An Alarming Reading Trend

I’m worried.

I don’t want to be, but I am. 

Partly, this is the fault of who I am. I tend more towards the cautious side. Partly, this is the fault of cold pitiless numbers. In this instance, there are specific numbers to which I refer.

 9,000
 11,000
 9,700
 8,000
 6,000

See what I mean? Ah no. Wait. It’s unlikely you do for I haven’t put them into any context. Here’s how I should have posted them.

Physical books checked out of our school library. (Numbers are rounded.)

4 years ago: 9,000
3 years ago: 11,000
2 years ago: 9,700
1 year ago: 8,000
Current year: 6,000

Have these numbers tickled your curious side? Or, like me, do they skip the curiosity phase and go straight to alarming you?

Not alarmed? Eh, interesting. 

Is it because you noticed the use of the words “physical books” to describe the circulation numbers and figure the picture isn’t complete because our school provides electronic versions of books to be checked out by students? Well, you get a gold star for noticing. We do indeed provide electronic copies to our students. 

Here is the rounded number for electronic copies checked out this school year: 1,800.

Using a high-powered calculator, we come to an adjusted number for this school year of 7,800. The revised list should look like this. [NOTE: I did not pull the number of electronic copies for any previous years as this is a relatively new offering for our students.]

4 years ago: 9,000
3 years ago: 11,000
2 years ago: 9,700
1 year ago: 8,000
Current year: 7,800

On the surface, 7,800 doesn’t appear all too bad. It reflects a small drop-off from the previous year, at the very least and maybe reflects the adjustment phase as we transfer over from physical to electronic reading. But that’s the problem with surfaces, they too often hide a reality beneath them; and, in this case, we’re talking about the difference between solid oak and oak veneer.

Students checked out 1,800 electronic books this year. It seems solid. Seems. 

Our electronic book library come with a nifty computer program that lets us see a whole swath of things: who checked out what, which books are most popular in a month, how many minutes a student spent with a book open, how many pages they viewed, and so on, and on, and on. 

The program allowed me to ballpark how many of those 1,800 checked out books were actual titles checked out versus those which were the same title checked out by the same students over several periods. The new number drops closer to 730. A big difference. 

Of those 730 or so actual checked out titles, it appears as if only 40-50 were read in full. That’s the data I care about; the data I worry about.

Of the 1,800 books checked out, only 40-50 of them show as having been read in full. And, this is with me being rather lenient and giving credit for books close to done because I don’t know how many blank, filler, author biography, first chapters of other books, etc. are along with a title. Another wrinkle is that swiping through pages and/or skipping to the end of a digital copy registers as completed in the computer program. We do have the ability to see minutes read and could try and match those to pages read, but that’s a task I’m unwilling to tackle this Saturday morning. Suffice it to write, 40-50 may not even be a true picture of what was read electronically. The same principal applies to the physical books too. Just because they were checked out doesn’t mean they were read in full. 

If that caveat isn’t enough to question the solidity of that number, then consider that a large number of these “read” books were checked out for books clubs or whole class activities and were what I think of as forced checkouts: they were for class, not for idle enjoyment. The same applies to the physical copies that left the library. Many were for book club or whole class assignments and not necessarily for enjoyment reading. This stipulation applies to any previous year too, of course, which does nothing to change the trend. It’s moving down, not up.

Because I can only conjecture on who actually read what was checked out, I won’t lower that 4-50 total. However, it is one to be taken very lightly at best. Here’s the revised total for the current school year.

Current year: 6,050

Not as hopeful. 

It did manage to get the physical circulation numbers for the grade above ours, grade 7, for the last two years. Here are those.

2015-2016 school year 5,500 books circulated.

2016-2017 school year 4,000 books circulated.

Another drop off. Yes, the middle school offers electronic books too, but I do not have those numbers. Again, I can only conjecture, but I’d go with the same scenario as our own building and assume it’s a much smaller number than the physical totals and one that can be taken with a grain of salt.

A-LAR-MING!

The big question is why is the trend going the wrong way?

