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Amazon Launching eBook Lending Program, Publishers Unenthusiastic
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is starting a program to lend ebooks to Kindle users. It will allow users to borrow just one title at a time, but readers will be able to keep the borrowed ebook for as long as they want. The initial library will only have around 5,000 titles, because 'None of the six largest publishers in the U.S. is participating.' The article continues, 'Several senior publishing executives said recently they were concerned that a digital-lending program of the sort contemplated by Amazon would harm future sales of their older titles or damage ties to other book retailers. ... The new program, called Kindle Owners' Lending Library, cannot be accessed via apps on other devices, which means it won't work on Apple Inc.'s iPad or iPhone, even though people can read Kindle books on both devices. This restriction is intended to drive Kindle device sales, says Amazon.'"
How exactly is this supposed to work? What will be the costs, since most books are already cheap?
Someone should let them know that people are going to 'borrow' them one way or another, so they can either provide a legit means to do so that might actually result in a sale, or fight it and get nothing.
I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for the 'legit means to do so' choice.
Will this be like a library, where you check out a book for free, or will it be a rental, where you pay to borrow it?
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
No big publisher wants more to bring anything like a library back to life. Publishers had to have hated the fact that something like a library existed in the first place, and if digital publishing can wipe away libraries, you know they will be happy. A digital library is something that the publishers have to hate.
Yay, I have a sig.
Ebook lending is so dumb. It's a silly method to try and bring back the good ole days when people couldn't pirate your stuff because it was a big stack of dead tree. Now it's just some bits, and it's super easy to copy, so copy the hell out of it and sell it at a low price that reflects the ease with which it can be copied. I could pirate videogames, but instead I buy them on steam, because it's easier and better. They aren't just providing some alternative to piracy, they're providing a *better* alternative, and that's why I want to pay for it.
A nice organized ebook store with low prices that tracks what I've purchased is *better* than just pirating them and stashing them on a disk somewhere and loosing them all when that disk dies.
Publishers and people like amazon (amazon, to be fair, does an ok job already) need to think about what they can provide that is better than piracy. Ebook lending is not better than piracy, it's annoying and confusing and sucks.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
My local library in New York has a decent ebook lending program. Essentially it uses DRM-ed PDFs. Also, the New York (City) Public Library has a rather large eBook library, although it's locked into the Kindle universe.
I'd prefer to see a more cross-compatible standard that works with all the eBook readers out there, and doesn't give Amazon a monopoly, but this is better than nothing.
I'll happily pay £10/month for access to all the books I can read.
My Journal
Will borrowing out all "copies" of a book prevent other users from taking them out unless you "return" your lender, like a real library? :-P
I'm still waiting for the used ebook market to claw it's way to life. Unfortunately, it seems as if the first sale doctrine has been derailed by DRM to become the only sale doctrine.
I love my kindle, but I am reluctant to buy new books unless I am absolutely sure I will like them. At Borders (I guess Barnes & Noble now) I flip through the book, which I can to a limited extent with Amazon. However, with ebooks, I can not take a stack of finished books to the used book store and sell them for a fraction of the cost, and then buy more used books at half the original price. What really bugs me, though, is that the ebooks are often priced higher than the ones in Borders! As much as I like my knidle, I'm still more inclined to browse the used book store than to buy new ebooks.
One good thing from this is that I've been re-reading a bunch of the classics lately, since they're all free.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
One of the reasons my wife got a nook was that (at the time - but you can use the kindle and other devices) was that you can borrow eBooks. Yes they expire after a time limit, but this type of stuff does keep the local library relevant, plus its already paid for by my taxes.
The library also publicizes these other sources of eBooks: Project Gutenburg, Open Library and the International Children's Digital Library
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The industry (publishing) is undergoing fundamental change and most of those companies which do it by printing text on ground up dead trees are not realizing it. There most certainly is a role for "publishers", apart from that of printing and distribution. That particular role is fast becoming irrelevant.
it won't work on Apple Inc.'s iPad or iPhone, even though people can read Kindle books on both devices. This restriction is intended to drive Kindle device sales, says Amazon.'"
