Charlie's Diary

Curiously enough, a pint is the one thing that is actually cheaper (as well as better if you like real beer) in the UK. Even at current exchange rate, a proper (i.e. Imperial, 20 fluid ounce) pint is less than the minimum $5 (plus tip!) you pay for 16oz US pint.

Good luck with the ebook experiment. £3 is a reasonable price but I've already got the PB. Still, maybe just to encourage them . . .

Posted by: JDC | August 2, 2007 12:07 PM

It's very nice that you've got publishers to sit up and listen about ebook prices. Kudos!
:)

Vaguely Related Question:
I live in Scandinavia, and I order books from Amazon.com. I often buy "used" books because it's cheaper and it costs a lot extra to ship books overseas -- but will that rob you of your royalties?

Do sales of used books seriously cut into your earnings?
:-S

Posted by: A.R.Yngve | August 2, 2007 12:12 PM

ARY: I do not get royalties on used books. I don't get a bent penny from them. However, I don't see them as eating into my earnings any more than I see your loaning a book you bought new to a friend as eating into my earnings. We expect more than one set of eyeballs to read a book. In fact, there exist people who buy copies of our books and loan them out to people for free. Here in the real world, those of us who haven't drunk the RIAA/MPAA Kool Aid have a special term for such people: we call them librarians.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 12:21 PM

NB: if you are trying to insert a pound sterling symbol here, you need to type £ or £. Funnily enough, if you type the pound key on your Windows box, the resulting character will look like £ to you, but not to me (because Windows uses a fucked-up character set unlike anything else on this planet).

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 12:26 PM

I think this snippet from the "Digital Rights" section of WHSmith's website may answer your question

Adobe eBook
Copy: not allowed
Print: not allowed
Reading aloud: allowed
Expiration: no expiration date

Thank god we can read it aloud!

Posted by: I.P | August 2, 2007 12:28 PM

It's regrettable that the ebook isn't available in a format useful to me (Palm), I've a hankering to read the book again and my copy is on another continent. What would be nice is some sort of easy bundling of ebook + paperback so I can read a pleasant dead tree book and at the same time have a less nice but more portable electronic version.

B>

Posted by: Bruce Murphy | August 2, 2007 12:34 PM

I'd happily read e-books if I had something to read them on. Just a cheap and nasty, slightly backlit, plain black type on off-white LCD thingy would do. Until the actual portable readers are available and affordable I'll carry on with dead trees. Reading on a PC is out for me, I spend all day in front of one, don't want to spend my leisure time in front of one too.

Posted by: Brent | August 2, 2007 12:46 PM

Just purchased a copy, wish they had a format for the sony reader though :)

Posted by: Simon Dick | August 2, 2007 12:47 PM

Simon @8: I don't think the Sony reader is sold in the UK.

Brent @7: One like this, perhaps? (Due in September, list price €350. Of course, it'd need an ebook edition in Mobipocket format ...

Bruce @6: I can't read the W. H. Smiths ebooks either -- Linux/Palm here. It's kind of annoying, isn't it? Fragmentation of platforms and file formats is one of the big drawbacks to the current ebook situation, and DRM makes it a whole lot worse (because if it was available as, oh, RTF or HTML from Webscriptions, I could just reformat/translate it to a more usable format).

All I can say is, I will try to nudge my publishers to Do The Right Thing at every opportunity.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 12:58 PM

It's not available in the UK, on the other hand I did buy one via eBay and much prefer eink to my previous ebook reader of a Palm TX (apart from the lack of backlight). On the other hand in theory at least lit files are convertible to the Readers format unlike the eReader version of the book I already have :)

Posted by: Simon Dick | August 2, 2007 1:04 PM

Simon, Orbit only have the legal right to publish the ebook edition in the UK and commonwealth territories. Because the Sony reader isn't available here, it's possible that if Ace were to have a snit and throw their toys out of the pram they might be able to convince a court that a UK edition for the Sony reader was a sign of bad-faith intent to violate their rights to publish the book in the USA. (This is a low probability scenario, for "I am about to spontaneously and mysteriously turn into a bowl of petunias" values of low probability, but it's the sort of thing they pay lawyers to think about, and it explains why you will not see a cheap Orbit edition of TAA for the Sony Reader.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 1:17 PM

I recently started buying ebooks from Mobipocket, as their reader works well on my Nokia E61i smartphone. I'm happy to see that they also sell some of your titles. The prices baffle me, though. "Singularity sky" goes for a very reasonable $ 7.99, while "Accellerando" sells for $ 24.95. Both are published by Ace, BTW.

