Paper shortage kills Christmas for book lovers, but …
There’s a solution if we’re prepared to change how we shop.
The paper shortage is real. It’s here in the UK and it’s going to do its level best to ruin Christmas. So the newspapers say.
If you want the latest best sellers, either in your own stocking or to give to someone else, you’re being encouraged to get out there, buy those books right now, and keep Christmas alive by … well … doing to best sellers what everyone did with toilet paper just before the 2020 lockdown. (No, not that! Buying them up!)
But is that really the answer? It wasn’t for toilet paper or the more recent fuel shortages. We just ran out quicker.
The whole thing reminds me of this conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds on Facebook recently. Make of that what you will.
While the paper shortage certainly is real, I’m not someone who likes to do as I’m told, especially when it comes to my reading. So the media messaging around the paper shortage has left me asking:
What about ebooks?
If the primary function of technology is to solve problems, isn’t that a paper-shortage solution right there?
That’s a yes-and-no sort of question.
“Best seller” ebooks and pricing
You’ve probably heard that ebooks are much less expensive than print. But if you look for the latest best sellers on Amazon (or Kobo), you may be surprised to see that the Kindle version is not significantly less than the hardback. Or at all, in some cases:
The latest best sellers aren’t the only books priced like this. In the first three months after my baby was born, (while breastfeeding a boob barnacle) I read all twelve of the Poldark series by Winston Graham. The ebooks were around £6.50 each, but for £22, I got the entire series in print, and a complementary flare-up of arthritis in my right hand.
What is going on with pricing like that? Let’s take the editing and development processes out of the equation for a moment. Now, an ebook can take a lot of time and care to create, but once it’s made, it’s a file that can be copied — more or less instantly, without further cost. Paper books, on the other hand, incur further production costs with every copy produced, plus storage and transportation. So why the weird disparity, and what are its implications?
I do know some of the answers, but what bothers me the most is the effect on readers and reading.
Firstly: digital products are rarely valued by consumers in the same way as physical products. For ebooks, this ‘value judgement’ matters. An ebook only does one thing: the same as a print book. It’s not like software that helps you carry out multiple money-making or time-saving tasks. Is a one-off read — soon to be hidden in my e-reader library — really worth £10? Not really. So ebooks go even further down in readers’ estimation. They’re not worth the prices, so why bother?
Secondly: who loses out from this kind of pricing? People who can’t afford to buy books at this price. When a kind benefactor first gave me my e-reader, I was working in rural home care, 3 shifts a day, 30 hours a week — which made me £645 a month (after tax) on average — and writing articles for clients on my two days off. I hadn’t spent money on books for years. My battered, second-hand Kindle gave me the opportunity to read again — but I still couldn’t afford the best sellers.
Ebooks offer a fantastic opportunity to open up reading more widely because they are cheap to produce — a well-read population is a more empathetic, better educated one. But not at this price.
Thirdly: why is accessibility important? Accessibility goes beyond large-print books in the library. Certain fonts make dyslexia easier to manage and can be installed on e-readers and mobile devices, but aren’t used in print books. Poor mobility can make it hard to hold a heavy, awkward book. I saw a lady in the hospital on Sunday get out a paperback of the Richard Osman book above, and I can tell you, that book is weighty.
It seems to me that the high price of the ebook is designed to persuade readers to buy the print version. It pushes out the multitude of readers who have less money to burn, ignores the needs of those with accessibility issues — and both disability and age are heavily linked with poverty — and pulls in a considerable profit with every ebook sale for the publisher.
You’d think they would want to sell more ebooks, not fewer, especially given the environmental issues of paper books as we rage through the climate crisis and the paper shortage. But that’s not the message I’m picking up.
And yes, I’m an author as well as a reader. Most of my sales are in ebook form. Of course I want to make as much money from that as I can, but there’s a sweet spot with the pricing of ebooks, and £10 isn’t it.
But okay, it’s nearly Christmas, there’s a paper shortage —if you have an e-reader maybe someone will buy you an ebook copy anyway, price be damned.
Oh, wait.