That may be good for them, but what is my incentive to support this self-serving plan with my money?
It seems that I don't get any real benefit, and they get more money.
"Lending" something that has zero cost to reproduce is insane. This has somehow eluded Amazon and the rest of these lunatics.
We lend physical books because they were and are a scarce physical resource. At first books were rare and expensive due to the physical constraints of making them. Later on copyright was created to artificially reinforce the scarcity once publishers gained the ability to print enough books to destroy any hope of profits and with it the impetus to create books. The concept is a good one even if the current execution is rather nuts. People could lend books because it didn't infringe on copyright (nothing was copied), the societal value of exchange of information was a good one, and books do have a meaningful cost to create, reproduce and distribute.
But "lending" an ebook is a rather stupid concept. The cost of reproducing and distributing an ebook is a good approximation of zero so the notion of lending makes a lot less sense. The exchange of information work equally well whether the book is lent or copied so that doesn't really matter. The only argument possibly in favor of the practice is that not "lending" would somehow damage the motivation to create and disseminate useful works. However you could accomplish feat of keeping markets viable by simply lowering the price of the book to a non-monopolistic price, thereby selling more of the book. This is possible because the role of publishers is drastically reduced when you do away with the need for a physical distribution system.
The natural price of an ebook is nowhere near $10. There is a cost to the creation of the work but the publishers are to a large extent middlemen who provide relatively little value without their monopoly on the old physical distribution system. Think of books a little like apps on your Android or iPhone. Most aren't worth much and will sell for small amounts of money but there also isn't the cost of a physical distribution system and its attendant middlemen. There is SOME cost but you can be certain it's a lot less than $10/book. We need to protect the incentive to create but we have no obligation to protect old obsolete monopolies.
I have two B&N nooks, and I've always been able to share any of the books I buy with friends.
There's a limitation (8 weeks or something), and you can't loan the same book to the same friend twice.
I can also "check out" books from my local library via their website, and I've done that before trips where I won't have good Internet coverage.
How does B&N get away with being able to do it, but Amazon can't?
Right now publishers sell paper books and people buy those books, often at a discount, and then give them away or resell them or borrow them from libraries. The publisher receives a profit on the first copy sold and hundreds of people may read that copy although the average number of readers per copy is 3.9 for print books. For electronic books the average reader is less, probably less than 1. Most people do not get past page 18 of a book that they have purchased. 5% of book sales are used books.
If we calculate costs of a book per reader, averaging $7 per copy of either a print of e-book the cost per reader for an e-book is probably $10 or more and the average cost for a print book is under $2.
I typically buy books at used book stores. When I need to buy a new book I go to Walmart, Costco, Sams Club, or another retailer that discounts the retail cost. My favorite book store discounts orders 10% to 20% from retail price for me when I have to order. Most print books I buy end up in a box that I donate to the homeless.
I can't give away e-books, especially I can't give them to people who can't afford a reader.
Publishers are idiots because their reticence in electronic distribution is increasing the black market (0 cost downloading) of books. A 0 cost download can be given away and kept. Every time a market tries to limit supply through regulation or artificially increased costs (drugs, prostitution, guns, music downloads, book downloads, numbers rackets) where there is a demand and resources available a black market will develop.
Want a cure for cancer? There is a supply because there is a demand. I can't say the cure will work, but, I guarantee someone will supply a cure when there is a demand. The cure may be free (local faith healer) and the cure may cost millions (local con artist) but it will be available. Publishers who refuse to recognize the basic laws of economics will find themselves destroyed economically.
Not zero cost at all, actually.