Posted by: Eirik Newth | August 2, 2007 1:19 PM

Charlie, see what you mean, I have to admit even Fictionwise doesn't really give any options for DRM'd books on the Reader, on the other hand their large print versions of the monthly magazines work very well as they're not protected and display nicely. Until Sony allow me to purchase from them with a non US credit card I'll be stuck to convertible formats

Posted by: Simon Dick | August 2, 2007 1:25 PM

Hey, Charlie, I'm generally with you on this one (ebooks should be priced lower than pbooks), but I have to say that I think that 3 quid is way overpriced for anything with DRM on it. You and I both agree (I think) that anything with DRM isn't really your property (being governed by abusive EULAs that confiscate your fair dealing rights), has a necessarily short product life (because the vendor changes platform or goes out of business), is bad for your computer (inasmuch as it installs software that overrides local policy with remote policy), can't be sold used (how much less would you pay for a car that you couldn't sell as used when you were done with it), and relies on evil laws like the DMCA to prop it up.

I think that the average reader is coming to understand this, and doesn't like it. I also think that we've got a moral responsibility as people who care about liberty and technology to help people understand the facts about DRM -- especially the fact that DRM infects your computer with programs that ignore your orders in favor of someone else's, inherently undermining your computer's security and integrity.

More importantly, I think that there's a moral dimension to allowing your publisher to use your copyrights to lure unsuspecting punters into installing, using, and growing accustomed to crippleware on their PCs.

If reading a book requires us to give up partial ownership of our computers, then I think it's fair that publishers should *buy* our computers from us first. IOW: the right price for DRM is "You pay me some money for a part interest in my computer, and I'll let you intentionally cripple it with your remote-control software."

I understand the complexities. I had an incredibly frustrating meeting with Orbit about this that was purportedly about discussing the possibility of a UK CC edition of my books but turned out to be about them saying, "Our new French overlords will never let us do CC, would you consider abandoning your principles so that we can publish you?" My answer was no -- for commercial reasons (I think that free ebooks sell more pbooks), for moral reasons (I don't want to help DRM vendors push their snake oil) and for career reasons (I don't want to come across as a hypocrite).

BTW, I don't have a day job -- and I haven't since Jan 06.

Posted by: Cory | August 2, 2007 1:30 PM

I've happily bought tons of DRM-free ebooks from Baen books. But they're not a major publisher, I guess.

As for readers, I do fairly well using my (ancient!) Nokia 6620's web browser to get through to a secure area on my website.

Posted by: PJ | August 2, 2007 1:39 PM

Cory: I agree, £3 is a bit excessive. And I agree about the undesirability of DRM in general. (Why do you think I threw in that link to your editorial piece in the Guardian?)

I have other things that I'll say offline, but not in public.

PJ: Baen aren't a major publisher. A certain major publisher who shall not be named here nearly got to join in with Baen, before their multinational lords and masters had a cow over the lack of DRM and yanked their chain. My personal expectation is that we see a major US publisher ditch DRM on ebooks within 2 years, and that once that happens, the rest of the herd will follow suit. (But as I don't gamble, I'm not going to put anything on the table for you to collect on.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 1:49 PM

Because (mainly) I am a cheapass - I actually use a small bundle of unlinked toys. I have an older Palm device that can pretty much read anything, and if it can't I..ahem..will alter the format to HTML on a PC and stick it on the palm anyhow.

Then my phone (separate) sometimes is loaded up with smaller articles. My MP3 player (Cheapy chinese job, but DRMless) will have a few podcasts and tunes. And my Tablet PC...well that's a PC so also does all the above except make calls.

But it irks me that I need this many devices to get around 'stuff'. Why oh why can't we have some convention for a singular language that lets the end user apply their own preferences upon it I ask?

Cory D - very nice to see you here :) You can add me onto the numbers for proof that the CC caused my to buy your books in realspace.

Though I think Charlie does appear to be 'with you' and is just trying to work his overlords into agreeing with him.

Accelerando is, after all, available.

