books, ebooks, and publishing
Feb. 24th, 2006 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eLast year the Australian publishing industry had its worst year in ages. I wonder if the crunch may be coming sooner rather than later with the paper book publishing industry. There will have to be a move to electronic books at some point as paper costs and fuel costs force the price of paper-based books ever upward. And of course as prices go up reader numbers will drop. The rise in book prices will at first be masked by the big book publishers using cheap facilities in 3rd world countries to print stuff (this is already happening), but that only buys a little time.
As far as I can see, the only thing that can save the book publishing industry is ebooks, but they have been a commercial failure all around the world because publishers are so scared of new technology that they encumber it with all manner of locks. I have bought several electronic books, and after a number of close calls where I almost got locked out of the books I'd bought and paid for, I have become quite wary of them and extremely reluctant to buy them.
The problem is greed and it shows up in two ways. First publishers don't want anybody to share electronic books with anybody else so they put complex locks on the books. Secondly they vastly overcharge for ebooks (I guess they think we're idiots and won't notice).
So now, given that electronic books have not taken off in the way they expected, publishers think the audience isn't there. Admittedly things will start to pick up more when we have cheap handheld machines on which to read the books, but it is a bit of a chicken-egg problem. If the machines are expensive the market for ebooks will remain small and while the market is small nobody is going to make cheap ebook readers. And while this whole attitude persists of considering the audience as the problem instead of the solution it will take longer than it needs to.
The worst part of the problem is that publishers feel compelled to encrypt and lock ebooks so that people don't share them. They never seem to realise that sharing is how most of us find out about books. How many times have you read a book because a friend has put their copy in your hands and said "You must read this!" or because you've stumbled across something in a library, or in a secondhand bookshop? (Yes, you pay for a book in a secondhand bookshop, but the publisher doesn't get a cent of it.) How many books would you have read if they were chained to your friends' bookshelves or if libraries and secondhand bookshops didn't exist? Sharing is not a bad thing it is good. It is the most powerful advertising medium that books have.
Lastly, there is another change that is coming up and I think publishers don't even want to look at it because they feel it threatens everything they stand for. This is a peculiar time. There are more artists, writiers and musicians than ever before. Many excellent creators simply place their work online for free. How can a publisher hope to compete with this flood of often high quality work? My own feeling is that it is impossible to compete with it. The only way to survive is to facilitate it. You don't fight the wave, you ride it. My advice to publishers is to become filters so that people who want to find great books can pay a small amount to be pointed in the right direction. It is then imperative that the majority of that payment be sent to the author -- and it should not be the paltry 10% or 8% that they currently allow. At the moment the creators seem to be the least valued part of the chain. That must change.
As far as I can see, the only thing that can save the book publishing industry is ebooks, but they have been a commercial failure all around the world because publishers are so scared of new technology that they encumber it with all manner of locks. I have bought several electronic books, and after a number of close calls where I almost got locked out of the books I'd bought and paid for, I have become quite wary of them and extremely reluctant to buy them.
The problem is greed and it shows up in two ways. First publishers don't want anybody to share electronic books with anybody else so they put complex locks on the books. Secondly they vastly overcharge for ebooks (I guess they think we're idiots and won't notice).
So now, given that electronic books have not taken off in the way they expected, publishers think the audience isn't there. Admittedly things will start to pick up more when we have cheap handheld machines on which to read the books, but it is a bit of a chicken-egg problem. If the machines are expensive the market for ebooks will remain small and while the market is small nobody is going to make cheap ebook readers. And while this whole attitude persists of considering the audience as the problem instead of the solution it will take longer than it needs to.
The worst part of the problem is that publishers feel compelled to encrypt and lock ebooks so that people don't share them. They never seem to realise that sharing is how most of us find out about books. How many times have you read a book because a friend has put their copy in your hands and said "You must read this!" or because you've stumbled across something in a library, or in a secondhand bookshop? (Yes, you pay for a book in a secondhand bookshop, but the publisher doesn't get a cent of it.) How many books would you have read if they were chained to your friends' bookshelves or if libraries and secondhand bookshops didn't exist? Sharing is not a bad thing it is good. It is the most powerful advertising medium that books have.
Lastly, there is another change that is coming up and I think publishers don't even want to look at it because they feel it threatens everything they stand for. This is a peculiar time. There are more artists, writiers and musicians than ever before. Many excellent creators simply place their work online for free. How can a publisher hope to compete with this flood of often high quality work? My own feeling is that it is impossible to compete with it. The only way to survive is to facilitate it. You don't fight the wave, you ride it. My advice to publishers is to become filters so that people who want to find great books can pay a small amount to be pointed in the right direction. It is then imperative that the majority of that payment be sent to the author -- and it should not be the paltry 10% or 8% that they currently allow. At the moment the creators seem to be the least valued part of the chain. That must change.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 01:05 am (UTC)I can't imagine I'm alone in that, cheap reader or not.
Am I so alone?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 03:31 am (UTC)Confusing the symbol with the meaning, or the messenger with the message, is a common problem with us humans. The paper is not the book; it is just the substrate upon which the book is writ.
