Book Piracy — Less DRM, More Data

macslocum writes "Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM. 'The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers. As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there's a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.'"

Comments

DRM

[TaoPhoenix]

(Sarcasm)

You can never lock up content too tight.
Let's have each letter encrypted separately.
(/Sarcasm)

I love my Kindle

[chispito]

But just like with Apple and the itunes, Amazon is never going to convince me that the DRM they use is for my own good. It's about control and monopolies and always has been. (And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market).

Re:I love my Kindle

[east coast]

And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market

Care to cite? Once the DRM model exists it it is a minor cost to keep everything under the same model. I highly doubt that Apple's marketshare has much to do with their dropping of DRM. If anything, Apple probably has even more competition than they have had when they had DRM in the past with major players like Amazon in the market.

Re:I love my Kindle

[93 Escort Wagon]

But just like with Apple and the itunes, Amazon is never going to convince me that the DRM they use is for my own good. It's about control and monopolies and always has been. (And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market).

It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to. What evidence we have indicates the contrary - Apple wanted to be DRM-free, but the record labels wouldn't allow it.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

But just like with Apple and the itunes, Amazon is never going to convince me that the DRM they use is for my own good. It's about control and monopolies and always has been. (And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market).

It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to. What evidence we have indicates the contrary - Apple wanted to be DRM-free, but the record labels wouldn't allow it.

Then please stop trying to revise histroy. Apple always wanted DRM (their whole OS is DRMed on a hardware level. Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.) Apple only got rid of its DRM in its music because Amazon was in the final steps of getting the labels to agree that they would be able to sell DRM music on Amazon.com (look when Jobs wrote that letter declaring 'Oh we don't like DRM, we were strong armed...' a few months before Amazon started selling DRM free music). Apple had to drop the DRM in response to the threat Amazon was about to cause. Because if Apple really didn't want DRM they would remove it from every other digital product on iTunes. They just don't though because they love DRM, helps lock you to them.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only real DRM an ereader needs is not giving the user the ability to connect to other online stores from within the device. I know that given the choice between buying from several stores and managing the books on my e-reader myself and letting Amazon have all my buisness in exhnage for them handling the lybrary managment and content delivery for me I'd choose the later.

I used to have a Bookeen Cybook which i chose over the first generation Kindle because it was more "open"; dealing with multiple book stores (perticularly remembering which book came from which store to re-downlowd if nesesary) was rather anoying. When an unfortunate accident rendered the screen unusable, and I looked into replacing it I decided to instead go with a current generation Kindle rather than another Cybook, and I can honestly say that since I did that I have not missed the ability to search multiple shops, and have bought more books than I had at the comperable point in my Cybook's lifespan.

Re:I love my Kindle

[TheRaven64]

And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market

Music from the iTunes store is DRM free, but unless it's changed very recently videos are still DRM-encumbered.

Re:I love my Kindle

[jedidiah]

> It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to.

      Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.

      It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention
everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.

      There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.

      Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.

Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that
you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.

Re:I love my Kindle

[alvinrod]

Apple's market share has a lot to do with the fact that almost all music sold is now DRM-free, but it's not as straightforward as that. Apple wasn't the first to sell DRM-free music, and in fact were almost one of the last. Not because they wanted to keep the DRM, but because the record companies wanted them to be stuck with it. Apple's iTunes store was more successful than anyone could have predicted, including the music companies. Apple had a 70% share and used their clout to keep prices low. No other DRM-scheme would be able to compete since Apple didn't care to license other forms of DRM for the iPod. There was a positive feedback loop that kept driving things towards and Apple only environment, which the record labels didn't like because Apple wouldn't budge from their $.99 price per song. In order to try and break Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market, the record labels started allowing other online music stores to sell DRM-free music, hoping that it would adversely impact iTunes sales. This may have happened to a minor degree, but before the long-term results could be measured, Apple renegotiated their contract with the labels in order to get DRM-free music at the cost of allowing labels to price singles at $1.29 if they wanted to do so.

Apple's market share hasn't moved much since then, but the fact that most music is now DRM-free is because the dominated the market to the extent that they could dictate pricing terms to the labels, which pissed off the music industry to no end. In order to gain control of pricing the major labels had to budge on DRM. The film and book industries are going to try their damnedest to ensure that no one market entity ends up in the same position as iTunes did with music, otherwise they lose their ability to dictate price. If you want to see DRM-free movies and books, hope that someone ends up in the same position as Apple did with music. It doesn't have to be Apple, but someone needs to be the dominant force in the market such that they can start dictating price to the publishers. Once this occurs, the natural reaction for the publishers is to allow other retailers to sell DRM-free media so that the controlling store becomes less important.

Re:I love my Kindle

[alvinrod]

Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.

It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.

In all fairness, the bitrate is also increased, but realistically they should have done it for free or just charged a small, flat rate to upgrade an entire catalog.

There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.

The only one they're free to control is their own iOS or mac Apps. Technically I'm not even certain that the Mac apps require DRM as developers who did not correctly implement purchase-verification were subject to workarounds. Apple may require applications to properly check for proof-of-purchase, but if they don't, then it's only DRM if the developer cares enough to implement it. Otherwise the content producers who own the copyright on the videos, books, etc. are the ones who mandate the DRM.

Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.

Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.

Some of that is under Apple's control, but a lot of it isn't. There aren't many stores offering the same products without DRM, so it's not as though Apple is some kind of villain. No one else is getting the same content DRM-free so it's disingenuous to fault Apple in this regard.

The only legitimate point you have is that Apple provides DRM for iOS applications and will probably step up on DRM for their Mac app store. They're really not any better off (or better) than any other purveyor of video, literature, etc. They're stuck with what they're given and don't have the clout to demand anything better.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Ltap]

Apple also does some sneaky things that aren't exactly DRM, but are basically locking people in -- for instance, funny implementations of h.264 for AppleTV that won't play well with much things, and anything that you want to use with AppleTV has to be encoded that way. Most torrents of films are aggressively compressed, which is too much for AppleTV to handle (maybe it has a weak decoder). At any rate, it isn't explicit or removable DRM (more a deficiency and weakness in the software and hardware) but it is still a limitation and one that rather cleverly locks users into buying both the content and the means to play it from Apple or Apple-approved sources.

Re:I love my Kindle

[maxume]

It isn't that revisionist, Apple obviously wanted music from the record companies more than they wanted to keep DRM out of their store.

Re:I love my Kindle

[dangitman]

(look when Jobs wrote that letter declaring 'Oh we don't like DRM, we were strong armed...' a few months before Amazon started selling DRM free music).

Are you chronologically challenged or something? Your own post says that Jobs wrote the letter months before Amazon's music store launched. So, how could it be in response to Amazon?

Re:I love my Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

Well since Apple was working with the same RIAA people that Amazon was working with, they would have learned that Amazon was going to be DRM-Free. This isn't chronologically challenged, this is reading the writing on the wall and trying to get prepared before they are caught with their pants down.

Re:I love my Kindle

[dangitman]

Well since Apple was working with the same RIAA people that Amazon was working with, they would have learned that Amazon was going to be DRM-Free.

OK, do you have any evidence of that? Apple has managed to keep projects (even ones involving multiple partner companies) secret unit their announcement, why should we assume that Amazon can't also do so?

Re:I love my Kindle

[nxtw]

Apple also does some sneaky things that aren't exactly DRM, but are basically locking people in -- for instance, funny implementations of h.264 for AppleTV that won't play well with much things, and anything that you want to use with AppleTV has to be encoded that way.

It's not really sneaky. Your pirated H264 content is simply beyond the supported specification of the device, and the device is marketed to play content from Apple's and other supported stores/streaming services, not Blu-ray/HD DVD quality HD video or 1080p pirated content.

A lot of pirated content is encoded to Blu-ray supported specifications (1080p24 L.4.1 H264), as this is what Blu-ray players, many network/USB video players, and PC video cards with H.264 decoding support, but the Apple device doesn't even support 1080p output.

Re:I love my Kindle

[nxtw]

Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.)

Not really. It's not so much DRM as a specific set of supported hardware and a specific (different than BIOS) way of booting. The "lots of" modifications needed to get OS X running on non-Apple hardware tend to be drivers and patches for hardware support and a special bootloader or emulated boot environment.

Re:I love my Kindle

[arose]

Secret to the general public.

Re:I love my Kindle

[dangitman]

Secret to the general public.

So, do you have evidence that Apple and Amazon were in cahoots and telling each other their plans? I prefer to base my reasoning on facts and evidence rather than wild conspiracy theories and speculation.

Re:I love my Kindle

[BlackBloq]

I'm glad you can't change the Mac around. Why yell at an Apple for not being an Orange! If you want to slut around your hardware and make a Frankenbeast then get a PC@! Yell at Apple for ONE PC per Ipod dock rule, now that's dickish and it actually effects people.

Re:I love my Kindle

[arose]

The timing is suggestive, any earlier revelations about Apples unwillingness to use DRM?

Re:I love my Kindle

[Flentil]

If an author wants to upload a book to Apple's iBookstore, they can only do it from a mac. Furthermore, you can't even link to books in the ibookstore from the world wide web, unlike books for Kindle or Nook, whose bookstores are easily accessed from the web. When it comes to ebooks, Apple is a private system, segregated from the web. I wouldn't be surprised it they tried to take this further in the future and have their own private Apple-branded Internet for Apple fanboys alone where they'll never have to read a message like this one.

Re:I love my Kindle

[dangitman]

The timing is suggestive...

How is it "suggestive, when it was months before Amazon's store opened?

... any earlier revelations about Apples unwillingness to use DRM?

Yes. From Steve Jobs' memo on DRM:

"When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices. Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time..."

That pretty clearly indicates that Apple never wanted it in the first place. Why would they? It's just an additional complexity, another headache to program that would cost them money to develop and maintain.

Re:I love my Kindle

[dangitman]

P.S:

Before the iPod existed, Apple promoted iTunes with the "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign. If Apple was so gung-ho about DRM, why did iTunes rip to DRM-free files? If you actually remember this, at the time, Apple was under heavy attack from the record companies for promoting "piracy."

Re:I love my Kindle

[f3rret]

The iTunes store does not offer all of its content without DRM. Videos are still DRM'ed as are Audiobooks.
I've recently changed my old iPhone 3G out for a Desire HD and now suddenly all the audiobooks I bought for the iPhone need to be converted before I can use them.
And since most DRM breaking schemes for iTunes DRM involve the "analog hole", that is play the files on a virtual soundcard and record the output it takes as long as the file is to break the DRM, and for Audiobooks that's upwards of 8 hours per file, it's not hard just tedious.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Olivier Galibert]

Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.)

Not really. It's not so much DRM as a specific set of supported hardware and a specific (different than BIOS) way of booting. The "lots of" modifications needed to get OS X running on non-Apple hardware tend to be drivers and patches for hardware support and a special bootloader or emulated boot environment.

There is one "secret" key tucked into an apple-specific chip on the motherboard (smc) which is used to decrypt critical files of the system.

      OG.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they?

Lockin, no need to be dense about such simple things.

The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

The other major problem with ebooks is that the selection outside of the US is shocking. Most stores refuse to sell to us, the others will have something like "This book is not available in your region" for most of their titles.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically, distribution contracts did not cover distribution beyond a certain territory (e.g., the U.S). Those rights were retained by the authors/publishers, to be contracted out according to their best interest. This was actually true of "e" rights as well. Simply put, the fact that a publisher/distributor have rights to sell a paper book, does not automatically mean that they can sell the electronic version. People who have the rights have been sitting on them, trying to see how to best exploit the market(s). Now that there are major, mainstream distribution channels (Amazon, B&N, Apple, etc.) there is a chance that rights holders will start to relinquish their works.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[John Hasler]

> Most stores refuse to sell to us...

Because the rights for your country were sold to someone in your country. That's who you need to deal with.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[lahvak]

When I got a nook for christmas, I was looking forward for buying bunch of books from the country where I grew up. I would like to read some of the books that are being published there now, but shipping them across the ocean is pretty expensive. I was extremely disappointed by the small amount of ebooks that are available. In addition, when I tried to buy some, it turned out I would have to have a mobile phone number in that country. The only books that are available to me are either free out of copyright books that were digitized by libraries or volunteers, or pirated and illegally digitized books.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[NoobixCube]

Exaclty why I pirate ebooks. Australian publishers need to get their shit together. Either I pirate an ebook, or I have to spoof my IP and use a fake american address, all to pay for something that violates Australian copyright law anyway. Usually when I pirate an ebook, I have the dead tree on my shelf for looks, but some books aren't as portable as I'd like. I'd love it if dead trees came with a redemption code for an electronic copy, too, but I can't even legally purchase the ebooks I want. One step at a time.

Edit: I've never tried spoofing my IP to buy overseas. Seemed like too much trouble for no legal difference when IRC was right there.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Moskit]

At the same time you can import a real book without such problems.

Now, if only international shipping weren't so expensive and books so heavy...

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, but they have no intention of using them. So I can't get a digital version of the book, and I have no intention of buying a physical book (on principal at this point).

So basically I don't have much to read, and authors/publishers are missing out on money because they haven't arranged distribution rights in a sensible manner.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Opportunist]

Or, put shorter, global economy is only good if it's good for the seller.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Ltap]

Be careful of what you pay for. Some works (Orwell's, for instance) are out of copyright in Commonwealth countries but still under copyright (due to Disney's meddling) in the USA. I believe they are hosted at the Australian Project Gutenberg site if you are interested, but they aren't as well-proofread as the main Gutenberg stuff and come in very few formats.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Mega Agree. I would like to have access to a decent range of eBooks but living in Australia means that although I have a choice of readers I don't have much choice in books. Some popular paperbacks seems to be about all. I won't part with any cash for a reader until I can get content I want. The sort of sad thing though is the number of US sites I have had to block because they give you the "sorry, you live outside the real world so we can't sell to you" bit, then send you spam for the next three years. It's essentially a restrictive trade practise. The Oz dollar is about parity with US but books are about double in price (as is about everything else). So we buy a lot in the internet (Gerry, stop whining about it) and get other stuff we want when we go overseas. And we go overseas a lot. While hard-core piracy will always exist a solution to a good proportion of it is simple. Let the market have what it wants at a reasonable price. if not we'll find a way to get it, or even worse, discover we don't need it and just go without.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[jecblackpepper]

Actually it's usually that the publisher only ask for rights for ebooks to be same as the rights they want to pay for for paper books. So a US publisher will only want to buy US paper rights and so only buy US ebook rights. The author however, typically doesn't manage to sell their book to an international publisher, probably because it's often a waste of time for an international English language publisher to publish a book that is also published in US since international customers who want it can import the paper book (or have Amazon or Waterstones do it for them), so no publisher ends up buying the rights for ebooks outside of the US.

I've spoken to authors who've said, it's the contract the publisher offered me, it was a take it or leave it deal.

So it's currently the publishers who are sticking with a business model that works for paper books and trying to apply it to ebooks. It would be so much easier if the publishers updated their contracts to buy regional paper book rights and non-exclusive global (language specific) rights for ebooks.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

> Most stores refuse to sell to us...

Because the rights for your country were sold to someone in your country. That's who you need to deal with.

Living in Germany this would result in me reading the book in German. This is bad joke, as I want to read the books in english. But so far I am currently buying books at 3 Bookshops outside from Germany - with a German credit card. A fourth shop (whsmith.co.uk) has informed me, as I had registered with my real adress, that they cannot continue to sell me ebooks, as they have been forbidden to do so. But the few ebooks I bought there I can keep and they will continue to work, even with the DRM which would allow them to disable them.

The first trick is, to register with a US or UK adress, which passes simple tests, and you can google a bit till you have a more or less good adress. The only shop where my german cc does not work, is iTunes USA, if you really must, you can use Giftcards from eBay there (I did this once for a download of a film).
If you google a little, you can see that most (every?) cc has coded in it's first numbers the bank and country of origin.
So maybe the shops where I buy ebooks will get wise someday and I cannot buy there forever, their loss.
And I am even buying eBooks which would not work on my reader, stripping the DRM, so I can use them (epub).
Second trick: a VPN helps also, as my IP can come from US or UK or without VPN from Germany (which does not work with all shops).
What some publishers do not get, the alternative for ebooks I am not allowed to buy, are used books, all other options are to expensive.
And who gets money from used books? No publisher, that's for sure.

Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Senes]

Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device.

If I'm going to spend money on a device that's solely for reading text, I'm going to want to use it to read the long volumes I encounter on a daily basis because seeing them on a backlit screen is far more comfortable than seeing black text on a white background on a computer monitor. If I can't put whatever I feel like onto a reader, which is what serves as an open door to piracy, then it's not very useful to me.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Korin43]

Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device..

Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[betterunixthanunix]

At the same time, though, publishers are desperate to find a way to kill the used book market, which is an even bigger threat to their bottom lines. You see the worst sorts of tactics to kill used book sales in the textbook market -- publishers often release a new edition of a textbook with little more than the order of the practice problems changed. Publishers love the idea of DRM because it allows them to kill used book sales; of course, they are in for a hard dose of reality when they finally learn that these restriction technologies were doomed from the start.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[faedle]

You might be looking at the wrong end of the dog.