Welcome to digital rights management (DRM)
PenguinRandomHouse, PanMacmillan, Hachette and HarperCollins all use DRM, ostensibly to protect the book from being shared widely on free download sites. That sounds fair enough. Print books don’t carry the same risk at all. It’s not as if someone’s going to photocopy the latest hardback best sellers, tart them up as good as the original books and then distribute them worldwide for free.
But DRM puts off ebook pirates about as well as a Neighbourhood Watch sign puts off burglars. If someone decides to illegally share an ebook with millions of readers, DRM is unfortunately very easy to break. (Watermarking would likely be a much better option).
What DRM is very good for, though, is limiting the use of ebooks by genuine customers. A DRM’d ebook can only be read on one device, can’t be stored online, and can’t be bought with a book token. That purchase you make? It’s nothing more than a license to read the ebook. No ownership involved.
And that ownership thing is more of an issue when you’re looking for a replacement for all those lovely book gifts you were planning (or hoping for) for Christmas.
So, what’s the solution to that?
DRM-free independently published ebooks.
And here we are again. Independent publishing has the answer. Not only are the prices usually (not always, mind) far more reasonable — well below the £10 mark — but when you buy DRM-free, you also own the book files, so you can store them in an online repository for your own use, or move them from one device to another as you wish.
Gifting them is also possible, though not all shops enable this; it depends on their set up. For example, the excellent Weightless Books has a gift option built into its checkout system. (Sadly, Weightless doesn’t currently offer books to the UK due to the VAT regulations).
Technically, you can also simply forward the file to the person in question, but every independent author in the world would like you to consider the moral and legal implications of keeping a copy for yourself. DRM-free ebooks exist so that your standard use of them is not restricted. It’s a trust relationship. If we treat copies of ebooks like we do print books, we get somewhere close to how the world is supposed to work, yes?
Where can you get DRM-free independent ebooks? This list of independent ebookshops, publishers, and authors is, as ever, indispensable. Worth bookmarking.
The difficulty you might have is working out how to find what’s good. We tend to use word of mouth (media, advertising, family, friends) to choose the best sellers we think we’d like, but with indie books that aren’t so widely marketed, this isn’t as easy.
In my earlier piece Self published? No thanks, I covered a couple of pointers about how to discern quality when buying independent ebooks. But if you want to make the most of your e-reader — and find quality books almost every time guaranteed — you’ll get the best results if you change the way you search for books and ebooks altogether.
Marketplace sites
Marketplace sites are great if you already know what you like — it’s a bit like sorting through the sale rail at TKMaxx. If you apply a critical eye to everything you see, you’ll always find something amazing. Marketplaces are especially good for comics.
Buy Small Press is a great example of a marketplace site for comics of all kinds. You can browse to your heart’s content, see samples of the artwork and pages, and choose what suits.
The DriveThru family of sites are also excellent repositories of books and comics, including DriveThruComics:
Large marketplace sites are useful, especially to hungry readers, but there are so many choices. I get a little overwhelmed with sites like this, so for me, the answer is curation.
Curation is about trust. When the bookshop is curated, where the seller has personally read and approved every book, there’s an element of trust already built in — but it’s dormant. If I pick one book and love it, I’m prepared to try another from the same site — that trust element is then activated. Every additional book I enjoy is a win for trust, and it only takes about three wins to create customer loyalty.
But how do you know a shop is curated?
Curated bookshops
The easiest way to tell that an online independent bookshop is curated is when it belongs to a publisher. Not only do indie publishers read their books, they’re often also instrumental in editing them, helping authors develop them, and creating the book itself. Often, not always.
I’ll always recommend buying from publishers who sell their books direct, because you can get added value, special offers and the like. Some publishers provide a free ebook when you buy a print book; others offer discounts on multiple-purchase baskets.
Buying direct improves the sustainability of the independent book industry and can often be a better experience for readers. It’s similar to when you buy from a small business in town. Real people, real products that they worked on, and it puts real food on their tables. Better yet, there are nearly no middle men taking whopping discounts, so all the money goes to the publishers and creators.