That would be incorrect. If you want to get pedantic it is zero marginal cost. You ALREADY are spending the money for those electrons and bandwidth and admin costs and what costs they do present are spread out widely among lots of people and other services. The additional cost of putting a single ebook into the mix once you've already bought a computer and set up the infrastructure is so small that it is effectively zero. There is effectively zero variable cost involved. All the costs are fixed costs and you would pay them anyway even if ebooks didn't exist.
Disclosure: I'm a cost accountant in my day job.
Anybody bother to find out what the AUTHORS think of this or do we just have the opinion of what is essentially the middlemen ?
This is why I will NOT buy a license for a book (ie: ebook) at all. Untill such time as I can "buy the book" in electronic form, I won't be "buying a license" to read a book on electronic devices.
When I buy a book I am paying the author for this creative works as well as the overhead to publish that works ... whether it's in paper form or in electronic form. To *sell* paper but *license* electronic is just stupid and so are the *sheepable* that support this distinction with their dollars.
I always asked myself: when we buy a dead tree book, we can lend it to friends. What about e-books? Is there some kind of copyright/licensing that prevents it? Then could we make lending of a paper book forbidden (which I would feel weird about)?
It seems like the problem with digital rights discussions is the fact that they include the word "digital".
How can there be even a question that people would be able to lend out their books? That we'd be able to re-sell our used music and games? Whether media has a a physical media attached to it should make absolutely zero difference to what you can do with it. The only difference between the two is how they're stored, so why should what you can do with the content be any different, period?
If content owners want the same *protections* for digital-only media as media that also comes stored on some physical item, the same rights need to be given.
This is a large reason why I refuse to buy ebooks over paper books.
Looks like we're getting closer to it happening...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
E-books scare the crap out of the book publishers because if they replace printed books, they lose control of the book market. Publishing a print book is expensive and risky, while publishing an e-book is cheap and easy. Publishers can easily be eliminated from the e-book business and they are trying there best to keep paper books popular by tightly controlling the e-book market and making them less desirable options. In my opinion, they are failing.
Meaning if the GOP gains the White House and Senate again, damn near every US library will be bulldozed and the land sold to real estate developers. An ignorant public is a controllable public (this also explains their desire to destroy effective (read: funded) public education).
The scarcity isn't the issue - it's that you purchased a thing. The issue is that people's brains break when they can't physically touch it, but there should be no difference.
People grasp buying intangible goods just fine. Look at any balance sheet of a major corporation and you'll see some form of intangible goods on there. People buy music from the iTunes store every day. We understand it just fine. That doesn't mean that every type of transaction makes sense. Lending an electronic copy of a digital book is an absurd attempt to replicate a practice that arose due to scarcity of physical goods.
Scarcity is very much the issue. Lending makes no sense for a good that is not scarce. In the case of ebooks you haven't bought a tangible good but you can just as easily buy an intangible good (information, intellectual property, etc) or a service. I'm an accountant and we even have formal accounting treatments for these things. But the price of anything is based on its scarcity. If I can get it easily it will have a low cost. If it is hard to get the price will be higher. If someone controls the supply of something they can create artificial scarcity and thereby command higher prices.
Copyright and patents exist because the best available solution we have to the free rider problem is artificial scarcity. It's not a perfect solution (and our current laws aren't helping any) but no one has come up with a better one yet.
They should also explain how cities and towns across the country have these buildings with lots of high-quality books that anybody can read completely for free
Last time I checked I paid taxes to support those libraries. I'm a huge supporter of libraries and think that money spent on them is a usually money well spent but let's not pretend they are free.
Has been happening for generations, and its not hurt the publishers enough to worry about, and often causes a 2nd sale due to them wanting their own copy to keep and hold.
Sounds like the insane rants of the *AA all over again trying to save their dying business model.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wish they would just abandon these stupid schemes and implement a simple e-book lending model. I don't see why they can't make it so I can lend a book to a friend and have it 'locked' until the friend returns it. This wouldn't really impact publisher sales and it would give e-books the same sort of social interactive power that traditional books have.
