The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading
wired.com
wired.com
I have no idea why I can't borrow an e-book from a shady .ru site on the internet if I want. Or a perfectly legit site in the .uk
Therefore there seems little reason to charge my physically local library an enormous amount of money other than to encourage piracy in order to discredit ebooks as a technology. Perhaps an alternative plan is to get local libraries out of the e-book business and keep e-books online (presumably tightly centrally controlled)
My local library used to do books, but now its a downscale free internet cafe, complete with vending machine coffee, along with being a homeless shelter and free day care operator. I think they still have about half their books. But in a business that's pivoted almost completely out of books and into daycare and related areas, I don't think the price of books really matters anymore.
It's illegal, and if you're caught you can be sued for millions of dollars. I'm no lawyer, but I think the maximum penalty for copyright violation is $150,000 per violation in the US. Even "borrowing" 10 books with your plan could land you with enough fines to wipe out your home (if you own one) and all your savings. It's one of those things where the chances of getting caught are small, but the consequences of getting caught are commensurately massive.
Are there any laws against illegal downloading? And, how is the average person supposed to know if Apple/Amazon/etc.. are legally allowed to distribute the content they are selling you?
Note that its hardly illegal to borrow from a federated library or do an inter-library loan using p-books.
Also lets confuse the issue. Lets say the shady .ru site is in fact a perfectly legal genuine gov't supported library, although "everyone knows" this branch specializes in inter-library xfers and loaning out ebooks to mostly foreigners. This is going to be a complete mess to enforce and is not illegal in any way.
And realize any attempt to close this "loophole" is going to totally screw up foreign exchange students. Thats another excellent loophole, lets say I am now a official, govt sponsored and fully legally documented online student of the university of Elbonia, eligible for all manner of shared ebooks from the official perfectly legal and govt sponsored U. of Elbonia library.
Also I'm unaware of any recent "headline grade" prosecutions for downloading. Uploading, sure. I'm not offering to loan my ebook copy of Red Storm Rising to someone in .ru, I'm borrowing his copy. He's the one violating a copyright, assuming he is in fact violating any copyright.
Steve Jobs was absolutely correct when he said to the publishing industry that if they didn't immediately create a low-price, convenient, electronic version of their environment to compete with those that didn't care about copyrights, that they would soon find themselves in the same place the music industry did.
Books are also much, much smaller than music, and so, it's pretty trivial to get all the books that you'll ever be able to read in a relatively small download.
Publishing industry is shooting themselves in the foot if they don't examine what happened to the music industry and start making adjustments, and soon.
At least the music industry had the convenient escape hatch of huge concert revenues to make up for the loss of CDs. The publishing industry has no such equivalent. Authors go on book tours, sure, but those tours are not exactly raking in the dough for themselves or their publishers; they're just marketing expenditures designed to sell more books.
With Book Sales - the equation is the exact opposite. 95% of Authors revenue comes from Book Sales - not movie rights/public readings/etc... If they let the digital market get away from them, it's going to kill them in a way that the music industry was able to find alternate revenue streams from.
Actually, I'm selling myself a little short here, because I'm only considering the fictional book publishing industry. If we include nonfiction categories, the alternative revenue possibilities open up even more. For instance, book authors get speaking engagements with fees that would put some bands to shame.
This is the major reason I can't recommend a kindle to my mother. She and her friends exchange books all the time, it's part of reading for her.
I'm going to spend thousands on books over the rest of my life, and it's very frustrating that I won't be able to leave those to my family when I die. Unless I break the law to remove DRM.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
Kindle is "smart" enough not to let the same book be read on multiple devices, which mimics physical books (you can't read a book that is not in your physical possession). Kindles are cheap, too. After about a dozen books or so you might actually save money even with a loaner Kindle.
I'm not disagreeing with you regarding the absurdity of ebook DRM, though. If you don't feel Kindles are ethically defensible, don't recommend them. If it's a convenience thing however, the two Kindle scheme might work for your mother.
Yes, a kindle is an expensive electronic device. The books are lent without any real expectation of getting them back, certainly without time limit. She receives from others, some books are returned, some passed on.
