I have to borrow p-books from my local library (plus or minus interlibrary loans).
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.
>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
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.
The tragic part (for authors, publishers, the writing industry in general) - is that there is absolutely no way to apply DRM to a book, and the electronic duplicate of it (scan) is a 100% faithful replica.
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.
The fallout is going to be worse here than it was for the music industry.
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.
The lending thing really gets to me. Why the hell can't I lend my ebooks to a friend? I'd lend them the paper book and there's nothing wrong with that, so why the hell shouldn't I be allowed to do the same with the bits I just 'bought'.
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.
Is there anything stopping her from just lending her Kindle? If lending is important to your mother, and she would like the convenience of ebooks, why not buy two Kindles: one for reading and one for lending?
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.
I think the fear is because of its digital format, ebooks can be lent en masse to unlimited numbers of people. Maybe there can be some sort of built-in transfer mechanism that would allow shared ebooks to temporarily leave the possession of its original owner to appear in the lender's presence. That emulates real-world books. Or would that be DRM?
"Amazon’s ebooks can only be read on Kindle devices, lent only once, and only for 14 days (and then only by someone in the Amazon Prime program, which of course costs extra)."
That's totally wrong. I'm not a Prime member, and I've lent a book. I also read Kindle books on my iPad using my Kindle app, and you could just as well use the Kindle app on any other Android/iOS/Windows 8 or RT device.
I also read Kindle books on my iPad using my Kindle app, and you could just as well use the Kindle app on any other Android/iOS/Windows 8 or RT device
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.
I remember when discussions like this happened all the time over Apples DRM music.
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.
Plenty of people were buying music from iTMS before they stopped using DRM. "Fighting the music industry for your right to DRM-free music" is just an example of the Jobs' Reality Distortion Field at work.
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.
There are quite a few services that offer non-DRM epubs. O'Reilly's online store[1] is just one example, and there are a lot more listed in Defective By Design's ebook guide[2].
I get the impression the publishing industry is lagging the music industry by at least a couple of decades on this. The latter's pretty much conceded defeat in the DRM wars, while the former's opened a whole new front, apparently because they just can't come up with any better ideas than to invade Russia in September.
Just like the music industry before it, publishing is slowly going DRM-free. Looks of books on Amazon have a note that says something to the effect of "Per the publisher's request, this book is DRM free."
His point is that ebooks and libraries are an unsolved problem. Fair enough.
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.
>>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.
So, the main complaint of the author (besides the pricing) is that e-books come with DRM. But fortunately not all, and DRM free e-books exist as well.
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.
I wonder how the cost of ownership breaks down over time.
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.
I'd be interested to know how library ebook lending actually works. Are the original files hosted by the library, or does the library instead pass some sort of time-limited token to the reader which the publisher redeems for a copy of the text? I don't know anyone who works for a library, and I've never borrowed an ebook from a library; I'd be obliged to anyone with domain knowledge who'd care to describe the process here.
Ebook pricing needs to be sorted out, but this article is wide of the mark. The author argues for ebooks to be identical to physical books, but forgets that physical books have restrictions too.
> 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.
>> This implies that books aren't licensed but they are. The paper and glue isn't but the text is.
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.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quanticle|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ghshephard|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dkokelley|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KC8ZKF|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seabrookmx|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fancyketchup|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ruska|12 years ago|reply
http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
[+] [-] aaronem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecopoesis|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mseebach|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RougeFemme|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shmerl|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] migrantgeek|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aaronem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahewson|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nasalgoat|12 years ago|reply
Since they seem to effectively be worthless, ebooks at least give me convenience.
[+] [-] panzagl|12 years ago|reply