Time for a reality check here! Most books writen these days are typed into a computer. Yes, I realize that spell and gramer checking will not catch all errors, proofreading is needed. After that it is just a matter of converting to the file format that you want.
At that point the cost of as many digital copies as you want is extremely small (per copy). I see no reason that an ebook shouldn't sell for $1.00-$2.00($3.00 max) instead of the same price as the paperback version. After all, with the digital copy, you don't have to print it, bind it, ship it etc...as you do with the paperback version.
Also at the $1-$2 price pointt, DRM IS UNNECESSARY as piracy will drop to next to nothing. RIAA, MPAA, and publishers need to stop treating their customers like CRIMINALS!!
I have no problem paying $1.00 per track for high quality MP3 files I want. I won't pay for low quality, DRM'ed wma crap. I would have no problem paying $1-$2 for high quality non-DRM'ed ebooks. Publishers, like the RIAA/MPAA, need to stop trying to prop up ancient business models and practices that are no longer viable, and move on into the digital age!
My name is Nonya F. Biznes
Email: nonya@nonya.org
Address: 123 Nostreet
Notown, FU 77342-090
I help friends crack and strip the DRM and we share the epubs. works great.
it also has the side effect of giving me ownership of the ebook so it cant be taken from me or dictated as to what device I can read it on.
It's a Win-Win.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, maybe not the devil, but a minor imp.
The Big Six are afraid of the Kindle Lending program because "fuck you, how do we get paid?" And right now, the answer is pretty simple: Amazon either buys the rights to lend a book, or buys a copy of the book every time they lend it out to someone. From the publisher's perspective not a whole lot changes, and from the buyer's perspective the only difference is that you only have temporary access to a book you probably weren't going to re-read anyway.
But I don't think it's going to continue that way. Amazon Prime is $79 per month. Let's say the majority of users borrow six books a year -- half of what they're allowed to do. If Amazon is buying a new copy every time, that's $60 right there, leaving $19 to pay for all of the streaming video, free shipping, and other stuff that comes with Prime.
That's not a lot of room for profit, which means Amazon has to drive the cost of lending books down... and that's why this is spooking the Six. Amazon has already created an expectation that eBooks will be less than ten dollars, and that isn't an astonishingly profitable price point. Contrary to mainstream belief, the physical material is actually the smallest part of a book's cost. Author royalties, copyediting, cover design, and marketing are all much bigger chunks of that ten dollars.
The Six are worried that Amazon is going to commoditize their product entirely: rather than an expected price of ten dollars or less, Kindle users are going to expect books to be free. Which means Amazon is going to have to acquire them for almost-free. Which means that already marginally-profitable books are going to become even less profitable.
Now, I don't have a whole lot of love for traditional publishing. They're not as bad as the music industry, but they're still digging their heels in and refusing to join the rest of us in the twenty-first century. However:
As a self-published author, this makes me a bit nervous, too. I spent hundreds of hours working on the novel I just put up on Amazon (and Barnes & Noble, and SmashWords, and...), and those hours were all unpaid, on my own time. And then I had the cost of setting up a sole proprietorship (which was technically unnecessary, but still cost me a hundred dollars). And then I dropped two-hundred-fifty dollars on ISBNs (also technically unnecessary). Copyediting, if I hadn't cajoled friends into helping me out, would have run a thousand dollars. Cover design, if my wife wasn't a graphic designer, would have been another five-hundred to one-thousand dollars.
I'm selling the book for $2.99, and pocket 70% of that. I have basically no room to profit on this book -- and I'm actually treating it as a loss leader for future titles. But it would still be nice to recoup some of my costs, and I would like this little adventure as a whole to eventually become profitable. If Amazon succeeds in making books "free", that's going to be harder and harder to do.
