email to sony about the connect store.

[Cpt. Tim]

Can you explain what kind of rights issues are involved in expanding the current paltry selection of ebooks availible on the connect store right now?

I understand there are issues, but you cite this as a rights issue between authors and publishers. Since there is a plethora of material out there that is available from other ebook publishers, i'm assuming there may be additional issues?

If a book or author has readily available drmed ebooks under another store, what would be the delay in securing those rights for the sony connect store?

In the event that the situation does not turn around and the addition of new material continues at its current rate or trickles to a stop entirely, what steps would sony be taking to ensure that our purchase of their product was worth while? I would suggest adding support for other formats of drmed ebooks to the readers firmware, or liscencing the use of the readers format to other ebook providers.

Can you give me some kind of timeframe in which you expect the situation to improve? As i've made a 350 dollar investment, i feel it should be a question of selecting what i would like to read, instead of scouring the connect store for something i'm willing to.

thank you for your time and attention.

Tim.


EDIT FOR THE FORUM: this may seem harsh but i've been burned by sonys horrible anti consumer practices as a company before. It was only this great product and its reasonable price tag that got me to break a long boycott of their products.

[RWood]

None of us can speak for Sony so what we say in response to your questions is, at best, our views alone.

Many of the books available in other formats on other sites for other readers have been produced over a number of years. Some of them may have sold well at the time they were produced and now just remain in the catalog since the cost to keep them around is very low. Sony and the BBeB format is quite new compared to the PDB, MOBI, or LIT format. The PDB (for Palm) is almost unformatted and most of what I have seen is in it is little more than a text file. These are very quick and easy to produce. The BBeB for the Sony Reader is far more complex and difficult to produce and many publishers may be reluctant to spend money for poor selling back catalog items that may not show good sales potential. Of current releases since the Sony Reader has been introduced to the US market, the CONNECT store has a very good selection. Not as extensive as Amazon has in paper versions but equal to most other ebook vendors.

Sony has recently introduced a line of low priced classics that start to fill the gap between the current releases and the books available at MobileRead, Gutenberg, FeedBooks, Munsey's, or ManyBooks.

Sony makes money (the reason they are in business) by selling the Reader and by selling ebooks for the Reader. As I have said elsewhere, I do not think that adding additional DRM formats to the Reader is in the future plans for Sony as this will remove a future income stream from them. The current BBeB DRM is a passive scheme that registers a Reader to an account and restricts the DRM ebook to a single account. Since most other DRM ebook schemes rely on either the credit card number of the user or a password, these would not work on the Sony Reader as it has no user input ability.

Sony is currently selling the Reader in the US only and (although I am not sure where you are) they may have rights for the US distribution only. We do not know any more about this part of Sony's operation. They seem to have plans for introducing the Reader in Canada from the rumors we have heard and perhaps next year to the UK and even other parts of the EU. Since they already have some books by Australian writers that market may also be in their plans. Given Sony's past support of their products I feel that there is an excellent chance that the Reader will be supported for many years to come.

I do not know and you do not state what you like to read. Many here have found satisfaction with the classics or with the great DRM free SciFi offerings from Baen or Steve Jordan. Munsey's pulp and Asian collections are wonderful. A lot is also available in HTML that can be quickly converted to LRF for the Sony Reader through such programs as HTML2LRF of BookDesigner.

I find that I have more selection for what to read than I have ever had before. There is more available for the Sony Reader today than I even dreamed about when I bought mine.

[Cpt. Tim]

i've found that although there are plenty of classics are availible for free, which is what i've populated my reader with. many best selling authors like chuck palahniuk or brett easton ellis have one or two of their books availible. I noticed that the sci fi pulp section is pretty engorged, and indeed, thats where a lot of money is. As for difficulty to produce, i'll have to take your word for it, but the members here seem to be doing a fanatastic job working from project gutenberg texts. I also assume the publishers provide sony with the raw text. I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect a major ebook store to have fight club, or american psycho, or even more than 1 out of any 10 current and well selling books i feed into the search field.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Cpt. Tim

I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect a major ebook store to have fight club, or american psycho, or even more than 1 out of any 10 current and well selling books i feed into the search field.

That may be the catch: I'm not sure Sony can yet be counted as a "major e-book store" yet... they are very new in the game. Add to that the very slippery slope that is e-book selling, and it's not surprising that Sony's progress to become a major e-book seller has been slow and unimpressive thus far. Give them, and the e-book market, some more time to develop, and Sony's fare may look much, much better soon.

(O' course, they're still not returning my calls...)

[HarryT]

Are you really short of books to read? I feel personally that I have enough books to keep me going for several lifetimes!

