Cutting their own throats

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throats.html

by ible • 15 years ago

131 68 15 years ago

gamble2• 15 years ago

There are a lot of books that are only available through piracy. You can download 1 GB torrents containing more books than anyone will ever read in a year, and yet there are still major books like Dune that aren't available to Kindle users. The selection for older, out-of-print titles is even worse.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

Graduate level math and science textbooks, too.

icebraining• 15 years ago

Isn't this Dune for Kindle? http://www.amazon.com/Dune-Sf-Masterworks-ebook/dp/B004KA9UX...

larsberg• 15 years ago

I think the author is pointing out that the Kindle version of Dune is terrible. Horrible typos, bad formatting, etc.

Unfortunately, many middle-aged books have this problem, and unless you can wade through the Amazon reviews (which are not format-specific) and find out, you don't know whether the publisher just copy/pasted a text file and hit PublishNow! or actually had an editor sit down with it, mark chapters, fix typos introduced, un-break words if it was scanned, etc.

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

I really don't think history bears this out. The lesson of Apple seems to be people will accept DRM if you make it easy for them to buy. There were plenty of places to buy DRM-free music (including Amazon) yet people still went to iTunes because of its ease of use.

Of course Apple later proved DRM doesn't matter and people will pay for a DRM-free product if it's easy to purchase. But that's an entirely different point. As far as I can see the historical precedent is that DRM isn't enough of a deterrent for most people.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

The author's point was not that DRM deters people from buying; rather, that it deters them from using multiple competing services.

I think iTunes actually supports the author's point - how many people were there using iTunes and Rhapsody? DRM seems to have kept the iTunes customer well and truly locked in, at least for long enough for Apple to make a pile of money off their monopoly before Spotify et al. started moving in.

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

I understand that but I think the inferred point was "drop DRM and people will buy from multiple sources" which I don't think is true. My point is people don't want to use multiple services. If Amazon makes it easy to purchase books people will stay with Amazon regardless of DRM.

I'll give you an example. I was tempted to buy books from Apress today (they have a all e-books are $15 special). But I weighed the pros and cons and decided to buy them from Amazon instead for an average of $7 more per book because I like having books in my Kindle library that are automatically accessible.

So DRM is irrelevant but it isn't the main deterrent.

rmc4• 15 years ago

I thought the success of iTunes was only because of the success of the iPod. The iPod was one of the most popular music playing devices. I'd say that iTunes Music Store only did well because of the popularity of the iPod and how it was built into the software you use to manage your iPod.

bprater• 15 years ago

I can read my Kindle books in nearly every device I own.

olefoo• 15 years ago

The telling statistic for someone such as yourself, would be how much do you use non-kindle reader software. If you are using the kindle app on your phone, tablet or laptop the author's point is still valid. You are (willingly!) locked in to Amazon's kindle ecosystem; even if you aren't using the device itself.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

Right on - I usually use my Kindle, but also use the Kindle Reader app on my MacBook and on my Droid.

BTW, I have bought a lot of Charlie's books, all in Kindle format.

I really like publishers like O'Reilly and Manning that provide both MOBI and ePUB formats when you buy - that is real respect for customers.

caf3• 15 years ago

This is othogonal to Charlie's point; the pertitent question is "how many ebooks do you buy from places other than Amazon?".

mikeash• 15 years ago

How many places sell ebooks you can read on your Kindle, though?

m0nastic• 15 years ago

I definitely think there's a potential issue with buying into an e-book platform where there's a high barrier to switch.

About two years ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted an e-book reader. At the time, you could only get a Kindle online, and she didn't want to buy one without seeing the device first; so we bought a Nook reader (after she played with it in the store).

Over the next year, we probably bought about $2000 of books on it, when she finally got tired of being envious of my Kindle (which I had recently purchased) and I gave it to her.

She ended up spending like three weeks cracking the DRM on all the Barnes and Noble e-pub books she had purchased, so that she'd be able to read them on the Kindle.

Most people wouldn't have done that, I suspect. They'd have just stuck with whatever platform they initially decided on (and had amassed a collection of DRM-laden files with).

caf3• 15 years ago

My girlfriend got on to the ebook train early, before the Kindle was available in our region, paying ~$500 for a Cybook that reads Mobipocket format files.

A few years later, after amassing a couple of grand worth of DRMed books, the reader failed - and this presented two problems.

The first was that a replacement e-ink ebook reader that would read DRMd Mobipocket files was now impossible to come across, EPUB having mostly won out in the non-Kindle market. The second was that all those DRMd books she "owned" were locked to a broken device ID.

