So the Great eBook Wrangle continues…
On the one hand, Random House has agreed (the news services are mostly using the word “caved” and I hope there’s more than meets the eye here) to sell Dan Brown’s new book for Kindle at the same time as the hardback release, for the usual Amazon Kindle book price – ten bucks. Great news for anyone who doesn’t particularly want to own The Lost Symbol in hardback; maybe not such great news for mainstream publishing and its business model – and possibly not for Amazon, in the long run, if they don’t want to have to start doing the tasks of a traditional publisher and raising prices to cover their own costs, rather than trimming the profit margin of a separate company.
(God, I wish I knew what Amazon’s planning horizon / time horizon was, and how they see their endgame with eBooks. Speculating is annoying, and it actually deprives one of the opportunity to make intelligent creative choices. If the market-definer is determined to shadowbox, the market is shadowy. Grrr. And I really hope they actually know what their victory conditions are. I hate to think they’re doing this on the fly.)
In the mean time, Google is getting a kicking. Specifically, the Google Books Settlement – which I still have to deal with, basically by the end of this month – is being challenged left, right, and centre. As an aside, many of the people I’ve spoken to are much, much more concerned about Amazon than Google. Possibly there’s a lesson here for Google – dealing autocratically with individuals is much less popular than dealing high-handedly with other companies.
And there is an issue with what Google is doing, above and beyond the question of fees and orphan works and so on. It’s not a healthy precedent for a large company to be able to say: hey, we’ve infringed a bunch of your old copyrights, because we basically, uh, well we wanted to. So here’s some revenue, and off we go!
I would prefer, for example, that the movie studios not be able to make post facto deals according to a scale, non-negotiable, and then say: oh, and if you want more, sue.
Copyright is in a tangle, and it needs sorting out. There are some conceptual issues at its base which have been brought to the top by the arrival of digital media. However, this is not the way to do it. Google may have weakened the position of the small guy against the big guy here, probably inadvertently, and that is pissing people off. A lot.
Amazon’s just holding some big corporation’s feet to the fire. That they may – may – in the process be damaging a publishing industry already reeling is a much harder story to sell to the world. I mean, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Bertelsmann, however big-hearted you are. An organisation which operates in 63 countries is rather beyond that sort of response, especially at the moment when, if you’re like me, you’re seeing people come up against the sharp edge of the recession all ways up.
On the one hand, the good news is that the eBook situation seems in the short term to be skewing in favour of the consumer, and to be taking off. On the other, I’m not sure about the longer term. Some very big things are happening very fast, without a great deal of debate in the public sphere or a great deal of explanation from the main players about how they see the world when they’re done.
I got very hung up on the idea of stewardship during the high days of the banking crisis (which, NB, is still going on). It seemed to me that there was a pretty obvious lack of it in the financial system. I’m wondering whether we’re seeing a lack of it here, too: companies clawing for territory at the expense of the landscape and the fauna.
All that aside, though…
Something occurred to me recently which I think is worth mentioning. I’m probably the last person on Earth to think of it, but anyway: the Wired piece I mentioned earlier is wrong in one respect: books are not like CDs or DVDs. Not exactly. The curious thing about books is that they do not require a device to make them work. You can buy one and be reading it ten seconds later.
So, now: imagine that there were pocket-sized music boxes in the world which could play a smallish amount of music – say, twenty hours of it – with really high fidelity. Imagine that they were hard to destroy, required no power source, and cost under a tenner. Imagine there were small, simple, attractive objects which could bring Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A to your ears, and follow it with some more of his work. Imagine… the Perfect Music Box.
Want one? ‘Cos I do.
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Image by Rama under CeCill Free Software License.