It’s not at all as if we’ve suddenly changed our teaching style, goals, or enthusiasm for reading. Education rarely changes quickly and a love of reading would be the last thing to leave or bones. No, we remain a department of eight Language Arts teacher and one curmudgeonly skeptical reading teacher, employing a Reader’s and Writer’s workshop model, who love our books. Love them!

Maybe there’s been personnel change? Yes, there’s been some turnover in personnel but not much. Insignificant. The district, school, and individual goals all remain the same: we want to foster natural readers and writers.

Can’t lay blame on our administration or librarians because they’re the same people who were with us over the last five years. They’ve been as supportive emotionally, professionally, and financially as anyone can expect.

What’s changed?

Well, this is where it all gets messy. Messy as heck, because who knows exactly? 

Possibly, students are buying more books at home, using the town library more, or passing on books they’re not likely to read again. Not that’d I wager on any of those instances as being the primary issues. Home life continues to evolve. We know many of our students have robust after-school lives, but that’s been true for many, many years. Home electronics present another possibility to why reading seems to be eroding, despite our efforts. There too, I wonder. Game systems, iPads, laptops, and personal phones have been in our community’s hands for years now. 

Though I may well be pilloried for this, I can really only point to one big change in our classrooms; and that is the introduction of iPads. We have had one-to-one (one iPad for each student) access for several years now at various grade levels, working from our high school down. This year was only our first year with each student having his or her own iPad for use throughout the school day. We did have them in sets for teams to access, but they were shared and not carried around all day by the students. The HS, depending on the grade level, has had them for 4 years now and some elementary grade levels for a year or two. Middle school has had them for 2-3, I believe.  In other words, there is some verifiable overlap between these devices and the circulation timeline presented in this article.

I know, I know. They’re a tool and not going anywhere anytime soon. Got it. And yes, every teacher set the tone for these tools. You can ask every student who enters your room to put them away to work with physical paper if you like. This does happen. It just...feels like a harder stance to maintain.

I’m not looking to debate the good or bad of the device. It does have some amazing capabilities and has allowed our students to do some terrific things because of them. It’s just that the downside, in this reading teacher’s opinion, is concerning. There’s no longer a barrier or distinction between home behaviors with devices and school behaviors because they're now ever present. The phone or iPad at home is for games, texting, researching, and reacting to it every time it chimes. While we watch strictly how students use them in school, their belief is that what they do at home is how to use them in school, and how to react to them in school. The iPad is sometimes more authoritative and commanding of attention than the teacher in the room. Think about that. If you doubt this, then think about that the next time you’re speaking with someone, your phone chimes, and you reach for it without thinking. 

Anyone who’s used an iPad for his or her reading knows the pitfalls. It truly is a challenge to remain lost in a book. Notifications intrude often and if there’s a moment of weakness while reading it becomes all too easy to decide to just “check on something”: email, FB, some Amazon product, etc.

This is not to blame the students. I’m no better at home sometimes, which is why I’ve moved back to physical copies of books exclusively the last two years. I can’t trust myself on an iPad to remain focused, to read and think deeply. 

Our response to this next year, as a department, will be an increase in sustained reading within the school day. We’re also planning to offer book-swaps and increased time for students to spend time investigating new, physical, copies of books.

Who knows, we may even have to explore the mindfulness of reading, the mental value that comes from focused, meditative-like engagement with a text.

Oh and please, before anyone tells me how people and kids are reading more than ever because of how much time they spend on their devices visiting sites and working on things, let me chuckle right now. 

It’s not true in my eyes and that’s for two reasons. One, I’m a self-admitted curmudgeon and skeptic. I say nay to things first and wait for proof to be convinced otherwise. Two, there’s a vast difference between glazing over swaths of words and actual, deep, even meditative, reading of words. It’s like saying that because kids are texting thousands of words a day, they’re writing more than ever. Nope, not sold. Besides, the trend appears to be moving to emojis only. Though I won’t use them (still -proudly- don’t own a phone), if I had to this article would end with a thumbs down, worried face, and giant question mark set of signs.

Everything I Need to Know About being an Educator I can Learn from a Book Published in the 1960's

Do you remember the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It was an

entertaining read that wasn’t without merit. Here are a few clever gems:

Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.