Personally I give my work for free...mainly because no one will buy it (damnit)

Posted by: Serraphin | August 2, 2007 1:51 PM

Two things:

1. Given format incompatibilities, the expense & awkwardness (at least as perceived by me) of current e-book readers, my bad eyes, and the fact that I already sit in front of a PC all day, I'll stick with the paper versions - including the samizdat copies circulated by those seditious librarians! - for now. But I do long for the day when e-books are easy, not so expensive, highly legible, and effortless to port across various devices and formats.

2. Responding to JDC @1 (and other beer lovers): You should come to Austin and sample some of our better bars, where you can get a pint (in some cases a proper Imperial pint) of UK-worthy but locally made beer for $3 or so. And in many cases you can sit out under the trees to drink it - including in February, since our winters run extraordinarily mild. It's like a beer-drinker's Heaven . . .

Posted by: Tim Walker | August 2, 2007 1:57 PM

idle curiosity prompts me to ask:
since the prices of paper vs ebook are now different, is the money you personally get for copies sold also different?

as in, if I want you to be able to write many more books in the years to come, am I better of buying the hardcover, always, or how does it work? (the closest I ever got to the publishing industry is a good friend of mine who wants to work as a lector (or whatever this is called in english) but doesn't yet)

Posted by: Michael Hellwig | August 2, 2007 2:15 PM

Michael, I get five times as much money for a hardback as for a paperback.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 2:20 PM

I don't even own a red cape.

Ninja authors usually don't, too visible, especially in space.

Posted by: monopole | August 2, 2007 2:21 PM

Cory @ 14

A mild epiphany that you no doubt have already had: the business model you describe for DRM'd publication is a lease model, not a sales model. You can get a car (or a camera or ...) these days under the same terms; essentially you rent the use of the product for some specified time, after which your rights to use it expire. With physical items there remains the option to purchase all rights (at a usually horrific markup) at the end of the lease; I assume you can't do this with ebooks or other digital products because the publishers don't want to give up the rights under any conditions.

Hmmm, the similarities are interesting. The auto manufacturers create new models to keep the life cycle of the product artificially short, and so do book publishers, by letting the supply go slack and then issuing "new" editions with different covers. Digital products again can't do that as effectively unless they change the readers (which they can't control, explaining why Sony wants to manufacture readers), so they need the DRM to get the same effect. This might be a good way to explain the whole mess to people who are clueless about DRM: they think they're buying when they're actually renting, and paying more per use.

Charlie, I'd like it if you were to emphasize publically your plan to release your work into the wild when the demand for paper runs down. It seems to me to be something the average reader would understand as being advantageous to you without hurting the publisher, thus undermining the RIAA argument about lost revenue.

To be clear: I admire both you gentlemen for having the foresight to do something that will be good for both you and your audiences, and even the publishers, if they can be pummeled into thinking it through.

Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | August 2, 2007 2:56 PM

Tim Walker @ 18

Cory & Charlie:

If you go on a signing tour of the US, the two cities you must include are Austin and Portland (Oregon, not the one on the right side of the map). They're both cities with a high percentage of readers, many SF fans, and a love of (and manufacture of) good local beers). They're also among the more tech literate and wired (and wireless) cities in the US, which increases the interest in hard SF like yours.

Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | August 2, 2007 3:03 PM

I'm glad to see Orbit has issued an ebook, and hope they follow through with ebooks of the rest of your books. I probably won't be buying this one, since I've already purchased the ebook edition of the Atrocity Archives (and Glasshouse) from Fictionwise (for a substantially higher price). 3 pounds isn't too much for me even if it has DRM (although I do tend to buy the DRMed books that I have a DMR breaker for :) I know that I'm an exception, but I'm happy to pay for ebooks and given a choice between ebooks and paper books I'll choose ebooks.

Posted by: Jon Lundy | August 2, 2007 3:45 PM

Bruce, I might actually have an up-coming signing tour that takes in both those cities -- but if it comes to pass, it'll be my first ever signing tour. (Tours cost real money, so authors don't get them unless there's a strong marketing case.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 3:47 PM

Is it feasible in this day and age to point to things like the success of Baen's free library, and webscriptions, and the CC release of Accellerando and Blindsight and so on, and tell publishers that if they want to buy the digital rights, they have to release them in a non-DRMed form within a certain timeframe, and for less than 3/4 of the cost of the cheapest print version? If I ever get this novel I'm tinkering with finished, I want to try that, because I'd rather CC release it; that's done wonders for other people.