Plain text eBooks (or ones using open unDRMed formats) represent a threat. However, book publishers have found a way to have their cake and eat it too with DRM.

Through DRM, they eliminate the used market and lending, make it a challenge to share, and through obsolescence of the hardware will "get old and fall apart." Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.

With DRM, eBook readers are a publisher's wet dream. /Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Junta]

authors can't self-publish as easily

There is nothing in the DRM encumbered market that makes this true. The stewards of the DRM are the likes of Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc. Even if an author *did* consider DRM a must-have for him to be comfortable publishing, the vendors will gladly help that author self-publish with DRM in order to cut out the publisher middle man. The publisher doesn't implement any technical infrastructure required for DRM to function.

Even if it were the case that DRM is inaccessible, sure they don't get DRM, but they also don't have to let a publisher gouge them for money in the middle.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[demonlapin]

if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device.

I'm not aware of any reader that doesn't let you load content via USB. It's really not an issue.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[faedle]

The process is not transparent to authors, and requires a small amount of technical savviness.

I know a good number of authors, a few of them you may have even heard of. None of them understand the technology enough to effectively use Amazon's self-publishing platform. Amazon's self-published e-books section are filled with books with typesetting problems. Hell, you could say the same thing about the professionally edited and published books: there are few eBooks I've purchased from Amazon that didn't have some oddity in the typesetting when read on the Kindle.

Even the most piss-poor publishing house offers a lot to an author: editing, illustration, typesetting, and promotion. They get none of that if they self-publish through Amazon.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[The Mighty Buzzard]

They're pretty useful if you don't mind pirating the works or buying them in whatever format and stripping the DRM.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is Digital Distribution itself and no right of resale. Once physical media goes out the window, they will have no reason to discount prices as sharply as outlets in competition with each other do to free up physical shelf space. The distribution channels will be tightly controlled and we're all walking into this convenience trap.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.

Bullshit.

I do all the technical heavy-lifting for my wife's self-published book, for both print and electronic editions. We currently have it out on Kindle as a .mobi with their own DRM, in the Kobo store as Adobe Digital Editions protected ePub, and on iBooks as an ePub with Apple's own protection. Two people, a family partnership as the business structure, and a presence in three reasonably significant e-book distribution channels, all with DRM. Kobo treat us just like any other small publisher - that could in part be due to them being Canadian rather than American. Admittedly, iBooks requires use of an aggregation service unless you're huge (in our case, Lulu), but the point is that there are ways for even the smallest to get into some of the more significant DRM-protected distribution channels.

B&N appear to be where Amazon were a couple of years ago, and unless you're in the US or are a foreign business with US bank and tax details they're damn hard to deal with. So, we're not in there yet.

We initially considered DRM important, as we're still trying to sell her other work to traditional publishers and didn't want to de-value what would become her "back-list" through having uncontrollable non-DRM copies in the wild, but both the Kindle and Adobe DRM are easily bypassed and we hope that tech-savvy acquisitions editors will realise this. We're in the process of putting together a non-DRM edition through Smashwords, which will make its way into the Sony, B&N and Diesel stores. We intend to take up all Smashwords distribution options initially, with the exception of Kindle, iBooks and Kobo, who we have existing distribution arrangements with. We may re-visit that, as dealing with a single payment source that will use Paypal is a lot easier than dealing with several that will only send us cheques. That will mean completely foregoing DRM in all channels, but given how trivial the current schemes are to defeat I don't see that as any kind of problem unless the publishers we're trying to sell her other work to see it as one; they may publicly state that it is, but deep down I think they know how things work these days. In fact, by foregoing DRM we'll be increasing the breadth of her distribution, and that's a good thing as it's all about increasing readership and accessibility.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[thunderclap]

However as an author, ebooks do get old and die quickly unlike bound print. In an old book story I can find Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany or Dayworld by Jose Louis farmer or After the Fact by Fred Saberhagen or the Stand by Stephen King or 'the life of Olaudah equiano' which was his autobiography written in the early 19th century during the fight to end slavery in Britain. Unlike other media, Books in bound form are enduring and quantitative. I perfer to have my book bound because a nook, kindle etc won't function in 2050. However, a bound copy of 'Summon the Heroes' will. We need to move in all forms of media to the concept of shared space and acceptable loses. Until them, this insanity will continue and good books will vanish just like they did when the Library of Alexandria burned millenia ago.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[jack2000]

I don't mind buying books, but i want to give money directly to the author, thus cutting out the middle man.
eReaders need to be developed by companies without a horse in the publishing busies.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Junta]

But those are actual services to provide. None of that is inherently tied to the DRM aspect of the eBooks.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Quirkz]

I think most of the books you quote came out before eBooks existed, so naturally you can't find eBook copies of them. I suspect books that come out this year will still be available in digital format in 10 or 20 or 40 years. For one, with no storage and printing costs, there's little incentive to discontinue selling the digital copy, so it should be listed for sale long after the printed versions go out of print. (Not like King's going out of print any time soon, but today's niche sci-fi or fantasy authors might.)

It's true that my Nook won't function in 2050, but I think there's a very good chance the ePub files I have backed up on my computer will still exist. Possibly not in their current format, but certainly if there's a big shift in formats we'll have the option to convert and keep them updated.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[dangitman]

I'm going to want to use it to read the long volumes I encounter on a daily basis because seeing them on a backlit screen is far more comfortable than seeing black text on a white background on a computer monitor.

How is your computer monitor not a backlit screen?

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Publishers still bring two critical things, that won't ever change, first is exposure, a little know author, or one shot wonder, will have little chance to get a lot of readers, it would get better as they write more, and become more known, but not very much. And second, is the editing. You might have written a masterpiece, but you need the word of a professional to find out what you did wrong, which are provided by the publisher.

The only ones that have a chance of getting somewhere with this self-publishing bit, are the already well known writers. But to be honest, after publishing many good books, they probably have a good working relationship with their publisher and won't want to lose it.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Problem is the authors still like the big advances publishers give them.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[cpt kangarooski]

'the life of Olaudah equiano' which was his autobiography written in the early 19th century during the fight to end slavery in Britain.

Late 18th century, IIRC.

As for the loss of books, read 'Double Fold' by Nicholson Baker. What goes on at libraries will infuriate you.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[nxtw]

/Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.

You may own the Kindle, but you certainly don't own the books or the software running on the Kindle that renders the books.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[pthreadunixman]

This would only hold true in a DRMed world. Without DRM, its so trivial to copy and backup books that they'd have a far higher chance of surviving than a paper bound book.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[zentigger]

don't forget that with ebooks, the publisher's distribution costs are practically nothing, there is no printing cost, and no worries of over/under printing, but despite that, the books are still the same price (more or less) than the paper equivalent!

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Risen888]

I admire your romanticism, but you're wrong, and you spelled out the reason why yourself: "We need to move in all forms of media to the concept of shared space and acceptable loses."

We have that now, for the first time in human history,. It is the digital commons. It's archive.org, isohunt.com, my mp3 player, and your flash drive. And it's forever, because it's everywhere. You can't burn it, you can't arrest it, you can't kill it. It's immortal, indestructible, and omnipresent.

Oh, and it's free.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few really good sites from which to obtain "free" ebooks.

You can then print them out using a high quality colour laser printer, and comb-bind the pages.

My own collection of these printed ebooks would be approximately four metres high if stacked vertically.

The cost in electricity, toner, paper, binding equipment and materials, printer wear-and-tear, and anything else is *utterly miniscule* when compared to the cost of actually buying the ebooks, and even less when it comes to the legal printed and bound versions.

In my country, the average price of the kinds of books I "pirate" is around US$120, with some being much more expensive than that. Much more expensive.

Do I like "ripping-off" publishers? All I can say is it's better than *being* ripped-off by publishers.

And for what it's worth, I still buy a lot of books, either new or used, perhaps an average of three per week...but I never pay for the ebook versions: Paper still rules.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Olivier Galibert]

I don't mind buying books, but i want to give money directly to the author, thus cutting out the middle man.
  eReaders need to be developed by companies without a horse in the publishing busies.

You may consider the editor to be a middle man, but real editors are *way* much more than that.

    OG.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[demonlapin]

If he's sensible, then he has stripped the DRM from the Kindle books, in which case he has them in unencrypted Mobipocket. That's a format for which there are numerous readers and converters. I'd call that owning the book and the software. (Calibre, for example, is released under the GPL.)

Just wait

[MrEricSir]

Soon you'll need a DRM chip in your optic nerve just to read a book or watch a movie.

Re:Just wait

[jgagnon]

Don't forget the mandatory brain wipe when the information is recalled or your license is revoked.

Re:Just wait

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Don't forget the mandatory brain wipe when the information is recalled or your license is revoked.

Forget what now?

Re:Just wait

[rolfwind]

For some movies. that would be a bonus feature.

When the pirated content is higher quality

[thue]

If you decide to only sell DRMed books, then you are selling a lower quality product than the pirates are given away. DRM can be a huge bother.

So I hope they are taking into account people who would have bought a non-DRMed ebook, but will pirate ebooks if only DRMed ebooks are available for sale.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[metrometro]

The Kindle user experience is a data point against the "lower quality product" argument. It's certainly locked down, but the delivery path is pretty damn good. I've seen both DRM and pirated books, and buying a Kindle ebook is a better experience. Period. It just costs more.

This is very different from music and movies, where pirates perfected digital downloading long before a commercial option was available. Amazon, not stupid about these things, is hammering down ebook prices to get people on their platform before competitors can get off the ground - legal and illegal. Would I prefer to move books from my Kindle to my Nook, and buy books for Kindle from the store of my choice? Sure. But if quality user experience is the only argument against DRM you can muster, then it's a very DRM future in the ebook world, my friends.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[hedwards]

It costs more and you lose your entire library if you switch to the competition.

But yes, the delivery path is quite straightforward. At least with the competition you're not quite as locked down and can move to a different device.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed, straight up page scans, headers on every page (mostly a problem with reflowing PDFs)... it makes some books nearly unreadable on most devices. For $5-15 I can buy a book that (depending on my free time and the length) will take me 3 days to two weeks to read and I often read books several times. It isn't a bad investment and the formatting is good and I have no issues reading it on my device. I would prefer things be DRM free, and it would be nice if the kindle supported ePub (that's the primary reason I chose the nook) but eBooks are definately one area where the digital rips of paper books simply don't cut it and the cracked versions of published eBooks don't make it onto the pirating sites with enough frequency to offset the horrible OCR that plagues pirated books.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Nadaka]

Plus you get the bonus of having all your books and historical documents redacted and updated to the current version available from the ministry of truth with out any fuss or fear of the thought police busting down your door.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[faedle]

The average consumer doesn't understand that. The average consumer has already purchased their copy of "Neverending Story" on video tape and now DVD, and is waiting in queue for their copy on BluRay. Yes, they've bought the same movie three times over the last 20 years (four if they paid for a movie ticket).

Yes, you and I know (as geeks) that today's current crop of monochrome-display eInk readers are almost identical to tomorrow's crop of color display ones, or today's tablets. Being as the latter can run Kindle/nook/Border's store, that's not a big issue.

Most people don't honestly care about library retention, and they never have in any other mass electronic medium to any large degree. Most consumers expect tomorrow's technology to not play today's media. Very few consumers who invested in large Laserdisc libraries yelled very loudly when they had to repurchase their libraries on DVD.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[godrik]

Well, I also recalled spending hours looking for books in a epub (even drm-ed) format and I couldn't find it. I finally resolved to look for it on TPB and I found it in 2 minutes. I wanted to buy the book. But I couldn't find it!

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Tx]

Yes. I have a substantial library of DRM-protected Microsoft Reader and Palm Reader books, which I'm now trying to deprotect and convert to read on modern hardware, as those formats are now practically abandoned. I gave the DRM a fair shot, and I'm not feeling like I got a good deal. I'm not aware of any stores that let you re-download a book in a different format if you buy different hardware, which they could easily do; seems to me the DRM is as much about trying to lock you in to a platform as it is about copy protection. Anyway from here on in, I'll only accept DRM-free books, whichever way I have to get them.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Hortensia Patel]

The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed

To be fair, that's a problem with some legitimate content as well. I bought an E-Reads title recently and it was just appalling - probably averaged around an error per (small) page, including one in the very first paragraph. It was very very obvious that nobody had even glanced at the text after scanning it.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Doubleplus insightful!

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[demonlapin]

If you care about that, you probably have already figured out that ebook DRM has all been cracked.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. I can't count the number of Nookbooks that I've bought that have very obvious spelling, grammar, and/or typesetting errors. If you try to complain about it they treat you like you are crazy and give you the old "works for me". Usually they are oblivious to what it is you are trying to tell them is wrong with the book no matter how many times you repeat it for them.

Honestly, I'd pay more for a guaranteed proofread and 100% error free copy, even more if it were also DRM free.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Late Adopter]

Pirated ebooks suck. DRMed ebooks might not be great either, if only because of they DRM, but they could easily be less bad.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[TheRaven64]

The difference is that going from VHS to DVD and to BluRay gives you something better each time (special features, higher quality audio and video, and in the VHS to DVD transition, a much more convenient form factor). Buying an Apple-DRM's version of a book that you already own in Amazon-DRM format gives you nothing. Of course, lots of people never reread books, so they may not care if the book stops working in the future.

Laserdiscs are statistical noise. Very few people bought them.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

bittorrents and gnutella are both horrible ways to get ebooks. I used them for about 2 months before I remembered IRC ... get yourself over to undernet #bookz !!!

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[thesandtiger]

I have over 100,000 ebooks and I've paid for exactly 5 of them. Maybe 10,000 of those books are in the public domain and the remainder I grabbed in a few mega torrents since hey, they were available. I set up some scripts to have MobiPocket convert them all to a format my Kindle can handle, and they all fit onto the memory card my (original) Kindle can read.

The whole process of getting those 90,000 books and converting them so I could read them was easier and took less time than it took me to deal with Amazon customer support when, erroneously, the 5th and final book I paid for from their site, disappeared from my device when I was in the middle of reading it. It turns out it was just a software error, but it made me decide that as much as I like the device, I will absolutely *not* let Amazon have anything to do with what I put on it.

I am not the kind of person one would normally think becomes a pirate, but in the last few years, the behavior of those who hold copyrights abusing the system to ensure that their copyrights NEVER expire coupled with DRM that punishes ONLY legitimate customers and not pirates have made me basically decide, fuck it - I'm just not going to worry about paying for things like this.

Mind you, I am also the kind of person who paid on the high end for the Humble Bundle (and didn't play any of the games) and who bought a few "name your own price" tracks and albums just to support those models, bought songs on iTunes when they dropped the DRM to show support for that, and I also tend to send a few bucks to various OS projects when I find their stuff useful or neat. But I'm done paying unless I feel like it, and I can't even bring myself to feel guilty about it as I would have just 5 years ago.

I've got a lot of disposable income (more now, thanks to piracy), and I just choose not to bother spending it on people that treat me preemptively like I'm shit.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you buy an iPad, and load iBooks, the Kindle app, and B&N's reader on it.

Presto - one device, all three sources. YAY TECHNOLOGY!

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Ltap]

The errors (in both shared and commercial content) are usually because they were OCR'd cheaply and quickly without much proofreading. Most OCR software, unless you are willing to pay $20,000 (it's not available through "non-conventional" channels, the developers have so few clients that they keep a tight handle on it) for a suite, will result in many errors. Common ones include the length of a dash (no m-dashes anywhere), 'i' for 'l' for 't' (which is mostly due to funny fonts or printing errors in the paper book), etc... and good luck with special characters, even just ones with accents. Foreign (meaning non-English) language support for OCR software is virtually non-existent, and most seem to have trouble just recognizing basic ASCII characters.

In this case, errors are common. However, good release groups for e-books will generally read them looking for truly egregious errors, usually comparing them to a paper copy.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[dakameleon]

Give the average consumer a little bit of credit, they're not fools like you're making them out to be. Chances are, if they're rebuying Neverending Story on Blu-ray, it's because they like the movie. And chances are that means the VHS tape is now worn out, and the DVD somewhat scratched. It's the equivalent of buying a new copy of a The Catcher in the Rye, because the book you read and loved in high school is now somewhat tatty and falling apart. Most people care about library retention, otherwise they'd resell these things as soon as they were "done" with it, and backwards compatiblity is still a factor - if all Blu-ray players had been sold without any backwards compatibilty to DVDs, you can bet HD-DVD would have won the day by a country mile.

You can bet if you told your mom that to move from a Kindle to a Nook she has to buy all those books again that she's going to complain about it. Most consumers might be resigned to tomorrow's technology obsoleting today's media, but you can bet they would be happier if it didn't.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[narcc]

It costs more and you lose your entire library if you switch to the competition.

