Could lack of piracy be the e-book's demise?

[yagiz]

Originally Posted by GlennD

when MP3s were starting to become popular

I think it is a flawed logic to compare mp3 and e-books. One is a file format after all. And this is, in my opinion, the key to its success. It is a common format. When DRM-free, you can play your mp3 in (mostly) any music device sold today. We need a common base for the e-readers and tools (software) to work with. We need it to be accepted by the industry. Rather than trying to dominate with their own formats, they should see where this might lead.

What's Amazon's business plan? To sell as many Kindle's as they can? Or to sell as many e-books as they can? Currently, it may be both. But it shouldn't be the Kindle sales that they target... not in the long term... Do they have to make money on each Kindle sold? More Kindle distributed translates to more e-book sales. I think they should try to make money on e-book. But because it's very early in the e-book revolution, the focus is in the wrong place... From that angle, I see the couple e-reader/e-book less like iPod/mp3 but more like console/video-game. The constructors don't make money on their consoles, they make money on the games...

[yagiz]

Pirating an e-book is nowhere as easy as pirating mp3 files. Lack of common format prevents them to become consumable immediately. Most of the time, there's some transformation/conversion required.

Regardless... Most people are not interested in piracy anyway. They cannot be bothered. It's not rocket science but it's not something available to everyone.

Additionally, as some other people put it, the demographics are totally different. As an experiment, let's say we have 3 shops:

1) Game shop
2) Music shop
3) Book shop

If we leave them unguarded for a few hours, which one's merchandise would be targeted by common thieves?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by yagiz

Additionally, as some other people put it, the demographics are totally different. As an experiment, let's say we have 3 shops:

1) Game shop
2) Music shop
3) Book shop

If we leave them unguarded for a few hours, which one's merchandise would be targeted by common thieves?

I know where I'd go... I tend to not enter that specific shop as I know that shop will create a huge hole in my wallet... I will enter it again once our Lounge is finished (and I need to fill a lot more shelves!)

[basschick]

i personally know bands that got radio play and labels and had to keep their dayjobs to pay the rent. for that matter, death metal legend immolation and horror punk icon the misfits members all have day jobs to pay their bills.

i am happy to buy books and ebooks, knowing that part of the money goes to the author regardless of the author's financial standing. i only wish more of it went to them, and that they were paid on time and correctly. i'd love to see an author's coop publishing company!

[stezza]

Originally Posted by yagiz

Hmmm... Could there be a market for Amazon here? "Buy a Kindle, return us your old books and you can download their e-book versions"... I wonder whether that would work...

It's the only way you'd be getting me to buy a Kindle. I'm not buying the books I love AGAIN, just to have them in electronic form.

The talk of piracy and who does or doesn't get paid is missing the whole point. You won't make the Kindle the next "must have" gadget if you can't already port your whole collection on to it! This is the only thing stopping it from selling millions of units.

Should Amazon institute a "send us your books and then download the free electronic version?" Probably. Will they? Probably not.

Steve

[tdavie]

I bought my first ebook the other day. Not from Sony or Amazon, but directly from an author. In unecrypted format, so that when the time comes for me to buy a new e-ink reader I can shift the format.

I'm not going to lie or pretend otherwise; I've downloaded a few hundred ebooks that have had the DRM removed.

I simply will NOT buy media with DRM any more.

There's plenty out there for me to read, and plenty more I would like to see on an ereader (about 10 magazines and probably that many newspapers), but they don't publish in e-format or they are DRM'd. Naw, e readers will take off and in a big way. Not quite yet though. And it will be without DRM.

It's only a matter of time until there is a standard format.

Tom

[zerospinboson]

1. Form/content confusion, causing people to feel that reading .mobi files is qualitatively different from reading books
2. "pc screens don't read"
3. Availability: a minor issue.. I'd say most (mainstream/popular) fiction can be found in some form/translation or another by now. Way back when, music really wasn't that easily found either, esp. if you weren't looking for Britney.. People were just more willing to invest time in order to search for it. (although they might've become blasé by now)
4. reading takes time, PCs are multifunctional -> people are distracted more easily
5. "owning" books (that is, displaying them on shelves) is more about exhibitionism than about owning the content.. as Baudrillard pointed out, we are defined by what we consume. (relates to #1)

As for standard formats, I doubt that matters much, as long as enough is available in the same format (kindle).. What's more annoying is the fact that quite a few texts that *are* readily available lack layout (PG, .txt files) and as such look like shit (Rather than a book)

[Penforhire]

Hmm, lack of piracy seems to be related more to lack of cheap e-readers than lack of pirated source material. MP3's got popular not just because of the common format but also because the players were relatively inexpensive, at least at the bottom end. As soon as we get as many students with e-readers as there are DAP (digital audio) devices then book piracy will take the exact same center stange as MP3's.