The book made for a fun read and had more than a few people who read it nodding in agreement with its ideas. I wouldn’t go so far as to write that we should hold these early-learned tenants to be truths because that’s not how day-to-day living goes. For better or for worse, adult life can never be shoe-horned into a kindergartner’s world.  It doesn’t mean the book and its ideas aren’t valuable and still have some credence today.

I refer to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten because I feel like I’ve had in my hands this last decade a similarly worthwhile book. Only this one, titled Principals and Practices of Teaching Reading, was aimed at defining how an educator should teach reading. More and more, I find myself pulling this particular book from a nearby shelf at work to thumb through and compare what’s inside to “the latest research” I am reading.

The book, yellowed and missing a cover jacket, was given to me by a former colleague who has since retired. I recall how heartily he laughed when he’d given it to me, explaining “everything you need to know about being a good reading teacher is in here, Ralph!”  He then slapped me on the shoulder playfully, enjoying his joke because it’d been published in the mid 1960’s. My colleague believed he’d given me something dated and laughable, what’d he’d actually done was handed me 563 pages of irony.

Initially, I remember chuckling for a minute as I perused the table of contents, seeing a section devoted to “Sex Differences in Learning to Read”. How quaint, even droll, such a title seemed as we generally avoid ascribing any significant differences between male and female readers. But, because I am a curious type, I did continue to examine this published work and try to understand just how outdated it actually may have been.

As it turns out, it wasn’t that dated then and it’s not that dated now. Not at its core principals.

Here’s a specific. I am midway through Educational Neuroscience edited by David A. Sousa and published in 2011. The book is an examination of how the various parts of our brains function and how understanding these can assist classroom instruction. I would call it semi-dense as a text as I’m sure many teachers would find the terminology a bit much while medical students would consider it a children’s book compared to what they need to know about the brain. The attempt is made by the writers to bridge the complexity gap and make it useful to educators.

At its heart, the book seeks to show with empirical evidence the brain science behind student learning. It aims to support general understandings with scientifically researched proof. Here are some examples from a chapter on adolescents’ brains: the burst of growth in the frontal lobes means that teens over-complicate problems, idealize the world, and say one thing while meaning another, teen brains are particularly susceptible to novelty, feedback improves the brain’s efficiency, and the development of the parietal lobes helps teen athletes improve their pace and teen musicians improve their beat.

Teens idealize the world? Teens over-complicate problems? Teens are susceptible to novelty? Are these conclusions really anything we don’t already know? Nope, they’re not. It’s old news. It’s the kind of “news” that makes you think and possibly even say, Well Duhhhhhh. These conclusions are –without doubt- statements of the obvious. And yet, the feeling I get from the text is that somehow earlier generations of educators had no clue about these teenage affects.

Now, I am not as narrow-minded as I might seem, because I do realize that the authors are actually sharing the science behind what we’ve always known and that doing such can be valuable. Pinpointing the specifics of where and how this happens in the brain can lead to possibly doing more than understanding it. Someday it may even lead to correcting deficiencies in these areas.

Right now though it feels the same way people knew that smoking was bad for us long before science proved it. And yet, this book and the many others so eager to share the latest research don’t quite present it this way. It almost never comes off as, Hey you know all that obvious stuff we’ve known forever about teaching and learning? Well we’ve found where and how it happens in your head. We’ve proven it’s not just a collective assumption anymore. No, too often, it’s delivered to audiences as if it’s some new discovery, one that will make the teachers of today so much better than those of before.

Here are some additional conclusions presented in the first half of Educational Neuroscience, which is as far as I’ve gotten to this point.

For successful learning, students must want to learn.

To be able to read heavy volumes of printed materials requires lots and lots of reading of many different types of reading materials.

Clinicians assert that helping children to acquire an awareness of sounds and representative letters that make up words has a direct correlation to reading comprehension.

Successful reading beyond the primary years can only happen if children have become automatic decoders and readers.

The brain stores new information by identifying patterns in it. As it receives fresh material, the brain searches its established neural networks for a background against which it can comprehend the new knowledge. Anything familiar –sensory information (like a remembered scent), a pattern, a relationship – will serve as a connection to information already stored in the brain. If the brain finds nothing on which to build, it abandons the new information.

