Why publishers should be wary of the digital book era
The digital era is finally arriving for books. I wonder if publishers, retailers, and device makers realise the Pandora’s box that they are opening.
Books are one of the last analogue media formats, and as such have proved largely resistant to piracy. Music went digital with the CD in the 1980s while TV and movies became digital with the DVD format a decade later. Both of these physical digital formats opened up those media types to piracy as anyone could create exact digital copies of the content and share them online. The CD and DVD did more than anything else to lead to the piracy explosion, more than the actions of the original Napster, or Pirate Bay, or Kazaa or any other online site.
By comparison, to pirate printed books consumers have to manually scan each page. Then an OCR process creates an approximate copy that needs extremely time consuming and tedious proofing to fix errors. Result – only the most popular titles get scanned and shared online.
eBooks change everything. They open up the book world to the threat of piracy. eBooks provide an already-proofed digital version. Content protection for eBooks using DRM systems is not the answer. The music industry is switching away from DRM for music sales because it doesn’t work and causes legitimate consumers pain. Just one person needs to break the DRM system and then share that knowledge online and then anyone can make copies. eBook companies are still persisting with DRM but I don’t see this lasting here any more than it has for music sales.
There’s a prisoner’s dilmma at work here: Individual publishing companies have the potential to steal competitive advantage if they move first and execute well with eBooks. But for the publishing world as a whole, such individual innovation will accelerate the arrival of the digital era and open up greater piracy.
This risk is not stopping eBook and eReader innovation. The digital era is arriving for books:
Retailers are proving the most innovative, perhaps: Amazon have built on their acquisition of Mobipocket with the launch of first the Kindle eBook reader gadget and then with the Kindle application for the iPhone. Barnes & Noble are moving with their purchase of Fictionwise (which incidentally has a store available inside the Stanza iPhone eBook reader app).
Publishers are innovating too. Penguin see their eBook sales as a key growth area. Harry Potter-publisher Bloomsbury just announced a link up with Exact Editions to offer digital titles to UK libraries (see this item on the Writers and Artists Yearbook blog). Tech publisher O-Reilly and other tech publishers are the most cutting edge non-fiction innovators with an extensive offering. Random House, Harlequin, Pan Macmillan offer a mix of samples and promotional titles on the Stanza app.
Publishing companies I’ve spoken with say digital is inevitable and I think they’re right. But I question if it makes any sense to speed the arrival of the digital book era. There’s one exception. Companies that make eBook reader devices will benefit in any event, whether consumers buy books, read free out of copyright books, or if consumers pirate books.
For everyone else, innovate, but be prepared for the coming digital storm that will overturn existing business models and increase book piracy.
One problem that currently stands with ebooks is the pricing structure. When an ebook costs as much as a mass-market paperback, where is the incentive to invest in hardware? I have a Sony e-reader and adore it, and also read on my iPhone quite happily, but at seven quid a pop the ebook isn’t likely to shift so well.
Perspectives need to change for the uptake to accelerate, I think, and the main player who needs to do that is the publisher.
As an amusing aside, it would seem that my publisher is unable to send me a copy of a book I wrote. Is this a dumb side-effect of DRM?
Either way, with London Book Fair happening this week we might have the chance to see some kind of movement. I doubt it, though.
David Devereux
April 20, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I’m really surprised you don’t have copies of your own books! Would be simple if your publisher was Baen, of course.
Ian Fogg
April 20, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Physical books are easy, but I’ve asked for the digital and it never happens. When I sent an advance copy of the latest to somebody just after Christmas, it was esier to just complie the MS into an LRF file from here rather than trying to get an official copy.
David Devereux
April 21, 2009 at 7:11 am
To clarify this, I can get hardcopy books easily enough but the electronic version is on release and commercially available and, apparently, the system does not allow me to be supplied with a free author copy of the ebook.
David Devereux
April 24, 2009 at 2:12 pm
I’m eagerly awaiting an e-reader device I like. So far the only one I’ve seen is the Sony one, which is a bit complicated and slow at page transitions for my tastes.
The Cybook looks interesting, but I haven’t had a chance to see one in person yet.
As we’ve talked about before, Baen are pretty niche content wise, but they’re a publisher doing some very cool stuff in the ebook world.
Michael Stevens
April 20, 2009 at 6:12 pm
The slow page transitions annoy me enormously too. They make flicking through books quickly impossible.
I prefer a conventional LCD screen, like on an iPhone, over these “e-Ink” displays even given that are super low power. The black & white design and slow flicker on every page turn is too much of a trade-off for me.
I’m also a bit concerned over having yet another electronic device to carry around. I like the Kindle model as Kindle syncs reading position between the Kindle device (which I would leave at home) and the Kindle iPhone app (which I’d use on the move) automatically and in the background.
But as Kindle is US-only for now I can’t test this theory out.
Ian Fogg
April 20, 2009 at 9:40 pm
After a short stint working in it, I’ve always thought of the publishing industry as the unworldly trust-fun kid of the media world. But while I agree that the effects of digitization will be profound, the book industry already has differently priced formats (who’d have thought that hardbacks would survive), and a free legal model that has been around for decades (via libraries) without killing off the paid model. Maybe publishers are not so antiquated after all.
My take on e-book readers is that they will remain niche for some time, albeit a popular niche. Even then this market will only grow once the market consolidates and a triumphant format/device combination emerges. Of course that device could be the iPhone.
The other implication is how writers will respond to the creative potential offered by new formats. We’ve seen interesting experiments at the cutting edge, but I was struck by the choice of author to launch Kindle – Stephen King, one of the most widely-read authors in the world. Factor in what Paulo Coelho (the no 1 bestselling author globally) has been doing online and we can see how keen even mainstream authors are to explore the possibilities of new formats in new media.
Nick Thomas
April 21, 2009 at 1:19 pm