To effectively mimic that social pattern you would need one kindle per book, massively expensive (ebooks are seldom cheaper and the you have the device on top), environmentally unsound and just a really bad idea.
True, but that doesn't tackle the issue of price entirely. If we lived in an e-book only world you would have to spend nearly a hundred dollars before you could read a single book. That's not great. If the books were considerably cheaper it might be justifiable, but they aren't.
Sure, there's a small initial barrier to entry, in the sense that you have to have some device, where a paperback novel has no such constraint. On the other hand, how many paperbacks does $50 get you these days?
In a used bookshop? At least fifty.
Which is precisely the problem. eBooks destroy the very valuable (particularly in a societal sense) used books market.
The inability to re-sell ebooks destroys this secondary market.
Enough people bitched and complained, and now when you buy music on iTunes it comes with twice the bitrate and has no DRM. Why? Because it helped their sales. I made my first iTunes purchase the week they went DRM free, as their service was more convenient than digging up a torrent for an obscure album.
I think (and really hope) it's only a matter of time before the same happens with EBooks. If I could buy non-DRM epubs, I would do it all the time just for the convenience. It saves me having to dig it up on the internet, or fiddling around in Calibre to get the thing readable.
Tor (one of the largest sci-fi publishers) is now DRM-free: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/07/torforge-e-books-are-now-dr...
Apple has an effective monopoly on portable music players. They have lost some grip in the past few years with the popularity of Android phones that also play music. However, the iPod Classic owned over 90% of the market for hard-disk mp3 players and iPods collectively owned over 50% of the total market around the time iTMS dropped DRM. The remainder of the market was fragmented between Sony, Microsoft, and other players. That meant that FairPlay was your only option for selling DRM-encumbered music.
That gave Apple tremendous leverage over the music labels. Nobody was going to switch from an iPod to a Zune because it meant giving up a library of DRM-encumbered music. And nobody could sell iPod-compatible DRM-encumbered music without going through iTMS (which was already the only venue for selling to well over half the market).
So they did what any rational business would do: Start selling DRM-free music through Amazon (which people could play on their iPods) and push Apple to drop DRM from iTMS. It was actually quite funny to see everyone patting Apple on the back for "fighting for the little guy."
DRM-free ebooks aren't going to happen for a while because there are still too many vendors. Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, Sony, and others all operate ebook stores. If one ebook store gets too uppity, publishers can just take their books elsewhere without having to resort to the music industry's tactics.
But e-books are evil, an abomination and they price people out of reading? That is incendiary hyperbole with no foundation in fact. Incidentally, the guy is a lobbyist for libraries.
Yes, ebooks are different from paper books. They don't loan easily. They don't resell for charity well. They don't give a room that smell of paper, nor can you display them so house guests can see how smart you are. They do however have tons of other benefits. Things change. Problems appear, and so some people see an opportunity to write op-eds lamenting the passing of the world's glory, others try to fix them.
Libraries are a funny thing in a world where media is only artificially scarce, and the article doesn't even try to recognize this. If libraries allowed unlimited lending of all new books, nobody would buy new books because they can get the exact same experience from the library, so publishers obviously aren't going to allow that.
I know I'm in the minority, but I love having my own library. I would continue to buy new books regardless of the library's lending model because I enjoy having my own copy that I can re-read whenever I want to.
Reselling digital goods is a whole controversial topic. Since once you claim it all should be DRM free, you can't try to prevent cheating by controlling anything.
A library pays $15 for a physical book that requires re-shelving, index cards to be made and kept up, time spent searching when someone misplaced the book, floor space, shelving, off site storage, etc.
There's cost for storing ebooks too but a couple of Dell servers and a backup provider could handle even a fairly large library with less labor (probably the highest cost).
I don't know much about the library world so maybe $78 for an ebook is terrible but owning a thing isn't a fixed cost like the article pretends it to be.
(really I do buy physical books and refuse to use ebooks until this sort of shit is in the past).
http://www.overdrive.com/libraries/public-libraries/faq/
which is hosted by the vendor and branded for the library.
Your OverDrive digital library is a website that allows patrons 24/7 online access to a digital collection of eBooks, audiobooks, music and video.
> Ebooks are computer code [...]. We don’t buy them, we lease them.
