Libraries are sort of the Netflix of the book world, making it possible for people to read a book without buying it. eBooks makes doing so easier, potentially reducing sales. With movie companies pulling back from Netflix, etc (Starz not renewing their contract, DVDs being held back for 30 days before Netflix has them, etc) to try to get more people to buy rather than rent, it makes sense that book companies might do the same, despite the inevitability of the change. Record companies still haven’t really accepted the changes digital has caused them. Now time for book publishers.
The number of ebooks available for libraries to loan has just shrunk as Penguin Group USA has decided, for now, to no longer make digital editions of new titles available for library lending. Erica Glass, the media relations manager for Penguin Group (USA) sent LJ the following statement today:
Penguin has been a long-time supporter of libraries with both physical and digital editions of our books. We have always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers. However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.
Makes sense from a business perspective. Unfortunately, dishonest people always dampen technology’s full potential.
Then everyone argues over how much it matters if a “few” people steal.
Full disclosure:
I am a pirate. Probably a third of my ebooks are from torrent sites. The rest I buy. Why do I steal them? Because I travel a lot and am based in Thailand. Copyright restrictions, they claim, do not permit them to sell to me here! So, when I want to read the latest Lee Child, I have to “borrow” it from a pirate site.
Second thing: My sister wanted a new book so I went to Amazon and it was $14.99 for the hardback. She, too, prefers ebooks so I bought her the Kindle version. $13.99! So, no overhead, no paper, no shipping, no stock only knocks a buck off the price?
It’s a new era in printing. These idiots need to revise their business model or start their own version of the RIAA…
How can you steal information that should be public. Public Knowledge = Intelligent Society. Forcing people to pay for access to information allows ignorance to propogate and those with the means to further distance themselves intelligently from those without the means. It’s too bad we are a society where business guides how things are done as opposed to doing what is best for those who make up society. History has proven over and over that informing society is in our best interest no matter what.
I don’t argue that authors need to survive, but this old business way of thinking is out dated at best. Our society needs to learn how to adapt or we will continue to be our own demise.
Take a look at Baen books website and read their ebook manifesto. Here is a group of Science Fiction and fantasy authors who understand the nature of literature in the modern world (go figure). They keep a sizable free library so folks can get acquainted with the various authors and then they sell you reasonably priced ebooks from those authors as you want them. The whole printing/distribution overhead thing just smokes my brain. You pay more for streaming movies than you do for purchase or rental. It’s dimwitted thinking on the part of the movie industry and it contributes to CREATING piracy. Greed has no common sense or morality.
In Terms of DVD Movies, my landlord has 8 video stores. The movie companies just started NOT sending rental stores DVDs for thirty days, similar to Netflix and Redbox (Remember how the movie companies were saying the thirty days were to help out video stores? Liars). So now he has to drive around for three to four hours and buy them from other stores so he can rent them out and stay in business. Unbelievable
It takes a long time to write a book. Writing is not like a normal job. You can spend months or years writing a book and you probably only end up with a $4000 advance and hopefully some more royalties down the road.
Pay the authors for their books. You can cruise through Amazon and get a lot of cheaper e-books.
You complaint about e-book pricing seems sound. The solution is to wait until the publishing industry implodes and then make your deals directly with the authors. An author can make a lot more on a $5.99 e-book they sell themselves than a 15.99 e-book sold by their publisher. Also Baen has reasonable deals on their books. You can’t get them in the Kindle store, but their website sells the books in both epub and kindle formats and they are DRM free as well. They price e-books at 5.99 or 6.99, even if the 26.99 hardcover just came out. However, many of their hardcovers have a CD with previous books in the series in the back.
As for libraries, the only way to read the library’s e-book was to break the DRM and run it through a conversion program so I could run the thing on the Kindle. That is kind of a ridiculous. If it worked on the Kindle, I wouldn’t have to break the DRM. The conversion process also makes it so it won’t expire. I would rather buy the book than go through the trouble of having to convert the book anyway. Epub only e-book libraries do not work.
And no, authors don’t need or want an RIAA for books. It would keep authors like Scott Sigler or Cory Doctorow from giving stuff away to generate sales.
I like hard science. These guys want to charge me 70 or even well over a hundred dollars for the right to read a book I will most likely read once.
I can’t afford that much for the right to read a book once or twice. I might rent if for a few bucks in eBook format but if these people think the average Joe can afford their prices they are nuts.
No I don’t use the torrents. I just read something else.
I love technology, I build my own computers, I worked with it as it was being developed in the 37 years I worked for NJ Bell/Verizon, but I have to say we are putting way too many people out of work because of it.