But yes, the delivery path is quite straightforward. At least with the competition you're not quite as locked down and can move to a different device.

I'd have agreed with you before I purchased a Kindle 3.

The experience of reading is so vastly improved (for me, at least) over the old 'dead-tree' format that I find it's worth the extra cost to purchase both the print and digital versions.

I buy the digital version of books I'm not sure about first. If I decide it's worth adding to my over-burdened library, I buy it in print.

While it would be nice if I didn't have to strip the DRM myself for my digital archive/backup, that's a burden I've imposed on myself in anticipation of switching "providers" in the future.

I didn't find the heavier, thicker, touch-screen Nook appealing in any way. If it had been the only option, I probably wouldn't own an e-reader.

So I'm trading the Nooks obvious advantages for what I consider a better reading experience. I'm willing to pay for that in both time and money.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[pthreadunixman]

The user experience is good if and only if you are only going to read your books on the Kindle platform. As soon as you want to read your books on a Linux box and/or with free software, it now becomes a pain in the ass. None of the books I've bought (that I read on my Kindle) have come from amazon. I've gotten them all from publishers/retailers that use ePUB/Digital Editions from which I strip the DRM and convert to mobipocket format for the Kindle.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[arose]

Foreign (meaning non-English) language support for OCR software is virtually non-existent

I can't agree, ABBYY is pretty darn good as far as such things go.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The interesting conversation will happen when the file sizes pack down to (relative to storage) nearly nothing, and the bootleg libraries get better and cleaner. When the entire Library of Congress can be carried on a pocketable storage (and we're not far from that), it changes the economics a bit. "Downloading" and "filesharing" books will be irrelevant because these libraries will be nearly complete. You have one or you don't. Current books will be harder to find, but old ones will be available, and probably curated with great care (professional librarians are unfailing radical about these things).

Think of the impact this would have on, say, academics writing papers. Could you afford not to have a decent library?

I also observe that the publishing industry is already in a economic meltdown without piracy or ebooks playing a role.

I make two predictions:

1) The only authoring business models that will continue to work:

The stream: New books, sequels, serials will be the only reliable purely-for-profit business model. This will change how novels are structured.

The community: books will be written to fill a specific need. This will change the relationship between authors and readers.

2) When the authoring world blows up, people will freak and laws will be harsh. As cops track this stuff, people will avoid risk by trafficking hardware rather than go online. Memory cards, preloaded, shipping from outside the reach of Western copyright laws.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, they have this great invention these days where you can not only refuse to pay for the content, but you also don't have to break the law! It's called not being a fucking pirate retard. What an amazing world we live in!

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The user experience is good if and only if you are only going to read your books on the Kindle platform. As soon as you want to read your books on a Linux box and/or with free software, it now becomes a pain in the ass.

None of the books I've bought (that I read on my Kindle) have come from amazon. I've gotten them all from publishers/retailers that use ePUB/Digital Editions from which I strip the DRM and convert to mobipocket format for the Kindle.

What pain in the arse? You're making problems where there are none.

Unswindle works fine under Python for Windows on WINE, as does the necessary version of Kindle for PC - so it's no more of a pain in the arse to strip Kindle DRM under Linux than it is to strip it from epubs (Adobe Digital Editions works fine on WINE, and Inept works fine under Python for Windows on WINE too). Plus, there's no need for an epub->mobi conversion step as. That's generally less painful, from where I sit. And I can convert the books I buy from Amazon to epub to use with a cheap epub reader if I choose to buy one in the future as a secondary reader for the household - when they hit about $50 I might buy one just for the hell of it, I expect mono LCD ones to hit that by mid-year and TFT colour ones to be around $80.

The only gotcha might be that some titles on Kindle are Topaz format - and that's a whole other can of worms - but it costs nothing to download the sample and try to strip the DRM from it before buying the book. Most current Kindle books aren't Topaz, that's a bizarro reflowable bitmapped glyph format that's reserved for books there weren't electronic masters for and which Amazon had to scan in order to put out on the Kindle.

I buy Kindle titles and strip the DRM for convenience/backup purposes for use with my Kindle, and so I can read them with mobipocket reader on my Nokia phone. I buy protected epubs that I strip the DRM from and convert so I can read them on my Kindle and on my Nokia phone. I'd say I've got the best of both worlds, with a reasonable degree of flexibility in what I buy and from where.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

If you decide to only sell DRMed books, then you are selling a lower quality product than the pirates are given away. DRM can be a huge bother.

So I hope they are taking into account people who would have bought a non-DRMed ebook, but will pirate ebooks if only DRMed ebooks are available for sale.

Or you could get free, non-DRMed, non-pirated books from places like Munsey's

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Devoidoid]

Laserdiscs are statistical noise. Very few people bought them.

But we who did yelled extremely loudly when we had to repurchase our libraries on DVD.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[pthreadunixman]

Having to deal with DRM at all is THE pain in the ass of which I speak. You've simply illustrated that there are multiple flavors of PITA. No matter which way you slice it, as soon as you want to do anything outside of the Kindle sandbox, you have a PITA on your hand.

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am not the kind of person one would normally think becomes a pirate"

Me, either. I'm a 40 year-old housewife who never pirated music in college when all my friends were, have never pirated a movie or video game. I differ from you in that I will still buy an ebook if I enjoyed the pirated version. In fact, I'm spending *more* now on ebooks than I ever did before I started previewing them via piracy. Back then I wouldn't gamble my money on a new author or a book with mixed reviews. Now I download it and if I like it I pay for it, if I don't like it I delete the file. So I'm not a "lost sale" as many authors rant about - I was never going to buy these books in the first place, and now I'm buying many of them. I guess that makes me a "found sale"?

Re:When the pirated content is higher quality

[pnutjam]

help a brother out with some reading material...?

Baen Books

[Nom du Keyboard]

One must examine all possibilities before jumping to any conclusions. Maybe Baen Books doesn't publish anything worth pirating. :^)

Re:Baen Books

[Anonymous Coward]

One must examine all possibilities before jumping to any conclusions. Maybe Baen Books doesn't publish anything worth pirating. :^)

You can't tell me that Chicks in Chainmail is not worth pirating!

Re:Baen Books

[Anonymous Coward]

They publish Mercedes Lackey books, so I think your argument is refuted.

Re:Baen Books

[colesw]

Except people will pirate anything, even the crappy stuff (note I love Baen Books :)

Re:Baen Books

[CRCulver]

Who?

Re:Baen Books

[faedle]

Came here to say exactly this.

A lot of Baen's catalog is dry, hard sci-fi and fantasy, and a lot of it is sold in used bookstores for 25 cents to $1 a copy.

There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader. Most of their stuff I find to be impenetrable and/or very dry reading. I'm sure the hardcore fan base will mod this down, but there's a lot to be said for "Baen's content is DRMed by being completely inaccessible to the mass market."

Re:Baen Books

[east coast]

Really? So if you find an album that only has one solid song you buy the entire thing because, you know, it's all on the same album so the entire album must be good by some twisted logic?

Re:Baen Books

[Darkness404]

Um, what? No they won't. How many mediocre Journey cover bands do you find on The Pirate Bay (who aren't just trying to build publicity), none. Yet their stuff is under just as much copyright as Journey songs legally. Its just no one bothers pirating crappy Journey cover bands because no one really likes it. People don't pirate "anything" they pirate what they think is either:

A) Easier to find via pirating than legitimate means (things like obscure Japanese ROMs, DRM-encumbered files, etc.)

B) Things that cost far too much to their actual value (such as textbooks)

C) Things that are better to get pirated than legitimately acquired (games stripped of DRM, etc.)

Unless things are in bulk (As in, get all titles with the author's name A-C), people aren't going to be pirating crappy e-books.

Re:Baen Books

[hedwards]

The GP is correct, the assertion that they don't have piracy because there isn't anything worth pirating only requires a single exception to be refuted. I'm not familiar with the Mercedes Lackey books, but assuming that they're at all popular, that would meet the necessary level to set aside the argument.

Re:Baen Books

[MadChicken]

You need to read more Keith Laumer.

Re:Baen Books

[geminidomino]

Having read Mercedes Lackey in the past, I would not actually call that a refutation...

Re:Baen Books

[east coast]

You're just trying to bring this all down into a question of the literal interpretation of the point being made. Feel free but those of us who live in the real world aren't fooled.

Re:Baen Books

[Hortensia Patel]

There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader.

Oh, c'mon. Yes, Sturgeon's Law applies here like anywhere else, but are you really claiming that writers like Lois Bujold don't appeal to casual genre readers? Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga and not been utterly bowled over by it?

Re:Baen Books

[demonlapin]

Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga

No, I don't, and neither have the vast majority of other people.

Re:Baen Books

[alSeen]

You need to read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. The series has 3 books that have won the Hugo for Best Novel and 3 others that were nominated but didn't win. It is one of the best scifi series out there.

Available from Baen. DRM free. Heck, completely free from here.

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

Go to the Cryoburn CD to find the files.

This is a site that is hosting the CDs that Baen will include in some hardcover books. The CDs are freely redistributable. Baen is aware of the site and while it doesn't actively support it, they haven't asked them to stop.

You can get the complete set of the Vorkosigan books (minus one story called Memory that was forgotten when they made the disc, ironic huh) including the most recent book that had the CD included. That's right, they included an ebook version when you bought the hardcopy.

The files are all drm free and they give you the option of getting the epub, mobi, lrf, txt, html and another format I'm forgetting.

Re:Baen Books

[faedle]

I tried to read it. I got about 30 pages into Dreamweaver's Dilemma (the compilation containing the short story of the same name) and literally fell asleep in my easy chair. (irony: it's the only book of his NOT published by Baen)

It wasn't a bad story, and I can perhaps understand why somebody would read it. In the end, I felt it was no better than the average Star Trek pulp, which contains characters I'm already familiar with and "care about."

Yeah, I'm getting old. Increasingly, I don't want to be "bowled over" by my entertainment. Tell me a good compelling story with characters I can identify with, and you'll have me hooked. The Bujold I read just didn't engage me, personally.

Re:Baen Books

[colesw]

How many people download mediocre top 40 music? A lot of people. Just because some cover band doesn't get downloaded doesn't mean people don't download thousands of albums just because.
I have a friend who has terabytes of music, do you honestly want to tell me he listens to all of it? I don't think he has enough years left in his life ;)

Re:Baen Books

[moniker]

Amazon sales would say otherwise....

When Amazon says that Citadel has a salesrank of 2,675, that means there are 2,674 books in all categories currently selling better. Keep in mind, these are people who actually paid crazy deadtree prices. I got all of these books directly from Baen in an ebook bundle for just $15 a month... and I had them a month before they appeared in dead tree format. Granted, I would love if Baen had authors like Vernor Vinge and Iain Banks, but I find myself reading and buying a lot of Baen books simply because of the ebooks being DRM-free and the prices being so low.

Here are the books Baen published in January, 2010, with Amazon salesranks as of today.
Original publish dates are shown in parenthesis.

Citadel
John Ringo
Hardcover (January 4, 2011) 2,675

Cobra War Book II: Cobra Guardian
Timothy Zahn
Hardcover (January 4, 2011) 52,576

The Agent Gambit
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Paperback (January 4, 2011) 71,960

Torch of Freedom
David Weber & Eric Flint
Hardcover edition (November 17, 2009) 250,082
Mass Market Paperback (December 28, 2010) 13,870

The Tuloriad
John Ringo & Tom Kratman
Hardcover (October 6, 2009) 339,313
Mass Market Paperback (December 28, 2010) 16,079

Man-Kzin Wars XII
Larry Niven
Hardcover (February 3, 2009) 851,107
Mass Market Paperback (December 28, 2010) 29,951

Dragon's Ring
Dave Freer
Hardcover (October 6, 2009) 414,261
Mass Market Paperback (December 28, 2010) 426,955

Re:Baen Books

[CRCulver]

The series has 3 books that have won the Hugo for Best Novel and 3 others that were nominated but didn't win.

That's not going to convince judicious readers. All too often books have been nominated or awarded the Hugo or Nebula solely on the ideas they present, not the writing that the reader has to get through to hear these ideas. I just finished reading Robert Sawyer's Calculating God , felt it was mainly crap, and then was shocked to read that it had been nominated for a Hugo.

Re:Baen Books

[moniker]

Tycho from Penny Arcade praising Bujold here:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/11/26/additional-boys/

Great series of books. My understanding is that Memory is on the CD, but not actually linked from the TOC.

Re:Baen Books

[jedidiah]

They continue to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

So, obviously they sell something that a sufficient number of people consider worth buying.

Continued success is really something you can't argue against.

Re:Baen Books

[Unkyjar]

I disagree entirely.

I would say that while their entire library is science fiction and fantasy, very little of the Baen library is "hard" science fiction/fantasy. It's much lighter reading than that, but then again I probably read more Sci/Fi and Fantasy than you so it's really hard to mark where your tolerance is for prose since you cite no examples of texts you tried.

I will however point out that Tor, Harper/Collins, DAW, Del Rey, are all publishing the same quality books and authors as Baen. And you'll find that ALL paperback books can be found in used bookstores for a dollar if they're older than 10 to 15 years with a decent print run. It's the nature of the used paperback market itself.

Re:Baen Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey worked together on the PLanet Pirates books, so they were already pirated.

Re:Baen Books

[Hortensia Patel]

"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"? More irony: I'd never even heard of that, let alone read it, and from a quick Google it's the only story set in that universe that I haven't read. It's like rain, on your wedding day.

Obviously I'm not going to argue about the merits of that particular story - there are several of Bujold's peripheral and other-universe novels that didn't grab me at all - but I do think you were unlucky in your sample. The Vorkosigan books IMHO could serve as the dictionary definition of "a good compelling story with characters I can identify with".

The first couple of novels (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) are fine, but a bit Mills-and-Boone and not especially representative. The best of the lot to my mind are "Mirror Dance", "Memory" and "A Civil Campaign", but you'd be missing a whole truckload of backstory if you jumped straight in there. The best of the short stories is probably "Borders of Infinity".

Re:Baen Books

[thunderclap]

Honestly? This is a list of authors who have Published with Baen from their web page: Aaron Allston Catherine Asaro Isaac Asimov Margaret Ball Nigel Bennett C. Dale Brittain Clyde Caldwell Paul Chafe C J Cherryh Hal Colebatch Chris Dolley L. Warren Douglas David Drake Bob Eggleton P.N. Elrod Esther Friesner Doranna Durgin Rosemary Edghill Eric Flint Dave Freer David D. Friedman Roberta Gellis James C. Glass Robert A. Heinlein James P Hogan Sarah Hoyt Tom Kidd Tom Kratman Mercedes Lackey Edward M. Lerner Holly Lisle Anne McCaffrey David Mattingly Kurt Miller Elizabeth Moon Jody Lynn Nye Jerry Pournelle John Ringo Spider & Jeanne Robinson Fred Saberhagen Martin Scott Michael Shea Mark Shepherd Josepha Sherman Wm. Mark Simmons Wen Spencer Harry Turtledove's Lars Walker David Weber K.D. Wentworth Michael Z. Williamson These people make enough money to live off their writing and several are the who's who of the Sci fi community. Major movies have been made from their works. Baen simply believes that DRM is unworkable.

Re:Baen Books

[Opportunist]

Oh c'mon, you have the internet, don't you?

Who needs printed porn anymore?

Re:Baen Books

[thunderclap]

While you are true, its fascinating that none of those Journey bands made them any money. yet they left them alone. So when they were approached By Ryan Murphy to use "Don't Stop believing' in his pilot that he was doing they said yes, What did they have to lose? They now say they have made more money of that song thanks to Glee that they ever did what it under industry control. And it took a female broadway star and an unknown actor who never sang before to do it right. So you are half right. People pirate to deprive the industry money, that's why the wolverine work print appeared. What the industry doesn't get is that there is a max amount that can be made on piece of entertainment.

Re:Baen Books

[cheekyjohnson]

The fact that your friend acts that way doesn't mean that everyone else does.

Re:Baen Books

[dangitman]

One must examine all possibilities before jumping to any conclusions.

If you're just going to jump to conclusions anyway, why waste time examining all possibilities?

Re:Baen Books

[arose]

This is actually quite common... There are large number of virtual librarians and collectors among pirates, particularly people who pirate a lot.

Re:Baen Books

[cheekyjohnson]

Well, I certainly wouldn't know how common it is because it's nearly impossible to get accurate measurements for this. Perhaps it is, but I definitely wouldn't keep mediocre or useless data on my hard drive.

Re:Baen Books

[Toze]

^-- This post is exactly why book piracy increases sales.

Why I pirate books

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc. Recently three authors wrote an ebook and self-published at ~$3, they all made the same amount of money they made with a publisher. Yes, this is a different business model as the publisher does provide some value add services, and these three authors were already known authors but the point still stands as to the costs of middle men and old distribution models.

If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.

Re:Why I pirate books

[cob666]

This !

