Slashdot Mirror
Analyzing Amazon's E-Book Loan Agreement
conel writes "The Economist has a knowledgeable mainstream take on the restrictions publishers are forcing on e-books. From the article: 'They wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations. First, that their limited license to read a work on a device or within software of their choosing is equivalent to the purchase of a physical item. Second, that the vast majority of e-books are persistent objects rather than disposable culture. ... Just as with music, DRM will be cracked. As more people possess portable reading devices, the demand and availability for pirated content will also rise. (Many popular e-books can now be found easily on file-sharing sites, something that was not the case even a few months ago, as Adrian Hon recently pointed out.)"
I masturbated three times today. what did you asshole losers accomplish? FAIL!!!
I've been imagining that it might be the camel's nose under the tent. Hopefully there will be some publishers who take maximum advantage of the book loaning and see a big benefit from it. I'm not expecting the big name publishers to take advantage of it initially, but hopefully some small names will and will gain from it. Optimistic, I know, but I'm looking on the bright side.
Sean
Ebook piracy has been around since before ebooks were commercially available. Even many years ago there existed a usenet board I used to frequent where a constant stream of books were distributed - painstakeingly scanned, OCRed and (hopefully) proof-read by enthusiasts. The selection was surprisingly comprehensive.
It's been a long time since I was witness to the ebook piracy scene, but from what rumors I have heard the real action there now resides on a few DC++ hubs.
I don't find anything wrong with the lend program. I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, but it doesn't make much sense to build in the ability to give unlimited copies to everyone and think that it won't undermine the business. While the publishers "wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations", it seems like lots of other people want us to engage in another hallucination: that giving out unlimited copies won't turn into a financial problem for booksellers. For example, how many students are really going to buy their own digital copies of their textbooks, as opposed to passing around one copy for everyone? (Not that I really agree with the current economic model of expensive, often-updated textbooks, but I also can't agree with the pirates desire for unlimited free copies for everyone - as if that has no economic consequences, either.)
- It's often more expensive than a hard copy
- Its purchase does not affect the cost of getting a hard copy later (nor vice versa!)
- It is intangible and can (and will) be remote-deleted for the flimsiest of excuses.
Why are we supposed to buy this again instead of getting something made of paper?
My library (a little rural library) lends ebooks with Adobe DRM. Nearly every ebook reader can read them, except the kindle. Why can't you download library books to the kindle?
I bought a nook instead.
We need to start treating digital copies like books. We don't own the content, but we should own the copy we purchased, and we should be able to do with them what we want.
Obviously there are some natural limitations that apply to books that would need to artificially applied to ebooks, but we can already apply them, as this piddly excuse for a loan policy proves.
The concept is easy: a function in the software that ties an ebook to the device and only allows transfer to another device if it successfully ties it to another device, and then disables the ebook on the original device. That would make ebooks behave exactly like regular books. Then you wouldn't need a stupid loan policy, you'd just give your friend your copy of the ebook, just like you would a physical book.
I seriously do not understand why this has not been done yet, or why they insist on these stupid "loan" functions. Just move the ebook off the old machine and onto the new! Leave it up to the owner of the book to get their copy back, just like physical books. We've been able to "move" (copy then delete) digital media for ages.
Seriously, it's not that hard. Why the hell are they making it so complicated?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Thousands of painstakingly OCRed and corrected digitalised books can be had for free if you know where to look. And this has been the case for at least a decade. And not all of them "out of copyright" either. So no "six months" that I can see.
So yeah, more and better cracked drm versions. Sure, fine. For some books it matters more than for others. Textbooks I like best in PDF if original or DJVU if scanned (and it better be a good scan, many scans in PDF or DJVU or any format are horrible), but for most fiction, text/plain is the best option by far. Though if the publisher comes with a reasonable format then that's acceptable too. Baencd, anyone? And oh yeah, Baen. They've caught on, and are doing well by it. Good for them and (of course) all their readers.
to be honest if you are to call them real books then we should be able to go to the online library , read them and leave without paying anything and without owning the book
I was moments away from ordering a Kindle - I had added it to my Amazon shopping cart and had started to add some e-book titles. Then I noticed the used book prices. Every one of the 5 e-books I had picked out were priced at $9.99, while used books with shipping came out to prices ranging from $4.50 to $9.99 including shipping.
