E-book Wars, Episode 10: Revenge of the Killer Librarians

Your local librarian

Book publishers, take cover. The librarians are at the gate. The issue is, like almost everything else in publishing right now, e-books.

 If you go to your library website, chances are that you will see that it has a new program where you can check out e-books. Cool! Right? Hey, I’ve done it.  It’s free. All you have to do is select the book you want, hit the button, download the book, and voila!

 And you  can avoid the usual inconveniences that detract from the library experience. You  don’t have to go into one of those shabby old buildings , filled up with shabby old people,  and try to find one of those shabby old books. (Who knows what person may have been picking his nose while reading it last?) Furthermore the library rarely has a copy of the book you really want anyway, right?  Sure, if you are looking for  The Muncie Indiana Junior League Cookbook of 1954, you are likely to find one – or more than one. Maybe an old broken spine volume of Funk and Wagnall’s Desk Encyclopedia.  But if you are looking for  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen,  get  in line. You’re number 205 on the waiting list. And when you lose the book,  or maybe your kid cuts it up and makes paper airplanes out of it,  or when you just  bring it back late (which you almost always do), ka-ching!

The new e-book checkout program gets around all that. You do it all  from your home or maybe from the beach in Hawaii with your slick new  iPad2 with 3G .  Hit the button. Read the book. And  if you forget about it, the book automatically gets checked back in after 14 days. No muss, no fuss. No lost books.  No late fees.

 I went to the e-book check out site for the Oakland Library.  It wasn’t perfect. It is, after all, still a library. There were some of the usual library annoyances. The selection wasn’t great and half the titles available were in Chinese. And the books I really wanted were all on hold. But the list is growing, and it’s going to be pretty nifty.

Publishers have been concerned about this and with good reason. These  new library e-book lending  programs, which are all managed by a wholesaler called “Overdrive“,  are so easy that it really is the same experience  as buying one from a bookseller.  It’s just like going to Amazon.com – except no charge.

This week, HarperCollins decided to put the brakes on this. They implemented a new policy where instead of just selling the library  an e-book like they do to bookstores, they will only sell libraries a license to download the book 26 times. That is the estimated number of times that an ink-on-paper  book would be checked out in a year. After that, the library would have to buy another copy. Harper would also impose rules that the libraries could only provide this service to members located in the communities they serve.

The librarians are pissed. They and their knuckle dragging goons are already planning  to punish HarperCollins. They’ve even launched a boycott.  Check out the website. Josh Marwell, Harper’s president for sales pointed out that with the millions of e-reading devices expected to be purchased by consumers in the coming year, HarperCollins decided that the terms of sale of e-books to libraries “if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book ecosystem, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.”

Look, I don’t want to say anything bad about libraries. Just like I don’t want to say anything bad about puppy shelters.  But dammit!  I’m tired of all these people who think that authors shouldn’t get paid for their work. “Ask the Agent” has previously written about the noxious idea that “information wants to be free.” It is a view espoused in books by Internet gurus who get paid quite well for promoting this idea.

The United Kingdom has a curious notion that authors should – well — get paid. In 1979 parliament passed the Public Lending Rights Act   that mandated that authors receive a royalty every time their book is checked out of a public library.  The royalty  amount is 12 cents per check out with a yearly maximum of  about $10,000 US. Other countries that offer some form of compensation to writers for library check outs are: Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Canada, Australia, and Denmark. Civilized societies who honor intellectual labor. And what countries do not pay royalties for library check outs? Libya, Yemen, North Korea, and The United States of America.

Librarians, listen up! It is written. “He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”

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Sarah Palin Book Income Update

Why is Sarah Smiling?

Publishers Weekly just came out with its list of the best selling books of 2009.

For all of you readers out there who thought that Going Rogue by Sarah Palin was a joke, the joke is on you.  Sarah’s publisher, HarperCollins is laughing all the way to the bank. And so is Sarah.  Yes. Going Rogue was the #1 non-fiction best-seller of the year. It sold 2,674,684 copies. Nobody else came close.

Ask The Agent made an educated guess that Palin received a $6,000,000 advance for the book.  Truthfully, we were blowing smoke. We have no idea what that advance really was. But for comparison, it was reported that Senator Edward Kennedy’s received  an $8,000,000 advance for his autobiography, True Compass. It was  #5 on the non-fiction best seller list selling 855,843, about a third of Palin’s sales.

Now that the sales are in, it is a lot easier to calculate how much Palin actually made on the book and how well her publisher did.

Whatever Palin’s advance was, it was an “advance” against royalties. Royalties are based on actual sales of a book. An author doesn’t receive royalties until the advance is “earned out”, i.e. royalties exceed the advance that was paid. Typically the royalty rate is 15% of the list price, which, in the case of Going Rogue, was $28.99. So Palin made $4.34 on each book or a total of $11,608,128.56. Not bad for a book she didn’t even write.   She may have paid some of this out to her hack ghost writer. We don’t know how much, but $1,000,000 would be a lot for this kind of work. And shabby work it was!

But  wait! It gets even better. The numbers we are talking about are for US sales of the hardback version only. It doesn’t include the following: world English sales, translations, e-book sales, electronic apps, movie options, audio books, condensations, serializations, and merchandise (calendars, t-shirts, mugs, video games, and posters). And let’s not forget book club sales. And the Conservative Book Club is a huge driver of sales, frequently in the seven figures. We don’t know these numbers and probably never will.

But wait! It gets even better. Those numbers are only for sales in 2009.  Going Rogue is still a best seller juggernaut. Her Amazon ranking is (as of today) #266 and her Kindle ranking is #573. Trade and Mass Market paperbacks will be rolling out sometime this year. By comparison, the best-selling non-fiction trade paperback in 2009 was Glen Beck’s Common Sense selling over a million copies.  Assume 8% royalty on a $16.00 paperback (that is conservative), Palin stands to reap another  $1,250,000 plus change on these sales.

Feel sorry for the publisher, HarperCollins, for shelling out all that dough for royalties? It’s ok. Don’t worry. Let’s look at publisher costs. Typically a publisher will receive about half of the retail price of a book which would be for this book $14.47. HarperCollins out of pocket costs would be approximately $3.00 for preproduction (editing and the like), $2.50 for manufacturing, and $2.00 for marketing. Add to this Palin’s $4.34 royalty. The publisher’s profit  should net out at $12,383,786. (This does not account for publishers fixed overhead costs). And they also stand to make lots of money on continuing sales, paperback sales and other subsidiary sales.

I wish I was Palin’s agent. Let’s see….15% of author’s net income. That’s $1,741,219 and counting.  Sweeet!