E-Book Lending Stands Up To Corporate Mongering

phmadore writes "Publishing Perspectives is talking today about the rise of e-book lending, which, one would hope, will lead to a rise in questioning exactly how far one's digital rights extend. Although the articles are mostly talking about the authorized lending programs through Kindle and Nook ('The mechanics are simple: ebook owners sign up and list books that they want to allow others to borrow. When someone borrows one of the ebooks you have listed, you earn a credit. Credits can also be purchased for as little as $1.99 from eBook Fling'), we have to ask ourselves why we are suddenly paying publishers more for less. In the case of iBooks, you can't even transfer your books to another device, let alone another user, but then at least the prices are somewhat controlled. In the case of sites like BooksOnBoard, you've got ridiculously out-of-control prices with a greatly decreased cost of delivery. It's not all bad, don't get me wrong; Kobo offers competitive prices that never leave me feeling ripped off or stuck with an inferior product. Still, I can't help but think: digital rights management, sure! Where are my rights, as a consumer, and who is managing them? I wouldn't mind selling the rights back to the publisher or store for in-store credit; I also wouldn't be terribly bothered if they got a reasonable cut off the resale of the product to someone else. What I won't like is if they never allow it or continue to make it impossible for me to sell what's rightfully mine."

Comments

Only buy PDF, ePUB or another open standard

[Yaddoshi]

If it's not available in any of those standards, then the eBook is as worthless as DRM-hampered MP3s purchased digitally. If you can't purchase your eBook in one of the aforementioned formats, do yourself a huge favor and go to your local bookstore, and purchase it in paperback. That way you can keep it indefinitely, sell it, trade it, lend it to friends, and so forth. It's about time for companies to stop proactively treating their customers like criminals and thieves. Vote with your wallet.

Re:Only buy PDF, ePUB or another open standard

[PCM2]

The Nook, Kibo, and (I think) Sony readers all use ePub, but the books still have DRM. As you yourself point out, just because it's an open standard (or a de facto one, like MP3) doesn't mean you're automatically free of DRM.

If anything, the way this will change is if people buy the hardware, use it, and put pressure on the vendors to get rid of the DRM. It eventually worked on Apple and Amazon for music. I think Barnes & Noble would be more than happy to provide people with DRM-free books (and I've received some classics from them that already are, though they don't advertise it). It's the publishers we have to convince (and maybe Amazon, which seems to want to create an empire).

Also, note that it's trivial to crack the Adobe DRM used on the Nook, for example. And I often find myself doing it, not necessarily to pirate the book, but because the formatting is so cockeyed on my Nook that I have to bust open the ePub and tweak the CSS myself. Digital publishing still has way to go before it's truly mainstream.

Re:Only buy PDF, ePUB or another open standard

[shutdown -p now]

1) Buying ePUB does not guarantee no DRM. Apple sells DRM'd ePub, and so do B&N and Sony.

2) MOBI (which is what Kindle uses) is really just as open as ePUB (it's also packaged HTML). There are a bunch of other formats like this - e.g. LIT, or Sony's LRF. You can use e.g. Calibre to convert them to ePUB or other format of your choice, provided DRM is stripped first.

From a purely pragmatical point of view, just buy books in formats for which DRM stripping tools are readily available at the moment. Today, this means Kindle, or any of the stores that use Adobe ePUB DRM. Don't bother with iBooks.

Re:Only buy PDF, ePUB or another open standard

[Moryath]

Welcome to "modern DRM", also known as "Broken By Design."

Buy a console video game on disc... but then there's the 0-day "DLC" associated, the "DLC Expansion" the month later because the developers were too damn lazy to finish the game before ship date. 5 years from now, nobody will have a complete copy unless the game's lucky to get a "game of the year edition" release, because all the consoles will have broken and the DLC authorization server will be turned off.

Don't believe me? Take a look at Halo 2 right now. Want to set up a LAN party? Hope you're willing to bring in 3-4 original Xboxes, better hope they're all softmodded, hope someone has the custom installer for all the DLC maps preserved somewhere, and pray one of them doesn't die on you while you play.

Ebooks? The goal of the publishers is, and has always been, to try to figure out ways to stop lending and resale. They hate, hate - with a passion - companies like Half Price Books that buy and sell used books. They hate, with a passion, the public library system.

And what they really don't understand is how stupid it makes them look. The "pirates" do the world a huge favor by crafting no-CD hacks, by coming up with ways for people to back up their discs and still play the game, with the original tucked safely away where a dog with chewing issues or a small child can't reach it to destroy it. They give people a way to back up - without having to trust in "authorization servers", without having to hope for a working net connection - downloaded package files for DLC content.