While I understand that people that travel a lot may prefer an e-book for the convenience, I do 90% of my reading in my living room. Why would I pay $139 for a device plus a premium price on each book just to have a fancy gadget? I'm not one to run out and buy the latest bestseller and I have enough books on hand to not find it hard to wait a couple weeks for a used book to arrive.
I could even resell the books after I'm done and make the effective cost even cheaper (printing a priority mail label takes a couple minutes, so there's hardly any inconvenience). Though in reality, I donate my books to a local charity.
I don't expect the publisers to allow e-book resales, but unless they cut their book prices significantly, they are going to have a hard time competing against paper.
I avoid eBook piracy by simply by reading the classics
Baen Books has been posting e-books, several formats available, for several years now. And, curiously enough, it's the authors that make the choice. I have a solid library of their titles that are loaded on all my machines to read during down-time (waiting on something) and all of them, including ones that I initially wouldn't have bought in book form normally, are here in the pulp as well. So, it's a good deal for the author, give me a book that may have me buy the series, rather than miss a potential sale.
A rather radical thing that I recently encountered was a hardback Baen Book ("Rats, Bats, & Vats") that had a CD with several dozen titles from Baen on it that encouraged you to make a copy and give them out.
As for the e-book community, yes, they are alive and well in the newsgroups last time I looked (August I believe) and you can get what you want in almost any format. Then again, that's been true of anything that can be presented in electronic form pretty much since newsgroups (NNTP) came to be. Just as with the cracking community (hell Apple should know what with rooting the iPhone) you'll always see them out there. Keep the price point low enouigh and frankly most people won't go to the effort of finding, downloading, etc., since you never going to know what you get (unusable/, malware, and lawsuit, oh my!).
And before anyone professes that this is incorrect, go back and take microeconomics again, specifically opportunity costs. The beautiful thing about iTunes, iPhone Apps, NetFlix, downloadable software, and e-book marketplaces is that they have been an ecometrician's wet dream for statistical market behavior. I don't think that this was the intent of the providers of music, apps, and video, but there you have it. Saved us a ton of research grant money. Thank you!
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Even though there's hardly digital comics you can purchase, people still take the time to manually scan each comic as it comes out.
For manga, people even take the time to TRANSLATE it before they release it.
Just like anything else, piracy is based on demand, not convienence. People don't do all that work just because its easy, they do it because people want them.
The demand for ebook piracy may increase as people get more and more used to the idea of reading digital books, but wether or not a publisher decides to sell their books digitally would have no bearing on the chances of it getting pirated.
As more people possess portable reading devices, the demand and availability for pirated content will also rise. (Many popular e-books can now be found easily on file-sharing sites, something that was not the case even a few months ago, as Adrian Hon recently pointed out.)"
Is this really the smart thing to do at the beginning of a fledgling industry? At least publishers have physical books to fall back on if E-books don't take off. Physical protections aren't perfect, but there's the satisfaction of seeing "pirates" actually working for their booty.
I find it amusing that you broadcast so proudly to the internet how you download other peoples property. I can't wait to hear more of your smug reports after it happens to you and your company, (assuming people really care enough to steal your shit).
Who cares about what Amazon does not want you to do with the books? Removing the DRM completely is not entirely trivial (yet; it shouldn't be hard to write a 1-click app that does it, it's just that no-one bothered, so far as I know), but the instructions are out there.
The big difference is that lending a physical book means that single copy is only in one place at a time, whereas electronic copies are capable of being copied to exist on multiple media simultaneously such as I do that with mine for my multiple ereading platforms (not for pirating out to the rest of the world - in my case, I am only reading that book on one ereader of mine or another at any one time). Thus, those copies can become substitutes for legitimate sales to different (human) readers, and that is a legitimate threat to the economic basis of the publishing industry, regardless of what one may think of it.
