The used pbook conundrum

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by KenJackson

O'Reilly, which many consider to be the top-of-the-line in computer books, sells all their ebooks with NO DRM, yet they sell them at the same high prices they sell their paper books for. Excellent stuff will fetch a high price, even when it's possible to steal it.

Has there been any studies by either O'Reilly or others that has looked into the impact their position on DRM has affected sales of pBooks?

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by KenJackson

After I bought my Sony Reader, I made the decision to attempt to buy all books as ebooks. It's just more convenient to read my Reader.

If I want a specific book (meaning it's not available at Smashwords) I typically find it on one or more ebook sites and then take a look at Amazon to see how much they're selling used pbooks for. Often, the book I want is available for less than a dollar + $3.99 shipping. So I have a choice: buy my preferred format for $9 to $20 or buy a like-new used paper book for $4 to $5.

It seems like about half the time anymore I end up with the paper.

I don't care that someone has already read it and it's a little banged up. And I do appreciate the lower price. But the irony Irritates me a little.

Yeah, I find myself in this exact spot quite frequently. I would much rather the author get the sale, but sometimes the price difference is simply too large to ignore. And if I haven't read the author before, well, the used book is going to win hands down if it is cheaper.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Irony?

Why not just buy the printed book, download the ebook from a torrent site, and then burn the printed book when it arrives in the mail? It would save you the trouble of scanning the thing yourself...

Or would it be more ethical to give the printed book away??

An Ethical problem with that is that when you Leech (Download) a torrent you are also seeding it (Uploading it for other people to download, this makes torrents much faster than regular downloading), so you are also helping other people who may be doing it without owning any version of the book/movie/whatever.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

That has always been the situation, or have you previously believed to own anothers words? Regulations and laws only serve to restrict our reading habits, not increase them, and therefore they should be disregarded.

You're buying the right to read the book, if the author doesn't want you to read her/his book because you didn't pay for it they should have the RIGHT to do that. In my mind that is one of the simplest things to understand, getting paid for you work.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

You're buying the right to read the book, if the author doesn't want you to read her/his book because you didn't pay for it they should have the RIGHT to do that. In my mind that is one of the simplest things to understand, getting paid for you work.

I don't believe that is a good way of looking at it. Should we not compensate creators for producing texts that we enjoy, while at the same time allowing universal access to all texts? Placing texts behind a paywall does not seem morally sound.

We allow for private texts, private communications, but uploading to one of the myriad text depositories already available on the network should by any ethical standard place the text into a postmodern public domain...

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

You're buying the right to read the book, if the author doesn't want you to read her/his book because you didn't pay for it they should have the RIGHT to do that. In my mind that is one of the simplest things to understand, getting paid for you work.

I can borrow a book from a friend and read it without giving the author a cent. There is nothing wrong with doing that, and the author has no say in it whatsoever. I can do the same with pretty much every other inanimate object my friends own. The lawnmower company can't stop me, and neither can the author. You're going down a dark path if you want to start making it wrong to borrow stuff from each other.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by KenJackson

But there's a difference between a new and used pbook. The used one is a little scuffed up, might be marked up and might have coffee spills on a few pages. Few people would give a used pbook as a gift. You can sell it because you're not selling quite the same thing that was originally sold, and after each sale its quality decreases until after a while it "gets used up" naturally by wearing out.

But ebooks are totally immune to coffee spills. If there were no limitations on reselling, the same copy could be sold and sold and sold. Artificially limiting resales to a certain number could be done, but to what end? It would be an attempt to make an ebook behave like a pbook.

Reselling ebooks bears some similarity to recording a movie you received over cable (you paid for it, after all) and reselling it.

If the free market is allowed free reign, ebook prices will drop and there will be little incentive to resell them. Already, Smashwords authors sell books at a fraction of what bigger name authors sell them for. And that site seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. I see promise in that.

A good hardcover book can last 100 years. Try opening a digital text file from the late 80s or early 90s. I will again reference the 4-5 hours I spent trying to find something that would properly open my dad's stories... .doc files, but from (probably) WordStar for DOS.

I had some old powerpoint files from my company that would no longer open in Powerpoint, even Powerpoint via Office XP I installed in a virtual machine. Digital files have a high rate of obsolescence.