The only solution was the same as in the parent comment - spend a decent chunk of time breaking the DRM and changing their format.

fpgeek4• 15 years ago

Ironically, this is an advantage of Kindle. The last time I checked, Kindle DRM was relatively easy to get rid of. I didn't research as exhaustively because I wasn't very interested, but it seemed like non-Kindle formats were harder to deal with.

ssebro• 15 years ago

Amazon's ability to forgo short-term profits and look towards the long term is their biggest weapon. Very few companies are able to act on threats far enough into the future to fight against Amazon's strategies at a time when defeating those strategies still possible.

flatline• 15 years ago

This made me think that we can expect to see ebook wars like we are currently witnessing with other media, e.g. iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu. If, say, three of the big six publishers end up creating their own marketplaces with their own formats and DRM, and possibly even their own devices, while pulling their ebook titles from Amazon and B&N, I can't help but think it will be a net loss for customers and of dubious advantage to the publishers. I wonder if Amazon's dominance would make this too little, too late. Something tells me there's still room to maneuver, but perhaps not for long.

jerf• 15 years ago

As I've said in other contexts, I simply will not purchase a subscription to each of ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, Showtime, etc etc and those guys can just forget that dream.

Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not mandatory that every company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements), it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It isn't harmless, but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a $9.95/month subscription fee each out of me.

Where I feel like video needs something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google (as a search engine, not some new service) might be sufficient for ebooks.

If the book publishers get their act together.

...

So never mind, I guess.

akkartik2• 15 years ago

I love my kindle, but I've been reluctant to buy books for it. I don't want to support a medium that causes the average reads per copy to tend to be 1. After reading this I'm conflicted: will buying more DRM books cause paper publishers to see the light sooner?

sudonim• 15 years ago

Does that mean you're pirating books for it rather than buying them?

I buy lots of books on the kindle. However, I wanted to read "Atlas Shrugged" and there was no kindle book for sale so I found it online.

I take the customer is always right approach. I am the customer. I consume content in the way I find most convenient. If you make it difficult for me to pay you to do what's most convenient for me, I don't.

akkartik2• 15 years ago

No, just good old-fashioned hardcopies. From amazon, secondhand stores, libraries. Wherever they begin, they end up back at the library. But I can't do that with ebooks.

patio113• 15 years ago

It's good for customers in the short term, but it's not good for anyone in the long run: they're sweating their suppliers, all the way back down the supply chain (read: to authors like me) and sooner or later they'll put their suppliers out of business.

As a reader, this does not strike me as against my interests in the long run. I get books teleported to my Kindle instantly -- what isn't to like? (They're cheap, too, but that isn't a huge win for me. I'd pay twice as much as I do currently without thinking twice.) A shame about Charlie's publisher. They've sold me minimally $200 worth of product in the last year, I could not tell you their name if my life depended on it, and they bring precisely zero value to me relative to any other publisher aside from having signed Charlie. If Amazon signs Charlie instead, it will be literally impossible for me to identify any way in which my life changes at a consequence.

nikatwork• 15 years ago

The problem for you as a reader: a monopoly would allow Amazon to jack up retail prices as high as it feels like.

Amazon could also eg set very unfavourable terms for authors, so only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.

Of course, other channels would open up in this event, but there would be a massive time lag. And if Amazon didn't squeeze too hard, they could maintain the status quo for a long time.

Monopolies are bad for everyone.

patio113• 15 years ago

only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.

Only mainstream literature is commercially viable in the status quo.

fpgeek4• 15 years ago

> Amazon could also eg set very unfavourable terms for authors, so only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.

Even as a monopoly, why would Amazon do that? The cost of distributing another ebook is negligible (and may even effectively be negative if the competitive advantages of a larger catalog outweigh the server, bandwidth and other operating costs).

It seems to me that, even as a monopoly, Amazon doesn't really care whether the books they sell are mainstream or non-mainstream as long as they make as much money as they can from them. And that doesn't mean jacking up the retail price just for the hell of it (or squeezing authors for fun). That means trying to gather enough data to estimate the supply and demand curves and pricing based on that (something Amazon is already good at).

I think authors are likely to get squeezed regardless because, like musicians, there are too many that are willing to write for (effectively) free just to get the lottery ticket for the big leagues. On the consumer side, it is important to remember that every book is already a tiny little monopoly of its own, so it isn't clear which way things will go if they are aggregated.

richardw• 15 years ago

I'd imagine Amazon fears becoming a monopoly. US/EU antitrust would break them up pronto.

asolove• 15 years ago

Ah, this is the key misconception. If you think Charlie is the only thing going into his books that provides you value, think again. Good development editing, copyediting, fact-checking, typography, and illustrations all go into an excellent book. Amazon has no skill at any of these things.

The future of publishing will belong not to middlemen like Amazon, but to people who can reliably put out high-quality, profitable books even from middling writers, and who can turn a profit based on the carrot of quality rather than the stick of DRM. That means cutting out a lot of the people in traditional publishing, but it doesn't mean that publishing as an industry will go away.