I've always read books and I find myself reading more now on my Nook than I did before I got an ereader device. The biggest gripe I have with ebooks is the price. I can walk into any bookstore and buy a paperback book for around 7 dollars, the same ebook will cost me a minimum of 9.99. I buy enough ebooks where this is becoming a problem. I recently tried to 'borrow' ebooks from the library but the selection is just laughable and unlike physical or even audio books there is no secondary market for ebooks. I now have a policy where if I'm reading a collection or multi title series I will by one ebook and download the rest. My justification is that if I buy a used book the publisher and author get no money from the secondary sale.

If the price of ebooks was BELOW the price of physical media then I would have no problem paying for all the ebooks I read.

Re:Why I pirate books

[hawguy]

Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.

But if you look at it from the publisher's point of view, he doesn't see a $1 eBook sale as a new $1 of revenue, instead he sees it as a $20 hardcover that didn't sell.

So he charges $10 for the eBook to make up for the fact that eBooks are eating into his paper book sales. Worse, he's still got to maintain that whole paper distribution model, but now instead of a title selling 100,000 paper books, it's only selling 70,000 so his cost per paper book is increasing making it more important to make up the revenue in eBooks.

The advent of eBook readers may expand his market and let him sell more total books than before, but that's not a given and I don't think that's proven to be the case (yet). I suspect that the eBook early adopters are many of the same readers that would have bought the new release at a bookstore.

Re:Why I pirate books

[harlows_monkeys]

If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.

You are, of course, almost certainly lying. If ebooks were in the $3-5 range you would be here with an almost identical complaint about how that is too high, but if they were around $1 you would buy.

Re:Why I pirate books

[Anonymous Coward]

If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.

You are, of course, almost certainly lying. If ebooks were in the $3-5 range you would be here with an almost identical complaint about how that is too high, but if they were around $1 you would buy.

As long as it's a more reasonable amount, but not the same damn price as physical books!

Re:Why I pirate books

[Silentknyght]

$1 is too high for a separate purchase. I want to buy a hardcover or paperback and get an ebook free (or "free") with the same purchase. Kind of like how bluray/DVDs are now beginning to include digital copies of the movies in addition to the on-disc version; its a way (albeit, so far imperfect) to provide additional value to someone who actually wants to purchase your product.

Sometimes I like the paper copy, like when I want to take my reading outside, especially when poolside.

Re:Why I pirate books

[Pengo]

You are, of course, almost certainly lying. If ebooks were in the $3-5 range you would be here with an almost identical complaint about how that is too high, but if they were around $1 you would buy.

Really?

Maybe i'm one of those burnt customers who have bought a Kindle with the hope that the eBooks will be more cost effective than tree-books.

I have just looked at my amazon account, and between myself and my wife we have over 100 purchased titles in our account. Both of us have kindles, as we're both avid readers.

A disturbing trend that seemed to occur when the iPad launched with it's book reader, the price of books nearly tripled, even more in the more popular books. Authors such as Steven King, have prices on their books that are drastically higher than the HARD BACK copies you can buy at Costco. Publishers such as Penguin are probably the worst of the publishers.

I'm not a pirate, nor am I going to threaten on Slashdot to start pirating books because the price is too high, but I will stop buying them. $15-20 for an eBook is ridiculous, and frankly i can understand why people would want to pirate the material when forced to pay such ridiculous prices.

The beauty of the price hikes that are occurring is it's pushing people to consider content from less popular, but just as talented authors that are selling their books in the $4-$7 price point, which from the reviews and popularity of these books growing on the top-100 lists on the Kindle store, appear to be a price point people don't mind spending.

Re:Why I pirate books

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.

But if you look at it from the publisher's point of view, he doesn't see a $1 eBook sale as a new $1 of revenue, instead he sees it as a $20 hardcover that didn't sell.

Sure, it's understandable if you look at it from the publisher's point of view.

But I'm not a publisher. I'm the (potential) customer. With the money. If the publisher wants my money, he damn well better start looking at things from my point of view, and catering to what I want, not what he wants. I don't care what he wants, or what his point of view is.

Re:Why I pirate books

[DarkOx]

Its not about just what it costs to produce its what the market will bear above the costs to produce. Apparently given the relative success Barns and Amazon are having with there E-distribution business $10 is in fact a price point at which there are a suitable number of customers. I just bought the most recent addition of a series I have been reading in hard cover, it was almost $30. I'd been excited about it for a long time and had no wish to wait for either my library to get it or for it to come out in paper back. I would have jumped at $10 E-book version; provided it was sufficiently free of DRM that I felt I had a reasonably good chance of being able to read it again a few years from now.

Re:Why I pirate books

[Opportunist]

And now please inform me why that should be of any interest to me?

Personally, I pay for a good what I deem it is worth. And the ebook version of a book is worth less to me than the dead tree edition. Sell it for less, or no sale. End of story.

Re:Why I pirate books

[CrimsonAvenger]

I want to buy a hardcover or paperback and get an ebook free (or "free") with the same purchase.

For reference, the last four Honor Harrington books I bought in hardback included a CD with basically everything written by David Weber in eBook form.

Re:Why I pirate books

[h4rr4r]

And why do I care about his costs?

Why do Americans always act like this? You are getting ass raped and you want to think about how hard it must be for the giver to be doing that since you did not bring any lube today.

Fuck the publisher, he should thank his lucky stars anyone buys his books at all.

Re:Why I pirate books

[zippy590]

The big problem with your math is that when I buy an eBook I don't have first sale rights. I almost always buy my books used and then pass them on to someone else. So every book I read ends up with at least three owners. I just got back from Goodwill and picked up 4 very-good condition used books for less than $8.00. (One of them was "CODE" by Lawrence Lessig, a good find!) Once the eBook publishing industry acknowledges the difference between purchasing a physical book and an eBook, they could make eBooks available for a 30 day rental at say $3.99. I'd switch to eBooks and wouldn't care about things like DRM, product obsolescence or vendor lock in.

Re:Why I pirate books

[hawguy]

And why do I care about his costs?

Because you want cheap eBooks and can't have them...at least not from major publishers. Small independent publishers that don't have a paper based distribution infrastructure to support sell eBooks quite cheaply - check smashwords.com - most books are priced at a few dollars (or free).

Why do Americans always act like this? You are getting ass raped and you want to think about how hard it must be for the giver to be doing that since you did not bring any lube today.

Fuck the publisher, he should thank his lucky stars anyone buys his books at all.

I didn't realize that the USA was the only country where product sellers set a price that the market was willing to pay rather than the fair cost to manufacture and distribute the product. What country do you come from where sellers are all altruistic and never price their products higher than their costs? Or do they still ass rape you, but use lots of lube and cuddle with you afterwards?

Nearly every product is priced like this. Do you really think that $20 (or 20 €) bottle of shampoo at the shop has $20 of materials in it? More likely, it cost $2 in raw materials, $2 to get it to you, and the remaining $16 is split between the manufacturer, distributer and retailer.

Ever buy food in a restaurant? That $75 steak only cost the restaurant $10 including labor you could make it at home for a fraction of the cost of what the restaurant is charging. A Coke at McDonalds costs them around 15 cents while they charge you $1.50.

The publishing industry is built around a particular way of business and they are slow to change. They still make the majority of their profits from hardcover and paperback sales, why should they give that revenue up until they have to? Do you also complain that hardbacks cost several times the cost of paperbacks even though they are not that much more expensive to create and distribute?

Industry change will come, but probably not as quickly as consumers would like it to and probably faster than the industry would like it to. The music industry finally came around to it, and the book industry will eventually do the same, but not without a lot of fighting.

Re:Why I pirate books

[Iman Azol]

Baen titles are $6, or all 6 titles for the month for $15. No DRM. Sharing encouraged. I suppose next you want them to pay you for your time downloading, right?;-)

Re:Why I pirate books

[dakameleon]

With the Kindle, Amazon was initially imposing a price cap of $9.99 on all books. Apple followed their app store model - set any price you chose, and we'll just take a 30% cut. That pricing flexibility prompted at least one major publisher (forgot the name) to pull all of its books, paper and electronic, from Amazon as a negotiating tactic. Amazon eventually relented, telling the consumer "this isn't what we wanted, blame the publisher" and so we are where we are today. And now, market mechanisms are kicking in as people refuse to pay an obscenely high price for something which holds less value in the customer's mind.

Re:Why I pirate books

[DerekLyons]

Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.

The problem is, the costs you cite don't account for more than a fraction of the total cost of the book. The absolute sin here is being studiously and willfully ignorant of the publishing industry.
 

Recently three authors wrote an ebook and self-published at ~$3, they all made the same amount of money they made with a publisher.

That sounds really impressive, so long as you concentrate on soundbite and don't think to hard about the reality. The reality is they made less than they would have made with a publisher - because all the things a publisher does, they now had to do for themselves.
 

Yes, this is a different business model as the publisher does provide some value add services, and these three authors were already known authors but the point still stands as to the costs of middle men and old distribution models.

So if it's a different business model, you're openly admitting to comparing apples to oranges in order to prop up your argument about pomegranates. When we're being polite, we call that intellectual dishonesty.
 
You also point out, inadvertently, the game breaking flaw in your 'model' - it only works for known authors or (very) niche markets.

Re:Why I pirate books

[h4rr4r]

Way to miss the point.

I understand costs, I only wondered why in the hell you seemed so concerned about their problems. They will either sell what I want or fuck'em they can starve for all I care.

Re:Why I pirate books

[hawguy]

Do you understand costs?

On the one hand you say that publishers are ass raping consumers because they are pricing their books as a competitor to their paper product instead of based on delivery costs of the electronic product, yet on the other hand you're fine when other retailers earn an obscene profit on dirt cheap flavored corn syrup.

Is there really a difference between the two pricing models?

Do you only have ass raping outrage against publishers?

They will either sell what I want or fuck'em they can starve for all I care.

I'm sure the publishers are aware that's how you feel, but you're not the demographic they are after. Right now they are looking for those that are willing to pay $10 or an eBook. Eventually as their paper sales channel dries up they'll be forced to stop protecting it and court eBook consumers, but that time (apparently) is not now.

I only wondered why in the hell you seemed so concerned about their problems.

I'm not concerned about their problems, but you seem annoyed that they aren't willing to change their entire pricing model to cater to you when you're not who they are interested in right now.

Re:Why I pirate books

[jimfrost]

I keep hearing people like yourself claiming that e-books don't have cost savings versus paper. That is just baloney. It's not even close, and it is really easy to go on Amazon and prove that to yourself. For those of you too lazy to do that, I offer some real numbers.

I have purchased literally hundreds of e-books going back to 1998, mostly fiction and science fiction. Over the last three years since the release of the Kindle I've purchased around three hundred (about twice as many as in all previous years, owing primarily to dramatically enhanced e-book availability). So let me talk about real-world e-book prices.

Back prior to the Kindle, if you could get an e-book at all, it tended to be back-catalog stuff from minor authors and small publishing houses ... and about $4-5. In cases involving major publishers they tended to demand full retail price for their books - $8 for paperback equivalents, and a whopping $20-24 for new releases (even though the new releases in paper were available for $18 at local retailers, and $14 from Amazon). Anyway, compare those to paperback prices of the era of $7-8 and you see that I was saving 40-50% over paper. I bought hardcovers for almost all new releases because it was much less expensive.

Amazon changed everything overnight. New releases were $10, and that's the price everyone thinks Amazon sold all their books for -- but they didn't. That was *only* new releases, and that $10 compared to $16 or more for paper from the cheapest sources. Back catalog stuff *never* sold for $10, it was $4-6, compared to paperback prices that were rarely less than $8. Typically you could expect to save $2-3 for an e-book version of a paperback; not big money, but as a percentage quite significant.

As catalogs expanded prices for paperback releases, particularly from the large publishers, went up a bit to $6-7, but new paperbacks were rarely less than $8 -- so you were still saving a couple of bucks per book. I read a mix of new and old stuff and in 2007 and 2008 my average e-book cost was just over $6 (there were a lot of $1-4 steals in there, even by major authors), whereas my average paper price from Amazon in the same period was $12. (That excludes shipping.) From local booksellers, $14. I saved, quite literally, more than 50% by buying e-books. Even considering the $400 cost of the Kindle I saved almost $300 on books by the end of 2008.

When Apple got into this a year ago the market changed again, and Amazon lost the ability to sell new releases for $10 from most of the major publishers. Costs went up -- to about $12. I think I spent $14 on one new release last year, the most I'd spent on a e-book in I think eight years; I haven't bought a new release in paper format for less than $18 in quite some time, and many are $20 now. Paperback books from most publishers are around $5-8 in e-book format now, with major publishers in the $8-10 range. Paper books, of course, got more expensive too -- most of them are $10 or more now from major publishers, and there have been cases where the e-book was within $1 of the cost of the paper book (but that's very unusual). I save less than I did a year ago, but I'm still saving money -- a lot of money.

Because I kept hearing all these claims that the books were now at least as expensive as paper, even though I hadn't thought that was the case, I had noticed the creep up in prices and a few weeks ago I went back and did a sanity check. I looked at my 2010 Kindle purchases. My average e-book cost (on 87 books) has gone up quite a bit since 2007. It's now just under $8, about a 30% increase. I took the opportunity to price all of those books versus Amazon's paper prices too, to see how they compare. Average price would have been just a bit over $12. This represents a 30% savings, a bit more than $4 per book. Times 87 books, that is a savings of around $350 for the year. A new 3G Kindle is $190, so even factoring in the cost of a new device (I didn't buy one in 2010) it would have b

Re:Why I pirate books

[L4t3r4lu5]

So don't buy any ebooks. Every sale is confirmation to the publisher that the price point is what the market will accept. When ebooks fail to sell, the price will drop. When ebook readers fail to sell because ebooks are too expensive, the price will drop further. It just takes a lot of people with the same opinion to do it, and make it work.

Re:Why I pirate books

[LauraLolly]

If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.

Baen Books do indeed fall into the price window you speak of, or very nearly. Please do your research before you shoot off another set of electrons.

Baen

[sjpadbury]

In all fairness, one of the reasons there's such a low piracy rate on Baen's books is that they are free to distribute as long as you don't charge for them

Baen on their own website has many first books in series available: http://www.baen.com/library/

Also, they've released CD's of books in many of their hardcovers over the years, with a license that allows copying, including online. One site that has them available is http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

The only versions of their books that are electronically available and not allowed to be distributed are the ones purchased at http://www.webscription.net/

Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

Music has by and large ditched DRM efforts on purchased content (may still factor in subscription/streaming services, I'm not paying much attention there. I think music has found a comfortable low price point that renders the point mostly moot. Music may be DRMed on streaming, and the best protection their is that a lot of people who would deobfuscate their stuff have no motivation to since purchases aren't afflicted by DRM. It's almost reaching a point of sanity, that the per-unit cost can be brought low because the distribution overhead is minimal (even more minimal without DRM) and the production cost is sizable, but not horribly bad.

Books, on the other hand are still DRMed by the dominant vendors. They also charge outrageous amounts and want to compare the price to the hardcover editions, completely ignoring the fact that per-unit cost is next to nothing compared to even paperback. They don't even have a significant up-front cost to recover (Movies/TV have actors/sets/etc, music has engineers and sound studios that are really needed for respectable sound, books don't *need* much more than a diligent author with a computer, though editors and artists frequently help). The DRM on at least the epub stuff is laughably easy to remove (because without removing it, it's pretty damn hard to actually put it on many devices, so they get a large volume of people out to get it). I wonder if publishers are keeping prices high and the distribution overly complicated just to slow down the electronic market because they know full well they play a negligible role if distribution becomes trivial to do.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[hedwards]

Why? Books were pretty much always the most locked down form of media to consume. It took a lot more effort to pirate them than was generally worth, and the savings to the end user was minimal.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they continue publishing books in dead-tree form, people will be scanning them. No form of DRM exists that will deal with that, so putting e-book DRM in place of any magnitude is basically a waste of time and an inconvenience to paying customers.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

The reasons for that are technical. Books on a technical level are more comparable to film reels and vinyl records without tape or any sort of digital representation existing.

With the popularity of eBooks, that playing ground is now nearly level on distribution, leaving little more than production cost distinguishing the mediums from a business standpoint.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[shmlco]

"They also charge outrageous amounts and want to compare the price to the hardcover editions, completely ignoring the fact that per-unit cost is next to nothing compared to even paperback."

Per-unit costs of paperbacks are next to nothing. (The physical book, shipping, etc., come in at less than 50 cents.) Fully half the book price goes to the retailer or store where you buy the book. So for a $7 paperback, that's $3.50 to the store and $0.50 physical costs, which leaves just $3 to the author and to the publisher, who typically fronts the advance to the author. (That would be an "up-front cost" to you.)

Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money. Especially when the majority of titles only sell ten thousand copies or so. 100,000 copies or more is exceptional. Only a handful sell in the million copy range, and the profits from those help subsidize the vast bulk of a publisher's list.