They should be worried, but DRM as it exists now is preventing legitimate lending and resale that compares to what can be done with a physical book, so many are motivated to circumvent it for comparability, such as my wish to read what I paid for on any device of mine that is convenient (and don't get me started on the horrible interface of Adobe Digitial Editions on Windows vs Aldiko on Android or the Sugar Reader app on the OLPC XO as viewed on the Pixel Qi screen inside or outside).
A "few months ago" I wouldn't have thought about pirating a book. I could get my favorite books for under $10 and I was reading them like crazy. Then here comes iPad and the bullshit deal Apple setup with the publishers to let THEM set the price and break Amazon's lock on E-books. Publishers, led by Macmillan, put the hurt on Amazon, and now they too are forced to let Publishers set book prices. Damn near overnight my buying of books came to a screeching halt as nothing I was interested in reading could be had for what I felt was a reasonable price. Some of the books I looked up were CHEAPER in hard copy! Books that have been out 6-7 YEARS for $12++?!
So I too looked towards Torrent sites and elsewhere and sure enough there was tons of books available. I haven't bought a single book from Amazon, hard or soft copy, since this change in pricing went into effect. the sad thing is that E-books are so small no one ever just shares one, it's ineffective. Instead you see huge collections thrown together in order to make the file size decent.
Thankfully some authors are getting a clue! Hopefully more will follow this guy's lead -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
People "in general" don't want to steal. They're happy to generally pay for something, given that its price intellectually/intuitively feels somewhat justified.
With the advent of digital and globalization, Content publishers have wet dreams when they project their old business model onto the new potential audience. Obviously, it's encountering issues.
The market is enormous, but the price, availability, and (lack of/DRM) ease of use of the legitimate version is prohibitive compared to the ease of use and availability of free pirated versions.
I spend much time in the Philippines, where locals routinely spend 30 pesos (~65 cents) buying pirated dvd's of widely varying qualities. From good dvd-quality screener copies, to horrible in-theater recordings with coughs, people standing up in middle of screen, and poorly synced bad-quality sound.
While they don't have to pay for the making of the movie, they still have to pay for the printing of the CD, creation and printing of a jacket and cd-box, multiple layers of distribution etc. And still make enough of a profit to justify the risks. 65 cents covers all that it seems.
And Filipinos are very poor, yet still are willing to pay a little for entertainment.
Sell movies online between $0.5 and $2 with no/minimal DRM depending on quality/popularity/whatever, and millions/billions will buy rather than pirate. Sell a collector's edition in stores for $30 if you like (With no DRM at that point, since it won't be needed) for those that want/like a physical version.
Offer monthly download/streaming subscriptions Netflix-style for $10/$20/$30 with the best stuff available first in the $30's. Again, no real DRM needed.
Same for music. Make it a few cents instead of a dollar, and you'll find that a whole lot more people don't mind paying for an actual music collection.
In either case, a tidy profit will -still- be made. Not to mention how much MORE can then be made from the derivatives when you tell ad execs that yeah, that 60 cents movie was purchased by 1.3 BILLION people actually. With a neat breakdown in metrics by country, age group and whatever else you make customers fill-out when they sign up.
Books are a bit more tricky. A song takes 5 min to listen to. A movie 2hrs to watch. A book is more in the 5 to 20+ hrs range and is a significant time investment on the reader's part.
I know I skip a lot of free books, even though they're easy to get from Amazon for my Kindle, just because I'm not interested. A good book is worth a good bit more to me than a good movie, but a bad book is worth a whole lot less than a bad movie. So prices ranging from a few cents (you can get the book for a song!) to $6 ?
Studios are trying to make orders of magnitude more $, without providing that much more -value-.
The market is dramatically larger, distribution is dramatically cheaper, prices -should- be dramatically lower. THAT is why people pirate.
__
www.gamersloot.net: Gametime cards, Cd keys and game news. No gold sorry!
Well, like movies or games, for an online business model, please make it *more* convenient to use.
Download the book to any device anytime if you are a subscriber (Netflix) or a purchaser (Steam) and if the book has all the tagging information in the precisely the best format I want for my device, it's worth many extra dollars to buy the e-book it as it saves time. Maybe add comments from other readers and see notations from your friends. Add value to the e-book, don't make it worse with DRM.
The current cost of an e-book is far too close to print cost, and DRM makes it less convenient. Authors give out e-books for free (Baen) and it improves their print sales.