O'Reilly, Five Simple Steps, A Book Apart and other technical publishers are paving the way here, and it won't be long before someone starts an ebook-specific publishing house for trashy romance or adventure novels and makes a killing.

patio113• 15 years ago

Ah, this is the key misconception

I'm aware of that argument, I just don't find it credible. The prevailing arrangement is that the publisher pays people to edit and do cover art, just like they pay people to actually print the physical copies. It does not matter to me whose name is on the check that goes to the person who edits Charlie's book -- Charlie, Amazon, the publisher, whatever. The internals of supplier's accounting systems do not surface value to me.

edanm• 15 years ago

It is against your interest for Amazon to have a monopoly, and DRM is helping give them a monopoly. That's the thrust of the argument.

I really wanted to buy an ebook reader when I last visited the States. As soon as I realized that if I buy anything that isn't a Kindle means I can't access all the books I've already bought from Amazon, I knew I'd have to buy a Kindle. This is a bad situation for a consumer, since I'm locked in to a specific platform. Right now it's fine for me, since the Kindle also happens to be the cheapest offering. But fast-forward 5 years, and if there's no longer competition, Amazon no longer has to make the price affordable for me.

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

What other systems can you play your xbox games on?

vilya• 15 years ago

I think Charlie's worrying about Amazon putting him out of business, meaning he won't be able to afford to write books any more and will have to find alternative employment. If you like Charlie's books - like I do! - that's definitely against your interests

billpatrianakos• 15 years ago

The biggest problem with DRM is that it often punishes legit customers. I always thought DRM was no big deal until I signed up for Google Music. I have a net book running Linux so I decided that having my iTunes library on Google music would be a awesome way to have my iTunes library everywhere )I don't want to pay for iCloud sync). I was excited to save hard drive space (I have less than 100gb on the netbook) and still have my library but I was disappointed when I couldn't upload about 20 songs to the service. Sure, 20 songs out of 3,000 isn't much but they were damn good songs and they were mine so why shouldn't I be able to do this?

Up till then I thought people were just whining but now I see the folly in my ways. I'm definitely for some sort of protection for content authors but there must be another way. Maybe they could have a DR,-like system that allows you to use it on X devices the same way you can authorize a number of devices to sync in iTunes. Still, we can do even better. What about a system that somehow measures ownership differently. Like maybe somehow make it so you have to use a password if you want to transfer a protected file to some other device?

Is that naive? Has it been done? I just recently changed my position on DRM so I still have much to learn. Does anyone know of something like I'm describing and is this feasible technically?

fpgeek4• 15 years ago

As a side note, presuming that the DRMed tracks are from iTunes there is away around the problem. If you are a US user, you can sign up for iTunes Match, match the DRMed tracks, download DRM-free versions of the matched DRMed tracks and then cancel your subscription.

I think Apple would charge you for a whole month, so it probably isn't worth it for 20 tracks, but in case anyone else is in the same boat with a larger amount of music...

mitchty• 15 years ago

As another option, you always had the itunes plus option of "upgrading" your tracks to the non-drm versions. I upgraded my last drm purchase about 2 years ago according to the timestamp.

Itunes has been drm free for some time now, drm on music is quite... quaint by now.

rmc4• 15 years ago

It is just very very hard to do. You have to get all these different device manufactors together to sign up and agree on how you measure a device. If my phone breaks and my phone company gives me a new one of the same model as replacement, does that count? What if it breaks and I buy one myself off amazon and claim it of my phone insurance, does that count? What if my phone is stolen? Does that count? For computers, it's even more complicated. It's a Sisyphean task and someone will get burned.

palebluedot• 15 years ago

The problem for me, is that so long as there is DRM attached, I don't feel like I've purchased something I own. Therefore, that erodes significantly the price I am willing to pay for Kindle ebooks; I enjoy reading on the Kindle more, so I like having the ebook, but I don't want to spend money to be locked-in. My threshold right now for an ebook is at least a 40% discount relative to the price I could purchase the physical book, to offset the DRM risk.

Ideally, what I would like would be to be able to buy a paper book, and get the ebook bundled for $X more (say, $2-$5 more). I would have the satisfaction of a book on the shelf, actually owning the book, and then the convenience of an ebook. I would also be less bothered by the presence of DRM. If I could buy DRM-free ebooks from Amazon, I would be willing to pay closer to price parity of the corresponding paper book.

dlitz• 15 years ago

I can't believe it's not yet obvious to some people that DRM isn't an anti-piracy measure, it's a vendor lock-in measure. How many times is this fact going to have to be demonstrated until people take notice?

tomjen3• 15 years ago

I have no idea where he gets his data on price. I am tempted to say that he made it up, but I have no evidence for that.

But the last two books I looked up were more expensive as a kindle edition than as a physically printed book. Not the same price -- that would have been bad enough -- but not having it printed was more expensive.

Since I am not interested in more dead wood I didn't buy either.

rpt• 15 years ago

If you're going offer an introduction to the concept of the Big Six, why tease with half of them and omit the other three by 'etc.'?

A rundown of the Big Six and their and their more prominent imprints: http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who...

Cutting their own throats

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