And if you want to bring up paperback pricing, nearly any book on Amazon in paperback form is available for basically the same price as an ebook, the price again split between Amazon, the publisher, and from there to the author. Not everything is "outrageous".

Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy. There's more to any business than per-unit costs. And if you think you're entitled to everything at cost, just go into MacDonalds and try paying a dime (cost) for a Coke.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Late Adopter]

This. Ripping a book is nothing like ripping a CD. And even if you do it right, and the book doesn't have necessary non-textual elements, formatting the text properly is still a chore. And nobody seeds exactly the book you want on torrent sites, you have to hope it's in a collection of books that enough other people like, and hope the formatting of that book in that collection doesn't suck, and that it either IS or IS NOT a pdf, depending on your preference (reflowing a pdf on a portable reader loses ALL formating, also some PDFs aren't even OCRed, they're just images of the pages).

Pirated ebooks suck. Best example of where the pirate product is vastly inferior to the paid-for physical product (the jury's still out on legitimate ebooks...).

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[mdielmann]

The key difference is that it takes roughly the same amount of time per page to scan a book, and it has to be done for each book. OTOH, once you break a DRM system, it applies to all eBooks that use it. Of course, if you really want to scan a book quickly, you could find ways, but the only ones I can think of will destroy the book (such as removing the binding and passing through a sheet-fed scanner). That adds a cost to bypassing the DRM that you don't have on, say, a DVD.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

I'm no expert, but I believe a lot of musicians get most of their revenue from merchandise, live shows, etc--and all for items that probably took a few weeks of effort to finalize. Books take months or years of daily effort (no up-front cost my ass, that's a lot of lost productivity which might NEVER be recovered if publishers don't like it), require the services of a proofreader at the very least, and take enough time to be read that you don't typically buy several copies nor reread them more than a few times--and of course, with physical books, the secondary market is huge, which is automatically taken away from the authors/publishers. Merchandise? Maybe book signings, or if you're very popular, convention appearances. I guess.

If we were talking about serialized novels or comics (and webcomics do persist on far less than the music industry, being largely independent, but again: merchandise is a big factor), you could argue that it's similar to music, being that they're both served in bite-sized chunks. But we're not, and music isn't all symphony orchestras, either. I just don't see an apples-to-apples here.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[TavisJohn]

For subscription services, I totally endorse DRM. You are paying a monthly fee to access music you are not paying for the songs themselves. If the company goes under I do not have a hard drive full of music or videos I purchased that will stop working. You are basically renting the music or videos, and you know that up front.

I am totally against any DRM for anything I purchase. Because if the company I purchased the DRM'd content goes under, their DRM servers stop, and the content I paid for stops working.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money.

That argument would make sense if incremental cost were the dominating factor or even a major contributer. Even if a paperback costs 50 cents to create as an incremental cost, that's still probably two orders of magnitude higher than a digital version. With negligible incremental cost, you can play all sorts of games with the demand curve and so talking about an individual purchase without the context of how that price increases/decreases volume of units sold is kind of pointless. If hypothetically charging $5 gets you 10,000 copies, but $1 got you one million copies, then $1 *is* a lot of money for a man-year of work, it's even more than $5. It's hard to play those games with even mass-market paperback, because you need to guess pretty well in advance what the required run will be or else get eaten alive by the incremental costs.

And if you want to bring up paperback pricing, nearly any book on Amazon in paperback form is available for basically the same price as an ebook

I consider this to be unreasonable. If I were going to buy an eBook and get no physical copy, I should benefit from the decreased cost from not having to create the book and carry stock that may or may not sell. If you insist on gouging me for the eBook, then I should be able to buy a physical book and be entitled to an eBook copy to go with it. If you insist on new-release pricing being high, then do hardcover only and save the e-book for paperback time. An 'early adopter' for a book getting a hardback at least gets a product with extra value that persists after the paperback comes out, but the eBook edition will be *identical* before and after a hypothetical price drop, leaving the original purchaser with nothing tangible to show after that arbitrary point.

Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy.

I'm not doing that, my stance is abstain from the industry. I feel the need to make it known why I'm almost abstaining from the market (have taken advantage of some appropriately priced ebooks when they are on 'special'), and how I (and presumably others like me) could be persuaded to participate. Pricing is one issue and DRM is another. DRM makes it damn near impossible for law-abiding (since DMCA screwed over fair use) people to do things like move a book from their Nook to a new Kindle they got, but it's absolutely useless at deterring unauthorized copies for people willing to break laws (just run two commands and poof, all DRM gone from your eBook library).

There's more to any business than per-unit costs. And if you think you're entitled to everything at cost, just go into MacDonalds and try paying a dime (cost) for a Coke.

Well, for one, I won't pay the $2.50 many restaurants charge for tea or soft drink and instead go for water. But in the larger scheme, incremental cost is a key factor in contrasting digital distribution from physical distribution. The cost of producing a copy, of stocking surplus, of risking spending money on copies that will never sell, of shipping that stuff all over the place, that cost is significant and yet consumers don't see any significant savings at all by participating in a model that saves the vendor and publisher from all of that.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

no up-front cost my ass

Relative to the cost of maintaining a sound studio and the number of people required to get the job done in the shorter amount of time, it is low. The key distinction is that movies and music require relatively expensive facilities and people that are reusable between projects, making 'publishers' more inherently valuable in distributing costs that would be unreasonable for a single effort to incur. In purely digital text media, the author doesn't get that much out of the publisher comparatively speaking, and can more realistically have a middle-man free relationship with vendors.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

The business merit for charging/restricting a media should not be based on how comparatively crappy the pirates do at breaking the law. It should be based on value delivered to the consumer.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80953120/

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Opportunist]

It's a learning curve, I'd say. EBooks are a fairly new thing compared to music CDs. We're with EBooks now where we were with MCDs roughly half a decade to a decade ago. Give it time, they'll sooner or later catch on.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[the_one(2)]

I think demand is just about as high as it will go. Price is pretty insignificant when buying books. Most people won't read books even if they are free. Sure there may be more people who will buy a book for $1 than for $10 but not 100 times as many:P

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Late Adopter]

Oh I'm not passing business advice, you're free to formulate that on your own. I'm sharing my own personal decision as to why I still buy paperbacks, despite owning an ebook reader. Pirate books suck, and I'm still very uncomfortable buying from DRMed stores.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[NeutronCowboy]

Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money.

Sorry, but in a capitalistic market economy, how long it takes to create something is not what dictates price. Instead, what dictates price is supply and demand. And the supply of amateurishly written books (and yes, that applies to a lot of big name authors as well - like you, Dan Brown) is damn near infinite.

Want to make money writing? Better make sure it's loads better than the competition, or get out of the market.

Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy. There's more to any business than per-unit costs.

Yes, that's called supply and demand. And that really is it. Unless you wanna go try that commie-socialist-childmolesting-terrorism-supporting directed economy thing.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[mdielmann]

I'd be curious about what the accuracy rate is, but yes, it looks like with a bit of patience you could get quite accurate results. It's still not as fast, or as automated as a series of audio or video recordings of just about any type or number of items.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[atrizzah]

I agree with GP 100%. I already have a few dozen paperbacks on my shelf that I've never read, and probably never will. I own DVD's that I may never get around to watching. I have digital cable channels that I probably don't even know about. Bottom line: most people overpurchase when it comes to media. I would agree that this effect is probably less prominent in books than other forms of media, but it remains.

I'm in the same boat as the GP. I own an e-reader, but I don't buy many books in the current market. I'm not that well-read and there are enough public domain classics out there to sate my appetite for the foreseeable future.

The retailers and publishers are going to get the point eventually: they need to move books, or there will be huge attrition in the publishing industry. There is a happy ending, and that is an adjustment of price--end prices and the retailers' shares. I just wonder how much damage the book industry will sustain before it comes to its senses.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[atrizzah]

Musicians get most of their revenue from touring because the record labels realized that they don't really have to pay musicians anything. Musicians receive advances, much as authors do, except that for musicians, that advance goes toward the cost of hiring a producer, studio costs, the band's manager, lawyer, and agents, etc. Finally, whatever's left over of the advance is split amongst the entire band as living expenses. This leaves hardly enough money to live off of. When the record is released, if it is successful, the label recoups the entire cost of this advance before the band sees a dime. If the record ever sells enough to be fully recouped (the vast majority don't), the artist's royalty continues to be partitioned between the entire band, its manager and the producer. Lastly, when it's all said and done, the copyright to the recording belongs, permanently, to the record company, and not the band. The end result is that the average musician earns nothing from recorded music, other than the living expenses the advance provides for and the exposure that it gives them, which allows them to earn more money touring and doing side deals. However, increasingly, record companies are taking a share of all of those other income streams, as well (known in the business as 360 deals).

I'm not an expert in publishing, but as I understand it, it's much more practical to live off a book publishing deal, alone.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said $3? Check out the pricing on Baen books. They've got it about right. I don't have a problem paying $6 for an ebook (they're $8 or $9 for paperback and $26 or $27 for hardbacks). It's unencrypted, I can put it on anything I want and make backup copies, so I'm not worried about losing it or the spine breaking or the pages coming unglued. Of course, it's also direct from Baen, so no middleman to take a cut, but the pricing is for the same book across all formats.
Compare that to a lot of pricing on Amazon, where the ebooks usually cost significantly more than the paperbacks.

If the retailers and publishers don't come to some kind of agreement, like Apple did with the music publishers, then that's their problem. The ones who understand the model will sell direct and make more money.

Depends on what books

[pieisgood]

I find that this sort of debate really lies to the side of entertainment publishing. Books that contain real educational material, usually, are so steeped in the universities that online piracy isn't even considered an issue. Thus, you can find older editions of classic texts online for most of the real "learning" material. Math, Physics, Engineering, Chemistry and Biology all have large collections online for download. The math collections are particularly deep and contain so much content as to not be able to understand it all. When you can find books on applying stochastic processes to financial markets, you've gone pretty deep into the rabbit hole. The DRM issue, as I see it, really lies in the realm of "popular" entertainment. The top sellers list on amazon, the prize winners and Oprah boasted "books". I think all the information that's important is readily available online in stashes so deep it takes a life time to understand them all. It takes two university years to get through both Rudins, let alone all the other math texts. I can hardly imagine the number of physics and bio books available.

In summary, let them have their DRM... I'm not really interested in the next Glenn Beck tirade or ghost written political horse shit that seems to plague the top sellers lists.

Re:Depends on what books

[PCM2]

The top sellers list on amazon, the prize winners and Oprah boasted "books".

Love the quotes. I suppose you're suggesting that everything promoted by Oprah's Book Club is pointless trash. You're probably not aware, then, that Oprah has chosen books by Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, John Steinbeck, and other classic authors, not to mention current literature by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey Eugenides, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. In fact, I'm not sure you could accurately describe anything she's recommended as trash. In the interest of raising the public awareness of fiction an literature and the overall intelligence of the country, Oprah's Book Club is a net force for good. Better to point the finger at Geraldo Rivera, who has enjoyed the same media access as Oprah but, to my knowledge, never encouraged anyone to read a book in his life.

The top sellers on Amazon are just a popularity contest, but your disdain for literary prizewinners is a little baffling, too. In my experience, an author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature has probably produced at least something worthy of an intelligent reader's attention. Why do you assume otherwise? Similarly, is there something about the Man Booker Prize or the Pulitzer that discredits them in your eyes?

But then, your entire post reeks of a general distaste for fiction and literature. It's not for everybody, I guess, but if you would pull your head out of a math book and try some fiction for time to time you'll be a broader, more cultured, more worldly human being. There's more value in a lot of this "entertainment" that you so scorn than you seem to realize.

Pirates...

[theamarand]

One of my favorite books is The Pirate's Dilemma: http://thepiratesdilemma.com/ It talks about the association between ancient methods of production and distribution, and streamlined methods of delivery. Piracy has always been on the bleeding-edge of mixing things up, and getting things out there faster than any large corporation could handle. I don't see that changing any time soon. Sure, the corporations might force governments to lean on the pirates, but they will just push them underground - won't stop the signal. Corporations and governments should earn from piracy, improve their business models, and give the people what they want - not what they think they want.

Re:Pirates...

[93 Escort Wagon]

One of my favorite books is The Pirate's Dilemma: http://thepiratesdilemma.com/

Did you buy it or steal it?

Re:Pirates...

[jedidiah]

Mebbe he read it in the library...

Re:Pirates...

[dakameleon]

That was the dilemma.

*ducks*

Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry..

[fleeped]

1. DRM sucks.
2. Drastically reduce prices for digital media, when there's no hardware cost/middlemen involved. The potential customer base is massively bigger so they can afford that, but I guess greed is greed...
3. Put LOTS of tempting offers
4. Aim for the customers' convenience when buying / browsing.

For pc games, in which piracy is rampant, Steam works great. It can't be that difficult to think of something similar..
Oh, and the mined data can be used for all above points.
The separate industries seem either incredibly dumb or incredibly arrogant. Or both. Cause they seem to think 'That won't happen to me - I'm better/different'.

Kindle is a great example

[Junta]

The seemingly most popular eReader can't 'legally' load copyrighted ebooks from Borders, B&N, or public libraries. Any user doing so violates the DMCA to get it there.

It's worse when you see people advocating buying dedicated eReaders per store as a reasonable thing to have to do with the reasoning 'why would you expect to use Gillette blades with a Bic handle?'.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[jgagnon]

There is very little cross use of DRM-burdened content for any of the devices out there, so it isn't just Amazon (and I know you didn't suggest that, just clarifying my stance). In my case, the Kindle was the best choice since I shop on Amazon frequently anyway and don't live near a B&N store. As for other devices/formats? I have access to a PC just about everywhere else I am and can read them on it if I choose.

It would be nice if Amazon went DRM free for books like they did for music, but it is the publishers that force the issue, not Amazon. Though I'm sure they are more than happy to profit from the limitation.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Moryath]

Book "piracy" (e.g. rampant copying) has been going on for ages now. At the same time, I can't object to much of what happens with it.

I'm a collector of roleplaying system books. A large number of them are out of print. A sizable majority, not only are they out of print, the publisher itself is long gone. My options are to scour secondhand markets and convention auctions like nobody's business, but that can't find everything. Eventually, just to archive them and keep them around in case they get requested for reference, "piracy" is the last-and-only resort.

It's not half as good as having the physical book in my hand, but it's better than being unable to find the material. And when traveling to a distant convention, sometimes it's a "necessary evil" in order to transport the material in a 6-lb laptop rather than shipping an 80-lb suitcase back and forth.

Now, I'd be willing to pay $1-2 more to get a PDF copy of the book along with the print copy, but the same can't be said for Kindle/Nook/etc formats. Why? Because I have NO guarantee that there'll be a good reader for them 10 years from now. I'm hauling around (in some cases) 20 year old material here, I know I'll still be able to read a PDF a decade from now because it's non-DRM'ed, but the same can't be said for the DRM-laden formats.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

You probably know this already, but you can easily strip the DRM from Kindle books.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Shadow of Eternity]

I've started countering that argument with "No but I do expect to be able to use any shaving cream I want".

Re:Kindle is a great example

[AJWM]

It would be nice if Amazon went DRM free for books like they did for music, but it is the publishers that force the issue, not Amazon.

The latter, exactly. It is entirely the publisher's decision. Indie author/publishers can chose, when publishing to Kindle, whether or not to apply DRM; most don't. (I have a few things up on Amazon for Kindle myself, without DRM.) Perhaps one day Amazon will impose royalty limits for DRMd books (as they do now with books outside of a certain price range) but I don't think they've quite got the leverage (or perhaps, the desire) to do so just yet.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Opportunist]

Apples and prunes. Whether I use Gilette blades or Bic ones doesn't really matter, they both shave my beard and neither offers me anything the other one doesn't.

Saying the same about content is a bit ridiculous. Stephen King does not offer the same as William Gibson.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Javajunk]

I would never be able to run my battletech campaigns anymore if I needed to find a legitimate print copy of all the sourcebooks I have worn through. Like you say, its not as good as having the book at hand but it is still better than not having it at all.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Junta]

'The Stand' from Amazon should not be considered a fundamentally different product than 'The Stand' from Barnes and Noble. If you obey the letter of the law and do not undo the DRM schemes, those are two different products.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Lord Byron II]

And there is an DRM encryption implementation in the PDF standard. Those PDFs are unopenable in KPDF and Okular (and I would also assume Acrobat). You have to use Adobe DigitalEditions to open them.

I know this because my library loans some digital books as encrypted PDFs.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Risen888]

Who the fuck cares? I'm not going to buy something that I know comes broken to get the privilege of fixing it unless I'm at a garage sale. That's ridiculous.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[rinoid]

Wellllll, you can read every store's books on an iPad or PC(sans the iBooks product) with the various apps. You can even load up your own pirated versions if u like.

