It’s a long-winded one today, so I’ve changed the usual order. If you don’t care about eBooks, skip the last section!

Interest Piquing: Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur – a record of all the graffitti found at Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. It’s broken down into galleries, there’s a spreadsheet record, and some pseudo-scientific analysis of it at Inkling Magazine. It’s a really interesting little study.

InsPiration: How to fall 35,000 and survive. Probably not good reading for nervous flyers, but a must-read if you’re writing a thriller!

Procrastination: XKCD – a stick-figure comic strip for science and tech geeks. Mostly funny, but occasionally just plain interesting. How about a graphical depiction of gravity wells, or the Drake equation, or the current thoughts of the Spirit explorer (warning: sad).

Publishing: So, there’s been a bit of a  kerfluffle between Macmillan and Amazon (documented, well, everywhere: DearAuthor falls broadly on Amazon’s side, PubRants broadly on Macmillan’s, for example. Everyone has an opinion if you google for it). Both HarperCollins and Hachette are turning to the agency model too. They don’t want to sell their books to Amazon for Amazon to sell on – they want to sell their books through Amazon, like you sell your house through an estate agent. The main motivation seems to be to take the pricing out of Amazon’s hands. And, yes, to increase prices a little. What does this mean for readers and writers?

Now, the following is predominantly speculation, based on recent articles. it’s anecdotal evidence only for customers book buying habits. I don’t have access to that kind of data, and those that do seem to come to different conclusions every time anyway. So bear with me, and feel free to argue.

Macmillan’s argument is that Amazon charges too little for eBooks on release and are undervaluing them. Certainly they’re selling most of them at a loss. However, if e-only pubs can sell eBooks for $3-$8 dollars and survive, why can’t print publishers? After all, until now most of the work they put into producing books was ideally made back from print sales. Though the creation costs for a single eBook are high (DRM, formatting, formats, etc), the price per unit decreases with every unit sold and the profit increases exponentially. Say a single book costs $200 to produce: 200 books costs $1 each to produce. But you have to sell 200 books, and your pricing has to reflect your confidence in potential sales.- if you price your books at $1 each and only sell 100, then you’re $100 out on your initial investment.

Macmillan claim they want to introduce flexible pricing, so the price will drop over time – this would be more comforting if actually did it more often with eBooks, and I’m more concerned with books I’ve remembered exist, books that are being marketed now and are new. For the same reason I’m going to treat hardbacks and paperbacks like their prices don’t also drop over time in order to shift warehouse stock to make room for something new.

Most of the profit for the old model came from hardbacks, which are commonly priced at around $25 (though, as that link shows, Amazon are quite happy to slash the prices of new books by half – which doesn’t affect what they’re paying the publisher or the publisher is paying the author). Print publishers argue if eBooks are priced too cheaply they’ll cannibalise these sales. That’s the reason paperbacks are released later than hardbooks, to preserve those sales.

But there’s a huge difference between paperback books and eBooks – paperbacks are owned, they can be drawn on and leant and resold and will continue to exist even if technology changes or your retailer goes bust. eBooks are leased. Not only that, but eBooks require something to read them on, whether it’s a computer or an eReader or an iPad. In my opinion, when you’ve forked out $200-$400 for a device to read a book on, you don’t then want to pay $15 minimum a book, not when you could get it cheaper in paperback. eBooks are more like audio books – it’s a different audience to a print reader, and they may never have bought the print book in the first place (or they’d buy it in print too).They’re not likely to cannabalise the hardback market. I mean, I don’t mind publishers delaying the release to match the paperback – though since the more aggressive advertising is long over and e-stores can’t artfully place ebooks like a brick and mortar shop can paperbacks, I suspect this resulting loss of eBook sales will equal or be greater than the gain of hardback sales – but then pricing it to match the hardback as well is odd. Customers perceive the cost of production to be less, and the value gained to be less, than a print book. They see no reason to pay extra for it when they could (a) buy the paperback and get more use from it or (b) buy a different, cheaper eBook from an ePub.

Print publishers lose sales. Readers pay more. Authors earn less. Who wins? Well, ePublishers, their customers, and their authors. Why pay $15 for an eBook from Macmillan, when I could buy the same book as a paperback (earning the publisher less and the author a lower royalty percentage) and another eBook from Samhain for the same price?

But, well, I’m in the UK anyway. So I’m already paying VAT on my eBooks, and most eReaders aren’t available here. Who wins? The Oxfam bookshop, usually.