Posts Tagged E-books

While I’ve written about why, at least for me, e-books will never replace real books, I am finding the  attitude of some publishers toward the format to be rather like hoping the problem will just go away if you ignore it or bluster at it enough.

Publishers should take a lesson from the mistakes of the music industry, and look at e-books not as an attack on the publishing industry, but as an evolution of it.  Instead of fighting the change, we should be looking at ways to embrace this new technology.

For the companies completely denying the e-book consumer by refusing to provide e-book versions, a significant portion of the market will be entirely lost, because there will be people who will simply not buy the book at all, unless they can get it electronically.  This would be the worst example of hiding in the sand, because it would mean those books that aren’t available as e-books would lose the potential sales that they would otherwise have had.

Several large publishing companies, such as Simon & Schuster and Random House, are setting delays between the release of hardcopy editions of books and the e-book versions, which could be a valid compromise, encouraging those who are truly excited to get the book to go out and buy it at their bookstore.  It would set up a delay rather similar to the delay between a theatrical release of a movie and the DVD release.

But here’s the thing: There will always be a group of sincere and devoted bibliophiles, like myself, willing to pay more for a beautifully crafted hardcover edition of their favorite books, but these will never be the “average reader.”

For the average reader, the ones already willing to wait for the cheaper paperback versions of books, waiting a few more months for the similarly cheaper and more convenient to purchase e-book won’t bother them one bit.  If a book they want is not yet available, well, they’re just more likely to go back and buy something else that is available instead.

It’s a difficult situation, and compromises will have to be made to make this new market work like it should, but the response to this new technology should not be one of fear or antagonism.  E-books are inevitable. They’re already here.  Publishers are going to have to learn ways to profit from them, or they’re going to be left in the dust.

Jenny: Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?
Giles: The smell.
Jenny: Computers don’t smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a – it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.

–Giles and Jenny discuss computers and books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I Robot, You Jane”

I have to admit that the growing market for e-books and e-book readers has me feeling a bit split.  Like Jenny Calendar, I am a dedicated technopagan and geek, and I love new gadgets and embrace technology and innovation with no small amount of excitement.  However, I was a book lover long before I became a citizen of cyberspace, and like Giles, it’s not just the words, but the tangible pleasure of holding a book in my hands that gives me satisfaction in my reading experience.

Like a good gadget junkie, I’ve read up and researched the various e-book reading devices on the market today.  I dismissed the Kindle due to the fact that the only materials readable on it are those purchased through Amazon, a limiting factor I didn’t like much, since my local library offers e-book lending, and there are e-books available in so many other formats.  The fact that Amazon has already shown itself willing to reach out and take materials already purchased from the consumer also left more than a slight bitter taste in my mouth.

Of the two newer readers, the Sony Reader and Barnes and Noble’s nook, the nook seems the better option (though the quirky capitalization has my inner grammar-geek shuddering).  The nook allows media to be loaded on it in a variety of formats, including the most common e-book format: epub documents.  You can get e-books from a variety of sources with the nook, and aren’t just limited to Barnes & Noble for your purchases, and you can lend books to other folks with nooks too, though only those materials purchased from B&N will be saved to your B&N account for re-download should they be lost.

I read on the computer just as much as I read physical media. I make my way through somewhere around a novella’s length of blogs on my RSS reader each day, I download e-books to read on both my BlackBerry and my computer, and the majority of “magazines” I read these days are in electronic format.  An e-book reader for me would certainly not go unused.

There’s also the fact that e-books provide a low-cost means for me, as a writer, to gain exposure and readership. I’ve come to refer to this as the “Cory Doctorow” method of publishing, as he is one of the best writers to come out of beginnings in digital media and one of the biggest success stories.  I’m already beginning to release some of my own work as digital media, as I get it formatted and edited.  What better way to convince an agent or publisher that they might want to take you on than to point to a website full of examples of your writing?  The coming of the e-book revolution hasn’t filled me with the same horror as it has other writers and publishers, because I decided early on that something of that sort was inevitable, and it would be better to embrace the format than to fight it.

But, the Bibliophile in me can’t help but speak up.  To even contemplate the purchase of one of these e-book readers seems a betrayal to the shelves upon shelves (and boxes upon boxes) of books scattered about my home, and car, and office, and pretty much anywhere else I spend any significant amount of time.  Nor do I think that an e-book reader will ever be a replacement for those books.  Never will I stop reading or buying traditional books just because it’s more convenient to download them immediately over the ether. An e-book reader wouldn’t go unused by me, not by a long shot, but it will be more of a supplement to my regular book buying practices rather than a replacement.