But yeah, agreed, it's a big mess.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

Because I want to read books that don't have errors in them. An e-book straight from the publisher doesn't have errors - I know, I've bought quite a few. I'll strip the DRM and have my book free forever for five minutes' effort. If you don't want to do that, fine. Pirate, or ignore, or buy on paper - I don't care. You're not me, and I don't care what you do.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[jgagnon]

But you can't do that for two to three weeks on a single charge. :p

(and yeah, I've actually gone very close to three weeks with my Kindle)

Re:Kindle is a great example

[JohnBailey]

You probably know this already, but you can easily strip the DRM from Kindle books.

And you can easily learn how to pick the lock of your front door, so why do you carry a key?

Fools break into their own property. Smart people make sure they own the key as well as the lock.

Break DRM, and someone comes up with nastier DRM.
Reject DRM, and it becomes too expensive to use.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Builder]

Really? Because I've read at least 2 dozen ebooks with _serious_ errors that I've purchased from Waterstones and Amazon. In 2 cases, I got refunds because of the error count. The paperbacks did NOT have these errors - they were introduced during the eBook creation process.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[L4t3r4lu5]

Ahem... This Is Slashdot. Bring out the Car Analogy!

"Do you expect your Mercedes Benz to only use Mercedes Benz tyres?"

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

It's a political decision to you. It's a practical one to me. As long as I can get in, I don't care how. If they changed the DRM so I couldn't crack it, I'd quit buying from them.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[JohnBailey]

It's a political decision to you. It's a practical one to me. As long as I can get in, I don't care how. If they changed the DRM so I couldn't crack it, I'd quit buying from them.

In what way is it political? Other than as a poor device to cast the opposing view as unreasonable?

You accept an inferior product that you need to unlock. I reject the same product as unsatisfactory. Political.. No. I just don't buy shit.

So I'll ask you again. Do you carry a key to your front door, or do you pick the lock?

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Anonymous Coward]

And how exactly does that send the "I don't support DRM-laden formats" message to booksellers?

Re:Kindle is a great example

[tgd]

No, you can only easily strip it from one of the two formats they come in.

The newer one, which seems to primarily be used to push out images of letters/words, as opposed to the text (to maintain fonts, or to ease getting scanned books into Kindle format, as far as I can tell) isn't able to be de-DRMed directly.

Worst part is, they also look like crap and you can't tell prior to buying them if you're going to get a Mobi format or the new one (can't recall the name, I think it starts with an A?)

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

Let me get this straight: your goal, presumably, is to convince me that I should avoid buying DRM in order to bring about the DRMerdammerung. In order to do so, you call me a fool.

This might not be the optimal way to get people to agree with you, particularly as I do, in fact, control every bit of the stuff I've purchased so far.

As long as I can get the underlying file, I don't care what you throw on it. If Amazon changes things so that I can't immediately decrypt my files, well, then I'll worry about that. I don't have to unlock it every time I use it, just once: if you can rip open the packaging with a knife, who cares about the stupid lock? It's not inferior to anything once I've pulled the DRM.

Practical choice: if I can turn it into a DRM-free file, I'll buy it. If I can't, I won't. Political choice: DRM is so wrong we should avoid any product with it, no matter how trivial the protection is. That is a political statement ("I reject DRM in all its forms") expressed as an economic action. The numerous economic boycotts of the civil rights era are one example of this; the economic boycotts of white South Africa and Rhodesia; the US embargo on Cuba; the various campaigns to get individuals or investors to make specific economic decisions in order to support a political point. You dislike DRM so much that you are willing to deprive yourself of e-books in order to avoid appearing to support it. I don't really care, so long as I can get rid of the DRM.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

It's called Topaz. It can be stripped; I've got the books in my Calibre library to prove it. You can easily distinguish the two by looking at the Amazon webpage describing the book. If it shows only the number of pages in the print version, it's a Topaz file. If it shows both pages and file size, it's in the original format.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Risen888]

Nothing you just said replied to anything I just said. What the hell are you talking about?

Re:Kindle is a great example

[demonlapin]

Well, here's a version that's a bit more explicit about it.

Who the fuck cares? I'm not going to buy something that I know comes broken to get the privilege of fixing it unless I'm at a garage sale. That's ridiculous.

I care, because it's a way to get good quality, legal electronic books. The alternatives are to pirate the books, in which case quality is often still quite poor, or to buy them from one of the tiny handful of non-DRM ebook sources, in which case there's no point because your selection sucks. I buy from the large-scale, legitimate store with an excellent selection of mostly very high quality ebooks that happen to come with a tiny bit of DRM that can be stripped out. Yes, I'd prefer they came without it, but when it's only an additional minute or two of work... it still takes less time than driving to the bookstore. That's why the fuck I care about stripping Kindle DRM.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Carik]

So I'll ask you again. Do you carry a key to your front door, or do you pick the lock?

I'm not the person you originally asked, but I'll bite.

I buy one of the many, many locks on the market that come with keys.

I also buy some of the many, many ebooks on the market that come with DRM.

They're very different questions: in one case, it's trivially easy to buy something that you have full access to. In the other, the legal options are often to get it with DRM or to do without.

For me, it's a practical thing. I want this book, I want the author to receive royalties, it's not available without DRM, I may as well buy it with. When I can, I give my money to companies that don't use it, but there aren't very many of them. My main goal is to make sure the author gets some money when I get the book, since I'd like them to keep producing books for me to read. (As an aside: I have no problem getting books or other media illegally when there's no legal way to get them. If the no one will sell it to me legally under any conditions, and I can download a copy without hurting anyone or depriving anyone else of the possibility of using it, I've got no moral problem with that.)

For you, it's an ideological thing. You want the book, you don't want DRM, and so you download it illegally or do without. Perhaps you occasionally buy from companies that don't use DRM, or perhaps you just don't read electronic books. Your main goal is to get what you want without compromising on your ideals.

You've made your decision, which is fine. Everyone has to make their own decision on this sort of thing, which is why this sort of discussion almost never ends with anyone changing their mind.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Carik]

Buy from the vendors that don't include DRM. Buy direct from Baen rather than through Amazon. Buy direct from the publisher in one of the handful of other cases where that's possible.

Also, send the occasional email to places like Amazon that says "Hey... I've spent $500 on books this year, and none of it went to you. It sure would be nice if I could do all my shopping through your store, but I won't while you have DRM on all your files." If enough people do it, they'll start putting pressure on the publishers.

Here's my contribution

[Pojut]

While I'm still in the middle of writing a bunch of short stories (and working on one long-form story that could potentially extend past 1,000 pages), I only have one that I feel is "ready for release".

"Reversion" tells the story of a zombie that is slowly coming back to life. The whole story is done from the perspective of the zombie, although it's told from a "god's eye view". Completely and totally free to read/download. Enjoy!

Re:Here's my contribution

[Anonymous Coward]

No one bought it so you have to give it away? lol you suck

Re:Here's my contribution

[Pojut]

It's always been free, as will all of my short stories. I've been given a lot by the writing community, so I feel I should give something back. When's the last time you released something for free, so you could expand culture rather than your own bank account?

Re:Here's my contribution

[wcrowe]

The plot doesn't really sound like my cup of tea, however I give you kudos for sharing your story.

Re:Here's my contribution

[Anonymous Coward]

You do a great job imitating the narrative style of an 8 year old. Are you trying to experiment with an omniscient narrator younger than both the subject and audience or is your writing really that bad?

Re:Here's my contribution

[Turiko]

Thanks for that. Though very short, it was interesting. :)

Re:Here's my contribution

[Pojut]

Glad you like it! All the short stories I'm doing right now are pretty much serving as practice for specific parts of writing. For instance, Reversion was a practice with description (which is why it seemed overloaded with perhaps too many descriptors...and also why there isn't a single line of dialogue in the whole story.) Another one I'm working on, "The Fall of Yunuth", is nothing but a giant battle sequence. There are others I'm also working on, each focusing on a specific writing style and type.

It's all for a major plotline I'm putting together which, as of now, is sitting at around 700 pages or so. I'd like to see it reach about 900 pages worth, and write it as a series of three books, but who knows if that will ever actually happen. Still, the short stories are great practice, and they're a lot of fun.

If nothing else, I get to share :) I'm glad you enjoyed it...follow me on Scribd, if you're interested in any of the others when they're finished.

Re:Here's my contribution

[Risen888]

Neat! Honestly, I've never been zombie guy, but I'm gonna check this out. Thanks for the tip, and thanks for the story!

Think of the fans

[subsonic]

I've never understood how ebooks, even compared to other media are so rigorously DRM'd. You should WANT people to share the content. Believe it or not, the concept of properly compensating someone for their work is an agreeable idea to many people. The trick of it is that getting it legally should be easier than trying to get it for free- I think both Apple and Amazon have shown that it is now much easier for most people to drop some coin and purchase books instead of trying to "pirate" them.
But what the publishers and the sellers still don't get, is that they should respect people who will become their most valuable asset: the fans. Imagine the ability to share that one book you love to five friends, not even five friends at once, just share it like you would with that physical book you bought at the store. I can share that book with anyone, and while it is shared I cannot read the book since its with someone else. When that person (hopefully) gives it back, then I will pass it on. Maybe that person will have loved that book so much that they will go out and buy it (or its sequel). Its the one thing that makes it seem like, "no matter what you think or do, we do not trust you as a person". Hell, I'd be OK with even keeping the "two week" limit on, just let me loan out the book to as many people as I want to share it with. Its amazing how DRM has that effect of essentially declining money from honest people to protect some perceived 'future value' to your intellectual property.

Re:Think of the fans

[PybusJ]

With the power of the internet your scheme would soon end up with bookswap sites where you could borrow a book from some random person who's already read it (for success add in some web2.0 style social graph and personal ratings for how much you've lent).

In the worst case for the publishers this leads to a world where they only sell enough books to cover the maximum number of simultaneous readers. Kind of like a perfectly efficient library system. A good world for users but unimaginable to the publishers, and probably not too good for authors.

Not that I approve of DRM on eBooks. I struggle using a Sony Reader with Linux, and find that content is only available on Kindle (so I can read it on my phone with a Kindle App, but not in eInk).

Situation in Spain

[Superken7]

Let me briefly explain what the current situation in Spain is and why it drives me nuts.

Over here in Spain all ebooks are sold and advertised as ePUB, until you notize its not really ePub, but Adobe DRMed ePUB. I think Barnes&Noble does the same. And there are lots of other platforms that use Adobe DRM to encrypt their PDF files.

It drives me nuts that adobe has such a high penetration in the ebook DRM market because they don't have tools for most platforms. AFAIK no official readers exist for any platform beyond Windows or Mac, which is great (sarcasm) given how many portable platforms exist nowadays (Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, iOS)

What good is using ePub if you are going to encrypt it in a proprietary format? I don't know why they took the time to advertise it in PDF and ePub (the two "biggest" and most popular cross platform formats) if they are going to screw everything up by turning it into a proprietary file.

I for one will avoid DRM ebooks, and like with movies and music, will just buy it from places where there is no DRM. If no such places exist then they have already lost because I'll just look through the net for hacked .epubs, simple as that. And if that happens too often I will just stop looking for legitimate ebook shops and start downloading everything. Maybe some people don't agree morally, but I am okay with it, and reality is most people will do the same...

I should mention that over here in Spain, amazon does not offer any spanish ebooks, same goes for the iBooks store and google books, all books are sold as a DRMed download and you need to register at Adobe Digital Editions, then register AGAIN at the online store where you are buying your books at (there is no "central store" like amazon.com, they tried to replicate the physical stores fragmentation to the online world), then validate your content with your device - granted thats even possible - its not possible for any android device for example, and THEN you are able to read your book, if you are lucky

It just amazes me how an industry that has been able to learn from the music industry and then the movies industry is so slow at adopting what consumers want.

Just my 2c, :P

Re:Situation in Spain

[bcrowell]

It drives me nuts that adobe has such a high penetration in the ebook DRM market because they don't have tools for most platforms. AFAIK no official readers exist for any platform beyond Windows or Mac, which is great (sarcasm) given how many portable platforms exist nowadays (Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, iOS)

When I go to this URL, it automatically recognizes that I'm running linux, and it offers me the linux version of Adobe Reader to download.

Re:Situation in Spain

[pthreadunixman]

DRMed ePUBs books don't use Adobe Reader. They use Adobe Digital Editions and there is no Linux version.

DRM is impossible

[harl]

It's impossible for DRM to work. The customer has to have both the lock and the key or they can't use what they paid for[1]. If the customer has both the lock and the key then it's impossible for DRM to protect anything.

What vendors need to realize is that a lot of piracy is done simply because they can. When the cost of acquiring things is literally 4 seconds of your time you go crazy and acquire all sorts of shit that you will never use.

Is the cost of the DRM more than the lost sales? Yes piracy does generate some very small number of lost sales but not a significant amount.

Stop catering to non customers!

[1]Yes there are central server methods but until we have 100% uptime wireless, usable anywhere, with central servers that have 100% uptime forever this method will never work.

Re:DRM is impossible

[Opportunist]

Not only that, but DRM might well make more people consider copying instead of buying if DRM is invasive enough that convenience goes down and it becomes more convenient to simply copy instead of buying, jumping through 10 hoops and registration forms only to find out that for some odd reason it still doesn't work.

Re:DRM is impossible

[hawguy]

It's impossible for DRM to work. The customer has to have both the lock and the key or they can't use what they paid for[1]. If the customer has both the lock and the key then it's impossible for DRM to protect anything.

But if you lock that key inside a dedicated device that no end-user can reasonably get into, then successful DRM becomes possible. Very few people have the resources to slice open a chip and use a scanning electron microscope to decode what is inside that chip.

And if the key is stored in NVRAM rather than hardwired into the chip, it's even harder to pull out. But of course, Amazon allows eBooks to be viewed on non-Kindle devices (PC's, phones, etc), so that's where their weakness is, and I believe the PC app has already been hacked.

And of course, the Kindle does add one weakness to DRM - Kindle books are easily OCR'ed - set a large font size, set up an automatic "next page" button pusher, and you've got a great way to get clean, accurate OCR'ed copies. This still doesn't really help with books that contain images and diagrams that are integral to the content.

Re:DRM is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you lock that key inside a dedicated device that no end-user can reasonably get into, then successful DRM becomes possible. Very few people have the resources to slice open a chip and use a scanning electron microscope to decode what is inside that chip.

So what? All it takes is one person to do it and break it.

Secondly there are many many cases where these steps were not needed yet the DRM was broken.

this is all because copyright is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Content is being protected by copyright laws that guarantees the revenue stream for the life of the author + 50 years. This form of law does not encourage the authors to produced, but instead encourages them to be lazy.

Re:this is all because copyright is broken

[Opportunist]

The whole idea boggles the mind. When have you heard of someone creating something real being allowed to charge for it for his life and then some? Ever had to pay your bricklayer again if you sold your house? Had to hand Ford a buck when you sold your car? Or wasted a second considering when either of them thought that you shouldn't be allowed to resell "their work"?

more odd

[Anonymous Coward]

all mine dont

The kindle store killer

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC bot sits in one of the many IRC ebook chans, email is sent to bot via kindles experimental browser with search term. Bot searches and returns results via email. Download strong is sent back to bot, who downloads and unrars and then emails direct to myusername@free.kindle.com for direct delivery to Kindle.

Re:Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry

[CastrTroy]

What they really need to do is make the cost so low that people don't even think of whether or not to buy it. It should be so low that I don't even want to bother pirating it. Music should be a dime a song, $1 for the album, books should cost $1. That way I could buy every song I even remotely liked, without even thinking about whether or not it was "worth it", or if I should spend the extra time to pirate it. With the distribution costs being basically zero, and the production being a fixed cost, people shouldn't have to think about whether or not to buy it. It should be so cheap that every will automatically just buy it, if they have any interest in it at all.

Some kinds of books need to be modernized...

[blahplusplus]

... I've been frustrated with the whole book publishing model in the era of the internet for many kinds of books, esp technical books and self-teaching kind.

No few people can write a whole book and make sure it is error free. It's time to put "teach yourself X book" and technical books in editable wikibook like format, then everyone who has knowledge can contribute to the work making the book more valuable over the long term.

So many books are just pump-and-dumps for cash grab... many people buy books to teach themselves stuff but so many of these books are beyond the scope of a few authors because they cannot see the frustrations and unmet needs of their readers.

DRM + Formats = Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I have is that I keep finding books that are Amazon but don't want to use the Kindle App on my iPad. I want to keep all my ebooks in one place but this DRM/Format stuff is driving me mad. I buy my books, and I have no problem "taking steps" to get Kindle books converted to ePubs. Amazon and the author got their money, I got my ebook where I want it.

I'll keep print books, thank you

[wcrowe]

I hate so sound so, "get off my lawn", but I really don't like ebooks or digital readers. I can appreciate having your whole library on a single device, etc. But there are too many disadvantages to ebooks as they currently work.

