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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!
Have a look at Baen books: They publish everything also as downloadable without any DRM (HTML/RTF/PDF) and you can buy months (4-6 books) or individual books. Individual books cost about the paperback price, a month costs about twice that. You typically also get the first 1/3 of a book as fee sample. They also have a "free library" where you get older books in the same formats entirely for free.
Eric Flint coordinates the free library. He has a series of postings on the effect and it seems to be very postive, with older books suddenly producing significat income for the authors, which they did not before.
Of course this only works for good quality books, but for them it works. I found myself buying more and trying authors I would otherwise have overlooked.
References:
http://www.baen.com/
http://www.baen.com/library/
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Greed.
That's all this is about. That's all its ever been about.
-S
Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.
I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.
If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
nobody reads anymore. In fact, I'm notrqwh even lookitnag at whwat I'at typing right nwo.
When my last book was made available in electronic form, I asked my editor about DRM. Her reaction, before I'd expressed an opinion on the subject, was 'don't worry - I'm used to authors hating DRM. We won't put any on if you don't want it.' The contract for my most recent book had a explicit clause added preventing the publisher from distributing it in any DRM-encumbered format.
Tech book publishers know that what they provide of value is access to a large reservoir of knowledge. That is why they are creating things like Safari Books Online, which allows you to browse books online and buy DRM-free PDF copies (or get some included with your subscription) if you need to read more than a few pages.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Kindle
The "Guide" on the other hand...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
So why are book publishers doing the same thing?
Because the companies are run by old-timer that are still trying to apply a set of rules that no longer apply to a failing business model.
Look, the internet is here, it isn't leaving. Portable electronics are not some sort of passing fad. Dead-tree publishing is an old technology. As things like the kindle and the sony reader start showing people that they don't need to purchase a stack of paper to read a book, they're going to start demanding that when they purchase a book, they own the *book* not the rights to display the text of it on one specific device.
People are starting to catch on to it, too. There is a marketing tool that we use at my work that requires a serial # to activate. Since then, we have installed the software for all of the serials (this is a result of everybody demanding that they need access to it...not just the people we bought it for).
I finally told the boss that we don't have any more serials, we need more, and this is how much it's going to cost. He flipped out. Why was I being so difficult! The receptionist isn't using her copy any more, just use the serial number for that one!
I'm sure this is pretty common. People don't understand how completely and totally ridiculous DRM is until they actually run into it. As digital media becomes more and more ubiquitous, this is happening more and more and people are having their eyes opened.
Another example is when my Dad decided that he wanted to add MP3 playback capability to his home automation system (like what I showed him at my house). Problem was that all(most) of his music had been purchased in the iTunes Music Store and the tool that I was using for music playback ran on linux.
Sadly, it might actually take as long as it takes for some of the people running these companies to retire before things start to change.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
People don't have the attention spans for a full exploration of a theme across an entire novel.
They want one or two really catchy pages at a low price. Something you can dance to.
They don't have to, they hire people to do it for them.
Free Martian Whores!
Relying on a product model that worked well in the past, selling products that they hope to sell, and clueless about the future. Except the government won't be throwing buckets of cash at them since no one cares about the extinction of bookworms.
They are not ignorant of history they are afraid of it and so are trying to cling to what they have for as long as possible.
They don't have to, they hire people to do it for them.
Well now that the Kindle 2 has free TTS they don't need keep hiring those people.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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.
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
Another excellent write up on the subject by Eric Flint can be found at Jim Baen's free library. (along with some free sci-fi and fantasy books-I can personally recommend anything from there-I've read them all)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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.
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