My wife's been hounding me to by a kindle. Let's see, $150 for a device that needs charging and costs roughly the same per book which may or may not work 3 to 5 years from now versus a book I own forever can loan to anyone and reread 50 years from now if I feel like it.
I have every book I ever bought, including pulp sci-fi from 30 years ago. I'm free to loan them to whomever, reread them whenever. I really really have a hard time seeing the attraction of switching.
Saying I'd now be free to loan it to somebody for 14 days but only once just brings the distinction into starker reality for me, it's hardly a selling point. If they ever reach the point that I own the content, it's delivered in a completely portable format, I can transfer it to any device and loan it to anyone at any time and to as many people as I want just like I can with a normal book I might consider it, not until then.
I think they need those protections, because pirating can hurt the book market a lot. Only the biggest name authors can make money from perfomances, while local bands can still tour. Most books don't have the secondary markets like movies do, such as Netflix, Redbox, or other venues: only a few can be adapted into movies. Most authors make barely anything breaking out, and already suffer legitmate piracy through the remainder and used market, receiving no royalties.. The options that other media can make use of to defray piracy don't exist for authors. /. doesn't realize it, but their constant focus on free information is going to harm content creators, and help the people they hate. The aggregators can just shift to the long tail approach and offer tons of digital e-books for free or for low cost, and most will be crap or legacy works. They will make money no matter what, but the creators wont. Look at Nextflix's instant queue, and count how many titles are low or no-budget. That's going to be the bulk of the content of the future: fast, cheap, and sucky.
It's an e-book. If you're not willing to abide by the rules of the vendor, just go to a real live book store and buy an actual book. End of problem.
i don't know what their definition of "popular e-books" or "file-sharing sites" are, but i've been getting books over bittorrent for about two years, and irc for about ten (and <CENSORED> for longer than that....). if they're talking about new-fangled dumbshit like rapidshare, that's another matter....
I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos
I think you are mistaken. There may be a few people who believe this, but my observation has been that the vast majority of Slashdotters are much more concerned about the right of first sale, which DRM-encumbered digital downloads do not currently allow. There's no way I'm going to spend $10 or $20 on an e-book if I can't sell it to someone when I'm done with it.
If true then Slashdot would be badmouthing Steam left and right. Do you see any badmouthing?
Can't they just make it a library?
I mean, I would not buy an eBook for the same money as a paperback-edition. I cannot give this eBook to my kids, when I die, I do not see it in my bookshelf but more importantly (and Cory Doctorow, I believe, said this before Randall Munroe), I cannot burn it.
I would use an eBook-reader if it was a way of accessing my local library. I pay my annual fees and I can rent two books at a time for two weeks (which I can extend) and if I don't "give it back" in time, I have to pay late fees. They also have to print my daily newspaper on trees.
But I love my bookshelf and I hate going to the library.
It is sad, that we have the technology to fix this, just not the business-model.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's the same as the music industry. Publishers still operate as if there is this huge advertising and distribution infrastructure that everything "must" work through. The lords of the system don't see the real world from their tower, so piracy/DRM and even *shock* the fact that people don't want to buy a physical CD/book is inconceivable (cue Wallace Shawn). We all know musicians don't receive as much royalty as they should from this system, I would bet writers aren't treated royally either. What the music industry doesn't get is that record stores are becoming extinct, radio is no longer a key medium for sales, people don't have a way to get informed/hooked on new music, so the file sharing de facto that filled the gap is nearly unstoppable. Publishers should get a clue and realize the same thing: bookstores are becoming extinct in the digital age, people aren't going to buy a book unless they can see it/thumb through it/read it-- so file sharing is filling the gap once again. While I am not a fan at all of "e" books and prefer physical ones, and I do not like what I've seen from Kindle (DRM, restrictions, no advantage on costs, Amazon can delete remotely, must re-buy books if you get a new Kindle) I will eventually learn to embrace the "e" crap and won't be buying anything unless I can look through it first.
I would like to post my dissenting view of e-books and e-readers.
I've been using Linux for 15+ years, I know exactly what DRM is, and yet I love my Kindle.