And what's sad is it didn't have to be this way. They could have included a way for us to back up our DLC packages on the consoles. They could sell the games without the ridiculous DRM crap and DVD drive being used as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle. But no. Instead, they treat the customers as criminals and drive them right into the hands of the "pirates."

The FSF got it right

[Saint Aardvark]

Still, I can't help but think: digital rights management, sure! Where are my rights, as a consumer, and who is managing them?"

And that is why the Free Software Foundation insists on calling this technology "Digital Restrictions Management (http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm): it points out that this is meant to keep YOU, the paying customer, from doing useful things with the stuff you buy.

I am waiting for academic publishers to realize

[savi]

That their out-of-print books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that are currently making them ZERO money, could be sold for $2-$5 as pdfs. There are hundreds of books that I would like to buy, but since they are out of print (and weren't cheap to begin with and had small print runs), they cost in the rage of $70+. This means that I simply don't buy them. This means that no one makes money of my desire to own these books. What a waste.

Re:I am waiting for academic publishers to realize

[radtea]

That their out-of-print books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that are currently making them ZERO money, could be sold for $2-$5 as pdfs

This is unlikely to happen.

Having dealt with academic publishers I've found them to be the most ignorant bunch of incompetent rent-seekers imaginable, whose entire business model is fortunately doomed. I once tried to find a copy of an out-of-print book that I wanted to use for part of a class I was teaching. I asked the publisher if they knew where any were available, and also for permission for photocopying limited sections of any copy I did find for teaching purposes (fewer than 10 students, but I figured I may as well play nice.)

I got a nastygram back refusing permission to make copies, and also asking me to inform them if I found a copy because they didn't actually have a copy anywhere. They had "ownership" of the copyright, but not the actual text! This raises any number of fun questions, the first one being: how can they know if I've violated their copyright if they aren't in possession of the text?

As it turns out it was all moot because I never did find a complete copy, but its still the most egregiously stupid thing I've ever heard from the bloodsucking, parasitic, rent-seeking academic publishing industry.

intellectual or personal property? just pick one

[craftycoder]

Much like music before it, publishers can't decide if books are personal or intellectual property. If they are personal property, then you should be able to do with it what you want after you purchase it. Put it on any device. Share your ONE copy as you want. Sell it when you are done etc. If a book is intellectual property and you only have a license to the content, then the form of the content takes should be provided to the license holder at cost. Say I buy a license to Rush, 2112, a favorite album of mine. I should be able to get an MP3 version for the cost of transmitting it to me. I should be able to get a CD, LP, cassette, 8 track or whatever new format is available whenever and as often as I want one for the cost reproduction and delivery. If books are intellectual property, then I should be able to get a nook, kindle, mobi, pdf, word doc, and any other digital version for the pennies it would cost to deliver it to me and printed versions should be made available at printing cost + shipping once I've purchased a license. The caveat for IP is that I cannot share it with anyone ever.

As it is now, they want the best of both worlds. They sell me a license to the content and give me no credit for that license if I want to put that content on some other device I own. Buying a printed version in the IP world should essentially mean I get free digital versions of that product for life. Same with music. I promise you that if you sold Harper Collins a piece of software and they lost the hard drive it was on, they'd insist that you let them install it on another computer. Why are we not treated the same way?

Short rant about e-books.

[yossie]

They cost as much or sometimes more than the printed copy, are badly edited/proofread and the software for reading them has issues with formatting, they are DRM'ed, and the rules for lending and/or reselling them (when that is even possible) are restrictive and draconian..
Fact is, e-books are an outrageous scam, by any measure. Far more so than the music and movie industry, the book industry figured out how to fleece its customers more, so much more.
That said, they do save paper. I own a kindle, but I am still trying to figure out how much money I want to give amazon. I am petitioning my favorite authors to directly publish, hopefully cheaper..

For short-term business related material...

[ScientiaPotentiaEst]

... maybe I can see the point. But for long term reference material or for books I value, there's no way I'm going to use any of the eBooks. Sure, they're portable. But they come with more points of failure that can prevent the contained books from being read. Also, the text isn't (yet) so clear and sharp as ink on paper.

But even were there no technical issues, the DRM makes it a non-starter for me. I've had /.ers beat me up about my opinion on this subject. Still, it doesn't fix the "rub". When the distributors can reach out and remove books remotely (as Amazon has already done), or restrict what one can do with them, or charge for lending, or provide no mechanism to buy anonymously, etc, I'm just not interested.

PS: if you tell me that the distributors promise not to delete books remotely again, you are then telling me that you trust large corporations to keep their word.

The Right to Read

[rafial]

While mentioning the FSF, it's also worth pointing out Richard Stallman's old "science fiction" story, _The Right to Read_

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

It's worth checking in with it every few years to see how close we've gotten to that particular dystopia.