Slashdot Mirror
Book Publishers Making the Same Mistakes as Record Labels?
Techdirt points out an interesting query in Slate asking why book publishers appear to be making the same mistake that record labels did with the iTunes service with DRM, and single-vendor lock-in. "Back in 2005, we noted that Apple's dominance over the online music space, which upset the record labels tremendously, was actually the record labels' own fault for demanding DRM. That single demand created massive lock-in and network effects that allowed Apple to completely dominate the market. If the record labels had, instead, pushed for an open solution, then anyone else could have built stores/players to work as well, and it could have minimized Apple's ability to control the market. Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position. So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"
Publishers don't read.
A vendor means money flow. Non-DRM can, and does, open itself up to free transfer of a product with no money being involved. That's a bigger headache than dealing with vendor lock in when you're trying to make a profit.
Better the devil you know, so to speak.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
We're going to go through the same problem again in about ten years when those 3d printer/modelling machines get really cheap. First music, then video, then books, then "solids" or whatever they'll be called.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position. So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"
Because book publishers and record executives have the same types of personalities and intelligence that drives people into executive positions. They have the same token MBAs and Law degrees and lawyers that all "Business" people have. They all think-outside-of-the-box the same way.
No matter where you are, if you are there long enough, you will start to think that what happens around you is normal. That is a very generic way to describe the problem.
To put it more concrete, the more time Bill Gates spend as they head of Microsoft, at Microsoft, surrounded by Microsoft, the more he got to believe that this is the way the world is. He no longer has any connections to the outside world and his own world has become one that agrees with what he thinks because his world ain't stupid enough no to.
Yes-men are liked, get promoted, you make friends with them and pretty soon everyone around you is a yes-men.
I am a volunteer cameraman. The unique thing about this job is that you become a faceless observer, the camera allows you to distance yourself from whatever you are filming yet who you are filming often assumes, because you are focussed on them (Yes, cameraman wit) that you are not just intrested but even part of their world. Once the camera is allowed in, you are part of the family.
It allows me to see parts of the world that I would never see otherwise. I don't mean shocking things like secret societies, well actually I do, because I am still at the early stage but still.
Take for instance, performance art. I have filmed pieces where the artists involved talked about the importance and meaning of what they did and how their new work was affecting the world, while a simple pan would have showed an audience of only other artists and then only because they were waiting for their turn.
It is a common thing, you see property developers talking about new plans when you can see that NOBODY cares about it, architects presenting new exciting buildings that you have seen countless times before and are never going to work out or if they do end up and windy hellholes where nobody wants to work or live.
People live in their own small world.
And so the book publishers, they live in a world surrounded by other publishers and hear the thing from people who want to work as publishers and get promotoed. So you say what you think your boss wants to hear and the boss promotes those that say what he wants to hear and pretty soon you got a system where no outside information can get in. No previous information.
Right now we are debating in the Netherlands about the selling of public utilities to foreign companies. Because that worked out so well in the US. But the people in the banks say it works so it must work. Nevermind the credit crisis caused by the same banks, privatisation is good because...
Trust me, once a system has been in place for to long with nobody to shake things up, you have a small bubble of alternate reality that you have no hope of penetrating.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, because just downloading the torrent w/o buying the product is theft. Period. If you really really hate DRM, don't buy the product and don't steal it either.
> Well, because just downloading the torrent w/o buying the product is
> theft.
No it isn't. Coyright infringement is a tort, illegal, wrong, and even a crime in some circumstances, but it is not theft.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Wiktionary defines a monkey trap as "a cage containing a banana with a hole large enough for a monkey's hand to fit in, but not large enough for a monkey's fist (clutching a banana) to come out. Used to 'catch' monkeys that lack the intellect to let go of the banana and run away."
I think the lure of requiring customers to buy new books rather than borrow or buy them used has placed book publishers in a situation similar to that of the monkey who can't get his hand out of the trap because he's too greedy -- or perhaps just not intelligent enough -- to realize it's in his best interests to let go.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
First off, make sure to read the Slate article, not the crappy techdirt page that just summarizes and links to it.