[bob315]

Several recent threads have gotten me wondering about a slightly different ebook pricing model. Since the cost of producing and delivering one additional copy of an ebook is so low, could publishers/vendors adopt a steep volume discount and succeed?

If, e.g., a reader buys 10 books a year from a publisher at a total (retail) price of $100, would the reader be tempted by an offer of $200 for the entire year's output by that publisher? The publisher would double its revenue and the reader would have many more books to choose from. Seems to me like a win for both sides.

[KenFisher]

Most of the 600+ ebooks I have were purchased directly from Baen. I purchase each month's books from their site directly. The reasons why I support Baen are as follows:

1. Can purchase all the books released for that month together.
2. They are DRM free and in multiple formats.
3. They publish stories I like to read.

While I do purchase some ebooks that have DRM, I try to limit the number. I am in the middle of cataloging my book collection (approximately 5000 books total), in the last year I purchased 300+ books, only 29 were paper books. The remainder were ebooks, e-magazines, and audio books. Since January 1, I have not purchased a single paper book, all have been ebooks or audiobooks.

The reason I have switched to ebooks is that I am running into a storage problem and it is easier to store ebooks than pbooks.

Ken Fisher

Currently reading - The Cobra Trilogy

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by bob315

Several recent threads have gotten me wondering about a slightly different ebook pricing model. Since the cost of producing and delivering one additional copy of an ebook is so low, could publishers/vendors adopt a steep volume discount and succeed?

If, e.g., a reader buys 10 books a year from a publisher at a total (retail) price of $100, would the reader be tempted by an offer of $200 for the entire year's output by that publisher? The publisher would double its revenue and the reader would have many more books to choose from. Seems to me like a win for both sides.

It's worth noting that it costs $180 to purchase all of Baen Books' published output for a year. That's 12 Webscriptions purchases at $15 each, with a guarantee that at least 4 of the 6-to-8 books in each month will be never-before-in-bits.

The webscriptions site also sells books from other publishers along with electronic-only re-issues, so that $180 does not get you everything available at webscriptions for a year. But it does get you electronic copies of everything Baen publishes in dead tree format.

Xenophon

[ProDigit]

perhaps another argument may be (if not already mentioned):
How long will the file extensions be valid?
look at all the books created for cellphones and PDA's.
Apart from reconverting you can't really use them on a modern ebook reader like the kindle or Sony,
And who says 2 to 3 years from now when color and higher resolution devices are been made, not another incompatible with today's format will appear?
Who says that Sony will want to stay with LRX,or kindle with prc (or whatever they use)?
this might also be a reason as to why ebooks are not really accepted.
There's PDF and TXT as the only 2 reasonable stable storage containers for books.
Both of them are a bit incompatible with ebook readers.

Perhaps once ebook readers will read compressed html 4 , they will gain more respect with the downloaders (since html is read- and editable on a computer,pda and cellphone by the end user).

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

How long will the file extensions be valid?

Keeping your formats and storage media current is a critical part of long-term data storage. Sadly I don't think your average consumer gets this yet. Open formats and cloud storage should help this but we're not quite there yet.

[Penforhire]

That challenge is the greatest we face where I work with our CAD files, the medium of storage and the format itself. We have products still made today that date back to the 1960's. So the very media of storage is a challenge over the years.

Right now I have a temp working to scan all our paper-only documents (drawings, blueprints, brownlines). We estimate it as a three man-year project but the results will fit on one large modern hard drive. Formats chosen, right now, are PDF (wrappers for JPEG) and TIFF. I don't know what we'll do when PDF and TIFF viewers begin to obsolete!

[BooksForABuck]

Listening to music can be done without attention, and much music only lasts a few minutes. Reading a book is a long-term and full-attention affair. When pirating a song, listeners may justify their decision based on their fear that they won't enjoy it. Most eBook publishers offer significant excerpts, allowing readers to get a fair look at the content before they spend their money. Finally, a few bucks for a book that will last for hours is a bargain compared to a buck for a song that lasts three minutes.

Bottom line, I definitely don't think eBooks "need" piracy to succeed. Unfortunately, need it or not, there's plenty of piracy going around.

What eBooks need is high quality content, affordable prices, and attractive devices on which to read. Increasingly, all three of these are becoming available.

Rob Preece
Publisher, www.BooksForABuck.com