This implies that books aren't licensed but they are. The paper and glue isn't but the text is.
> It’s for this reason that we should stop using terminology like “bestseller lists” — when it really should be “most leased” lists
Why not do this for paper books too? The copyrighted content in them is under a license to you.
> Buyers of physical books can do whatever they want with them
No way. Can I photocopy the book and sell copies of it? No. Can I write my own book using the books characters? No. Can I sell large quantities of them into foreign markets? No. Can I lend it to multiple people simultaneously? No, at least not without copying it which isn't allowed.
> ebook distributors have radically changed the pricing from that of regular books. [...] For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 [and for the ebook] libraries would pay $78.
Is that really such a radical change though? As the article later notes a library might buy as many as 80 copies of a major bestseller, which in this case is $1152. Yet the e-book is only $78. In order to compare these two numbers we need to know how many times the ebook can be lent out simultaneously, but that number is missing...
> Random House [...] limits the number of check-outs per ebook. This means libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold … as if the ebook had died or something.
Physical books will fall apart ("die") at some point, especially those paperback bestsellers. To make a fair comparison we need to know the ebook limit and the lifespan of a popular paperback, but those numbers are missing too...
> In fact, that’s the problem some authors have with ebooks — not just that they earn less money on them, but that “They never degrade. They are perpetual. That harms writers directly,”
It's a quote, but it contradicts the previous point! 'Ebooks are bad because they expire, no wait, ebooks are bad because the don't expire!' Which is it?
> These authors don’t mind the high prices charged to libraries because they don’t even like libraries to begin with. [...] books can be loaned out (for free!) many times, costing writers money from presumably lost sales.
Any evidence for this? It sounds a lot like the anti-piracy myth. Could people reading and talking about books perhaps boost sales? Do some authors in fact like libraries? Maybe they even spent some time there at some point?
> Most physical books in libraries aren’t tattered and worn out [...]
That's because the worn-out books have been shredded.
> Ebook consumers should be able to lend and resell ebooks the same way we do with physical books
Well, an ebook that is exactly like a physical book is an ebook that is artificially restricted to be lent out to one reader at a time. But that's what this article is arguing against. What exactly is the author advocating? What should an ebook be? That's the genuine question which goes unanswered.
You own the paper book. The words are protected by copyright, sure, but that's not the same as the restrictive lease that ebooks are subject to. Very different beast.
And then the lending provisions. You could lend your kindle to someone (giving them all your books rather than just one). With a paper book you can give the book away or lend it to people in a serial fashion for however long you want. The tech is clearly there (single, two week lends) but the terms under which it operates are far more restrictive than a paper book.
--edit-- I realise that I first said ebooks and now am referring almost exclusively to amazon. It's entirely possible that other schemes could allow transfer of ownership relatively easily. I'm not aware of any that do right now, but there you are.
You are perfectly welcome to share the medium itself (e.g. the ebook reader), it just so happens that with physical books, the medium lends itself (pun intended) to sharing.
Either way, you actually don't own the text in the same way, as amazon has demonstrated that they think they have the right to revoke your account and therefore access to the data.
There's a mixup in terminology here. We're not talking about lending the medium the book is printed in. We're talking about copying all the words over to someone else's machine, maybe with a promise to delete it on your own machine. The thing is, the right to copy the contents of a book is restricted by copyright and can only be done with the permission of the copyright holder.
So let's rephrase this to be more precise:
> The tech to lend or entirely transfer the contents of a paper book or an ebook via copying is clearly there (some books can be lent once for two weeks), you are operating in an environment where the vendor does not allow it.
And yes, exactly. Both for print and electronic books, copying the words and sending them to somebody is not allowed without the permission of the copyright holder.
You don't have to like the system, I certainly have issues with the system as it's set up. But it's perfectly obvious that under any standard interpretation of the concept of copyright, it means that the copyright holder has exclusive rights to the copying of the content. Lending ebooks involves copying, therefore it must be licensed by the copyright holder.
--edit-- also the fact that you can onmly ever transfer any data in electronic form by copying is an irrelevent implementation detail. The tech is there to transfer ownership, we are simply denied it by license.
Since they seem to effectively be worthless, ebooks at least give me convenience.