Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this:

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but your agent can’t sell it) AND
• It is good (which you can tell because it was once commercially published, or your agent has been trying to sell it) AND
• It has been professionally edited (this is harder to judge, but if you paid someone who works as an editor and you both agonised over the text for weeks or months, getting it to the point where the editor was satisfied, you’re probably OK) AND
• It has a good cover, designed by a professional AND
• You are willing to spend hundreds of hours promoting it, or thousands of dollars paying a professional to promote it THEN
• You should self-publish.

OR

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it would only be interesting to your immediate family) AND
• The quality doesn’t matter (because your immediate family will only be looking at the pictures anyway) AND
• You don’t care at all if only five people ever see it THEN
• You should self-publish.

Nevertheless, with self-publishing being so easy these days, and ebook publishing not necessarily having any up-front costs (except cover design) it is very tempting to give it a go.

Strangely, the temptation is probably higher for published authors than for not-yet-published ones. Published authors have already had (on average) ten years of being rejected by agents and publishers. They have already felt the frustration of having the publisher, agent, and retailer between them take 90% of the sale price of each book. They have already felt the strain of running themselves ragged to promote a book when no-one else in the food chain seems to care. They have already gnashed their teeth over their lack of control over the pricing, positioning and presentation of what used to be their own property, the product upon which their whole future depends.

Yet commercial publication is still the best option for the new writer. (Joe Konrath may be demonstrating that, for established writers, or writers with a huge ‘platform’, it no longer is.) If it all goes well, it is by far the best – and easiest – way to make sales and establish a reputation. If it all goes well.

And this is all by way of a preamble to the announcement that I have just self-published a small collection of short stories. Some of them have already been published in magazines, some have not. What links them is that they are all set in the same ‘world’ and all belong to the unfolding story of a group of transhumans who inhabit a virtual world called Placid Point.

The collection is called “Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity” and is available in all popular ebook formats from Smashwords (over the next few weeks, it will also be available through Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, and other major retailers.) I’ve set the price at $1.99, which I hope you’ll agree is reasonable. I don’t actually intend to sell bucketloads of this collection (unlike my debut novel, TimeSplash, which I do want to sell lots of) but I want these stories out there because they are in the same world as the novel I have just finished writing (The Credulity Nexus) and, if that is ever published, it would be nice to be able to point readers to a book of related short stories.

Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity - A collection of short stories by Graham Storrs

And guess which ebook I hope everyone is reading

With between 200 and 300 per cent growth year-on-year in the ebook market (different surveys call it different ways) you wouldn’t think there was much need for such an event, but there is.

It isn’t just that there is entrenched, almost paranoid resistance to ebooks among many readers (you know the type – people who rhapsodise about the smell and the texture of blocks of printed paper, and who feel besieged and beleaguered by those who promote ebooks, swearing to defend their right to own lumps of pulped tree to the bitter end)  it’s that the vast majority of readers have not even heard of ebooks and ebook readers.

For those of us who have, there are many free ebooks on offer during this week. So shoot across to E-Reads, or Smashwords, the Read an eBook Week site, or any participating outlet, and see what’s on offer. (You can avoid all the big e-book stores like Amazon and Fictionwise if you’re looking for read an e-book week special offers, none of them appear to be participating. I bet they will be next year.)

But it’s not just about the free stuff. Books are starting to be published in digital-only editions (like mine, for instance) and digital-first editions. This means that, even now, the only way to see some new books is to get the ebook. If you’re not reading ebooks, your choice of books is already starting to narrow.  A few years from now, this trickle of digital-only books will be a torrent.

And when you have a hard drive stuffed with great books, maybe you’ll want to pick up an ebook reader to go with them.

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

Reading the Entrails

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon.

It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. So I’d get into some pretty silly calculations involving Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, prices, shipping, and exchange rates.

Then I bought a Kindle. The relationship deepened. I stopped buying printed books from Amazon. In fact, I stopped buying printed books altogether. Now I only get ebooks from the Kindle Store. Unless they’re cheaper elsewhere, of course – which they easily can be, because Amazon charges a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’ on every book bought by people who have the temerity to live outside the USA. (Don’t ask me why. Something to do with Amazon wanting all the money in the world, I think.) This means there is no such thing as a free book on Amazon. All Amazon books start at US$2. So I tend to look around. If I can get a PDF of the book somewhere else and cheaper, or a Mobipocket version, I will. As for free books, on sites like Project Gutenberg, they’re rather better value than the US$2 Amazon equivalents. (What’s worse than the ‘foreigner tax’, I’ve discovered that many Kindle editions of English classics have been ‘Americanized’. God knows why but someone has gone to the trouble of changing the spelling in old Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen novels! Are American readers really that dumb that they need a ‘translation’ from English spelling before they can read a classic English novel?)