Because try as they might, innovate all they want, they’ll never be able to make the experiences the same, even if they added some sort of smell-o-vision to make the e-book readers give off a musty-old-paper smell.  There’s nothing out there like the pleasure of holding a well-crafted book in your hand and flipping the pages and, yes, smelling that smell.

Data devices give you data, and that’s all it is, floating out in the ether, moving in bytes over the airwaves or through the landlines, and it can easily be lost or changed or even taken from you like a physical book cannot.  Like China blocking any negative references of Tiananmen from the internet there, data is easy to control and block, but no matter how many books are burned, there’s likely to be another copy of it floating around out there somewhere.

There seems to be a good many self-publishing services cropping up over the web, but I have to take them with a grain of salt. Regardless of how you do it, self-publishing is rarely a good way to get your book seen if you want it to hit mainstream audiences.

There are, however, a few good things that you can do with self-publishing.  My grandfather has a book that he treasures which lists our family genealogy back 500 years, with a history of the family researched and written up by a cousin who is a genealogy hobbyist. He’s also the one who went to the trouble of having hardcover editions of this book printed.  The book can mean little to nothing to anyone outside our family, will never be sold at a bookstore, and will never have much more than a few dozen issues printed.

That is one of the areas where self-publishing is useful and works well.   In these days of the E-Book, it is entirely possible for an author to self-publish without much cost whatsoever (as I plan to do, publishing my first novel as an e-book under creative commons).  However, this is more of a good way to get exposure in the publishing community than to actually…make a living off of your writing.

Unfortunately, to do that, you’ve still got to do it the hard way.  There may be a lucky few who self-publish and make it to the big leagues . . . but they are just that, lucky.  Especially without the assistance of a professional, experienced editor,even if you self-publish through a service that places your book at Amazon, it is unlikely that it will sell more than a few copies, much less gain the notice of critics.

I tend to take the same tack as Stephen King when it comes to editing: “To write is human, to edit is divine.”  Many times, it is the editor who can take what might be a mediocre, or just moderately good, piece of work and turn it into a great piece of writing.  Authors, myself included, have a tendency to treat our work as a sacred child, and sometimes it is necessary to cut out even your best loved passages to make a story work.

For what they provide, these self-publishing services do what they do well and offer a convenience that was hard to come by before, however a writer should not go to them expecting to be the next New York Times bestseller or to make a million dollars off of it.

After all, if you’ve come to writing in the first place expecting to be a millionaire….you’re probably writing for the wrong reasons anyway.

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Here are some articles for your reading pleasure:

• E-Book Provider goes out of Business, Book Owners can’t access Books
• Amazon deletes books already purchased on Kindle

There are plenty of others.  But you’ll realize that, in those articles, the people who were losing their digital property were people who had actually done the right thing and purchased the items, spent the money to pay for the rights to read and own those books.  These were not pirates that were getting punished by DRM, but the people who had bought these things legally.

The primary purpose of DRM is to prevent piracy and protect digital property from theft.  To do this, publishers of digital content place DRM on the things that people buy from them.

However, pirated music/books/films/games/etc. are easily attainable for the people who pirate them without any DRM restrictions on them whatsoever.  A prime example of this is the Will Wright game, Spore, which shipped with some of the most restrictive and invasive DRM available, SecuROM.  Spore was already available before the official release in a DRM free version on torrent servers, free to pirates.  It was the people who bought the game who got the DRM.

And this is why DRM does not work.  It does nothing to stop piracy and does a lot to infringe upon what most consumers expect to be purchasing when they buy something.  What happens if you buy a game or an MP3 of some music with limited installs – and the computer that you have it installed on breaks down or gets replaced in some way? Well, if it happens relatively soon, you can call the company and get those installs reset.  What about years down the road, though, or what if the company that made it goes bankrupt? Will that number still work?

I am very anti-piracy and anti-theft.  A writer myself, I believe that everyone should be compensated for their work just as I expect to be.  However, I do not believe that punishing the consumer who actually sets out to do the right thing and buy an item from you is the way to go about stopping piracy. I know that when I learn that something has DRM on it, I generally choose not to purchase it.  If a legal DRM free alternative is available, I’ll happily buy that, but if not,  I don’t turn around and download a pirated version . . . I simply make the decision that I can do without it.  I don’t want to spend my money on something only to have it snatched from my hands later.  I’d rather not risk that.

There are alternatives to DRM that do work, without punishing the consumer.  Music and print publishing companies should take a look at Corey Doctorow and Jonathan Coulton, who publish their work DRM free (and often completely freely available) with Creative Commons licensing.  Valve, with Steam, has the right idea.  Steam doesn’t just protect the publisher by helping to discourage piracy – it provides a service to the consumer as well, making it simple and easy to download games with the assurance that they won’t just disappear.

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