Amazon To Offer Kindle ebooks Via Public Libraries

destinyland writes "Amazon announced this morning that they're making Kindle ebooks available for free in America through 11,000 local public libraries. 'We're thrilled that Amazon is offering such a new approach to library ebook...' said one Seattle librarian, and one Kindle blog listed out the top advantages to having them available in libraries."

Comments

So Amazon is violating copyrights en masse?

[dgatwood]

Speaking as someone in the last stages of preparing content for publication, I'm seriously leaning towards dropping plans for a Kindle edition because of this.

Letting libraries check out books is certainly a useful thing. The mere fact that a library is interested enough in your title to buy a copy is an indication of its quality, and has the potential to drive future sales by exposing more people to your book. However, unless there's a part of the equation that Amazon isn't telling us, this new policy completely destroys the value part of that equation from an author or publisher's perspective.

Previously, if those 11,000 libraries wanted to be able to lend my book, I would have gotten 11,000 sales. Now, if I interpret this correctly, all those people checking out the book translate into zero sales. In effect, Amazon is declaring that it has the right to loan copies of your book to anyone for free without you seeing a penny. This not only cuts the legs right out from under your current book sales, but also all future book sales unless you refuse to publish a Kindle version of your next book.

Worse, for those of us who are anti-DRM, we're completely screwed. I don't want DRM on my books, period, because it limits my readers' options for viewing content that they paid for. However, if my readers aren't paying for it, and are instead using a gratis lending model, a DRM-free book basically means that there's nothing stopping someone from checking it out, copying it to a new file, checking it back in, and basically getting the book for free. And unlike downloading it through bittorrent or whatever, because they obtained it through a legal channel, there is no way to track that behavior, no way to police it, and it isn't even all that easy to explain to users why it is wrong, or under what circumstances it is wrong. So books would have to be DRM-encumbered for lending purposes, and it's not clear if Amazon provides any such distinction, nor is it clear if it is even technically feasible for them to make such a distinction within their current model.

And finally, for the ultimate kick in the teeth, the Kindle edition of any book is inherently a substandard experience compared with the EPUB version because Kindle's support for HTML and CSS is utterly abysmal. This means that if I produce a Kindle edition, the vast majority of the readers of my books are likely to be able to freeload without me seeing a penny, and they will be disinclined to buy future content because the current content won't look as good as it should.

So explain to me again why I should support Kindle at all. At this point, despite the fact that I've wasted a week hacking a copy of my EPUB books to look marginally acceptable on Kindle, I'm strongly leaning towards writing off those extra hours as an unfortunate mistake unless Amazon provides clarification of their policy in a way that assuages these concerns. I will, of course, release EPUB versions for more functional readers like iPad, and (if Adobe fixes the four or five major CSS bugs I filed, including one potential security hole/crasher) possibly Nook.