When my novel, TimeSplash, went on sale in the Kindle Store, my relationship with Amazon plumbed new depths. At first my biggest concern was with the huge slice of the sale price Amazon charges for the privilege of selling my book. They take a 65% cut of what you pay! Then, not only do they arbitrarily discount it from US$5.50 – the publisher’s sale price – to US$4.40, they also add a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’, making it US$6.40 for foreign buyers, making the book more expensive for the 95% of us who do not live in the USA. (And you only get a DRMed, .PRC file for that – which is why I recommend to anybody wanting to buy my book, for the Kindle or any other eReader, that they buy it from the publisher’s own bookstore. Even for American buyers, I think the bundle of non-DRM formats you get from the publisher is a far more attractive deal than the slightly lower Kindle Store price.)

But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve started noticing all the twiddly bits on te book page in the Kindle Store. Things like the star rating and the tags. As a buyer of the book, you get to rate it and to tag it (either just ticking tags you agree with, or adding your own). It turns out the ratings and, especially the tags are crucial for sales. They determine whether the book turns up in Amazon searches (if it’s not tagged, it probably doesn’t show) and how high up the results list it appears. (So, for God’s sake, if you love me and you bought TimeSplash, rate it and tag it, or you might be my last customer on this site!) Then there’s the customer review. I don’t know how many people have bought the book so far – from the kind things people are saying on Twitter, there are a few of you – but, so far, only one person has written a review. Just one!

But the most insidious and terrible piece of data on the Kindle Store page for TimeSplash is the Kindle Store ranking. It’s something to do with how many books are being sold, but I don’t know what. It’s never the same from one minute to the next and it fluctuates wildly – and I mean wildly, within a range of 70,000 so far. And it means nothing, or, perhaps it means everything! Since it is a rank, and I know Amazon has about 400,000 books in the Kindle Store, it’s easy to see that, if the book is ranked better than 80,000, it is in the top 20% of sales. If it is ranked 20,000 or less, it’s in the top 5% of sales. But what does that mean? Does Amazon sell a thousand ebooks books a day, or a dozen? Who knows? And since 90% of the “best-sellers” in the Kindle Store are free books anyway, what on Earth does that do to the sales distribution? If they’re giving away books by the shovelful (in the US presumably, since they’re not free anywhere else) at one end of the ‘sales’ scale, are there 200,000 titles at the other end that are not selling at all?

I’ve had to stop looking at my book page on Amazon because this kind of thing is driving me nuts. I only make about 60¢ on an Amazon sale anyway so it’s hardly worth worrying about. I’d need to sell tens of thousands before I saw any serious money, and that’s not going to happen. So why torture myself?

Well, because, regardless of the money, I’d like to see people buying the book – and reading it!

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ‘social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add.

I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The ‘international’ version (why don’t they just say ‘the one for foreigners’?) doesn’t have a proper charger (just USB – which is SLOW) has no SD card slot, and, even at the current exchange rate, I still think it’s overpriced.  However, it is the best – certainly the best value – that is currently available in Australia, I really, really wanted an ereader, and it’s wireless connectivity trumps most other technical features.

When I took it out of the box, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The screen was smaller than I had expected and the device weighed more. The e-ink page is not as high contrast as I remembered (much less than the LCD screen I’m typing into at the moment) and the slow refresh rate makes the user interface feel slow and clunky. When I uploaded a few MobiPocket files from my PC (a piece of cake, by the way) and started to read, I found the slow page turning and the flickering through black as the page turns a bit of a worry. (Please note that most of these drawbacks would be common to all e-ink ebook readers.)

Then I started to read. Within a couple of minutes the page turning and the rest didn’t bother me at all. I got used to it and the whole device just melted into the background. In fact, now that I’ve spent a few hours using the Kindle, I found going back to a real book quite a surprise. Have they always been so big and heavy and cumbersome as that? How did I cope with such a ridiculously cumbersome technology for all those years?

Someone put a lot of thought into the Kindle hardware. The ergonomics of the physical device are excellent. The controls are just where they need to be. Most things do just what you’d expect them to without having to check the manual. It’s easy to hold, well balanced and feels natural to operate. The only part of the machine I don’t like is the on/off switch at the top. It’s hard to find (when you’re holding the machine in a reading position) and fiddly to use. But then, you don’t use it all that often.

The software user interface design isn’t quite so good, but it’s acceptable. The menus are OK, screen layouts for books and so on are adequate. The book cover images are too small to make much sense of and being black and white and fairly low resolution doesn’t help. But the designers made some good choices about menu contents and about defaults. The first time I went back to a magazine I had been reading and found that it opened just where I had left off, I wanted to shake the designer’s hand. My (long-sighted) wife particularly likes the fact you can easily switch to a larger font size.

Registration was easy (essentially there is none – unless you received the Kindle as a gift) and the shopping experience really shows the years of bookselling expertise that Amazon brings to bear.