[dhbailey]

I, too, have more books than I'll ever read, lined up. Of course, many that I think I might be interested in may turn out in reality to be deleted after a few pages.

But I think the ebook marketplace which Tim is complaining about is going to take a while to catch up. Just as the paperback marketplace in bookstores often needs to catch up.

There are lots of authors which I have found over the years who have been published for more than 10 years and have a fairly nice back-catalog of books, and when I go to order books not on the shelves, I get told by Barnes and Noble or Border's that the books I want haven't been released yet. What they actually are saying (although their computer screens don't indicate this) is that the original printings are out of print and the publishers are gradually bringing the books back into print, as they feel the marketplace will bear.

Publishers are in business to make money. Plain and simple. They are not here to further the culture, they are not here so that we can read our favorite authors except that by publishing our favorite authors they can sell us the books.

The publishing world is firmly entrenched in the manuscript-to-printer-to-binder-to-distributer-to-bookstore-to-customer business model. It's how they've done business for hundreds of years. Once a book has been printed, those plates aren't stored for future printings -- they're melted down and used for new books. So when they reprint books, it has historically involved a large expense in having the book typeset again, then going through the whole printing/binding process, etc. Publishers need to know they will recoup their expenses and make a profit on that process.

In this electronic age, the printing/binding/distributing expenses are minimal and since authors are expected to submit their works as digital files (I'm sure some of the big-name best-selling authors who want to send in typescripts are allowed to do so, but the up-and-coming new authors had better be digital or be damned), the time and expense in getting them ready to print is much less, and once done, there is no need ever to do it again, as the digital files can be stored forever (we won't get into the longevity of various storage media here). And that means that creating various ebook formats isn't all that time consuming anymore, either.

But I believe it is the publishers who do the conversions, not the on-line retailers such as Connect. Publishers want to know that their materials will be presented as they wish, and not left to the whims of a third-party. So they need to know that they will make a profit from a particular format before jumping whole-hog into converting back-catalog books, since many of those will need to be either scanned from printed versions, or manually entered into the computer, having originated as typescripts and not as digital files when originally submitted.

So, in the words of the immortal tv show Kung Fu, "Patience, little grasshopper."

And buy those books so that the publishers know there is a marketplace and will be encouraged to make more of their works available in Sony Reader format.

Project Gutenberg is terrific, but it will not get the next Spenser for Hire or Robert Ludlum book onto the Connect website. It won't even get the next reprint of an Agatha Christie copyrighted book onto the Connect web-site.

The only way to get those books and lots more onto the Connect website is to convince publishers that they can make money from putting their content there. So e-mail the publishers of your favorite authors and e-mail the authors themselves and tell them that you and your credit card are waiting for their offerings to appear.

[dhbailey]

One more thought -- as with each new technology, it is the early adopters who bear the expense of proving there is enough of a marketplace for more and more people to make money from. And that means that early adopters, should they wish the technology to stay around and improve, and have more content appear also, need to spend more money than people will eventually need to spend, just to convince the content providers and the technology providers that the marketplace has reached critical mass and isn't just a blip which will be gone in a year.

[HarryT]

Where we differ, perhaps, is that I don't see the "Reader" as a way of reading modern paperbacks. I've never been one for the latest "diet craze" or whatever it is that 90% of the books in the "best seller" list are about.

For me, the primary reason for buying the Reader was as a platform for reading books which I can't easily go out and buy as paperbacks - mainly books which 99% of people have never heard of which have been out of print for a century. I loath reading on a computer screen, but the Reader gives me a way of reading these completely unobtainable books in a format which is a close approximation to reading on paper.

There's one exception to that - I'm a big fan of SF and Fantasy, and those I buy as eBooks from Baen.

Perhaps I'm just wierd but, you see, for me it's irrelevent what books the "Connect" store does or doesn't stock, because I don't use it.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by HarryT

For me, the primary reason for buying the Reader was as a platform for reading books which I can't easily go out and buy as paperbacks - mainly books which 99% of people have never heard of which have been out of print for a century.

I think we can ALL agree on the fact that we desperately wish there was a way to get that older, out-of-print, "we'll reissue it when we get round to it" content that the publishers are sitting on, and get it digitized for us to obtain and read whenever we want. I believe there's a market point the publishers are waiting for, when they'll see it as profitable for them to make the effort to digitize their catalogs (the next great jobs market for the Third World: Retyping English manuscripts!) and get them out there.

The big question is, are they waiting for "the iPod of Readers," or a percentage of the consumer base, or a particular marketing group (probably the 15-35s) to go for it? And how long will we have to wait?