Use a variety of formal and informal assessments to communicate with your students.

Interestingly, parental assistance should be kept to a minimum; homework is no time for them to hover.

Did you find yourself laughing some as you read? C’mon. You had to because there’s nothing new in those statements. Nothing any teacher hadn’t already concluded decades and decades before.

A little more fodder for the cannon…

Also provided in the book is an educational sequence for combined word decoding and spelling programs.  The authors have created a year by school year approach to developing reading in students. Check out how novel their plan is.

Kindergarten: Phonetic sounds produced by one letter and corresponding letter name and some sight vocabulary.

First Grade: Consonant and vowels sounds and the letters that make them, more decodable words, some exceptions, and an expanded sight vocabulary.

Second Grade: More complex letter patterns and common patterns for word endings are identified and applied to spelling and writing.

Third Grade: Multisyllabic words, unstressed vowels, and common prefixes and suffixes are found in reading and spelling instruction.

Fourth Grade: Latin-based prefixes, suffixes, and roots add to a growing vocabulary for reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Fifth through Eighth Grade: Words based upon the Greek language and other words found in content level texts and reading selections.

(Side thought: I do find it interesting that Latin precedes Greek for instructional purposes as I cannot fathom why this is recommended. Possibly, Latin affixes and roots are more easily recognized by readers than Greek forms? I digress.)

The Educational Neuroscience plan looks sensible. It may even look remarkably new to those of you who are in the early stages of your teaching career. But, as I’m confident you’re grasping by no, it is not novel.

In thumbing through my trusty 1960’s manual, Teaching Reading, I discovered that all of the aforementioned skills and steps for learning to read are noted within. There’s a section on phonics instruction in which the authors note that “data from recent studies have reaffirmed the position that instructional programs which include considerable emphasis on phonics result in higher achievement at the end of grade one than do programs which include significantly less phonics instruction.”  It would seem that those 1960’s educators already had a plan mapped out for themselves.

More thumbing along and reading uncovers a series of lessons and overviews regarding the regular and consistent instruction of sight words, word families, spelling, root words, affixes, and contextual meaning to students in the primary grades. Again, all of this agreed upon and spelled out in the 1960’s. No brain science needed to prove its validity or value.

One giant difference between the 1960’s list and the Educational Neuroscience list lays in the Reading Teachers insistence that reading doesn’t occur by grade or even age but by practicing and improving in all the components listed above as is natural to the student. The term “ungraded” is frequently used in the Reading Teacher, meaning to group students in classes not by age but by their present abilities and needs. In other words, students aren’t first or fifth graders but rather fall into a broader spectrum of beginning, primary, intermediate reading students.

So, even while the book’s authors note that teaching and learning phonics early on is important, they do not limit it to one grade. Yes, yes, it’s likely the Educational Neuroscience writers don’t think phonics are only taught in one year and never again, but there’s a clinical tone or message to not noting as much, to merely listing the type of reading instruction that should occur at each year because they’ve determined that this is exactly when the mind is best suited to learn it. They’re focused on age and grade and not on the diagnosed ability of the student at that time. It’s an important distinction in my mind, because it puts social promotion further back on the stove, onto the back burner, focusing more on advancing students only when they demonstrate ability with certain important reading skills. Think about it. How often have you felt like a student of yours could easily pass for one much lower or higher than the grade level you teach? It happens, and often at that. Wouldn’t it be nice to focus only on them and where they are versus how far from where they should be? This is the drive behind Writer’s Workshop. Students ae frequently paired to texts they can work with, regardless of their age or grade, and asked to show understanding using what suits them.

Before I move too far astray, let us see what my 1960’s book on teaching reading has to say about sound teaching practices and developmental steps.

The book opens with 14 principals of teaching reading. Most I list as a principal without its accompanying and expanding text. With a few, I will include both the principal and a modicum of textual support as given by the authors.

1.       Learning to read is a complicated process and is sensitive to a variety of pressures. Too much pressure or the wrong kind of pressure may result in non-learning. Reading is not the simple sum of its parts, because in every case the reader must be considered in the process and each reader is unique. Reading always involves the simultaneous application of a great number of mechanical skills and comprehension skills, all of which are influenced by the reader’s attitudes, knowledge, and past experience. Reading is a complicated process.

