Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers

One of the truest joys of reading occurs when you discover an amazing authors while your favorite author is writing her next book. Unfortunately, by publishing a new book every month (please note that I did not say “writing”), James Patterson is creating something like a monopoly, wherein readers can fulfill their Patterson fix without ever having to discover another author.

Money quote:

> The demand for multiple novels a year, however, seems to be more about reader demand than improving an author's fan base. According to the *Times*, James Patterson (and his co-writers) released 12 books last year. And while that's great for James Patterson and his publisher Little, Brown & Co, it's not great for anyone else writing thrillers. If readers can get a monthly fix of one author, what will encourage them to seek out new authors?

While I'm certainly glad people are reading at all, James Patterson's “McNovels” are a far cry from his earlier, better work. I'll also add that his system of hiring other people to write his books simply can't hold up in the long run.

A 1972 essay by Samuel R. Delany explains why: “[V]irtually every great name in s-f… has had at least one eight-to-sixteen-year period when he could write no science fiction at all.”

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A lot of aca­d­e­mic work is highly spe­cial­ized, and highly spe­cific. This kind of work is vital to the pro­fes­sion. Right now if you write such a book, a book aimed at a very spe­cial­ized audi­ence, you shop it to presses, and a uni­ver­sity press takes it and pub­lishes it for, say, $75 for the hard­cover and $35 for the ebook. Or $55 for the print ed. and $25 for the kindle/ebook. The press hopes to make most of its sales to libraries, which are A: fac­ing bud­get cuts, and B: likely to be going dig­i­tal more and more. The high price dis­cour­ages both libraries and all but the most seri­ous readers.

Aside from the fact that it’s indeed nice to have a phys­i­cal book, what is the advan­tage of our tra­di­tional meth­ods, to any­one? Do you want an object, or do you want your book read? Ide­ally, you’d like both, but if the book costs $60 dol­lars, get­ting either becomes unlikely. If the AHA pub­lished them as eBooks, and left dis­tri­b­u­tion to Ama­zon and Apple and B&N, or sold them directly its own web­site, your work would be embla­zoned with the author­ity of the AHA, “in print” for­ever, and instantly avail­able at low cost to all read­ers. If you want a phy­isi­cal object, print on demand is read­ily avail­able. In fact, uni­ver­sity presses use it them­selves.

Yes, the AHA would have to do some edi­to­r­ial work, and it’s not triv­ial, but the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is status–publishing with a major uni­ver­sity press con­fers sta­tus; hav­ing a nice look­ing book on your shelf con­fers sta­tus. But really hand­some car­riages used to con­vey sta­tus too, and so did hav­ing a “princess” phone. The AHA should take this on. They could make money, they could re-assert their cen­tral­ity to the enter­prise of his­tory, they could elim­i­nate weirdly, grossly over­priced books.