Dating Upwardly

Few good articles the last day or two I wanted to share with all's y'all if you haven't seen 'em.

First, this little gem about J.K. Rowling. Gotta love that Huffpo. "Associated Press Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report." In any event, the article breaks down to something very simple. Not only has Rowling decided to finally start selling Harry Potter books in digital form, she's doing it through her own store, which means she's probably using PDFs or plain ePUBs that haven't gone through any particular company's conversion from ePUB into a proprietary format. It's not like Rowling is the first author or company to do that. The 30%+ chunk Amazon, B&N, Apple etc. take of every sale for simply hosting a file makes it worth even a small publisher's time to develop their own site and sell it themselves. I think the differences here are essentially two fold. One, J.K. Rowling is not merely a best seller as some authors who have pushed digital publishing hard, to the point of opening their own publishers or creating other online ventures to work in conjunction with their regular "day job." Rowling is a MEGA best seller. The other major difference is that it sounds like she's decided to sell them *exclusively* through a site she runs.

I'm going to be honest. I have very mixed feelings about Rowling and her work. Are they interesting books? Sure. They're also over hyped and in dire need of editing. If you have copies handy, check it out. Compare the first to the fourth to the final. You'll notice the margins shrunk, the text shrunk, the leading shrunk, the paper is thinner and it's still so thick it can barely be printed at a commercial publisher. I know the managing editor from the first few books and the whole thing was a nightmare for her. Trying to figure out how it could possibly be produced and overseeing security at the same time. There is also the usual jealousy. I mean, I'm in publishing (kind of) and I like to write. Why aren't *I* J.K. Rowling? Or why didn't I get to sign her or whatever? I'd like to have been all up in that. But even if I am going to be murdered in my sleep for suggesting that eight hundred pages at ten point type is too much for a single middle grade novel, I do respect Rowling's abilities, especially her ability to make things happen her way. Granted, it's not always good for the publisher...or even for her own products. Those books were too long because (so I hear) she refused to allow them to do any serious editing. But I think this is a great move on her part and I wish she'd done it a year ago.

Even though publishers and authors are finally warming, and in some cases, pushing digital forms, this is the first time I've heard of that someone with a lot of market power has chosen to cut Amazon out entirely. Hopefully it will bring them down a peg or two and reduce the fee that Amazon, B&N, Apple etc. charge for e-books from 30% (far too much for simply hosting a file- in fact, Amazon has new pricing that's 30% plus something like 15 cents per Megabyte of the file, which is their *actual* hosting cost) to something more reasonable, like 10%. Publishers big and small, and especially the smaller ones who haven't got the clout are afraid that, just like in the retail era you had to bow to the whims of Barnes and Noble because if they didn't carry your book, you'd never get wide enough distribution to make that particular project profitable. If Rowling is successful, at the very least it might embolden them to re-open negotiations or increase efforts at promoting their own online stores.

And yet the article was all about DRM. The DRM battle has been going on for freaking ever and will for a long time and there's merit to both sides. In the meantime, this represents something way bigger. I'm going to guess that the "Associated Press Writer Hillel Italie" who was credited with having "contributed to this report" is more keen on tech than on publishing.

Phew, that took me longer than I expected to analyze, so I'll save the other article + a brief rundown of the pros and cons of DRM for monday. Join me then in "Dr. DRM" OR "Fifty Ways to Lose Your Customer."