Publishing Economics

The book industry has struggled recently.Free alternatives consume more of our time and new e-reader schemes avoid all of the cost and complexity of stocking, shipping, and accepting returns on books. Newspapers are if anything in worse shape; physical printed items to read are somewhat obsolete, or at least diminished in importance.

New markets emerge, and Amazon makes quite a bit of money and almost single-handedly makes life miserable for independents. Amazon has been struggling with book vendors, trying to push for somewhat uniform prices, while the book vendors (perhaps seeing what happened with Apple and music publishers) have resisted allowing Amazon too much price setting authority.

Meanwhile the book companies are retrenching, laying people off, and publishing less. Will new publishing methods make a difference?

I saw an interesting blog that mentioned AppPublisher.com, an Indian publishing company that can take your content and turn it into an iPhone app (and Droid, and Blackberry and others, apparently). They take your doc, pdf, or html and turn it into down-loadable content from the iTunes store and publish it alongside the 2,000 unique titles they've already published. For free. Revenue from purchases is split 50/50 between the author (you) and appserve.

So the cost of publishing has just hit a new low - free - and the percentage coming to you is kind of radically high - book companies don't give up 50% to most authors! That's not quite as spectacular as it sounds, since book companies will handle sales, marketing, accounting and sometimes even tour organization; there's an element of "you get what you pay for" in this. On the other hand, the barriers from creation to distribution to consumption have never been lower.

We'll see where it all goes, but it's already become radically easy to enter markets - I know an ex-Cisco employee who stays at home with his young child and makes appreciable money on the side doing iPhone apps. No office overhead, fairly inexpensive tools, he determines his own hours, and he has access to millions of paying customers. Nothing wrong with that!