A few publishers you might like to try include:
Northodox Press. They produce the kind of northern noir crime fiction you didn’t know existed. I’ve only read one of theirs so far, Airedale, but if all of their work is as compelling as that, then I’m excited to get my hands on the rest. It’s a lovely, clean-looking site, easy to navigate — a pleasure to use.
Evernight Publishing is a sexy-but-smart romance store with all the categories you can think of to keep your blood up and the stories are thoroughly engaging. Professional covers, well-produced, and it’s a beautiful site. There’s more than enough choice to keep you occupied over the Christmas period.
Black Shuck Books brings you novellas, collections and micro-collections, where you’re guaranteed at least 200 pages of horror with every reasonably priced purchase. (Pages are irrelevant when it comes to ebooks, but it helps to give you an idea of the value).
I’ve also got a shy addition to this list. Although we’re not publishers, Scarlet Ferret is a curated bookshop. Its special editions come with added extras — a little like special features on DVDs — and its ebooks range from climate horror and satirical sci-fi to modern literature, with witchcraft and werewolves in the middle.
There are a few other ways to track down curated collections, too! Ebooks really do provide opportunities for book lovers to indulge their passion that print books have never afforded.
Bundle sites
If you haven’t come across the concept of ‘bundling’, it’s where a site curates a collection of books, comics or RPGs (role play games), usually with a time-limited offer. You can buy the starter collection of, say, 11 titles, for a recommended price of around $15 (price depends on the offer) but if you want to offer more money, you can ‘unlock’ a number of other titles. The curator is often someone of note — a well-known author, a writing association committee, that kind of thing.
Bundles give you a chance to spend a relatively small amount of money for a significant number of books. You might not have heard of all — or any — of them, but the deal is so good, it’s worth a small risk. One of the best bundles I ever bought was an Afrofuturism one where I was introduced to the work of the erudite Tenea D. Johnson, and Nisi Shawl. Another was a comic bundle that included the classic comic Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa, a book that changed me somehow.
Storybundle in particular offers amazing deals — you can pay what you want, but if you pay more than $15 (about £11 GBP), you can unlock sometimes twice as many books again as were in the original bundle.
The main bundle sites are Storybundle, Humble Bundle, and Bundle of Holding for role playing games, but the best way to keep track of them all is to use this up-to-date list of current bundles.
And that’s not all indie publishing’s got for you. There’s still more …
Magazines
Magazines come in all sorts of formats online. Some, like Omenana, (speculative fiction from writers across Africa and the African diaspora) make all their issues freely available on their website — and many of Omenana’s authors are big names on the indie scene, as well as new voices. You can read these amazing pieces on any browser, any device. If you enjoy reading them, you can choose to support their Patreon using this link.
Others, like Lackingtons and Three Crows, are beautifully designed and curated issues in PDF format, with intriguing themes and fantastically professional fiction — which again, you can open on any device. You can also buy some magazines in ePub or Mobi format instead. (E-readers are not generally as good for reading PDFs, but your smartphone or, better still, tablet — or even better, computer — are all able to open them).
All this to say — you and your reading are not limited to a handful of rapidly vanishing best sellers. Not only does independent publishing offer both print books and ebooks on a normal basis; in these troubling times characterised by shortages and climate disaster, it also offers you opportunities to work around the problems.
One final question to consider
One thing’s been irking me this week. A question (or two) that won’t go away:
If large publishers are concerned about readers not being able to access their products, why are they not using their purchasing power to do deals with e-reader brands for discounted devices?
Why are they not making their ebooks more sensibly priced?
I can understand they want to sell the print books they already have in the distribution system, but if they made all the options more readily available, surely that would be a longer term strategy that would pay off, especially when they can charge as much for an ebook as they do a hardback. Do they even know for sure that paper production will be back on form in the New Year?
It’s linked to my question at the end of my last piece: “do we want to live in a sustainable, creative, diverse world, or are we happy just reading what corporations decide will sell?”
We may not be living in an conspiracy of made-up shortages — the paper shortage is real — but corporations are telling us what to do and it isn’t for our own good. They probably aren’t trying to save Christmas for us.
I’ll leave you with that thought.
