This post has been a long time coming. If you know me, you’ve probably already heard a number of the points I’m going to make. It’s because ebooks are important to me, publishers piss me off and ebook piracy is a load of horse-shit.
So… read on, after the jump.
This might be a long post. Mainly because I’ve got a fair number of opinions on the topic. Which is why it took so long to write it, ’cause all those thoughts needed organizing. They’ve been on the back burner since almost immediately after I got my Sony Reader, some 3 or 4 years ago.
First off, I love ebooks. I love my Reader. I take it everywhere. It’s easy to use, allows me to read virtually anywhere without carrying around a bulky book (REAMDE is 3lb) and doesn’t strain the eyes. That last one is particularly important and an argument I present to anyone who tells me to get a tablet (iPad, of course) and read on that. The reason I use an ebook reader is so I don’t have to constantly STARE AT A LIGHTBULB. Didn’t think that needed to be said, but… I already look at a computer monitor most of the day, don’t need to do it while enjoying some good sci-fi.
Second, I hate ebook publishers. Yeah, actually hate them. And why? Well, there are a number of reasons for that:
Low-quality product
A fair number of ebooks that I’ve read are of inferior quality. Sometimes there are text alignment issues. Once in a while, some paragraphs are (for instance) center-aligned, while the rest is not. Sometimes, the text crawls off the screen and isn’t visible, no matter what font size or screen orientation I use.
But most of the time, what really gets to me is OCR. Yes, Optical Character Recognition. Why do I bring it up? Because apparently, that’s the way publishers are creating a fair number of ebooks. They take an existing dead-tree copy of the book in question, run it through a scanner, run the images through an OCR application and ship the result as-is.
I’d just finished “Startide Rising” and was appalled not at all surprised by constant OCR errors. Out-of-context appearances of words is a common give-away: “tune” instead of “time”. (Squint a bit and you’ll see how those two can be confused.) Dropped periods. Characters meshed together. And this is incredibly common. Classics like “1984″ and “Flatland” are formatted similarly. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every 2nd or 3rd book I read has blatant OCR errors. OCR errors that could have been caught by running the book through MS Word.
I ranted about this nonsense in 2007 on MobileRead forums. And was horrified by what I found out:
The big publishing firms are so wedded to their ‘traditional’ methods that many of them still have word-processors who’s whole job is to convert the submitted (*IF* they bother to accept electronic submissions) electronic manuscripts into paper and thence typed back into Quark. And does everyone understand that once the MMPB, TPB or HC layout has been finalized, the galleys have been approved by the author and the print runs set up, those Quark files are trashed!?! Yep. That’s right. That means many a popular HC title must be *RE*-entered into Quark to be reformatted to MMPB or TPB format for the *next* release!
Publishers DON’T KEEP DIGITAL COPIES OF THEIR BOOKS, and instead enter them manually for every release. It’s not surprising that scanning old editions to create ebooks is actually a faster approach. Actually, the surprising thing is that they’re even that high-tech. But, then again, maybe they see the OCR as the low-budget approach that is, reserved for the “untested” territory of digital publishing. Maybe they reserve the Good Stuff™ – where said Good Stuff™ entails manual re-re-re-entry of a manuscript – for the “Real” publishing.
Ridiculously expensive product
Publishers must be taking their cues from the video-game-store industry: sit on your hands and make money at the same time. Gamestop does it wonderfully: they sell a brand-new game for 60$, buy it back two weeks later for a fraction of the cost (or slightly more if you’re accepting store credit instead of cash), sell it again for 50$, buy it back two weeks later for even less than the first time, again sell it for 50$. Repeat ad nauseam. The perfect business! Resell your inventory time and time again! (God, I hope the restaurant business doesn’t get into this any time soon…)
Uhh, back to ebooks? Right, right.