Having read ebooks on my little Palm computer for about 5 years now I now vastly prefer reading on that than on paper. Apart from the convenience of carrying literally thousands of books in my pocket, there is the ability to easily search backwards for the previous occurrence of a name when I wonder who they are or what did they did. On paper I have to painstakingly leaf through page after page with no guarantee of finding it. In an ebook I don't even have to break the train of thought. When I read on my Palm in high winds I don't have to battle to keep the pages flat. At night I used to read in bed without disturbing my partner because I didn't need to switch the light on. (I still read in bed, but haven't a partner to disturb anymore.)
When I first started using my Palm for reading ebooks I found it a little uncomfortable, but I put that down to the way we humans resist change. Now I find the reverse -- it is uncomfortable to read paper.
I have a couple of thousand paper books. I would love to replace them all with ebooks.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 03:36 am (UTC)Actually, that would be handy.
I'm not overly attached to the feel and smell of paper, mind. I just feel a book is a book and that's how I like to read.
Plus, I suppose, I stare at a computer screen for a lot of the day, and I get danged tired of it.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 10:32 am (UTC)I hope things are better in Canada. That's where I'm trying to get a book published now; gave up on the Australian industry!
Ratfan
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 09:50 pm (UTC)My favorite place to read my Palm is sitting in bed.
I don't know what is happening in Canadia, but logically speaking this has to happen worldwide. The limits on paper and fuel are global. My feeling is that paper books will always exist, but the market will dwindle till they are expensive specialty items.
Relief may come from an unexpected direction. Worldwide, newspapers are experiencing a crisis. Readership is plummeting as people no longer trust them or want to hear about only the bad news. I don't really expect them to change. There is plenty of evidence to show that they will simply fight more furiously for their remaining, shrinking market. Loss of audience may cause some newspapers to collapse, freeing up cheap paper for books for a time. The big drawback is that it is very cheap paper and falls apart in just a few years.
The future is ebooks. Unfortunately I think the human resistance to change probably means that we won't move to something better until it becomes intolerably painful to keep our old ways. In the case of books I think it might mean we have to have major crises in publishing and ecology, and many great authors lost before we collectively come to our senses.
Good luck with your book Sue. I honestly hope it gets published. I wouldn't advise anybody to pin too many hopes on the ebook market yet while the publishers are strangling it and the audience largely overlooking it.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 02:25 pm (UTC)I have only one ebook that I paid for. And like you, I was nearly locked out of it and that ticked me off. I'm also not sure I know how to transfer that ebook off my pda if/when I need to get a new pda. That bothers me, because I bought it five years ago (the book) and there's no way I can trace down the passkey or whatever I used to unlock the book in the first place. So if/when I do get locked out of my ebook, that'll be the final nail in the coffin for me ever paying for another one.
I thought I read somewhere that there's an ebook "library" service. Personalized. Maybe it's part of amazon.com. But the idea was you bought the ebook and downloaded it, but the place you bought it from kept a copy so you could re-download it again if necessary.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-24 10:35 pm (UTC)I will never buy locked ebooks for my Palm ever again.
On the extremely rare occasions I buy ebooks now I only get them for my desktop, decrypt them, and then move them to my Palm. I never want the panic and anger of being locked out of an ebook I've bought ever again.
I get lots of free ebooks. Project Gutenberg is probably the best, but there are also a lot of websites that have ebooks available as html pages. An example is a site I was told about by a friend the other day where the famous, Nobel prize winning, Swedish (lesbian) writer Selma Lagerlöf's book "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" is online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/lagerlof/nils/nils.html
Wikipedia has a related project called Wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/ which makes lots of books (mostly reference works) available to people free. (For languages other than English just omit the 'en.' at the beginning of the address.)
Baen Books http://www.baen.com is a paper book publisher who has seen the light and also publishes both free and priced ebooks which are not locked.
Big time author Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com publishes all his books online for free in many different unlocked ebook formats.
Artemis Press specialises in lesbian and feminist ebooks http://www.artemispress.com and publish their books in a an odd form that is not locked but is pseudo-encrypted. This is a very odd thing to do as it doesn't really accomplish anything except make the book more unwieldy. I have bought a number of books from them (most of their current catalog) and when I want to read one I decrypt it first so that it is easier to use. I worry that sooner or later someone is going to point out how easy it is to decrypt their html versions and they'll only publish in locked formats. When they do that I shall cease buying from them.
I also download ebooks from peer-to-peer networks and from some newsgroups. Mostly those are scanned copies of paper books that are still in copyright, which is against what is, in my opinion, a stupid law. My intention is to eventually replace all my paper books and be able to discard them. When I moved to Queensland most of the large truck was occupied by books. It was exhausting, time-consuming, and expensive to move all those books, and I'm fighting a losing battle against fungus, rodents, silverfish, and simple deterioration in storing all those books.
If they were in electronic format I could hold them all in one hand and they could be kept safe for as long as I wanted.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-25 01:02 am (UTC)I know very little about ebooks, but am fascinated by the concept. I Love to read, it is my chief form of entertainment, as well as one of the largest source of information. I love having my bookcase full of books that I can return to and share out and curl up with when I have no access to electricity.
However I would be very supportive of being able to access books on line, I plan to travel extensively and the ability to carry, as you say, numerous books around (not to mention the search options) is very tempting.
You say you have read them on your Palm. That is what I want a electronic book reader I can take to bed :) The laptop is good but I still have to sit relatively upright. I'll have to check it all out.