Posted by: JonR | August 2, 2007 3:55 PM

JonR: If I was willing to fight to the finish over my ebook rights, I'd try it. However, the small print you don't get to see says that even though Baen's Webscriptions outsell other ebook models by 10:1, the actual sales volume is comparable at best to hardcover (i.e. a fifth of mass market paperback sales). And while free CC releases boost paper sales, I'd have a hard time believing that they double them (at least, not in my case). More like a 10-20% rise. Finally, book contracts aren't forever; in general, you're lucky if you're still seeing money coming in 5 years after the first edition comes out in a given language.

While the clauses you suggest might boost my income per book by somewhere in the 10-30% range, to get them right now, as things stand, I'd have to start a knock-down drag-out fight with my publishers. I'd have to run the risk of pissing them off so much that they'd tell me to go somewhere else (and I'd get a reputation for being "hard to work with" into the bargain).

And you know something? Pissing off my publishers is not high on my list of career-enhancing moves.

This isn't to say that I wouldn't like to see such clauses in my contracts, and I discuss this sort of thing with my agent whenever a new contract comes up (every couple of years). But I'm not about to jeopardize my job over them. I think Cory lucked out to some extent in that he has a very smart editor who is also the editorial director at Tor, answering directly to the CEO, and once he'd come around to Cory's way of thinking he was in a position to authorize such a contract. The houses I deal with (in this case, Ace and Orbit) are very different companies, and my editors -- alas -- aren't in a position to say "boo" to their respective chief executives.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 4:17 PM

Bruce@22: this is a very attenuated lease, however. For example, I'm willing to bet that Charlie's publisher does not account for the transaction by which you acquire an ebook as a licensing deal, but rather, as a sale -- sales usually generat a 5-10% royalty, while licenses are more likely to garner 50%. So it's a "lease" that pays Charlie 20% of what he should get if it were a real lease.

Likewise, in terms of consumer protection laws, the vendor doesn't want to treat you as a lessee, who is entitled to ongoing support and enjoyment of the object for the duration of your "lease" (perpetual), but rather as a purchaser, not entitled to any rights other than those conveyed by a sale, mostly about "implied merchantability" or "fitness for the purpose for which the article is sold."

But these are just small fry. Here's the biggest difference between a real lease -- say, of a car -- and the "lease" in DRM: if you lease a car from Ford, you don't give Ford the right to arbitrarily enter your garage, to surveil your use of the car, to add governors and limiters that prevent you from violating the terms of your lease, etc. A lessee isn't spied upon by the lessor.

I've written a column about this:

http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/09DoctorowCommentary.html

Posted by: Cory | August 2, 2007 5:13 PM

Three pounds for a DRM'd ebook that I can only read on a computer that runs Acrobat Reader? No thanks. When I read the digital version of Accelerando, I read it on my Nokia 770, which I was carrying around in my pocket. It worked because it was in an open format. Price isn't the problem with ebooks, at least for me. I'd much rather pay the same price as a paperback and get something I can actually read. It's not like Adobe's ebook format actually protects the book from people who want to pirate it - the DRM has long since been broken.

Please don't take this as abuse - I appreciate being asked the question. I just want to give an honest answer.

Posted by: Ted Lemon | August 2, 2007 5:52 PM

Ted: any book sale (except, perhaps, the bait-and-switch lease variety) is a reverse auction. They start out at maximum cost, and then the price gradually comes down. Eventually, if you wait long enough, it'll show up in a second hand store. And eventually, if you wait long enough, you'll get a free, legal, Creative Commons licensed, open format release of "The Atrocity Archives". I'm just not promising you a publication date yet.

Bruce @22: there are clauses in my book contracts that say I'm not to compete with my own publishers. It's possible that emphasizing those plans might be misread as undermining my publisher's efforts to sell ebooks. It's also possible that such a statement would be seen as encouraging librarians pirates premature enthusiasts to jump the gun and start passing round warez copies. This would fall under the rubric of "annoying my publishers". It's therefore something I need to plan in advance and run past a couple of marketing people to make sure nobody objects strenuously to the wording. (And I need to pay a lawyer to draw up the literary trust for my estate, to make sure it happens even if I die before I get around to doing it in person.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 6:00 PM

Er, one other thing. I never bought a copy of Accelerando. Set up a web store where I can pay you a fair price for it electronically and I'll do it in a heartbeat. I've bought a couple of your hardcovers instead of waiting for paperbacks because I felt like that was some sort of compensation (I hope you get more for the hardcovers, or that's out the window).