Ebook publishers commonly charge the price of a physical book, minus about 10%. Sometimes, the ebook version actually costs the same as the physical book: Nicholas Sparks’ “The Best of Me” is 12.99$, for the hard-cover, Kindle and Sony versions. But the ebook costs nothing to print, distribute, store, redistribute, etc. After the ebook is created – which is one-time cost, and it’s probably fairly cheap; I mean, how much are they paying that intern to scan a book? – the cost of selling ten digital copies is the same as selling one hundred thousand.
And this situation hasn’t changed. Ebooks have been around for a while. The New York Times Best Seller list includes ebooks in their counts. And still nothing. We’re still being gouged for virtual books, books that we can’t lend friends (Amazon supports lending of books, but the limit is 14 days and the publisher decides if a book is “lendable”), books that we can’t photocopy, crappy books that we can’t use as door stops, books that we can’t resell.
How does this make sense?! Why the hell are we paying (almost) the same price for an inferior product that doesn’t cost the publishers anything?!
As I said, ebooks have been around for a while. Why aren’t there more “features” to them. As mentioned, some books can be lended, but that’s still only supported by few sellers and the publisher has the final say on whether or not a book can be lended at all. A serious discount on ebooks, of say 50%, is not unreasonable, considering the limitations. Or how about following the movie industry and allowing me to download an ebook with the purchase of a physical book? (Nevermind the fact that those Digital Copy movie versions are more expensive as a result and the codes to get the digital version of the film expire fairly soon after the release.) The last point is kind of important. In the words of a coworker: “I’m not paying twice for the same content.”
Why?
Why are ebooks and the consumers treated like second-class citizens? I haven’t read an official explanation, so this is conjecture, but it does remind me of the widespread use of mp3 encoding in the late 1990′s to share music. At first, the technology (the encoding algorithms, portable mp3 players and later file-sharing applications like Napster) was hailed as a danger to the music industry. Words like “piracy” and “royalties” were thrown around, without people actually realizing what they meant. Then followed slow acceptance, which grew over the years, albeit with heavy DRM policies, until now, where most of the legally available online music is sold in the un-protected MP3 format. On some levels, it looks like ebooks are in for the same battle.
But, once again, why?
With music, the “fear” was that digital music was too easy to pirate and would cause CD sales to plummet. Of course, that didn’t happen. People didn’t toss out their existing CD collections in favor of MP3′s. Piles of CD players didn’t dominate garbage dumps as everyone upgraded to MP3 players. There was a minimum entry-level to music piracy: a computer, an internet connection, some technical know-how. The “infrastructure” didn’t appear overnight.
And there was the moral aspect that prevented most people from doing something “illegal”.
But the music execs didn’t factor any of this in. They’d made stupid assumptions, filed idiotic lawsuits and stirred up a storm in a teacup. They didn’t understand that the barrier to pirating music was still relatively high. That those people who were going to steal music probably weren’t the people who were going to buy their CDs in the first place.
The same is happening, I think, with ebooks. The publishers are dinosaurs (see section about entering books in by hand), not wanting or unable to change. They’ve got the same fears of digital, DRM-free books being pirated by every human being (even the ones who don’t read!) and the sale of physical books will hit zero overnight.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. People love books. The smell, the feel of the pages, the nice stacks of the in their home libraries, the piles that dominate every open surface, etc. Ebooks won’t replace an entire culture of books. Maybe because not everyone wants an e-reader. Maybe because people want to read a dead-tree book and not worry (too much) about spilling water on it, dropping it in the tub, forgetting it on the plane or even tossing it aside without shattering the damn thing. Maybe because people want to actually own a physical book. (I’m not one of these.)
Sometimes a physical book is more useful than an ebook: in the case of a technical reference or a magazine, I’d prefer something “real”; in the case of an Ann Coulter book, a physical copy would burn a lot better; I gotta figure the hard-cover edition of “Cryptonomicon” would serve as a pretty good melee weapon during the Zombie Apocalypse. Physical books have this curious property that if you’re reading one book, there’s no reason why someone else in your household can’t read a different book that you own.