2.       Learning to read is an individual process. Even though all children in the lowest group have the common characteristic that they are poor readers, grouping them physically in the classroom and psychologically in the teacher’s mind is of negligible value unless the teacher adjusts learning situations to each child’s need for instruction.

3.       Pupil differences must be a primary consideration in reading instruction.

4.       Reading instruction should be thought of as an organized, systematic growth-producing activity.

5.       Proper reading instruction depends on diagnosis of each child’s weaknesses and needs.

6.       The best diagnosis is useless unless it is used as a blueprint for instruction. Diagnosis itself has no salutatory effect on the performance of the child tested. If diagnosis alone had salutatory effects, it would be possible to raise a child’s level of performance indefinitely by more and more diagnosis. It may be noted that extensive testing and metal filing cabinets full of individual folders do not necessarily make a better school. Testing in many American schools has become an end in itself.

7.       No child should be expected or forced to attempt to read material which at the moment he is incapable of reading.

8.       Reading is a process of getting meaning from printed word symbols. It is not merely a process for making conventionalized noises associated with these symbols.

9.       Any given technique, practice, or procedure is likely to work better with some children than with others. Hence, the teacher of reading must have a variety of approaches.

10.   Learning to read is a long-term developmental process extending over a period of years.

11.   The concept of readiness should be extended upward to all grades.

12.   Early in the learning process the child must acquire ways of gaining independence in identifying words whose meanings are known to him but which are unknown to him as sight words.

13.   Children should not be in the classroom if they have emotional problems sufficiently serious to make them uneducable at the moment or if they interfere with or disrupt the learning process.

14.   Emphasis should be on prevention rather than cure. Reading problems should be detected early and corrected before they deteriorate into failure-frustration-reaction cases. However excellent the instruction in our schools, some children will not profit from as much as others. The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.

Pause and look at these 14 principals to teaching reading. Do any of them really standout as dated or unfamiliar to you? They don’t seem that way to me. In fact, the majority are highly recognizable in so much of “the latest research” being cranked out. I remind you, in case you’ve not done the math, that this book, which I’m comparing on some level to Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, is quite close to 50 years old; and, quite likely, was not  the leading authority on teaching reading at the time.

I remember that the educational wave prior to SRBI was an emphasis on demonstrating how I differentiated instruction in my classroom. If you’ll recall items 2, 3 and 9, you’ll see that there’s evidence of our forefathers-in-reading keen understanding of the importance of differentiation. Possibly, however, you think I’m reaching. It happens. Therefore, in support of my claim that earlier generations of teachers grasped how important differentiation is to students and instruction, I note pages 301 and 311 in Teaching Reading which come under the heading “Differentiation of Instruction”.  Not long after this this section of reading comes an entire chapter devoted to “Individualized Reading”.

Clearly differentiation, which was being presented to me and my colleagues just prior to the SRBI wave as “the latest research”, was actually a lot newer in the 1960’s. And yet, there was such a rave and fervor for differentiation in all the workshops and publications at the time that one couldn’t help but assume it was brand new.

Today, the reading world is afire with talk of common core goals and RTI practices. If you’ll refer back to principal 14 on the list above, you’ll see that Teaching Reading writers already had a strong sense of how important prevention was to reading success when they wrote “The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.”

The list of items in Teaching Reading that pre-date the recent research findings I see in today’s professional publications is at once unsurprising, affirming, enlightening, and amusing.

Wow, this is a long (and I’ll fully admit rambling) read. For that, I apologize and will curtail all the rest I’d intended to include. I do hope that my intent wasn’t missed, because while it may seem like I was forever bashing one book while championing another, I was really working to underscore the strangeness that has become education today. Too much is trotted out as "new" when it's actually something old but proven and merely better defined or understood. It is not new and not going to save education.

Today, we feel we’re uncovering one amazing discovery after another when it comes to students and education. And yet, what we’re actually doing is affirming what’s been know long ago by pinning down the specifics of what we already knew to be true. Educational Neuroscience is a fine book and does uncover the mysteries to how our brains function and how students learn. The thing of it is... I'm not sure I really need to know it. What I need to know is what works with my students. The science and data behind it is just gravy.Like I wrote, everything I need to learn about being a reading teacher I can learn from a 1960’s textbook. 