The Slate article makes a lot of oversimplified analogies. One big difference between books and music is that with music, there is only a very tiny difference in utility between a CD and a song bought online and downloaded. Personally, I perceive the CD as having slightly negative utility compared to the download, because it's just one more physical object to clutter up my house. Other people might prefer the convenience of having the CD, since you don't need to make backup copies of CDs. But in general, they're pretty much interchangeable products. With books, however, there are huge differences in utility between paper and download. I can easily make notes in a paper book. I can loan it to a friend to take to the beach. It's never going to become obsolete, whereas a digital book in a specialized e-book format is almost certainly going to become obsolete within 5-10 years.
Because music has nearly the same utility regardless of whether it's embodied in a physical object, there are lots and lots of people who copy their music from other people without paying for it. There's really no such phenomenon in the case of books. Okay, sure, there are people who scan entire books and post them on scribd or something, but it's a very tiny niche, so this is another case where the analogy between books and music breaks down.
The article says $10 is cheap for a digital book. This is both an oversimplification and an irrelevance to their argument by analogy. In the case of music, the huge difference is that if I want to buy one track, I can buy it for about $1 by downloading it, whereas on CD I would have had to pay $10, even if I didn't want the rest of the music on it. That's an order of magnitude difference in price. When it comes to books, there's nothing like that. $10 is ridiculously expensive for a used mass-market paperback. $10 is not cheap for a new mass-market paperback. $10 is about the going price for a trade paperback. $10 would be insanely cheap for an illustrated physics textbook.
If you want to look for a real threat to the book publishing industry that's analogous to the threat file-sharing poses to the music industry, it's not the Kindle, it's the extreme efficiency of the used book market these days. Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a weekend was bum around used bookstores in a place like Berkeley or New York. It was fun, but it was incredibly inefficient, and the used books weren't particularly cheap. Today, you can get pretty much any used book you want online, at a very reasonable price, and the internet has obsoleted the concept of a bricks and mortar used bookstore. A lot of titles go for something like a buck plus shipping. This is what the book publishers should really be afraid of. They hate the used book market. I see this most vividly at the community college where I teach. The publishers bring out a new edition of the textbook every few years, for the sole purpose of killing off the used book market. The sales reps are now constantly pushing DRM'd books that the students use on a rental basis, meaning that when they stop paying, they can no longer read the book.
Find free books.
Come on - always the same 'it is copyright infringement' bla bla bla
Slashdot is not a court room - people say steal when they get something illegally without paying. Period.
If you want to nitpick, regardless if you purchased the drm version or not, downloading the torrent is always copyright infringement. What do you tell your kid in those circumstances ? Moral Copyright Infringement vs Immoral Copyright Infringement ? Let's call the immoral one stealing and hope the second disappear one day.
Amazon already has a huge share of the book market. In most respects, Amazon is much better placed than Apple was when it launched the iPod. Imagine if Apple had been the largest single retailer of music CDs when it launched the iPod...that's where Amazon is now.
The cake is a pie
yes, pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
Saying, "Night is day and let's not quibble over the definition" doesn't make night and day the same thing. Piracy is infringement, not stealing.
Every book that is pirated, and to the same degree where a book is swapped on an internet site, means one less sale to the author
Replace the first 2/3rds of that sentence with "Every CD or video borrowed from the library..." to see why the argument is retarded.
But you know as well as I that with electronic copies, the barriers are completely removed. That is why publishers want DRM.
These 2 sentences together make no sense. If you add DRM, you still have an electronic copy.
But you know as well as I that with electronic copies, the barriers are completely removed.
True, no barriers. Make a thousand copies in the blink of an eye. And still, every study that is not paid for by the industry itself says 'pirating' is actually beneficiary to the bottom-line.
Sure, a lot of people get your product without paying for it. But they wouldn't have bought it anyway! No lost sales there. And there are (a lot actually) also people that had never heard of your product and now, due to free exposure, are suddenly buying your contents. Extra sales!