[LBalsam]

I recently attended a presentation by and spoke with one of the Sony's Reader evangelists.

He made it quite clear that the hold up is on the publishers' side. The publishers are terrified that the intellectual property they have made substantial investments in will end up posted on the Interest. Many publishers do not like the e-book business model because they are somewhat marginalized.

Book publishers may have had previous experience with DRM being broken and the content posted to the Internet. This makes them much more cautious when Sony approached them.

One thing I like a lot is that Connect has some books that are otherwise out of print. I hope to see a lot more of that. If the publisher does not feel another printing is economically justified, it seems logical to allow it to be published electronically, it does not threaten the sale of out of print books.

They have added over 3,000 titles in the last few months. According to their rep Sony is working with as many publishers as they can to make as many books as possible available as soon as possible.

If you want more books available for sale, keep buying them. If the publishers see this as a viable income stream they will continue to add books.

Downloading free books, legally and illegally does nothing for the publishers and provides no incentives for them to make more books available to Sony.

[Xenophon]

Did you get contact information for the Sony Reader Evangelist? There're a few points I'd like to get through to such a person.

1. First, a source of content for them. Baen purchases non-exclusive electronic rights from their authors. That means that all of those books are also available to any other e-seller who wants to make a deal with those authors and their agents. Thus, you see many of those books also available on Fictionwise (for example). Going this route would give them access to several hundred SF and Fantasy novels, including a number of NYT bestsellers. The downside is that they'd have to compete with Baen's "low prices and no encryption" e-sales model.
2. Nextly, I don't use the Connect store at all. Because I can't! They can't be bothered to support the Mac, so I'm locked out of doing business with them. And I'm certainly not going to spend money on a windows machine (or on parallels and Windows) just to get access to the connect store. I'd remind them that many market studies indicate that Mac users have higher average disposable income than PC users, and that Mac users average about 2x the online purchases made per year. So the "mac share" of their potential market is at least 2x what the percentages look like if you only consider the hardware numbers.
3. Lastly, I'll never purchase another encrypted eBook. I've been through the process of being orphaned twice so far (once with an RCA/Rocket eBook, and once with a proprietary music device), and I refuse to risk it again. I know from other avenues that Sony is willing to sell unencrypted content. I'd appreciate it if they (a) hurried up with making some of it available, (b) clearly marked which content is encrypted, and which is not, and (c) made it easy to search for ((whatever-else-I-wanted) AND not-encrypted), so that I don't even have to look at the encrypted offerings.

Until the last two items are addressed, it's :behead: for the Connect store, as far as getting any of my money goes.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by LBalsam

I recently attended a presentation by and spoke with one of the Sony's Reader evangelists.

He made it quite clear that the hold up is on the publishers' side. The publishers are terrified that the intellectual property they have made substantial investments in will end up posted on the Interest. Many publishers do not like the e-book business model because they are somewhat marginalized.

If that's so, we probably shouldn't expect the publishers to sign on until they figure out how to get their desired piece of the pie... or until they see that they have no choice.

It's true, e-books will certainly take some of the power and control of the industry out of the hands of publishers. Unfortunately, that is the price of progress, and the only thing that can be said about that is, the publishers aren't the first industry to be turned upside-down over progress, and they won't be the last.

However, the sooner they figure out how they can survive and thrive in the face of change, the better for them... and, by extension, for us. It would seem that they would benefit from dedicating a unit to converting their old catalogs for e-book sales, even if it is as a loss-leader. But as such an effort would stil require printed text transcribers and proofers, then a file conversion department, even that isn't going to be cheap for them.

Still, publishing evolved to handle the first mass-printed books, then they evolved to handle paperbacks, and again to digitally process books. They can evolve again. They just have to make the effort, and bite the bullet if necessary.

[Bob Russell]

Why do I wonder if the publishers' next step will be to create an e-book catalog of paper book titles offered? And odds are they will DRM it!

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Why do I wonder if the publishers' next step will be to create an e-book catalog of paper book titles offered?

For a second, I thought you meant an e-book that would be just a list of paper titles!

But at least that idea would be a start... after all, they will at least learn how to roll out the content that way. But as we know they are concerned about losing said content to hackers, that's why I think starting out with older materials would benefit them better:

• They make (at least a little) money on otherwise-profitless libraries of material;
• They work out their e-book processing/distribution/sales system;
• They can try old material in non-DRM, and get a better idea of how to live in a non-DRM world.

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

For a second, I thought you meant an e-book that would be just a list of paper titles!

Yep, exactly what I did mean! <But with tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course.>