hand…

5. Welcome to, you know, capitalism guys

Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name. 

Takeaway: So I might know more about the seven people who read this blog through the tools Google provides than the big six publishers know about their customers. You know what’s a worse sign? That I’m not all that surprised. I think one might reasonably conclude that the kick in the ass that Amazon is giving publishers might just create a leaner, more nimble, and in the end more sustainable book industry. Still, I think we don’t want Amazon doing it all because…

6. You get what you pay for

Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books. The industry produces more than a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of which will not earn back the money that their authors have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty advances are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.

Takeaway: Publishers are risk-aggregators. They do the work of screening, supporting, and distributing the work of writers. Would Amazon as publisher-distributor do what FSG does? I highly doubt it. Wihtout this sort of gate-keeping, the result could be… 

      

7. Make ready for the hordes

Budget-conscious publishers have also reduced the editing and marketing and other services they provide to authors, which has left a vacuum for others to fill. Author Solutions, a self-publishing company in Bloomington, Indiana, has ninety thousand client-authors.

Takeaway: Here’s what you don’t want—a sea of tens of thousands of books in a huge pile. How in the world will you decide what to read? How will reviewers? It’s time to acknowledge that publishers protect us from the paralysis of choice. I’m sure some books get missed, but surely more would get missed if no one was minding the store.

8. Google to the rescue, again/finally

Google Editions will let publishers set the price of their books, he said, and will accept the agency model. Having already digitized twelve million books, including out-of-print titles, Google will have a far greater selection than Amazon or Apple. It will also make e-books available for bookstores to sell, giving “the vast majority” of revenues to the store, Clancy [director of Google Books] said. He suggested that in trying to dominate the market Amazon and Apple were taking the wrong approach to business online. “It’s much more of an open ecosystem, where you find a way for bricks-and-mortar stores to participate in the future digital world of books,” he said.

Takeaway: The digital book readers might be the eight track tapes of today’s publishing revolution. The long arc here is toward platform neutrality, universal availability, and flexible pricing. Sound like the M.O. of any super-humongous-giant tech company you know?

There are more choice nuggets in the article; the Ape suggests a full read for anyone interested in these matters.