Last curiosity. A quick search of this book turned up a 10th edition on Amazon. It seems like this book has had some legs over the decades. It'd be interesting to know how much they're evolved over those years given so much of what was written so long ago still seems worthwhile and relevant. 

Amazon Wants to Bury the Hatchette. It is to Laugh

I use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP, Amazon’s publishing arm) to self-publish my fiction writing; and as a result I periodically receive emails from KDP regarding any manner of items they believe important to share. Sometimes it’s an interview with a self-published author who has hit it big using KDP; sometimes it’s a list of tips for getting your work discovered; and sometimes it’s a list of improvements the company has made to its service.

Generally, I ignore what I receive from KDP. That is until a few weeks ago when I received an entirely new form of correspondence from them: a plea to me, as a KDP user, to email the CEO of Hachette Publishing on KDP’s, i.e. Amazon’s, behalf.

You can read Amazon’s letter here.

In reading the letter, one brimming with passion and multiple bolded sentences, I couldn’t help but laugh.

The crux of matter: KDP/Amazon believes that Hachette Publishing (a sub-division of Legardere) is charging too much for the digital versions of their newest book releases and Amazon would like for me, along with the rest of its self-published authors, to email Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch with the following points and requests.

• We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
• Lowering e-book prices will help — not hurt — the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
• Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle.
• Especially if you're an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

The letter also details the lengths Amazon had gone to in an attempt to meet on some middle ground with Hachette and work to lower the entry prices for its digital copies. Amazon noted that Hachette was found guilty of colluding with other companies to keep digital book prices unnecessarily high, that, in fact, lowering digital-book price points creates more profits because far more sales are made, and that a “healthy reading culture” needs cheaper reading materials to compete with other popular media forms.

Hachette, the letter explains, flatly rebuffed Amazon. Digital books prices, though far cheaper than physical copies, would remain the same. 

Hachette’s refusal to work with Amazon left Amazon no choice but to place sanctions against Hachette and its authors. That’s Amazon’s belief, not this author’s.

On first blush, the matter smacked of the usual exorbitant greed companies too often seem to have. Anyone who has even a sliver of understanding about digital versus physical copies understands that the former costs next to nothing to deliver to customers. 

Again, on first blush, Hachette comes off as both greedy and flat-out wrong.

So, what made me laugh?

Well, it was taking that half moment before deciding what to do next to pause and ask: What does Amazon have to gain from this letter campaign? They want me to believe, as a customer, I’ll be part of a group that topples a heartless company and trumps a wrong. Fact is, Amazon’s real gain is more obvious:  more book sales and therefore more money for them. There is also a secondary –almost as valuable- benefit, which I share later. 

Human skepticism runs stronger and stronger each year, it seems, and I’m confident more than a few of you reading this also questioned Amazon’s true motivations. Making money is after all what companies do. A company is an insatiable money earner and I believe we all grasp this. 

What’s amusing is that Amazon didn’t quite admit this in its letter. No, the letter was saturated with noble intent and sentences possessing a tone of good versus evil. To Amazon’s credit, they listed among their many solutions to getting Hachette to crack the following.

•  authors [would] receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved

• [Amazon] would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette's normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity

Hard to see why Hatchette would balk at either of these offers. Amazon seems awfully sincere, dedicated even to providing the best for readers everywhere. And yet, I was chuckling quite a bit at this point. 

Amazon is not leading a revolution with their Hachette letter. They’re manipulating the propaganda machine to their benefit. 

Amazon is a company; by definition this means profits are central to its being. Leading its customers and users to believe that it’s basically a white knight fighting solely on their behalf and not its own greed is silly. [For proof of this consult with my wife who heard me laughing several times as I read and reread the letter. Weak reasoning, I know, but I couldn’t resist.] Worse is that Amazon doesn’t admit that it would stand to earn quite the altruistic shot in the arm if it can lay claim to getting Hachette to lower its prices to the benefit of readers the world around. That second, unwritten, goal is the other benefit a company like Amazon hopes to gain from its letter campaign. Of course, it’s somewhat hard to embrace Amazon’s magnanimity when it’s calling for author works to be available to all and also cutting off Hachette’s books until it gets what it wants.