To illustrate: right now it's looking like Books A Million will be going out of business soon. That is a shame. However, I don't have to worry if that happens because I will still be able to read all the books I've bought from them over the last 20 years if they go out of business. Additionally, short of fire or flood, I do not have to worry much that their pages will get scrambled, lost, or damaged -- at least not in my lifetime. I also don't have to worry that anyone will steal my books, nor do I have to worry that Books A Million will come in my house and take my books back.

The only way I am going to enjoy and use ebooks is if they are in plain ASCII text format, like those in Project Gutenberg.

I do have an open mind. If someone can give me some overwhelming benefits of having ebooks over print books, i would love to hear them.

 

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[demonlapin]

I can take 1000 ebooks with me wherever I go in under 300 g of weight. It's all about convenience. (And none of them have any DRM anymore.)

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[wcrowe]

That sounds great. But you say none of them have any DRM anymore. Does that mean they're pirated? What format are they in? Are they in a format that will still be viable years from now?

I'm seriously interested. If I can get non-DRM'd ebooks in a standard format, I'm all for this.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[demonlapin]

I've bought a lot of Kindle books from Amazon. The most common format they sell is simply the old Mobipocket format with DRM added. The scripts to strip the DRM are out there (K4MobiDeDRM.pyw), and you can use Calibre to convert to any of a wide variety of other formats should you not like Mobipocket (or should your reader not support it). If you go this route, ActiveState Python 2.x is the preferred distribution to run the scripts. I use this method and convert all my books to have both Mobi and ePub because Stanza on my iPad, which does not support Mobipocket, has some features that the iOS Kindle app lacks (like in-app screen brightness adjust).

There are some mostly image-intensive books that use a different format called Topaz, but that too has been broken, although the conversions often look more like a typical pirated scan/OCR than a good quality ebook. Fortunately, the format is relatively rare, and of course if you are willing to spend some time cleaning it up you can have a nice clean book - there is no chance that you'll lose the text, just that it won't look right.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a paper book reader myself. Until 2 months ago. Now I have my kindle and I don't think I'll go back, unless I get a nice hardcover as a gift or something. Similarly, I will continue to buy hardcovers of great reads (IMO) as gifts too.

Do I pirate my ebooks? Hell yes! That way, I can keep a copy on my pair of handy external hard drives, one of which is always stored off-site (parents house) in case of an emergency. Every six months or so I sync them up, and every 3 or 4 years (done it twice so far) I upgrade to newer/bigger drives and guarantee I never lose my content (well at least 99.9% guarantee). I TREAT EBOOKS JUST LIKE MY MUSIC AND MOVIE COLLECTION NOW! All together I'm up to about 750GB of movies (~500GB), music (~200GB) and ebooks (~30GB). To me that data is priceless. it represents a lot of the ideas and beliefs that make me the person I am today. The entertainment companies whose material I've pirated would probably value my collection up around $30k, and I bet they'd try and put me in prison for 100 years if they could. And I don't even distribute (other than maintaining a 1:1 seed ratio)...

Anyway, I'm morally opposed to the entertainment industries across the board. They use people's emotions and popular trends to shear us like sheep. The digital revolution has given us a chance to fight back, and I'm embracing it. I still spend a couple hundred dollars a year on movies, music, and books. Hell I spend as much as I can on that kinda stuff, but I have to pay rent, have a car payment (no I don't have a BMW), and student loans. I simply don't have the means to support my desire for more input. But with piracy, I get WAY more content to ingest. That makes me happy, and I'd like to think I'm a better, smarter person for the pirated material I've found on on the internets. :)

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[demonlapin]

Also, I forgot to address one of your concerns: Yes, you can use Calibre to convert directly to ASCII text.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[tool462]

I had pretty much exactly the same take as you up until I bought my e-reader a couple months ago. I find it perfect for two cases that don't have some of the downsides you've listed.
1) Reading materials I don't care about keeping. For me that's periodicals and pulp-fiction style novels. I've never had any interest or desire in rereading or sharing any of the magazines or newspapers I read, so inevitably they get thrown in the recycling bin when I'm complete. That's a lot of waste and bulk. It's also very useful for getting access to some foreign language papers that would be very expensive to acquire in paper form here in the States. Same applies for pulp novels. I enjoy reading some Stephen King-style stuff every now and then. It's entertaining, but I'm never interested in rereading it or sharing it, generally. Price plays a bigger factor here though, since the paper versions are usually so cheap. If the eBook is more expensive, I avoid it.
2) Books where the convenience factor outweighs everything else. For me this is typically programming books and other reference materials. These books are usually big and bulky, and depending on the scope of what you're working on, you may need access to several different ones. And since I program at work for work and home for fun, I'd often run into the problem of having the book I'm looking for in the wrong place. The eReader makes it easy to have access to my full library of programming books when needed. I do try to go DRM free here wherever possible. Thankfully O'Reilly has a really nice policy with eBooks, so I have been able to stay 100% DRM free so far.

These cases may not apply to you or you may have different ways of dealing with the issues my eReader solves for me. But I read my eReader every day, and I read paper books every day. They complement each other, with the way I use them.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[Xian97]

The biggest advantage I have had since buying my Kindle is the adjustable type size. The older I get the harder it is to read small print and not every book is available in large type. With the Kindle I can change the type size and line spacing with ease to adjust to whatever is most comfortable to me.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[walterbyrd]

Yeah, that's important. Last time I was on vacation, I kept thinking: I wish I had another 1000 books to read. No way I could get by with one or two.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[pthreadunixman]

All the issues you worry about are due to DRM issues. Not ebooks. EPUB is much better than ASCII. Hell you can read them in a web browser if you unzip them. Each section of the book is just XHTML.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[demonlapin]

Then a Kindle is not for you. I'm cool with that; if you don't value the advantages that an e-reader offers, don't get one. They're certainly not for everyone.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[perpetual pessimist]

I had pretty much the same attitude as you. Why buy an ebook reader, when print books are just fine?

Then I found myself alone in a hotel room, at 2 AM. I was making the 2 day drive back home from visiting family for Thanksgiving. The bed was awful and I couldn't sleep. Usually I can read a bit and get to sleep that way... but all the print books I'd brought on the trip with me, I'd already read, and left them with the family for them to read.

I booted up the netbook I had with me, looking to go online to read something... and the hotel's wifi was so slow it was maddening. Even when I got to my favorite blogs, even, no one had updated anything because it was Thanksgiving and they had better things to do than provide entertainment to a desperate guy in a hotel far away from home and any open bookstore.

It occurred to me that if I had a Kindle, I could order a book right damn then, and start reading.

So I ordered it. Didn't get it 'til I got home, of course. And now I'm loading it with a ton of books so I doubt I'll ever be without something new to read (unless the battery fails). But as long as it's working, I can get a book RIGHT NOW. Any time. Almost anywhere.

That's the advantage to me -- not so much the ebook in and of itself (although they've been fine so far), but getting it immediately.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[atrizzah]

Thanks for the tip. I have a Kindle, and using the tool you mentioned, I can now buy eBooks from any retailer and use them freely.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[nametaken]

I like both for different reasons. First, the Kindle is tiny. It weighs less than a book, and is about as thin as a pencil. Even so, the screen size is bigger than most novels. As you no-doubt know, I can put a gajillion books on the device. It's readability is about as good as paper. The ebooks never fall apart. If I don't mind having a DRM'd one, I can get a couple sample chapters on a whim, read them at my leisure, then decide if I want to buy the whole ebook later. Every one I've ever bought was considerably less than the paper version. The reader also will play my music while I'm reading, if I want. I can adjust the print size on the fly. Many of my ebooks can be sent to friends without a problem, and without having to meet up with them in person. I can also get my news feeds, newspapers, etc. on the thing automatically. Also, I can use a bookmark in my browser to send an article to my kindle to read later, just one click. Ebooks make it much easier to find something in a technical book. They always lay flat. Paper books have stronger DRM than DRM'd ebooks. Also, they are much harder to send to a friend. And while my friend has it, I don't. I do like having paper books on my bookshelf. Not sure why, but I just like seeing them there. They can't be repo'd by Amazon, though many of my ebooks couldn't be anyways.

Both have their advantages.

Re:I'll keep print books, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, font size is great, as I'm getting older as well, plus the fact that I live in China where printed books are hard to come by or at outrageous prices. I haven't read that much in China than ince I got my cheapo Chinese eReader. It's a blessing.

New business models mean new businesses.

[John Hasler]

Publishers are old businesses.

Require publisers to allow other readers?

[hawguy]

Since eBook sellers dont' have incentive to allow books in other formats to run on their reader device, then maybe book publishers should be required to allow a user to have his books be revoked and reissued under any other reader that the publisher supports.

The publishers don't want Amazon to be the sole eBook reader maker - it gives Amazon too much power over them.

This gives users something more akin to a real book -- they can keep it forever, moving it to other devices as they are released.

And it prevents Amazon from becoming the defacto market leader due to people being afraid to buy eReaders from other makers in the fear that if the seller goes out of business that they'll lose access to their books (either because the DRM will stop working, or because the device may break down with no chance of repair/replacement).

I know that I shied away from the Nook reader and went with the Kindle for this reason, I don't trust B&N to be around in the long term.

Listen, Children . . . Go to Your LIBRARY

[MarkvW]

The answer to ebooks is public libraries.

First, you need copyright protection so that loaning out ebooks by a library is fair use. I think that already exists, but I'm not sure how it works with scumsucking DRM.

Second, you need to make it so that people can donate their used ebooks to libraries. This will save your municipalities tons of money. This may require a copyright fix.

Third, facilitate inter-library loans of e-books.

Who needs to own a book? If you need it, download it from your public library. You may have to wait for a lot of other people ahead of you in line to read it, but that's a small price to pay for having a virtually limitless supply of books available to you.

The ebook is custom-made for the public library system. It's easy to manage (less expense for communities) and it maximizes usage by the citizens who pay for the books. If people can donate their books to the library system, books can also be acquired much cheaper.

This would be massively good for communities.

Re:Listen, Children . . . Go to Your LIBRARY

[b0bby]

A lot of libraries (mine, certainly) have ebooks in DRM'd epubs. The fact that Kindle doesn't support this keeps me on my Palm, and reading dead tree books from the library.

Ironic, from a Publisher

[chromatic]

I've lost more money to publishers than I have to copyright infringement.

(My current publisher and I give away the electronic versions of Modern Perl: the book for free.)

Re:Ironic, from a Publisher

[davecb]

Could you expand on this a bit? I'm thinking broad categories, not trying to troll (;-))

--dave

Re:Ironic, from a Publisher

[chromatic]

Suppose that the wholesale price of a book is 50% of the cover price. Suppose that your royalty rate is 10% of that. Suppose that you, like me, end up doing almost all of the editing and almost all of the marketing of the book. Has your publisher really earned 90% of the value of that wholesale price?

(The marketing plan for one of my books—I am not making this up—appears to be "The editor will mention it in a Tweet once every six weeks".)

I signed the contracts and blame no one else but myself for that, and I certainly begrudge the publisher nothing for taking on the risk of publishing the book and managing distribution and sales channels. That provides value.

Yet given the lack of editing, production, and marketing, the publisher has not convinced me that it deserves 90% of the revenue. It certainly didn't do 90% of the work.

Library concept

[Pro923]

When you think of the concept of a library - in the context of the modern day battle for content control - it totally doesn't fit.

Re:Library concept

[Opportunist]

"What? Going there, taking a book, taking it HOME with you, reading it and returning it when you're done with it, then they hand it out to the next person? And all that without any dime to the publisher? That's no viable business model!"

(The sound you just heard was the Sony/BMG CEO dropping after fainting)

Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[traindirector]

There is very little cross use of DRM-burdened content for any of the devices out there, so it isn't just Amazon

Actually, the Kindle is one of the most, if not the most, limited ebook reader devices in terms of DRMed content. The Nook and many other readers support the EPUB format with Adobe Digital Editions DRM, which is the closest thing there is to a standard right now. Amazon chose to make their own non-compatible format and not support the standard. So they're chosen to make things worse.

In my case, the Kindle was the best choice since I shop on Amazon frequently anyway and don't live near a B&N store.

In terms of content and options, probably not. The Nook supports alternate bookstores that use the EPUB format (Google just opened one) as well as borrowing books from libraries. The Kindle does neither. Why does it matter if you live near a Barnes & Noble? Do you live near an Amazon?

I selected the Nook for the ability to borrow library books alone. Sure, the DRM still sucks, but at least the device gives you a little interoperability and the option of selecting your source to some degree in the DRM world, unlike the Kindle.

Re:Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[PCM2]

Sure, the DRM still sucks, but at least the device gives you a little interoperability and the option of selecting your source to some degree in the DRM world, unlike the Kindle.

And in case anybody's wondering, yes, much like the Kindle, it is trivial to strip the DRM from Nook-compatible books with a few Python scripts.

Re:Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[Lord Byron II]

it is trivial to strip the DRM from Nook-compatible books with a few Python scripts

Great, I can see the DCMA takedown notice now. "Python infringes on publishers' rights. It must be destroyed."

Re:Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[pthreadunixman]

The Kindle can read DRM free mobipocket, and it's pretty easy to convert from epub to mobi. On the otherhand, it would be nice if I could just drag and drop epubs onto my kindle without the conversion step.

Re:Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of content and options, probably not. The Nook supports alternate bookstores that use the EPUB format ... The Kindle does (not) ...

I've had no problems loading EPUBs from sources such as Project Gutenberg on my Kindle, I can't imagine why a purchase from a store would be much different.

Re:Others support the "standard" DRM ebook format

[lxs]

Because the Kindle DRM is licensed in such a way that you're not allowed to ship a reader that reads both Amazon encrypted ebooks and those in a different DRM format (such as Adobe DRM encrypted epubs)

Which is one more reason to strip out the DRM as soon as you've downloaded your books.

Re:Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry

[JoelWink]

I sometimes wonder how much market research the music and book publishers have (not) put into their pricing models. If they sell 1,000 copies at $10/each or 3,000 copies at $4/each, then tell me, at which price point do both the publisher AND consumer benefit? BTW, I think we're seeing this with iOS and Android apps. There are a lot of promising apps out there for two or three dollars that I am very willing to take a risk on. A lot of app developers are obviously going for volume sales.

They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA

[Joe The Dragon]

They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA will hit them hard and by law they may be forced to let a screen reader be able to read your book.

But that's beside the point..

[Junta]

The argument that DRM is ok because it is futile against those in the know is horrible. The ostensible point is to combat piracy, but in this case the pirates aren't even slowed down and legitimate customers are forced to violate DMCA (in US) to get what should be protected as fair use.

Also, easily is a relative term. Last I checked it was non-trivial to do if all you had was a linux box and a Kindle, but trivial if you had a Windows box. Even then though, it required the right version of the Kindle app that was obfuscated in the way that your particular de-DRM script understood.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[demonlapin]

How many people run Linux and yet do not own or have relatively immediate access to a Windows box? I'm not making an argument about what should be; I'm talking about what is. I've derived great pleasure from owning a Kindle. If you're more interested in the politics of it, I support your choice to avoid DRM media - but it's not mine.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[HeadSoft]

How many people run Linux and yet do not own or have relatively immediate access to a Windows box? I'm not making an argument about what should be; I'm talking about what is. I've derived great pleasure from owning a Kindle. If you're more interested in the politics of it, I support your choice to avoid DRM media - but it's not mine.

Quite a few Linux users do not have access to a Windows box, and prefer it that way.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[demonlapin]

You literally don't have access to a Windows machine? And it's not a political decision for you?

Re:But that's beside the point..

[quadrox]

I know I'll sound like a fanatic, but Microsoft has done some things that go beyond the normal call of maximizing profits. Things that are clearly ethically wrong by pretty much any standard.

Supporting Microsoft in any way means supporting their business practices. It means making the world a slightly worse place to live in.

I'll gladly forgo the questionable pleasure it is to have windows installed, if it means I'm innocent of Microsofts crimes.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[Builder]

I was in this position a few years ago. I had an apple desktop and a linux laptop. I didn't have the disposable income to buy a Windows license.

Eventually, I started working for a company who required that I use windows for remote access, so they provided me a license. But that was the first time in years I had access to a windows box.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[ncc74656]

Last I checked it was non-trivial to do if all you had was a linux box and a Kindle, but trivial if you had a Windows box. Even then though, it required the right version of the Kindle app that was obfuscated in the way that your particular de-DRM script understood.

To some extent, ease of rendering a Kindle book to an unencumbered format depends more on the format than anything else. The decryption apps I've run across are written in Python and run anywhere you can get Python running.

Amazon uses two formats for Kindle books. One is basically ePub with their proprietary encryption scheme, which they can use if they receive ebook text from the publisher. Once the decryption is removed, you have a standard ePub file that can be read by a wide variety of apps. The other format, commonly called "Topaz," is used for books that Amazon receives in printed form. They're scanned, vectorized, and OCR'd. What gets displayed is the vector representation of the text in the book. Converting these to an ebook format involves considerably more work, as the embedded OCR text frequently has errors and isn't worth bothering to try to correct it. On the one book I bought that was in this format, I converted the book to PDF, brought the PDF into an OCR program, proofread the text as I copy/pasted it into some HTML, and then converted from HTML to ePub.

