O'Reilly To Release DRM-free Ebooks In July

andrewsavikas writes "Starting in July, O'Reilly Media will pilot select books as DRM-free ebook bundles (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) priced at or below the cover price of the book. David Pogue comments on the pilot in the wake of his own recent dustup about ebooks and piracy, covered previously on Slashdot."

Comments

Still too dear

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we pay as much, or near to the full price of a dead tree product for a digital copy? The manufacturing and distributions costs are near zero. There's no need for shelf space in retailers either. On top of this, we have little resale options. Ever see legal digital itunes music on ebay in lots?

Re:Still too dear

[Sancho]

Well, frankly, because of economics. If the ebooks sell at full dead-tree price, why shouldn't O'Reilly sell them at that price?

Also, don't underestimate the cost of keeping a server running and capable of serving out the eBooks 24/7. The actual cost of sending the bits through the tubes might not be high, but the cost of keeping those servers running and cool isn't negligible.

Then there's the issue of value. Lots of people consider ebooks to be more valuable than dead-tree versions because they're searchable and smaller. If they're perceived as more valuable, they'll sell for more. We saw this trend with cassette tapes vs. CDs and VHS tapes vs. DVDs. In both cases, the disc-based media cost less to produce than the tape-based media, but tapes sold for less because they were considered inferior and were in less demand.

DRM free eBooks could be easy

[Coopjust]

Make them openly viewable, but lock them for editing via password and put the name and address, and account email on the title page. That will let people use the ebooks as they want, but strongly deter people from uploading them or freely sharing them with people who haven't bought the book.

Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy

[cephah]

It's a good idea, except if people want to spread them, they would just remove the lock and change the information. DRM doesn't work, period. I'm glad to see O'Reilly embracing this fact.

Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy

[Pinckney]

Make them openly viewable, but lock them for editing via password and put the name and address, and account email on the title page. That will let people use the ebooks as they want, but strongly deter people from uploading them or freely sharing them with people who haven't bought the book. And how do you propose to lock them? In what proprietary format must these books come, and how long until someone releases a program to ignore the read-only bit?

Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong, sorry :(. DRM does work, because 90-95% (taken from large population of my clients) of computer users still have no idea how to break it, and most non-nerds value their time above the effort required to find an unauthorised DRM-free copy of something.

Unless they can get the copy off their equally non-nerdy friends, which is precisely what DRM stops.

ORA is exceptional as it caters to the very industry of people who already know how to ignore DRM.

Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy

[RAMMS EIN]

``DRM isnt the super-breakable trick everyone claims here on slashdot.''

You won't hear me claim that it is always easy to break a DRM scheme.

``One could devise a DRM which procesess all state information within a signed VM.''

No. Because that's an implementation detail. You can't force people to use a particular implementation.

Fundamentally, you have a Big Bag Of Bits (usually a file) that has the information in it. Once you figure out how to interpret the bits, you can get the information out. The only way this won't work is if not all the information is there.

Having said that, you _can_ make it very difficult for people to decode the information in the BBOB, without going through a channel controlled by you. One way to achieve that is by using encryption. If the encryption algorithm is good, the information will be almost impossible to decode without the key. If the key is difficult enough to guess, the only feasible way to decode the information is by obtaining the key from you. But even still...if the decryption works once, it will work again, so if people can somehow store the key for later use (e.g. sniff it from the network, extract it from a program, ...), the cat is out of the bag again.

Finally, once you have raised the bar for decoding the content so high that nobody is willing or able to crack your scheme...they can still get at the information once your software has decoded it for them. For example, if an ebook reader renders the content...who is to say the rendered content ends up on a screen, and not in a file?

Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy

[debatem1]

While I admit that you raise the difficulty of breaking such a scheme considerably by doing all of that, it is far from "unhackable". My first thought would be to run the entire VM under an X proxy, which would permit me to capture image files of each individual page. Another possibility would be to take snapshots of the VM in operation and correlate the opening of the file to memory allocation. Either way, you're fighting against Knuth's third law, and you just aren't going to win that one.

Always want ebook.

[Odder]

Given the choice, I will always buy an ebook from O'reilly. I can put them on sftp and have them anywhere, they won't sag my shelf and so on and so forth. I also imagine it will be easier to buy because I don't have to drive to a store or wait for UPS. I wish all my textbooks were like this.

Re:Always want ebook.

[morcego]

I do "own" several DRM'ed ebooks. My main problem is that they are locked to a computer/reader (serial number). So if I loose that computer (cellphone etc), I loose access to the ebook.

This is something that really annoys me. If they want to "lock" the ebook, fine. But lock it to ME, not to my computer.

Pricing Wrong

[leabre]

I wouldn't mind purchasing digitally unrestricted files, but not for "at or below the price of the book". I've seen way too many Kindle books that are nearly priced the same as the printed counterparts and gives me no advantages of my printed counterparts (can't give it away, sell it, write in it, requires no additional expense EG batteries, etc.). I'm talking tech books. Some are priced okay, others that I've had an interest in are nearly $50-70. I've seen one Kindle book that was $135 while the printed counterpart (no longer in print) was selling for roughly $15 used.

