It’s easy to be negative, much harder to be balanced. Everyone has an agenda, and a balanced opinion makes it harder to push. When I first commented to someone – online or off – that I thought the business model of traditional publishing was broken, I had an agenda; I was trying to justify my decision (at least to myself) to put out a print run of Make a Move myself, rather than keep submitting it to UK publishing houses of all sizes. A year or so later, I’m a lot more relaxed about my decision, for a variety of reasons, so I don’t have an agenda colouring my opinion. Do I still think the traditional publishing business model is broken? Yeah. Or, more specifically (and less flippantly) I don’t think any of the major houses have demonstrated that their models are fit to compete in the electronic realm.

But rather than be negative, I’ll try to be balanced by suggesting a fix. Saying something’s “broken” is pointless commentary unless you can state, clearly and with neither emotion nor agenda, what “fixed” is.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking on Amazon for a book on audio mixing. I’d already bought one title for my Kindle (the well-written and professionally converted Zen and the Art of Mixing by Mixerman) but I wanted something more in-depth. A friend of mine did a degree in audio engineering, and has a load of books on the subject, but they’re all over ten years old, and a lot of the technology described within has moved on to the point of being unrecognisable, so I wanted something published within the last couple of years. I found Mixing Audio – Concepts, Practices and Tools by Roey Izhaki, and it has a Kindle edition, but I decided to go for the print copy for a few of reasons:

• It was only £2.21 more than the Kindle version
• It comes with a DVD, that I then won’t have to download
• I can lend it to my friend when I’m done

The second point is just laziness on my part, but the first and third could have been predicted and negated by the publisher. The point about lending is a contentious one, as legally, I’ve bought the book for personal use, and don’t pay the publisher for lending rights. Fair enough, but it’s a bit… backwards. Many software programs allow you multiple installs within certain, fair, scenarios. I’m thinking of audio plugins from Stillwell and Cytomic, but that’s just where I’m at right now. Other, much larger, companies are moving to the same kind of thinking. And that got me thinking.

I’ve bought books that teach software or technology, read them, and each time a new version of the product is released, I’ve just read up on the changes from the website; I’ll never buy a new release of that book again. But eBooks, in their simplest form, are software. You don’t buy a full license each time a new version is released; you buy a much cheaper upgrade. And you always buy it, because you like software, and you want the latest and greatest.

I ordered the Roey Izhaki book, and I’m reading it now, but once I’ve read it, I’ll never buy a subsequent edition. It’s too expensive for the 20%-or-so of updated content you’d get in that full-price printed book. If the eBook came with updates – new editions at discounted prices to the owners of previous versions, as confirmed by your Amazon purchase history, I’d have bought it. I’d have bought it because the eBook, even at the same price, offered better long-term value. Never mind colour, or video, or embedded sounds (I can download them from the website once I pull my finger out…) upgrades to content that becomes quickly outdated are a serious value-add, at little cost to the publisher, that don’t impact future sales, of which there won’t be any anyway.

So that’s my suggestion for a new business model; find out how your customers want to use your products, and work with your distributor to allow them to do it, and pay you for the privilege.