And I'm not an Evil Big Publisher. My book is available in damn near any format you like, DRM free. I've even sent free copies to people that have written to me saying they can't afford to buy it, or were prevented from buying it by $BULLSHIT_POLICY. This was a labor of love more than anything else. But still: as an author, Amazon's move has me just a little worried.
Thomas Galvin
Others on this forum have spoken about the importance of ownership. I agree. The publishing community is only going to learn a hard lesson if it perpetuate a model where there is no real ownership (therefore no real value) in the products that they sell. But why re-invent the wheel. Haven't we already seen this movie played out already in the world of software? You can take some degree of ownership when you purchase a piece of software by registering (on line) and getting some sort of key. You can transfer ownership by uninstalling the software and transferring it to someone else (along with the key). There is no question that software piracy still exists but I have to assume that the issue would be even larger if people had no sense of ownership. If I paid $30 for a piece of software (that I feel that I own) and a friend wants a copy ... my attitude is ... 1) you can get a copy from the same vendor where I got mine, or 2) I am not using it any more ... how about if I sell it to you for $10. If I didn't feel that I really own it ... my attitude would definitely change to ... sure ... here is a copy ... do whatever you have to make it work (there is no skin off of my nose ... because I didn't "really own" anything ... did I?).
eBooks seem to be an even more obvious candidate. I read it ... I liked it ... I want to share the experience ... so ... here is the files and the key-code ... tell me what you think (or maybe I sell it to you.). And you can give it back to me under this arrangement.
But that would mean that eBook sellers would have to put a little effort into the selling process. Right now they are just stamping out identical DRM copies (zero effort at no real zero cost per incremental unit). But for an ownership basis to work they would have to do the same thing that software vendors do ... key each copy and maintain activation/deactivation records (and provide service for lost key-codes). It is not magic ... it is being done every day by software vendors.
I am assuming that we will get to an ownership model in the long haul (primarily driven by consumer back-lash) ... which means that the first eTailer who introduces this type of program will get to set the standard. Who knows ... maybe this time it won't be Amazon who leads the way.
From supporting Mobi. It's an open standard, and it predates ePub. They're just being petulant over the DRM.
How would you sell bits? You don't relinquish them by giving them to someone else.
Amazon's lending system is pretty much the same as B&N.
In both cases you're better off just stripping the DRM and "lending" them an unencumbered file.
What purpose does locking your copy have? Either you buy into the whole copyright nonsense, in which case you'll refrain from reading your copy voluntarily, or you don't, in which case you'll ignore the restrictions anyway.
First off, marketing is never a cost item. Either it's bringing in profit you wouldn't otherwise get, or you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. More importantly, there are inefficiencies other than just printing that ebooks bring. Distributors take a 50% cut, ergo an ebook should be, at minimum, half the cost of the lowest priced print edition.
FYI, someone fleeced you on the ISBN. Even if you live in a failed state like the US, the most one will cost is $125. If you live in a developed nation your government will provide one without cost. If you are American, you may want to strike a deal with someone north of your border to publish in Canada for you so you can take advantage of their infrastructure.
Hasten the obsolescence of these "middlemen" by promoting and developing replacement technology
Replacement technology whose makers will inevitably draw lawsuits from the big incumbent publishers for "inducing" copyright infringement. It tends to happen every time there's such a disruptive development.
Become politically relevant.
I send letters to my representatives, and I get back a form letter claiming that the draconian laws are in the best interest of America, which just reinforces my belief in how strongly bought my representatives are. I vote, and my preferred candidate loses. I try to spread word of mouth about my preferred candidate in those few venues I know of that haven't already put up a complete ban on political discussion, and nobody appears to show any interest.
Make them fear you by providing a threat of being voted out of office for not representing your interests.
This doesn't help for people who happen to live in a district whose representative has a "fairly safe seat" for one of the two largest parties.
Support and promote open-source/free technology and content.
"Content" referring to works of authorship other than computer programs, I assume. What's the business model to fund the creation of entertainment works with professional production values to be distributed under some license for free cultural works?