I don't know what would be a good price point for a ebook, but considering bandwidth is relatively cheap compared to printing and binding and shipping a book, I don't think an ebook should be priced similar to the printed counter part. With DRM-less ebooks, perhaps it is less of an issue than with DRM encumbered ebooks, where a dead machine or defunct ebook publisher can render your collection useless (has happend to me, which is why I don't buy encumbered ebooks anymore).

To me, an ebook should be pricsed roughly 20-40% of the price of the book if it was printed. Keep in mind, retail books are already highly marked up from what the retailer pays the publisher/distributor. It should be 20-40% of the whole sale cost of the book (because other publisher/distributors/retailers don't usually offer the ebooks for sale anyway, so it need not be priced according retail value, but wholesale value).

The other thing is, while certain very-hard to find books, or other in-demand little-supply books could command a premium in print, ebooks are not scarce. They are, for all intents-and-purposes, unlimited supply. So they should not reflect prices of scarcity or high-print costs.

Until the pricing of any ebook reflects something more realistic considering the what we have to sacrifice to use and that the publisher has so little overhead costs associated with the distribution of the digital media, then I still am not convinced to purchase.

I do applaud O'Reilly for doing this. They produce great books and if more publishers follow suit, then maybe, just maybe, the landscape will improve and the Ebook market will become more viable.

Thanks,
Leabre

Re:Pricing Wrong

[GleeBot]

I don't know if 20-40% (a markdown of 80-60%) is really reasonable. I'm not entirely sure where this attitude comes from that bits should be vastly less expensive, just because the distribution costs are near-zero.

Newsflash: Printing a technical reference doesn't actually cost anywhere near the majority of the book price. That $50-200 book you bought might contain a few hundred pages with lots of glossy color pictures (if it's a very nice book).

Compare that to the price of, say, Harry Potter 7. 784 pages in hard cover for about $20. No glossy pictures, true, but if the cost of printing is really such a major expense, I'd point out that it's 784 pages.

There's a couple reason for this, the major one probably being volume. Harry Potter sells a lot of copies. That has implications for the printing costs, of course, but it's nothing compared to the way it spreads out the cost of developing the content to begin with. Technical material is expensive to develop.

Estimates for the cost of a typical textbook is something like 25% for printing and distribution. I think it's justified to expect that an e-book should cost somewhat less than a printed book (maybe that 25%), but it shouldn't cost 60-80% less. That's significantly undervaluing the content, which is what you're really paying for when you buy the printed book.

Or would you be just as happy buying 200 pages of blank paper, bound in spiral form? Maybe even with some lines ruled out so you can write on them? Those go for about $10.

I do hear what you're saying about the cost vs. used books, though. That's one of my major complaints about single source electronic distribution models like Steam; they really eviscerate the used market, and there's generally no incentive to discount a product as quickly as in a market of competing retailers.

Re:Well

[failedlogic]

I've had a copy center print out a few GPL books before and supplementary PDFs that came with a textbook I purchased. PDF is wholehartedly a much more convienient format, especially with the ability to bookmark, highlight and write notes on the page. And I agree, having a digital copy means you can make unlimited markups of the text and start with an unmarked copy without having to buy more. I actually edit my documents using PDFs in this fashion rather than use Word's (or similar) text markup. Because of the problems with CDs and DVDs (easy to scratch) etc., I would happily buy e-books if there are: 1) no restrictions on use; 2) if I loose my copy or it doesn't work any longer (e.g. corrupted), I can download another copy.

I really would like to see E-book readers like the one Amazon launched recently come down in price. I just don't like reading E-Books on a screen.

I am a bibliophile. I am packing up to move right now. Because of the sheer space (and weight) of the books I have, I ended up selling close to 100 of them. Were they all e-books would be a lot more convenient - 1 DVD. Most books are only good for one reading and occasional glance backs. I would like to save trees, electricity (no paper to print) and make sure writers get their royalties.

IMO, with full digital books, it would be cool too to have some interaction with the book .... perhaps some embedded video relating to the content on the page would be neat. Afterall, there is Flash and MPEG support in PDFs isn't there?

So with the right concessions, per above, and a cheaper and good portable e-book reader, I will certainly buy the e-books.

Re:Well

[gnasher719]

The 'Customer is always right' is a mantra that was sold to customers to make them believe they are always in control - in actuality, a customer is very rarely right when it comes to your business. Actually, "the customer is always right" is supposed to remind the sales person that their job is not about being right, but about selling and making money. If a customer says he wants to buy X because of Y then you say "yes", sell him X and make money. If you say "no you are wrong", even if you are right, he walks away and spends his money elsewhere, so you lose..

There are cases like a customer saying "what you sold to me is rubbish, you have to give me my money back", where 'the customer is always right" automatically does not apply. Some customers are surprised by this.

ebooks should be bundled

[code4fun]

I think ebooks should be bundled with each copy of book sold. Or, at least give a reasonable discount. I have a lot of books which I would love to have an electronic copy.

Screen real estate

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

...my screen real-estate is very valuable to me, there's really no room for a PDF reader open at the same time

Don't you love virtual desktops? One for the browser and mail, one for the IDE, one for the PDF documentation and finally one spare...

I'm not kidding, but it is one of the reasons I consider Windows not ready for my desktop.

At or below the cover price?

[Perp Atuitie]

As I recall, the physical manufacturing and distribution of a book costs around 60% of its price. Seems like the publisher could pass some of that savings along. I mean, how much does it cost to upload a bunch of pdf?