The Authors
This fear isn’t just localized to the publishers. Authors also fear the coming of the ebook age. (Not all, quite a large proportion actually embrace it, and those guy rock!) Some argue from the piracy point of view (“everyone is stealing my books!”), some claim that aspiring writers will not be able to make ends meet under the ebook model. There are even arguments that the ebook format will make it too easy for “just anyone” to publish a “book”, thus filling the market with fodder. (Of course, I happen to think the market is already full of crap, but that’s a different story.)
There are counter-arguments to each of those points, of course.
A friend re-tweeted a link to a blog post by an author bemoaning piracy. The post was an interesting read, but I think I was in the minority of the readers: most commented that they were sorry to hear about the author’s predicament, while I thought she was making a mistake. Here’s a quote from the post:
[My book is] going out of print in hardcover because demand for it has dwindled to 10 or so copies a month. This means I will never get a royalty check for this book. By all appearances, nobody wants it anymore.
But those appearances are deceiving. According to one download site’s stats, people are downloading SHADOWED SUMMER at a rate of 800 copies a week. When the book first came out, it topped out at 3000+ downloads a week.
If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list.
[I have no idea where she's getting the download statistics, but let's assume they're accurate for a second.] Is it just me, or is this author being blind? For every person who buys her book in a store, 80 people download a copy online. Do you need a business degree to see that there’s a market here that’s being ignored?!
Of course, people who were going to steal the book anyway are still going to steal it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a book that has an official digital version. If it’s popular enough, someone will digitize the damn thing. The problem is that by trying to fight the “pirates”, you’re putting off your actual target demographic. It’s the people who like your writing, want to follow your story, but want a choice in the format of their books. Or, like the post above mentioned, maybe they’re in a region where your book isn’t published. (The arguments against that horse-shit will be in a future blog post.)
OK, so that counters the “piracy” argument. Now to address the issue of lower royalties and lower-quality books.
A price-winning author claims that “e-books threaten livelihoods of aspiring writer”. To quote his main argument:
“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can’t make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”
Which, of course, is shit. Your argument can’t be that an author who gives up will “leave potentially great stories unwritten”. There are countless great stories to be told. Walk up to a homeless man on the street and he’ll tell you a fascinating story. Seriously. Everyone has a story to be told, and they’re all interesting and human and important. That doesn’t mean we have to cherish each and every one of them. But, that’s just me arguing with how the prize-winning author presented his point. Let’s get back on track.
If the author is good, their work will be highly rated and will become popular. Success, respect and a reputation will follow. As the article goes on to mention, authors of ebooks can successfully compete with paperback authors by skipping the middle-men (publishers and agents) and asking for only a fraction of the price of the competition. Already this is proving a successful tactic as ebooks overtook the “printed” printed word on Amazon.com.
Of course, another problem is that with such a lowered entry bar for publishing a book, there is going to be a lot of crap out there. Who will “separate the wheat from the chaff”? Why, the market, of course. While you might agonize less about spending 2$ vs 10$ on a book, you’re not just thinking about money. You have to consider the time spent on this book and not on a different book. The money is different, but the time is the same. In this sense, a Neal Stephenson Michael Crichton book is the same as a book by a first-timer. We’ll simply use different criteria for choosing the next novel to read. Instead of picking from the New York Best Seller list, we’ll be picking from the “highest rated ebook on Amazon” list. Similar concept. We’re already accustomed to seeing star ratings next to items online, so this’ll be very easy.
What now?
Actually, this is me wondering how to wrap up this too-long post. Maybe some comment on how ebook progress should hurry up and move through its inevitable stages. Perhaps a comparison to rock and its tumultuous history, ranging from its counter-culture prominence to wide-spread popularity and current god-like status. (Or maybe that’s just me.)
Or perhaps I will just do what I usually do: link a Pink Floyd YouTube video and call it a day night.