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

[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.

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.

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.