[Dear Friends, before I post this somewhere, probably Medium, in the hopes of getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at this, would you be so kind as to look this over and offer some constructive criticism before I post it? And is there some way that the folks on BookWyrm have the option to see this?]
This is a hastily written, very brief, not particularly well-thought out response to the sudden disappearance of Small Press Distribution by one of the many people who relied on them to get their books before the eyes of the public. If you’re reading this, I suspect you probably already know about about what happened to SPD, and so in the interest of time, I’ll skip the background which can be read about on SPD’s Wikipedia page, and in the following Lithub article. I’ve thought it appropriate to post this on Medium, which is the same site where an employee of SPD first blew the whistle on some of their more unsavory practices several years ago.
As a user and fan of Bandcamp, I’ve often wondered if the same sort of business model, with some obvious and extensive modifications, might not also be a viable model for small presses or booksellers in general. Bandcamp is a site and platform where musicians can sell their music, whether in digital or physical form, and be fairly remunerated for their work (as opposed to sites like Spotify). Here, musicians’ songs can be listened to, in whole or in part, and then purchased digitally as DRM-Free mp3 or flac files. Bands can also sell physical media such as vinyl, CDs, cassettes, T-shirts, and all sorts of other merchandise while also having an opportunity to have more interaction with their fans.
I use Bandcamp to keep up with bands that I listen to by signing up for their mailing lists and for buying digital media; I have admittedly not yet purchased any physical media from anyone, and I get the idea that this is a site that is predominately dedicated to selling digital media.
Switching to this model would require, at least in part, a bit of a “paradigm shift,” for lack of a better term, that many publishers will potentially not like. As a reader, I am perfectly content to read high-quality ebooks, provided that they are one of the vanishingly small number in PDF or epub format that are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM), but I realize that in this screen-oriented age of ours that many readers prefer to read books the old fashioned way, on paper. To my mind, this would not dispense with books as physical media; on the contrary I feel that books should be able to exist side by side with digital versions (and the reason they haven’t so far in the way that music and movies have been able to transcend their physical media to a degree is because too many people bought into the Amazon kindle ebook ecosystem of poorly-formatted, DRM-encumbered, and prone to disappearing ebooks, but that’s a whole other rant). Skipping over print on demand (POD), which as a publisher I have really had a less than spectacular experience with due to quality control issues, for which providers such as Ingram/Lightning Source already exists, I wonder if publishers might consider making their books available digitally on Presscamp as either PDFs, epubs, or whatever other format readers prefer, while having a limited print run of offset-printed books sell beside them as a sort of deluxe format, in the same way that I might have an entire hard drive full of music files, but sitting next to it a cabinet full of vinyl LPs for the albums I hold to be among my most favorite. Traditional offset print runs can be excessively expensive and prone to being left to sit around unsold, but if a smaller number were printed, the most ardent fans of those particular authors or presses would be alerted to their publication and sold to them, but when the physical media has been sold out (barring reprintings or reissuings), the work will still remain available to purchase and read. I realize that there will probably be a lot of objections to this way of doing things, and rightly so, but this is simply one possibility that I’ve considered that I thought make sense to other presses in the same boat.
Barring the investment of a suddenly-appearing, kindly, and free-spending millionaire, a setup like this would require some kind of crowdfunding to get off the ground, servers to host the ebooks, and warehouses to store the physical media (I actually don’t know if Bandcamp warehouses their artists’ physical media or if they themselves are responsible for sending them out). And some kind and honest folks to administer all this! In the same way that musicians give away their music as a means of advertsing for their live shows, ebooks could be provided, in whole or in part, as an advertisement and incentive to buy a physical copy (or perhaps even as an advertisment for an author reading, but that might be stretching things a bit . . .)
Putting something together like this is honestly far beyond my competence, ability, and resources; I’m simply writing this in the hopes of putting a bug in someone’s ear who has a higher degree of the aforementioned qualities not to mention the time (ha!), to assemble something like this. If this sounds like a good idea to anyone at all, please take it and run with it! The demise of SPD can be a blessing in disguise if we can get our act together and move on to something better!
[Ok, you made it all the way to the end, so tell me what you think!]
