January 31st, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Some True Words About E-Books
I’ve been reading a lot of e-books these days, and I’d buy more than I currently do if the publishers weren’t so pants-on-head retarded in their pricing, policies, (and especially) DRM practices. The truth is very simple, and the current giants of commercial publishing will just flat DIE if they don’t comprehend this very soon:
No one ever woke up and said, “Gosh, I wish there was a way I could get an e-book that does less than the books I’m accustomed to.”
No one ever will.
From Digital Lysenkoism: DRM, “Social DRM,” and The Madness of Publishers.
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I am so in agreement with this. I was just on Amazon the other day looking at books for my daughter to read on her kindle that someone bought her for Christmas. I was stunned to find that nearly all the books from recently published authors were virtually the same price as buying the actual book in the store. In some cases they were even more expensive as many of the books I saw I can buy in my local supermarket, where they are on sale for buy one get one half price. Why on earth would I spend that money on something that I can get for the same or possibly cheaper and actually own a physical copy that can be shared with other readers.
This is a total ripe off, the e-book costs them virtually nothing to publish. There are no distribution or delivery costs, no printing, no paper, no ink etc etc. If e-books are going to be a long term success then this completely ripe of pricing will have to change.
Mollyxxx
Molly, I very much agree that it makes no sense to price an e-book the same as a physical book, but for me it’s a matter of utility. As you point out a physical book can be shared … or used to swat a wasp. There’s also a collector value and some physical beauty to the objects that seems mostly lacking in the electronic version. So, the way I see it, they should always cost less, because you get less when you buy one.
In regards to the publisher’s cost, I also tend to agree with you; I wouldn’t say publishing an e-book costs “virtually nothing” but it surely must cost something less if you leave out all the dead tree pulp and the petroleum you’d use to ship it around the planet. However, author Charlie Stross has been known to argue (though I can’t find the specific link just now) that the work that goes into a book on the publishing side constitutes a much larger fraction of its total cost than most people think, greatly lessening the amount by which (most of us imagine) ebooks “should” cost less than paper ones. I don’t know if he’s right about those ratios, but I think he’s pretty persuasive in arguing that even an e-book probably costs more than “virtually nothing” to produce and distribute.
DRM is toxic. I was going to write more about it, but everything just kept turning into a poorly remembered paraphrasing of something Cory Doctorow said about it. So I’ll just recommend checking out his works instead.
But basically the entire ebook market is currently broken, and I can’t purchase anything from them since I refuse to purchase anything that contains DRM. I won’t even buy DVDs because they contain DRM (even though it’s old and easily broken).
Other than DRM (which a few minutes on the web can show you how to break),
I find e-books to have higher utility for me than physical books, and as such I am
actually willing to pay more for them than I would for a paperback. It’s more
than worth an extra buck or two to have something that won’t end up taking space
in my house for years, that I can carry around by the dozens without wrenching
my back, and that has adjustable fonts for late nights and early mornings when
my eyes are tired.
(Bad formatting because your comment box is broken in Chrome.)
The DRM issue aside, what is even more unsettling is the fact that some publishers are saying ebooks constitute a “license” and that you really don’t “own” them. (Referencing back to when amazon deleted people’s bought copies of ebooks from their kindle)
Lots of eBooks have no DRM, everything on Smashwords, for example. You can get those from Amazon and other places, so that means plenty of books on Amazon are also DRM-free.
Prices: well some are unrealistic. You can get away with high prices if you have a seriously famous author, probably, But of course people feel ripped off. Again, there are lots of free eBooks (including on Amazon) and there are plenty of sensibly priced ones (less than $5). Keep looking.
As for the argument that publishers’ costs are higher than you think, that is just a hang over from the incredibly inefficient processes they have, which they have been able to get away with because it really does cost a lot so much to print and distribute paper books. I can point to lots of indie authors who are doing very well without any of those costs. Sure, lots of indie authors don’t do well, but lots of print authors don’t either.
So just don’t support publishers who add DRM and silly prices. They will get the message eventually.
Also, while paper books are fine things when at their best, cheap paperbacks which is what people buy most of, are not things of great beauty and best replaced with eBooks before we kill all the trees.
Anyone looking for free books for Kindle should check out http://fkbt.wor...s.com; I’ve gotten so many books through there at zero cost, it makes the DRM nonsense tolerable.
One legitimate use I personally have for ebooks, though, is anything of a technical nature (and being a computer tech, that’s a big deal for me).
Tech ebooks are typically drastically cheaper, and (of course) take up no shelf space, which is really valuable considering how big most of them are.
Flipping through a physical book is still faster and in many ways easier to use, but I feel that the shelf-space issue is a big enough one to make this a tolerable tradeoff.
As for lending a book to another person? Check out Lendle (http://lendle.me). Granted, it’s stuck with the limitations Amazon imposes, but it’s a start, at least.
Honestly, I don’t have a problem with the *principle* of DRM; I do have a huge problem with the draconian restrictions that are currently common.
Barring being able to eliminate it totally (which I’d like, but I’m not sure it’s realistic; some nice experiments going on that may well prove me wrong, though :-) ): what DRM *should* do, as far as I’m concerned, is enable the same kinds of restrictions that are implicit in a physical book anyway (ie: only one copy can be shared around, etc). I’d even be happy to put up with a (very low) “rental” fee (eg: 10c) for the right to be able to share it as often as I wished, if that would get the industry to loosen up (would I prefer completely free? Sure. But I’m trying to be realistic).
There are some publishers that get that ebooks should be DRM free and less expensive than physical books. Baen (www.baen.com) is one.
They also have a large free library…
I publish an E-book on Amazon, and I agree, most e-books by established print authors are insanely pricey. Less established authors (like me!) sell for a lot less. Walk on the wild side, binkie-winkies!