IMO Digital files are probably more likely to be useless in 20 years than a hardcover is. .azw and .epub files from today's ebookstores will not necessarily be openable on a modern device in 20-30 years - or it may require a large amount of processing or conversion. And that's assuming you don't have any DRM to fight. A hardcover, though, if well-treated, will surely still be usable then.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Should we not compensate creators for producing texts that we enjoy, while at the same time allowing universal access to all texts?

You're floating around at 50,000 feet. I have a few questions about your sentence above that may help ground the conversation.

1. Who are the "creators?"

A member of my wife's family is an editor who has both worked as a publisher employee and as a freelance. And there are published books where she is more the author than the person on the cover. As Alfred A. Knopf Sr once wrote, Today authors submit manuscripts and editors write books. Always? Certainly not. But given that this possibility must be sorted out for each book, I believe that there has to be a sorter, and, if the book isn't self-published, the sorter has to be the publisher. No one else is in a position to pay the various people involved in creating the book, such as the author, editor, agent, translator, sundry assistants, graphic designers, and any finance people who figured out how much of an advance was affordable. Agreed?

2. Who is "we?" Everyone on earth? All literate people? Or just people in the most prosperous English speaking countries? If the latter, they already have near-universal access through inter-library loan. All it takes is patience.

3. What does enjoyment have to do with it? If enjoyment just means that someone finished the book, how is the government going to figure out which books really get read, as opposed to people just downloading books because they like what the author stands for politically, and want to give him or her money without actually reading the book?

Placing texts behind a paywall does not seem morally sound.

What is so special about getting a text right away in the format that you personally prefer? Surely a right to free medical care, free food, and even free dental implants would come before free texts. I'd say that getting your reading material, instantly, in the preferred format is a nice to have luxury item way down of the list of stuff government could provide if it, one day, has some revenue to spare. The only immorality comes into play when a government makes it impossible to get the text, which brings back the question of who this "we" is.

by any ethical standard place the text into a postmodern public domain ...

Your ethical standards are not the only ones possible.

P.S. After all the above negativity, Giggleton, I just want to thank you for bringing up what I consider real issues concerning how the internet challenges existing economic models for publishing. I admire willingness to stand up for what you believe even when your ideas are unpopular.

[KenJackson]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

IMO Digital files are probably more likely to be useless in 20 years than a hardcover is.

You make some good points, though you're talking a slightly different angle than what we've been discussing.

I couldn't find it just now when I searched, but a few years ago, Spectrum Magazine had an interesting article about archiving data in general that's along a similar line. The author asked if we've ever seen any clips from Superbowl One. No? If you never have, then you never will. It seems both of the broadcast companies that filmed it accidentally destroyed their films. There is no record of that momentous sports event.

We can't take for granted that any data we have today will be usable in the future unless we take precautions. If I recall, he discussed acid paper, electronic media and digital formats--all very worthy of concern.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

I don't believe that is a good way of looking at it. Should we not compensate creators for producing texts that we enjoy, while at the same time allowing universal access to all texts? Placing texts behind a paywall does not seem morally sound.

We allow for private texts, private communications, but uploading to one of the myriad text depositories already available on the network should by any ethical standard place the text into a postmodern public domain...

I have a suggestion for you --- let us all just not work. We will create a society where we will all do whatever we want and just get everything we need by borrowing money from the Greeks. Sound good to you?

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

A good hardcover book can last 100 years. Try opening a digital text file from the late 80s or early 90s. I will again reference the 4-5 hours I spent trying to find something that would properly open my dad's stories... .doc files, but from (probably) WordStar for DOS.

I had some old powerpoint files from my company that would no longer open in Powerpoint, even Powerpoint via Office XP I installed in a virtual machine. Digital files have a high rate of obsolescence.

IMO Digital files are probably more likely to be useless in 20 years than a hardcover is. .azw and .epub files from today's ebookstores will not necessarily be openable on a modern device in 20-30 years - or it may require a large amount of processing or conversion. And that's assuming you don't have any DRM to fight. A hardcover, though, if well-treated, will surely still be usable then.

That's a fair point, though I believe it'll be less of an issue in future, because open formats like ePub are more common. An ePub file is a zip file containing text files (HTML, XML etc are text files). It can contain images, but if they are PNG or SVG format then they are also open standards.

The problem with your Powerpoint and .doc files is that there is nothing to tell anyone how they are formatted. With open formats, there is documentation on how to open them, and that documentation should still exist in 20 years. Worst case, you'd have to hire someone to open/convert the files for you, but in that case, the person you hire wouldn't be working on a black box, they'd be working on a documented file format.