And so… amid chuckles I decided to write a letter to Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch, though not fully in the spirit Amazon asked of me. 

Hello-

As you likely know, Amazon is making a tremendous push to have independent authors(hacks, really) like me reach out to your company with the expressed aim of having you reconsider your stance of charging hardcover prices for electronic copies of the same title.

Initially, I was whole-heatedly in agreement with Amazon.

Of course, I'm not exactly balking one hundred percent either.

They are correct in noting that digital copies incur far less expense to make and send; and continuing to ask for hardcover prices in this instance is ridiculous. Amazon also correctly points out that in many instances lowering the price point results in more sales and more profit in the end.

However, that's where I begin to see altruistic flaws in Amazon's request of me.

Let's face it both of your companies are worried about the bottom line more than the customer. Amazon stands to profit a ton too with lowered price points on books coming from your publishing house and others. Honestly, I don't care which way your company goes with its prices. Business is business and I'm under no obligation to buy your product. However...

...it might interest you to know that I have in the past 3-4 years held a limit-to-what-I'll-spend-for-a-digital-copy attitude. Essentially, I'm unwilling to pay more than 9.99 for a digital book -with a very few exceptions for favorite authors. One, it is next to nothing for you or Amazon to get that too me. Two, I realize that digital amounts to "renting" not owning an item. When I buy a physical copy of something, that's forever. Not so with digital. Amazon can pull that copy right off of my Kindle or Amazon account. It's happened to others. Amazon could also go belly up. That's happened to companies too. So, I won't pay too much to rent.

In the end, the market will settle this matter. If I were a betting person, I'd say you'll end up lowering your price point. Buyers will make that happen with their dollars. 

Well, thanks for letting me drop my thoughts into your electronic well.

Somewhat sincerely,

Ralph

Yes, it’s a smart-alecky email and, no, I did not receive direct feedback from anyone at Hachette, but anyone who has half his or her sense can see through the true intents of Amazon’s letter. Or, so I hope. 

In time, I did receive a letter from Hatchette. Same form letter response, I’ll gather, every other KDP user who directed emails to Mr. Pietsch got.

You can read his reply letter here, but I bulleted the key ideas below.

Among the notable highlights of his and Hachette’s reply are:

• 80% of Hachette’s digital copies are sold below a 9.99 price point

• costs for printing, promoting, shipping physical books is off-set by higher digital price points
• digital piracy cuts into earnings

•  higher price points for specific titles come down with paperback version

• both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment

I put the last highlight in red because I cannot help but applaud Mr. Pietsch for being truthful with me where Amazon seemed to want to avoid that.  Amazon asked me, and its users, to run off like a pitch-forked mob and demand justice for Hachette’s evil practices; and that was uncalled for.

I do feel, as I wrote in my email to Hachette, that this will all settle itself with lowered price points in the end. Money speaks loudest to companies. If nothing else, Amazon’s letter has sparked a fiery discussion, one that doesn’t fool too many, however. Customers know what companies want –dollars and more dollars.

Some final notes:

On principle, I don’t agree with high price-points for digital copies of materials –especially because I truly do not own these “books”. I won’t get into too much detail here but pretty much any digital item one buys today is simply a long-term rental of that item. Amazon has removed purchased copies from customers before and can do so at any time. Unlike a physical book, which I can hand down from generation to generation, that’s not the case with digital versions. Thus, do I make every effort to buy items I wish to read at rock-bottom prices.

Also, on principle, I don’t have issue with companies and their modus operandi of earning profits. As written, that’s what they are and do. How can I find fault this? Where I find fault, and oodles of humor, is when companies work to paint that truth away and expects its customers to now know any better. Believe me,  I would have respected Amazon’s letter request far more if they’d just written: we want cheaper price points for all books because we want make more money. Oh, and, by-the-way, you too will benefit greatly.

Any other ploy…?

Well, it is to laugh.