So far I have a handful of sci-fi magazines on the device, and a bundle of 50-odd books by Wilkie Collins that I bought from Amazon for about $7. (Yes, I know they’d have been free from Project Gutenberg but, for a few dollars, the convenience of having 50-odd books delivered direct to the reader is irresistable.) I’ve yet to see how the Kindle handles collections of hundreds of books and other documents. The way it seems at the moment (books easy and cheap to acquire, reading simple and pleasurable) I can only see one reason I would ever buy another print book: availability.

The Kindle Booksstore has about 300,000 titles but it is nowhere near enough. The first three books I looked for using the device (‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson, ‘Dead America’ by Luke Keioskie, and ‘Old Man’s War’ by John Scalzi) were not there. Stephenson and Scazi would definitely have made sales if they had been. (I’ve already got ‘Dead America’.) Fortunately, there are plenty pf other ebook shops and ebook editions of everything will be the norm soon enough.

I’m pretty sure my Kindle (for foreigners) will be thoroughly outdated in a couple of years’ time (hell, it’s starting to slide even now) but between now and then, I expect it to be my constant companion. People who don’t think electronic publishing is the future, probably haven’t tried using an ebook reader yet. I’ve only had mine 24 hours and the advantages of presenting books electronically over presenting them on paper seem overwhelming. Yes, the technology is not yet perfect, but it is already good enough that I don’t want to go back to the old days (yesterday morning) before my ereader arrived.

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on.

Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. They have done us all a great service. Today, a press release from Craig Emerson’s office announced: ‘The Government has decided not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government.’

It goes on:

‘Australian book printing and publishing is under strong competitive pressure from international online booksellers such as Amazon and The Book Depository and the Government has formed the view that that this pressure is likely to intensify.

‘In addition, the technology of electronic books (e-books) like Kindle Books will continue to improve with further innovations and price reductions expected.

‘The Government has not accepted the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to remove the parallel importation restrictions on books.

‘The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture. The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

‘The Government has decided not to commit to a new spending program for Australian authors and publishers.

‘Compromise proposals were considered, involving reductions in the length of the 30-day publication rule and the 90-day resupply rule.

‘In the circumstances of intense competition from online books and e-books, the Government judged that changing the regulations governing book imports is unlikely to have any material effect on the availability of books in Australia.

‘If books cannot be made available in a timely fashion and at a competitive price, customers will opt for online sales and e-books.

‘Introducing a price cap along the lines of the Canadian system would increase regulation with questionable effects on book prices.

‘The Australian book printing and publishing industries will need to respond to the increasing competition from imports without relying on additional government assistance.’

Please note that 3rd-from-last sentence, “If books cannot be made available, etc..” It was the book sellers of Australia (supermarkets and department stores included) who wanted to trash Australian publishing for the sake of larger profits by changing the PIR legislation. I think that sentence puts them firmly back in their box. However, it also points those of us who are concerned about Australian writing to where the next big battle will be fought.

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have similar legislation. It is almost certain that without PIRs, imported editions of popular books at lower prices (possibly remaindered books, and most of them, if they came from Australian authors, edited and censored to suit their primary, overseas markets) would make life very hard for Australian poublishers and thereby reduce the number of new Australian authors who could sell their work. For lots more on this subject see the Saving Aussie Books website.

Today, however, I read a blog post by Joanna Penn that made me think that PIRs were not the only, nor the major threat facing Australian publishers. Joanna makes no bones about the fact that she finds books published in Australia too expensive. She has often said she buys books from Amazon.com and pays the shipping and still gets them cheaper. With the huge mark-ups that Australian booksellers put on books, she has a valid point. However, Joanna recently bought a Kindle. In fact, she was probably one of the first people in Australia to have one. And, if you’ve read her blog post, you’ll see one of the main reasons why. A book she saw in a local book shop was available for instant download to the Kindle at about a quarter of the book shop price.

The important message for Australian publishers and Australian book sellers in this is that Joanna states flatly she would not have bought the book from the shop. It was too expensive, but, on the Kindle, the price was right.

Joanna is at the leading edge of a wave of change that is going to sweep through this country in the next couple of years. As an early adopter of e-reader technology she is among the first of probably millions of Australians who will buy these devices and use the wireless connectivity built into them to buy books – from anywhere in the world.

Australia has a book-selling infrastructure that is almost guaranteed to encourage rapid adoption of e-readers now that the first have arrived. Even when I lived in a Brisbane suburb, my nearest decent bookshop was 30km away (in the city, where parking costs a fortune). Now I live in the country, my nearest good bookshop is 150km away! (I don’t count the K-Mart that is a mere 60km away.) I rarely get to a book shop to buy books. I buy books from Fishpond.com.au (when they have them) and Amazon.com (when they don’t) or I go to the library. When I buy e-books, I tend to get them direct from the publisher where possible. It won’t be long before I get my own wireless e-reader and stop using Australian bookshops altogether.

There will come a tipping point, in five or ten years, when the number of people using e-readers and the number of books published electronically means that books printed on peper will be printed in smaller runs and will start rising in price – on their way to becoming rare, luxury goods. PIRs seem almost irrelevant in the face of what’s coming.