Publishers want DRM for one thing, and one thing only: to be kept in the loop. They aren't needed anymore, obsolete, and they know it. But they don't want you to find out.
Car analogy time...
Say I have a really neat device. I point it at your car, push a button and suddenly I have a copy of your car. Yours isn't harmed in any way. And everytime I push the button, I get another car, just like you still have. Tens, hundreds, thousands even.
Have I just stolen your car? Have I stolen from the car company? Nope, I didn't.
pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
It must be very convenient for you to be able to dismiss a fundamental argument over the meaning of a word which is central to the debate at hand as "quibbling." I seem to recall various Bush Administration officials doing the same thing with words such as "rights" and "torture." You may believe that copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing; a great many people, clearly, do not. By calling any objection to your position a "quibble," you are trying to cut them out of the debate. Sorry, you don't get to do that.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No one in their right mind would call it theft if you took a seed from a genetically engineered apple you found in the trash that was once bought in a store and planted them to make copies of that apple for your long term free enjoyment.
Go ahead and plant it...the Monsanto legal department will be coming to seize your left testicle shortly.
From a business perspective, an ebook with DRM shares nearly all the main characteristics of a physical book. The risks and your control stays the same, excepting that you lose the risk of over/under printing. Physical books are pretty safe, you can make good judgements of risk, have quote a lot of controls over the risks and balance out what remains: for every fail there's a win. The real work a publisher does is all about managing the fails and wins: slightly more, slightly bigger wins against slighly fewer, slightly smaller fails.
Without DRM, you lose that control. It's a completely new ball game. Suddenly it's all too plausable that the latest Harry Potter turns up a week early on a torrent and utterly decimates sales of your big title. You just lost the balancing item against the risks you took on all your other products: unless twice as many other books succeed as marketing estimated, the company is dead. Just like that.
The book industry is in a different set of circumstances to the music industry. They had no choice whatsoever since the market already beat them to mp3 and the industry had to respond. Their epic fail was to take so long - their worst-case scenario was already happening. In the book industry, electronic formats are still optional because the mp3 of books are simply not there. They still have good influence on the market. They are only fighting competitors, not the market itself. Second hand books are merely comparable to second hand CDs i.e. already factored into the present situation.
Thus for them, DRM ebooks retain the status quo other than to open up a new market and potentially reduce the second-hand market. Result = same + win + win%. DRM-free ebooks offer some benefits to their customers, may further widen the new market but entail a very real risk of arriving at the music industry situation: total loss of control. Result = win + win% + epicfail%.
But there's one caveat. The book industry has the benefit of hindsight from the music, game and to a lesser extent the movie industry. Many people have ideas about fairness and will still pay for things they can illegally get for free. Related to this is iTunes, steam and to a lesser extent, netflix. The service has to compare with the illegal version.
If I was a book publisher, to be honest DRM seems like a very obvious choice unless competing firms do otherwise, there's almost nothing to balance up the extreme risk. If I was publishing music, I have no control anyway: DRM is like locking the front door but leaving the back open, plus my primary competitor is piracy and I have to at least match their level of service and quality.
Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.
Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.
Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.
Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.
More Whiny Goodness cast in the "uhoh, business threat" mold
I prefer about 5 million-fold when I can get an ebook that is simply raw text, or text with light markup. That way I can refont, reformat, resize, or reflow it to suit a particular screen, or a particular reading posture.
PDFs fail at all of this.
Da Blog
The question boils down to this: Would I rather sell 100 ebooks heavily protected with DRM, and sleep sound knowing those 100 people are the only ones who can read my book.
OR would I rather 150,000 people pirated and read my novel, and 200 people paid for a copy out of honesty, guilt, or because they were too inept to seek out a stolen copy?
The second way I many twice as much money, even though it still wouldn't buy a meal for 4. I also reach more readers, some of whom might spring for a paperback.
By the way, anyone who thinks that putting DRM on the ebook in the second example would lead to 150,000 sales is deluded, and clearly employed by those stats companies who report on how many $billions piracy is costing industry 'X'
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts