HarperCollins Continues To Focus On Digitizing Books; But Still Having Trouble Letting Go Of Control
from the experimenting-away dept
About a year ago, we were a bit surprised to see book publisher HarperCollins, who is among the publishers fighting Google's book scanning project, decide that they were going to start a multi-million dollar project to scan their own books. It seemed a little odd considering that Google was basically willing to do the scanning for them for free. At the very least, it could have made sense to work out a deal with Google, where HarperCollins stopped trying to stop the Google scanning project in exchange for Google giving HarperCollins a digital library of their own content to do other stuff with. Since then, HarperCollins has been scanning away, and even running some experiments with ad-supported books. Today, the company announced that it's teaming up with digital publishing company LibreDigital to offer more features and services around the digital content. It's good that they're digging deeper into the possibilities of digital content, but it still seems like they're focusing on the wrong thing. Rather than looking at the new opportunities this allows for publishers, they focus on the "comprehensive control" this will allow. The lesson that should have been learned by this point is that the value in digitizing isn't in the control, but in allowing more things to be done with the content to make it more valuable. There's nothing wrong with HarperCollins trying to digitize works and do more with them -- but doing more often means letting go of control, rather than putting more rules on the content.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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They'll eventually get it
Meanwhile, HarperCollins is paranoid about 1000 word promotional blurbs, warning me to "Be sure none of the plot is given away!!!!!!" as if there's an original plot out there, is struggling to accept that there's an electronic world out there, and my royalties, from a much larger publisher, are languishing in the low hundreds of dollars a year.
All titles were published in the same timeframe, from 2004-2005.
You do the math.
I won't even go into the ease of emailing MSSs to Baen, reading galleys and submitting corrections by email, as opposed to HC wanting to FedEx hundreds of sheets of paper back and forth four times...
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Re: They'll eventually get it
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Re: They'll eventually get it
On the other hand, from a consumer standpoint, electronic books are easier to carry around. (I've got eight Baens in my Palm even as I type this, including The Weapon). And I've bought, without exception, everything Baen has ever put out as an e-book.
What really frosts me about HarperCollins is that they refused to publish Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife "because it might impact sales of the hardcover," but were perfectly happy to publish Michael Crichton's latest crud. FEH!
Thanks again for The Weapon, and please, keep 'em coming. I absolutely loved Humans Call It Duty in the upcoming Future Weapons of War.
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YEAH!
Nice to see an author who "gets it". Thanks for your insight.
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Maybe I don't get it
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Re: Maybe I don't get it
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Re: Maybe I don't get it
It's not like they have a big database with all the text from all the books they've published.
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Mr. Williamson
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Re: Mr. Williamson
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Thanks!
Now, if I could only find an ebook reader that didn't cost a fortune and have a lot of useless features, I would be happy.
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Re: Thanks!
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fractured market only hurts adoption
If I go into a bookstore and buy a paperback I know I can read it on any technology platform I want (at home, on the bus, in the office....except perhaps underwater) and I can lend it to a fried, trade it in a 2nd hand book store or keep it for ever
But if I want a decent eBook experience I have to pay for a reader software that is possibly limited to a hardware platform (what if I want to read using my PocketPC on the bus, my UMPC on te bus and my iMac at home) or a dedicated device (yet another thing to carry) and I loose all the flexibility that the paper copy costs me.
Yet in many cases the electronic version costs the same as the paper one.
Go figure!
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PDF-anyone
Things like proofreading, hypenation errors and layout checking was some of the reasons God and Adobe invented the .pdf-format.
I get the point of not sending word files back and forth, but when it comes to proofreading .pdf does every a hardcopy does, only better.
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Who is the market, anyway
Almost all nonfiction books aimed at young people are paperback originals becuase publishers don't want to risk paying a lot to publish a book geared at a market they don't know how to sell to.
So it seems like before publishers get gung-ho about digitizing the baby boomer liteary canon, publishers should figure out what the next generation wants to read -- digitized or not.
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