I'm not saying that everything's rosy and there won't be any issues, but I do think that the issues will be much less significant where open file formats are concerned. One big problem in my opinion is DRM - once DRM is applied to an ePub file, it stops being an open format.

Personally, I've got a Kindle, so most of my books are in mobi format, which is a closed format. Right now, I'm not too worried because Calibre can convert them to pretty much any format I wish. As soon as Calibre loses that capability, I'll convert them all to ePub so that I have them in an open format.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Has there been any studies by either O'Reilly or others that has looked into the impact their position on DRM has affected sales of pBooks?

The average person/reader is largely unaware of DRM or what it means. I'm on a few cozy reader forums and when the subject comes up, most people don't care. They buy from their 'provider'--so if they own a Nook, that means B&N. Kindle, they buy from Amazon. Some have run into DRM by buying from the wrong retailer. They sort of have an understanding that they can't do that. But they largely stay loyal to the retailer where they purchased the device or quickly understand they can't shop around and don't care. I used to offer my books at a discount via smashwords when they first came out (as ARCs while the cover was being chosen.) I thought it a clever marketing strategy. What I go was a lot of emails. "Why won't this load to my Kindle directly? I can't do that side load thing. It's too much trouble." Or "I downloaded the wrong file and it won't load." And so on. It meant more customer support on my part than sales. And I felt bad for readers who thought they could just hit download and sat there there waiting for the book to appear on their Nook or Kindle.

I use Nook and Kindle as examples because those who own Sony and/or Kobo or other devices tend to understand side loading and how to do it.

Those who buy a lot of books or those on this forum have a pretty clear understanding of DRM and try to avoid it where possible, but I'm not sure that mobileread represents the average/sale/buyer. Or it could be that I sell into the cozy market and that market is largely 50 and older women who don't want to spend a lot of time mucking with the computer. They are avid readers, but they love the one-click.

I did not, however, notice a different trend with my urban fantasy books. It doesn't seem to sell into the cozy market, but my sales are still largely from the two retailers mentioned above. A good portion of my Smashword sale are still international ones.

I'm just one data point however, but from the discussions I've seen (NOT on this forum) most people kind of know what DRM is (I can't buy anywhere) but don't care very much.

[BearMountainBooks]

Re: Surveys and DRM. Here's one done for a blogger's thesis that happens to include some questions about DRM:

http://thebooksmugglers.com/2012/05/...e-results.html

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

You're floating around at 50,000 feet. I have a few questions about your sentence above that may help ground the conversation.

1. Who are the "creators?"

2. Who is "we?" Everyone on earth? All literate people? Or just people in the most prosperous English speaking countries? If the latter, they already have near-universal access through inter-library loan. All it takes is patience.

3. What does enjoyment have to do with it? If enjoyment just means that someone finished the book, how is the government going to figure out which books really get read, as opposed to people just downloading books because they like what the author stands for politically, and want to give him or her money without actually reading the book?


What is so special about getting a text right away in the format that you personally prefer?

Your ethical standards are not the only ones possible.

1. Well, when you get right down to it there is only one creator... No one else can actually create anything. But I suppose it is fine to attach one account to each book and let the creative team dispense any compensation as they see fit.

2. We is anyone who has access to the network, the connection makes us one. The digital promises instantaneous communication, placing artificial time constraints on access, underutilizing the technology for supposed monetary gain, that is immoral and thus we are free to access as quickly as we see fit.

3. Our ereaders already track our reading, it would be trivial to deduct money from our Amazon et al. accounts if we spend more than an hour or so reading a book.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

We is anyone who has access to the network, the connection makes us one. . . . Our ereaders already track our reading, it would be trivial to deduct money from our Amazon et al. accounts if we spend more than an hour or so reading a book.

For a guy who started out sounding almost like an anarchist, you now seem awfully corporate. I don't claim this to be a defect in your thinking -- it could be more a reaction to defects in the thinking of people like me. However, I do want to point out that the internet is no longer a sole possession of countries where a distributor who aspires to distribute almost any text, regardless of political content, such as Amazon, would be allowed to operate freely. See:

Top 20 Internet Countries


An Amazon which has the powers you propose to give to it sounds to me like the great firewall of China on steroids.

The alternative? It's messy and inconsistent and actually not far from where we are moving.

P.S. Yes this post is way too political! Me bad!!! But maybe if we are really, really polite to each others, and try to keep at least some focus on books, the powers that be won't immediately intervene.