We're in Madison, Wisconsin for the long weekend in order to go to WisCon 34. WisCon bills itself as the world's leading feminist sci-fi conference, and this seems to lead to some pretty interesting and thoughtful discussion. Sci-fi is big explosion movies, sure, but it's also a narrative space that's about the alien and the other. So far, this has lead to a number of fairly active panels full of diverse audience participation.

I didn't take very good notes last night, but I hauled myself out of bed this morning for a session on e-book readers. The topic was fairly broad, but we ended up spending a lot of time talking about the publishing and business side (unsurprising, since the panelists were all authors doing e-pub).

There was an interesting disconnect between how I perceive this marketplace and how many others in the room did. I've only recently started to seriously consume ebooks, so my focus has been more on the big streamlined distributors (Amazon, Apple, B&N, Sony). It was pretty clear, though, that there's a midrange and long tail market that I was unaware of.

Specifically, there are specialty markets (the example here was erotic romance) that fill niches that big publishers don't. These gap fillers tend to be focusing on the electronic format as the first or only release, whereas the big publishers tend to focus on the print path first. This path tends go look more like:

1. publisher publishes on their web site first, no distributor involved. Author royalty is substantially higher (35% was example given)
2. then, the publishers sends it to the broader distributors. This includes amazon-level distributors, but there are apparently also smaller distributors that are willing to take bigger risks. (omnilit, all romance ebooks)

There was a lot of optimism around the long tail aspect of all this—the idea that the smaller publishers can compete more effectively in this space against the big established publishers. There was also a lot of excitement about ebook price points versus physical books, although I didn't think that people gave a lot of credence go the raw power of amazon's power over loss leading pricing right now. Still, amazon's "low" prices are relative to print prices; the electronic-only publishers can still to get under that $9.99 price point.

Finally, a lot of people were excited about the cheap/free books aspect of ebooks. I found myself distressed by this, because it's easy to see the withering of the library in this worldview.