My experience with book, e-books, and the DRM in the Kindle:
DRM sucks, and as e-books get mainstream it will probably go down, or it will have to get more consumer friendly. Yet, even nowdays the advantage of digital files far outstrip the DRM issue.
YMMV.
It's probably worth mentioning that there's at least one tech books publisher that publishes e-book versions in several formats (IIRC you get them all in a zip archive), with no DRM. That publisher is No Starch Press (http://nostarch.com).
I think for most of the writers who publish on No Starch, the thinking is that readers should have access to the material the form that's convenient to them, with as few restrictions as possible. For my own part, I see the bittorent trackers that turned up about four hours after the PDF version of the first edition of my book mainly as a sign that people appreciate my work.
Full disclosure: I have a title out on No Starch that's been available as ebook before the printed version is available (expected about Nov 10th), see http://nostarch.com/pf2.htm
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
I am struggling with this now contemplating my first book. What format is the most open, the best for all the various hardware and software readers out there? From big screen desktops to the smallest little cellphone screen, plus all the official branded ebook readers? I won't be interested in DRM or disallowing copies or sharing, etc, I mean, I just won't care, I want it as open and as accessible as possible, but still be able to "sell" it, offer it, on amazon, etc, and the other various publishing sites.
Thanks in advance for any insights!
I just published "Chasing the Runner's High: My Sixty Million-Step Program". If you buy the eBook from my site, there is no copy protection. There's no point. All Digital Rights Managment schemes do is make it harder for honest readers to buy a book and enjoy it. DRM doesn't stop piracy. If a book is popular enough for it to matter, someone will break the copy protection and make the book available for free.
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The license allows you to share unmodified copies of the book, as long as you don't use if for commercial purposes. If the book is read by thousands of people who got their copy from a friend, that's a win. I'm better off than if they never read it. Some of those people will end up buying paper copies, buying copies for their local libraries, or just paying what they think the eBook was worth.
You can also name your own price for eBook editions of my book when you buy from my site. I believe that if you can pay what you think a book is worth, you're more likely to buy. A sale for a little money is better than no sale at all (as long as you pay more than the 50 cents it costs to process your order).
Most people will be fair. The ones who aren't fair probably aren't going to pay anyhow.
Note: the eBook is available from other sites. Some people only shop from (for example) the Kindle store or the iBookstore, and so I need to be listed there. Those versions have fixed prices and may have DRM, but wherever it's possible, I've asked the vendor to sell it without DRM.
They technically have a right to control your license to read the ebook.
If you are going to be "technical" get it correct. No one has a right to control what we read. They may have a right to control whether an ebook is accessible on a particular reading device. Once I have access (regardless of the means) I have the legal ability to read the document. The license is a license to copy and/or access. It is NOT a license to read.
Remember ebooks are licenced, not owned.
If you are talking about the data in the book, the same is true for physical books. The only thing you actually own is the medium, not the copyrighted contents. Since they cannot be separated on a physical book, the first sale doctrine matters. Things get less clear once the data and the physical means for displaying it are separable.
Especially since you can usually re-download them if you lose it...
Only if the publisher is feeling magnanimous.
A friend of mine some time ago downloaded book four of harry potter as an e-book off some website, and read it. He then proceeded to download and read book five, only to find out that the story was completely inconsistent with the plot of book four... It turns out the book he had read was a fan-made harry potter spin-off, probably written before book four actually came out, but it was good enough that, while a few parts seemed strange, he did not notice it was a fake until he saw the inconsistencies to the following tome...
I don't find anything wrong with the lend program. I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, (...)
TFS is an excerpt of TFA, which is an article from the economist. As the name suggests, the economist has no such "...should be free ethos". Still, they argues that the publishing business should not follow the steps of the music and movie business because the consumers will not be duped into confusing a restricted digital copy with real ownership of a physical book. This does not mean the economist is against DRM, in fact this article suggests a lower-priced, "rental" model for digital books.
One click DRM removal is already there in form of calibre plug-ins. If you use Drag&Drop it is even Zero-Click.
You just have to google harder.
Thankfully some authors are getting a clue! Hopefully more will follow this guy's lead -> http://www.bbsjersey.com/