OK I may be off base on this. But it seems to me a lot of paper back books get resold or given away to another reader. If nothing else this helps promote reading. But I do not see that happening with eReaders at least in my limited observations. I would think publishers would be willing to offer a discount for renting a book rather then buying one. As we all know many books are simply read once or twice then put on a shelf or sold at a garage sale or given to Good Will. I have read results showing that reading in general has not improved that much with eBooks. You simply have traditionalists moving from paper to eBooks but no real significant additional readership. Maybe renting would help.
Donn O’Malley trots out the “Information Wants To Be Free” argument. Sure, the efforts of authors, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, etc. can result in a book (or e-book or website or series of magazine and/or newspaper articles or whatever) that can add to the sum of human knowledge.
On the other hand, all those people like to get paid for their time and effort. And by and large, competition in the industry does tend to keep the prices below the level of gouging. Except for textbooks for some reason.
Yeah, textbooks are a BIG part of higher education expense.
Textbooks should be unit priced, based on the number of real knowledge pages (ie. exclude appendixes that are often material in the public domain and just add to the book’s gross weight).
Paying $100 for a freshman-level college course is shameful.
I wholly agree that writers and even publishers should get paid for their work. As long as there have been books in our so called civilized society there have been libraries and used book sellers. Authors and publishers never made a dime off these. The business model hasn’t changed just because there are ebooks… except the publishers could now be cut out of the loop. I’ll jump at the opportunity to buy copyright material direct from the author. Same goes for music. I can feel like I’m actually supporting individuals that way. The reality is that if a serious reader finds an author they really like they won’t choke on buying one of their books so long as it’s reasonably priced. Offering a limited selection of dated material to free libraries is good advertising. Works for Baen from what I can tell. I read the ones I liked and bought more and everybody is happy. Those in the publishing business should start focusing on being advertising and distributors for authors if the need for paper ever really evaporates. There would still be a niche for that kind of thing. In the mean time the entire media industry needs to realize that the world is changing and they can change with it or join the dinosaurs.
Not publishing ebooks promptly also discriminates against people who benefit from etext, because they have disabilities, blindness is only one, that prevent them from using paper books effectively.
This is a particularly pressing issue with textbooks, where delays in the eformat impact the education of people with disabilities.
Uncle Patso said: “below the level of gouging. Except for textbooks for some reason.”
Textbooks are extremely difficult and expensive to produce and they need frequent edits and rewrites. And they have very limited distribution as not all schools use the same books. They are hardly ever written by a single author and editor but large teams. (I was responsible for a small section of a large textbook on physiology – IIRC there were about 80 authors of that textbook. My hourly wage for the work on that book was probably less than a quarter!)
When I was in med school, we all bought the standard textbooks but there was a copy shop just off campus that made a tidy profit selling copies of auxiliary texts and manuals at about a third the price of the real thing!
Animby said, “Textbooks are extremely difficult and expensive to produce and they need frequent edits and rewrites.”
That is not true. The edits and rewrites you are referring to just reorder some pages so students have to buy a brand new book instead of buying a previous semester’s used book.
One egregious case was a literature book that just reordered the short stories so that the table of contents looked different. If you bought the wrong book the instructor would say to read 290-314 and you end up reading the wrong story. The difference in pricing was 53 dollars for a new book and 29 for the previous edition. It’s a literature book. It is not like a story by Hemingway is going to change that much.
Even science doesn’t change that much at the undergraduate level that it requires a text book change every other semester. I know science is constantly changing, but we still teach Newtonian physics even though Einstein superseded him.
Benjamin, you beat me over the head with my words but, I maintain, textbooks (and I will add, ESPECIALLY in the sciences) are very difficult to keep up to date and more expensive to produce than your basic novel. They are generally the collaborative work of many authors and editors, they are printed on high quality, coated papers and have sewn bindings – not glued, to name a few differences. Science texts are usually reprinted on about a five year revision schedule and that’s not just reordering pages. Just the editing is a mammoth job. Imagine trying to make sure all your experts are exactly up to date with each other. You have to make sure everything author A says is current and agrees with what author B says and that both of them are “state of the art.” Admittedly, if your textbook is the collected works of Milton, you won’t be finding a lot of new and original research. You still want high quality paper and bindings. Who cares if that James Patterson novel fades, yellows and falls apart after a year or two. Your Milton will be on the shelf for decades!
It seems that a large part of the issue with eBooks for libraries would be solved by improving security of distribution, perhaps requiring that libraries only allow one viewer to see the book at a time. While some will argue that such a policy is wasteful, it will help eBooks remain a feasible option for publishers.
Zylun, it doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem. I’ve never borrowed an ebook from a library so I’m not sure of the methodology but the library could simply buy readers that require special equip to load and off-load ebooks. Or maybe a read-only SD card that could be used in an individual’s reader. Sure, someone would figure out a way to pirate but this would keep the majority of borrowers honest.
At the end of the day all this is just the oil lamp makers trying to sue their way into revenue in the era of the light bulb. Good luck to em’.