One day, all knowledge will be stored in living books which move around your house like enormous tortoises made of literature and science…
Myself included, actually. Hence, for the last little while, I’ve been guzzling eBook primers and eReader and Kindle reviews and discovering Stanza and the like. I’ll dump a lot of links at the bottom of this post for anyone who wants them, but before I offer you the opportunity to form your own ideas I want to pollute your brain with my own. So:
Are eBooks Real?
Yes. They don’t sell in huge quantity yet, but the technology is there and the products are getting better. I’m not a huge fan of Sony’s eReader – I think it’s physically uncomfortable to hold and the controls are awkward and slow, and the screen, though deliciously clear is a) boring and depressingly grey and b) irritating when you turn a page and it flickers like a lousy old B&W TV. Also, it looks like something you use for work. It needs to feel more book-y. The curious thing is that Sony, on some level or other, already know that – their info page shows a hand wandering along the shelves of a reassuring library of conventional books. Elsewhere, you’re given a tour by animated illustrations from Alice In Wonderland.
The Kindle from Amazon has a huge advantage over the eReader because it doesn’t need to be connected to a computer. You can download books directly to the handset. Sadly, the Kindle is also a staggeringly ugly object.
And then there’s Stanza, an eBook reading application for Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone is almost perfect for this purpose – it has a touchscreen which allows you to turn the page almost the way you do with a book, it’s sleek and you’re already carrying it because it’s a phone. If the screen was a little less glaring and a little larger…
And there are more on the way. The moment will come when eBook readers are convenient, easy, and everywhere. At that point, I’d say people will use them – even if they continue to buy paper books as well.
What about piracy?
Well, that depends partly on what you mean. If you’re talking about high-end, professional piracy, that’s probably going to happen if someone wants to do it – but then, it already happens with paper books. In fact, one reason why it’s impossible to stop is that a professional pirate can spend a day scanning the pages of a paper edition. Paper books have no copy protection, after all. They’ve never really needed it. And one thing you can guarantee – you don’t want the pirate(?) eBook to be available before the legitimate one.
What’s really bugging you, though, is file-sharing. You’re looking at the music industry and thinking: that could be us! Well, yes and no – that very much depends on how we handle the transition to whatever new ways of reading are lurking around the corner. But look: it’s not a disaster after all!
So the next thing you’re thinking is: there must be a way to protect our books! Isn’t there some way we can make them non-transferable? Turn them back into rivalrous goods? And of course, there is… but.
DRM
Digital Rights Management. Can you hear that sound? That is the sound of the entire internet getting its hackles up. DRM sounds so simple, and it’s such a giant ugly ball of yuck. It was the first step in the music industry’s attempts to come to terms with the new market, and it hasn’t been a huge hit. Ask Apple’s Steve Jobs:
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
The basic concept is that you build into the reader system an encryption which requires users to register, buy the book, and so on. In other words, it’s a technical fix to prevent people from copying the file and giving it away. Business as usual carries on. Great idea?
Ah. Well. Come this way…
First thing is, it makes eBooks more difficult to live with. You can’t treat them like real books. You can’t share them, move them from reader to reader, appliance to appliance. You’re locked in. And you may be locked in to something temporary. In which case your library can vanish over night. It’s also about ownership. People don’t rent books. They buy them. The book is theirs. You don’t get to tell someone with a paperback whether they can read it in the bath or on a plane or at the office. But that’s basically what DRM does. It governs what you can do with something you own. And that makes people cranky. Cranky customers do not buy.
So how do you make people behave? Well, one thing is to set up an experience which is just plain better than your free competitors. The music experience shows one thing: people don’t mind paying for a good product, even if there’s a free equivalent knocking around. If you make it more difficult and annoying to get the legitimate download than the pirate one, on the other hand, you will be punished.
I’ll talk a bit more about that in a second, but in the mean time, there’s also a thing called Social DRM. At root, it’s very simple: you watermark your electronic books with the customer’s name. That way, if the file is copied, everyone knows who’s book it is. That’s both a bit alarming and a bit shaming for them, and allows you to ask them pointedly not to do it again.
Yes, there are privacy issues. In fact, the whole question of eBooks is fraught with some pretty startling political and legal questions I hadn’t even begun to consider. In the US, for example, Amazon resisted a legal suit to force them to reveal 24,000 customer records. They had the 1st Amendment to back them up – I have no idea what would happen if the UK government required something similar of a UK eBook seller who has no such constitutional protection. And think about it – book-buying probably does tell you a great deal about someone. It might even allow you to profile terror suspects.
Yikes. It’s a joined up world.
Buying should be fun.
I do not want to have to register myself with twenty sites. I do not want to waste time telling you stuff you don’t need to know about myself to sell me a book. I especially do not want to have to wrestle to get my eBook onto my reader and then find that it’s badly formatted or won’t run because I don’t have the firmware or the latest edition of the DRM. No, I do not. You’re in competition with the book. The book is mercilessly simple and effective. It is excellent technology. If you’re going up against the Great Old One, you better have your game up to scratch. You better bring:
recommendations
discounts (actually, before we talk about that, let’s talk about reasonable pricing, because I’m not paying the same price for a file as I would for a physical object)
rewards
extras such as interviews, competitions, signings, appearances, pictures, music…
a community
excitement!
In short, you better make me love you. Because you need my loyalty now…
Powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal books…
Every so often you run across something which cuts clear through a debate from a fresh angle. What if the whole eBook/dead tree debate is not an either-or proposition? What if the future is a hybrid?
He asked the audience if, upon encountering an obscure reference or foreign word on the page of a book, we would appreciate the option of touching the word on the page and being taken (on our PC) to an online resource that would identify or define the unfamiliar word. Then he made it happen.
I want one.
Less magically, I want my eBook edition to do things my paper edition can’t. I want it to have an index, a glossary. I want it to link to websites, educate me, talk to me, connect me. Why shouldn’t it? Why, if I’m buying a technological version of a paper book, should it not behave like technology rather than paper? I want my eBook enriched. Yes, like that, but more, and more interesting, and more fearless, and more seamless. Maybe I want the author’s music choices. I have no idea.
Amaze me.