FWIW, I've used a Windows box and a jailbroken iPhone (with its Kindle app) to decrypt downloaded books. I've run the decryption scripts from within Cygwin, so running them on something other than Windows shouldn't pose a problem.

Re:But that's beside the point..

[ncc74656]

Amazon uses two formats for Kindle books. One is basically ePub...

s/ePub/Mobipocket/g

Re:But that's beside the point..

[HeadSoft]

I don't need one, and I save myself money in the process (not to mention security headaches.) I suppose I have a few acquaintances whose computer I could borrow if I really needed to, but I really can't imagine that scenario happening any time soon.

Pirating since my 15's

[Anonymous Coward]

Never bought a book before.

Read about 2000 now.

Still haven't bought a book.

Re:Pirating since my 15's

[preaction]

I go to my local library, too

Re:absolut stupidity

[Opportunist]

Oh sure, piracy is the culprit that book stores are closing. Amazon and other wholesale book sellers can't have anything to do with it, along with people (ya know, the "Joe Random" kind, not the unix devils) preferring the convenience of online book purchases to running down to the bookstore.

Is there a chance to take a look at the whole picture before you try to fit the frame so it shows the angle that your pet peeve supports?

But at least you managed to get Godwin into the trollpost, so I guess I'll give it a 2/10.

Re:absolut stupidity

[Hatta]

Your post is aptly named.

Re:Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry

[CastrTroy]

I don't imagine that they've redone their research since digital sales came into being. When they are selling digital copies for the same price as physical copies, they obviously haven't rethought the numbers. I think what they are really worried about is, if they don't charge a premium on their stuff, then the public won't see a reason to buy from the large publishing houses (or large recording studios) over independent artists. That is, if you charge more for something, then people will assume it is better, and thus you will have more buyers. If you lower your price, and therefore admit it isn't worth much, or is only worth as much as an independent artist, then people will compare your product with that of the independent.

Re:Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry

[DerekLyons]

The lesson hasn't been learned because it isn't a lesson - it's a childish tantrum.

Re:absolut stupidity

[VortexCortex]

Your argument that it's the free software mentality that is killing off books is quite ridiculous considering that Free & Open Source OS users are actually in the minority.

From what I can tell, proprietary information sales (ebooks, movies, music, & esp. games) are at an all time high in an era where it's increasingly difficult (if not illegal) to consume these products on FOSS operating systems.

I use Linux and I don't use what doesn't work with my OS, and as much as I'd love to think that FOSS is having a severe impact on commercial shite, it's not.

Why ebooks suck

[walterbyrd]

New ebooks can cost less than new real books, although the overall cost advantage may go to real books. First, with ebooks you have to consider the cost of the device itself, maybe a few hundred dollars, although they are getting cheaper. And you can be sure any device you use to read an ebook is lot more fragile than a real book. Try dropping an ebook reader, and a real book, off a four story building onto a cement sidewalk. An ebook reader is also a lot more likely be stolen. Also, used ebooks can not be bought, or sold. Sometimes I can buy a used real book for next to nothing, and then sell it for about the same price. Also, replacing an ebook reader's battery can be very expensive - well over $100.

The thing that really annoys me the most about ebooks is the "Tower of Babble" problem. There are multiple ebook formats, and "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) restrictions. With a real book, I have no concern about which electronic format is used.

No one ebook reader can read all the different ebook formats. Typically, ebooks are not transferable between different ebook devices. I can possibly remove the DRM, and convert the format, but that is a headache at best. The may also affect the cost of an ebook relative to a real book. For example, if I want to read a "Nook" ebook on my Kindle, I am expected to buy the book again. I can get an ebook in ePub format from my local library, but I would not be able to read on my Kindle, I would expected to buy a separate device for that.

A lot of the problems with ebooks can be avoided by using a multi-function device, such as a desktop, laptop, netbook, iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. These device will read practically any ebook format, plus they do a lot more. On the downside, these devices are heavier and more expensive, and the charge on the batteries does not last nearly as long. Also multi-function devices typically have an LCD screen, not an e-ink/e-paper background, that means that multi-function devices may be more difficult to read in bright light. Then again, multi-function devices typically have color screens, and are easier to read in dim light, and I am more likely to read in bed, than on the beach. Why go to the beach to read a book?

 

Re:Why ebooks suck

[atrizzah]

There are actually very simple ways to convert between eBook formats. But the spirit of your post is correct--a $10 eBook seems like a rip-off compared to the prospect of buying a much cheaper used book or checking a book out at the library. There are advantages, like portability and the ability to change font size, but on the whole, buying an e-reader currently is hardly a winning proposition compared to paper books in many cases.

I have a Kindle, but I'm definitely planning to continue using physical books, as well. Where the Kindle wins out for me is in its convenience for reading free public domain books and for its usefulness while traveling with regards to phrasebooks, free internet access over 3G, and travelguides.

Eventually, the eBook market will have to standardize. I think digital music has proven that there is a market for DRM-free content and that, furthermore, consumers will not fully adopt any product until they can use it the ways in which they see fit. That means, we either need very low-cost books and flexible options for lending/borrowing, or we need DRM free content. Also, right now, prices are waaay out of line on periodical content and blog content. Those are pretty much a complete joke. Lastly, on the hardware side, we're still at least a couple years away from PixelQi screens that can do a color electronic paper mode, but that option seems like the end-all, be-all of portable screen technologies. So, basically, the eBook market right now is about 5-10 years behind the digital music market, but I think that economics dictates that the situation will work itself out. Eventually.

A mobile number is needed to buy ebooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that.. excessive?

For what reason could they possibly need a mobile phone number?

Don't tell me. They also collect your D.O.B, town of birth, mother's maiden name and require you to install their app on your phone and enable location detection?

I can understand that an online retailer of IT hardware would want a landline or mobile number. If something goes wrong direct contact is preferable.

However, I don't see why a ebusiness store requires a mobile number. They have your credit card. What more do they need?

In relation to TFA, an ebook reader is next on my list for tech toys to acquire. Looking at the Kobo and the Sony it looks like the devices are in the same realm as epads.

A comparison of the various ereaders is very useful, in particular noting the formats supported - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers#Supported_File_Formats

In regards to DRM, this war was lost before it started. If you are willing to 'sacrifice' readability then many books are available from the shadowy corners of the net. Consumers need to have the ability to buy ebooks and load them onto their device with a minimum of fuss and with confidence. There's got to be something more in it for them.

One function I expected all of the online stores to have is the ability to re-download the file in the case where your ereader / computer fails. It should be a fairly simple exercise - and would induce customers to utilise specific stores for their purchases (in the same way that bricks nd mortar stores use Store Cards and Discount Cards).

Kudos to Borders for stocking Terry Pratchett's collection for around $10 per book (the price I originally paid to buy most of the Discworld series back in the 90's).

Meanwhile, the hunt for an ereader continues. The Kobo looks like a good entry option; it's just a pity they the screen refresh isn't optimised / fixed.

Yes, I will pay for ebooks as long as the price is right. $1 to $5 for 'trash' and 'cheap' books; up to $10 for a Novel. Meanwhile, if enough people jump on the band wagon the publishers will not have a choice but to jump on with us. Now, who's terms would you like for those on this wagon.. ours.. or.. theirs?

No, it ISN'T what publishing companies want

[Garwulf]

"Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer."

You know, I really am sick and tired of this drivel. Seriously, THIS gets modded up? I challenge you to prove just ONE of your claims. Go on - take a look at market figures and prove just one of them.

Not only do I run a small publishing company, but I was also there in the first big e-book experiment. In fact, I wrote one of the key attempts to make e-books work. It was called Diablo: Demonsbane, and it was an extremely successful e-book. Pocket Books marketed the hell out of it - they WANTED it to work. In fact, from 2000 to 2002 there was a concerted effort to make the format successful. It failed - the market just wasn't there yet. A bestselling e-book meant selling over a hundred copies, if you were lucky.

Here's the reality about e-books: they are a niche market, and they're being treated as one for a reason. If they did have a widespread adaptation, publishers would be thrilled. Do you know why? Because there is no print cost, and you can even cut the wholesalers out of the picture, so there are more profits.

Do you honestly think that self-publication is anything new? Print on Demand technology made it possible for authors to get a business license and self-publish inexpensively years ago - and those books tend to have a bigger market share than e-books do. Those e-books, by the way, haven't broken a 10% market share yet, and on a busy month, their market share is less than 5%.

Publishers don't give heavy support to e-books because in most sectors of the publishing market (there are exceptions, such as the technology reference market, which as far as I know is now mainly electronic), they are, and remain, a niche market. 90% of the publishing industry remains printed books, not because of some publisher conspiracy to keep the e-book down, but because the majority of demand is for printed books.

So kindly stop mischaracterizing the entire publishing industry as some reactionary dinosaur in an conspiracy to keep new technological development from the public. It simply isn't true, and it's reaching the point of slander.

Re:Lesson (not) learnt by music and games industry

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have something here. All these different publishing industries are ultimately entertainment industries with respect to the piracy issue. When you think about it, that makes their pool of competition VERY large -- they're not just competing with the other players in their industry, they're competing with

* Music
* Movies
* TV
* Books
* Video Games
* Hell, even going walking at the park!

for their customers' time. If the customers decide that they'd rather spend their time doing something else, wave bye-bye to that revenue.

Even within a given arena, there's a lot of competition. There are millions of people making free Youtube videos, for example, so you don't actually need to pay for TV in order to be entertained by watching videos. The expensive industry players can still coast on higher production values, but computer aids are steadily eroding that advantage.

Book 2.0

[Fantastic Lad]

Nah. After the Ultraword (tm) fiasco, the project was (thankfully) abandoned.

-FL

Give away and sell

[LaissezFaire]

Both giving away and selling the same product can work really well. For example, there's this Linux thing I've heard about that seems to be doing that.

It's very true in the economics world. The Austrian economists have been giving away books for as long as they've had a website, and they've found it increases the market for their printed books.

Respect, trust - and DRM

[jandersen]

What somehow seems to be lacking in the furore over the issue of "piracy" and DRM is the fact that the realtion between seller and buyer is a business one - even if one side is a multi-billion dollar business and the other is a pennyless student. And what are the fundamentally important things in any business relationship? Respect and trust. And those two come from both sides experiencing mutually beneficial transactions.

In the past we've seen that book publishers have charged very high prices for their materials, especially for study books - and what was it actually they were paying for? Considering the fact that, say, the mathematical department at my old university could produce basic, but very useable course material for about 1/20'th of the price of a book from a global publisher, I think there must have been a lot of excessive profit involved - so students quite reasonably felt cheated by the big publishers.

And now, with ebooks, it is even more crass: no expensive printing, binding and physically transporting tons of paper books, and on top, many abooks now have a limited lifetime, so you can't even buy second-hand. And the prices, I bet, remain the same as ever, or more. So how can one even start on building a respectful business relationship?

Cutting piracy in just 1 step

[Builder]

I used to violate copyright to read ebooks on my reader. You see, to buy many of the titles I wanted, I had to buy the book from Amazon US then strip the DRM and convert it to ePub so that my reader can view it. Buying from Amazon US meant using proxies to change my IP to one that is allowed to buy the book, a complex gift certificate purchasing and gifting process and a number of other hoops.

I'm buying the book, but I'm still violating the DMCA / EUCD to be able to read it. I have to do this because for reasons beyond my understanding, while I'm running naked up and down the streets with a fist-full of money yelling "Let me make you rich!", many publishers won't sell me the books that I want in my region.

Now, if I want to read these books in electronic format, I have to break the law. So why bother to pay money to break the law? That seems silly. I'm a criminal with similar penalties and censure in both cases, so why not just move to downloading for free ?

Oh, and it turns out that downloading for free is actually _easier_ than when I was paying money. When I was paying money to get this product, it took 4 steps and a number of pieces of software that I would prefer not having to use. By getting the book for free, it's a 1 step process and there is no extra software required.

Want to stop ebook piracy ? Sell me the damn book!

Re:Cutting piracy in just 1 step

[bradley13]

Want to stop ebook piracy? Sell me the damn book!

This.

I just tried to buy an Ebook ("Outies") both from Amazon and from Barnes&Noble. Both refused to sell to me here in Europe. I wrote the author, who was shocked that this was the case. It certainly is not a case of the rights being sold (as an earlier poster suggested), but simply a case of blithering incompetence. Failure to notice that the Internet is, well, International. In this case, she was kind enough to sell me the book directly. However, this is not the way it ought to have to go.

By the way, a plug because she was so nice about this. If you like Jerry Pournelle's stuff, her book is a worthy to his novels in the Motie universe. It's her first novel, so not as polished as what Jerry Pournelle produces, but it's a very fine first novel.

Re:Cutting piracy in just 1 step

[Builder]

Thanks for the tip - I'll contact her directly for a copy then :)

Re:Cutting piracy in just 1 step

[PCM2]

It is a case of the rights being sold. Publishers and authors often negotiate different rights agreements in different countries around the world. A book published by Random House here in the U.S. might be sold as Penguin imprint in the UK, or some other arrangement. You are supposed to buy the book from your locally-licensed imprint. European resellers are generally not permitted to stock U.S. editions of books (or if they do, they are excessively expensive due to the additional shipping duties and taxes imposed). Barnes & Noble has been forbidden to sell books outside the U.S. by the publishers; it's not that it doesn't want to sell them.

Re:Cutting piracy in just 1 step

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, and it turns out that downloading for free is actually _easier_ than when I was paying money. When I was paying money to get this product, it took 4 steps and a number of pieces of software that I would prefer not having to use. By getting the book for free, it's a 1 step process and there is no extra software required."

EXACTLY!! Pirating is much easier than stripping DRM. Once people have turned to piracy for that reason, how long will it take before they do it for every reason - price, regional availability, sampling, whatever - just because they can?

Wanted: One Bulls-eye.

[Ostracus]

I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers.

So we've developed an accurate method to measure piracy rates and it's subsequent consequences?

"Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar...

Oh, wait, no we haven't. Might it be better to wait till we can accurately measure something before we start proclaiming one should do this or that? I know it makes some feel better to reiterate tired cliches but the potential consequences of piracy are too big for such.

Making libraries unnecessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Making libraries unnecessary and therefore you don't have to pay taxes to keep them. An additional bonus: no need for a central library to keep ALL the books. Tertiary bonus: when copyright expires, the work moves into the public domain.

Given all these PUBLIC (authors and publishers are members of the public too) benefits and the FACT that copyright is meant for the benefit OF the public, why the whining?

Buy unencrypted EPUB

[SlothDead]

We might have already lost the battle, but PLEASE try to only buy from stores that sell unencrypted EPUBs which work on every device. For German books, I buy them from "beam ebooks" (Not sure if it's okay to post links that could be seen as advertisement, but it should be easy to find anyway). I haven't yet found a good store for english language unencrypted EPUBs, could anyone recommend one to me? Finding these is such a hassle because of all the lying sellers ("It's the cool free open EPUB*!" *includes DRM that makes it impossible to view on your device)

Also, even though it's illegal, if I can't buy an unencrypted ebook anywhere, I resort to downloading the free pirated version or not read the book at all. Since DRM often doesn't work on my ereader, the only legal alternative would be to fill my house with more paper bricks.

I mean, it's totally obscene: This is how I became to read the German bestseller of 2010 "Deutschland schafft sich ab":
1. Tried to buy it online, wasn't available.
2. Found a horrible pirated scanned PDF that I did not want to read
3. Gave up and went to the physical book store: All sold out everywhere for days, even amazon could not deliver
4. Gave up, but within days of release, somebody crafted a really nice EPUB with OCRed text and all diagrams embedded correctly. So I downloaded that one and was very happy with it.

Why, oh why couldn't they just sell me the EPUB in the first place? I hate hunting down pirated versions and want to give money to the authors.

Not Piracy

[AP31R0N]

Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery and kidnapping.

Re:They better not lock out screen readers or the

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-169.html

See 2010 DMCA exemption #6, "Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format."

Even if they do try to lock out screen readers, people are now legally allowed to bypass such protections.

Fighting A Losing Battle

[GreenSeven]

Look at sites like peepcode.com Their content is 100% DRM free, but is sold as a subscription based service. I recently heard an interview with Geoffrey Grosenbach, the owner of Peepcode.com, and he said pirating isn't a huge issue Of course some of his material is pirated but he says that if people steal the content, and like it, they're more likely to come subscribe to his service. At worst, it's free advertising...

Re:They better not lock out screen readers or the

[tgd]

They already do. The Kindle application for the PC, for example, doesn't expose the contents of the page via the UI Automation interfaces in Windows (which effectively means its invisible to a screen reader).

Of course, that would make it trivial to write an app to extract the contents of a book from it. (Not that it wasn't ... er... isn't ... er... would be... hard to do so with an OCR library and small bit of wrapper code)