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.
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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.