Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
[snip]
Publishing may catch on someday. We're at least beginning to see cracks in that ice.
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Dennis
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The recording industry was incredibly slow to adopt the new electronic media and distribution models and got burned horribly in the procress. Aiding that destruction of the older monolithic "recording industry" was the ability of many artists to get their music recorded professionally and distributed without the use of the record labels. What is left of the industry has just barely managed to salvage itself with its formerly huge ego bruised and battered but survivable.
But one very important factor in the whole recording industry debacle is that so many people listen to music and were willing to do whatever they had to to get the music onto the new portable electronic listening devices. So there was a huge potential market for the recording industry to adapt to.
The book publishing industry is much smaller than the recording industry and is even more bound (pun intended) by tradition than the recording industry. The book publishing industry is something like 600 years old (going back to Gutenberg -- much older of course if one takes into account all the hand manuscripts before the movable type printing press was invented) and the recording industry was only 100 years old or so when it had to scurry to save itself.
Far fewer people read books than listen to music, and listening to music is something many people do in far more varied settings than reading books is possible. You can listen to music while doing many jobs, while walking in the park, while exercising, while in bed with your eyes closed trying to fall asleep, while reading, while driving or riding in cars or public transportation.
Reading a book is only possible in a much reduced subset of situations where one can listen to music, so there is less public outcry for electronic distribution, and so far, less of an economic incentive for the publishing industry and authors to pursue electronic distribution. Adding to the problem for publishers is that they saw what happened to the recording industry, and are overly cautious about trying to find means of distribution which will protect their works from piracy.
Yet another complicating factor is that the court decisions (as opposed to provisions actually written into the copyright law itself) which have supported consumers' rights to convert audio into different formats (location shifting, I believe it's called, which allows a person with an LP or CD to record it to a cassette to listen in the car, or more recently convert it to mp3 files for use in a location where the originally purchased medium can't be used) or to record TV shows to watch at a later time (time shifting -- so you can watch a program which airs when you're at work and unable to see it) haven't been put to the court test to see if they apply to printed materials.
In other words, we don't know (at least I haven't heard of any court cases which have been decided) if it will be considered legal "fair use" by the courts for us to convert printed materials into electronic media in the same manner as has been decided for audio and for TV broadcasts.
It well may be the same (i.e. physical format to electronic format, or conversion among electronic formats) but we don't know yet.
And the publishing industry and authors are so worried about being burned the same way that recording artists and the recording industry and the songwriters were burned.
So I think it is important that we who are the early adopters of the ebook formats need to prove that it will be a safe market for the publishers and authors to move into by not downloading copyrighted materials we haven't paid for, and not sharing the files we have purchased with others beyond what is allowed by the companies we purchase from.
After all, Sony allows 6 devices (computers/readers) to be registered to the same account, so if there is a family of 4 who all have their own reader, they can share the books very easily if they have one account.
Other publishers such as Baen are going on the "we trust our customers" business model.
The whole thing is still so young that it will be a while before it shakes out. And while it does shake itself out, we have to remember that stealing is stealing even if done electronically and not actually depriving someone of a physical item which cost them money to produce.