Personally, I think that the way to break the DRM blockade is for some well-known authors who can afford to take a risk to hire editors and self-publish electronically, with a web store. Because they're known quantities, the fact that they self-published doesn't damage their credibility. But I don't see that happening as long as authors are romantically attached to paper.

Personally, if it wasn't so much work I'd just buy and scan all the books I get, and then shred the paper book. Bookshelves take up way too much space. Storage is cheap enough now that maybe it's not necessary for the computer to grok the book - maybe it's enough to just have a picture of all its pages.

Posted by: Ted Lemon | August 2, 2007 6:04 PM

I've recently bought the (imported) dead tree, and I don't see any reason to buy it twice. For me, ebooks are good for sampling a work. I've bought dead trees after downloading the ebook (Accelerando, Free Culture)- I don't see myself doing the reverse. Would I buy an ebook of a work I didn't already own? Maybe. But DRM is a deal-breaker for me.

Posted by: Brian R | August 2, 2007 6:19 PM

Er, one other thing. I never bought a copy of Accelerando. Set up a web store where I can pay you a fair price for it electronically and I'll do it in a heartbeat.

No.

I've said this elsewhere, Ted: I can't accept donations for "Accelerando".

Reasons:

a) The non-competition clause in those book contracts.

b) The accounting headaches associated with declaring and accounting for an extra source of income to HMRC.

c) If I encourage people to go this route, it deprives bookstores of sales numbers. This in turn depresses my sales track and means that advance orders for future books will take a hit.

If you want to make a donation, buy a paperback and give it to a friend who isn't familiar with my work. That way, I get some money, the book trade gets the circulation numbers, my publishers are happy, and someone else gets a treat.

Finally, it's not a romantic attachment to paper, but a romantic attachment to making money that keeps us from switching to self-publishing online. Paper outsells ebooks 10:1 in most markets, and I don't see that changing for a long time because just to use an ebook requires a degree of tech literacy that limits the market.

I am aware of a couple of cases where authors are selling direct to their readers online and making money, but with few exceptions those authors are established pros who are continuing a series that has a devoted following but that has been dropped by their publisher. I might go that route in future if I am unlucky enough to have a series work in that position, but if you see me going that way without such a good reason it'll be proof positive that either the brain eater has gotten me or the traditional publishing industry has collapsed.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 2, 2007 6:33 PM

Mr. Stross:

I would like to add a couple of complaints to yours. One you mentioned in your earlier blog, the ridiculous cost of ereaders. $400 for an object with very limited utility is absurd. I truly want an affordable, decently sized device on which to read ebooks. I would probably spring for as much as $100.

Of course, your point that these idiot publishers expect me to pay as much for the ebook as for the hard copy further mitigates against using ebooks. Frankly, I'm old enough - 62 - to love plain old fashioned books. I just hate carrying them on planes or holidays in general.

Finally, and this is a constant annoyance is the amount that magazines want to charge for electronic subscriptions. I have subscribed to Scientific American for many years. Yet, they expect me to pay extra for the digital version. I would like to subscribe to the digital version of Analog magazine. They are asking almost the same for the digital as the print.

Now, I want all writers to be justly compensated. But, since these days virtually all written documents are originally in digital form, clearly the costs - even with formatting - for producing a digital version are substantially less.

I really do think publishers should finally get it about DRM and digital copies.

Posted by: Rick York | August 2, 2007 8:40 PM

Interesting, I have just come from spending way to much time and money at Amazon. I'm doing my part to support the hardback and paper trade. I like a nice first addition once in a while, although I think I spent too much. Today I bought a first addition, signed Doctorow DanOuInThMaKdm. How nice for me. I was dumb enough to give my first copy away in a "pass it on" jesture, spreading the bitchun meme or something like that. So, people do find a way to get this stuff for free. I have been known to borrow books and not give them back, but then I give a lot of books away as gifts, so it ballances out.

J.J. Minor

Posted by: Jeff Minor | August 2, 2007 8:40 PM

IP (#5): "Reading aloud" in the context of Adobe Acrobat files refers to Adobe's built-in text-to speech program, and not the v1.0 eyeballs-brain-mouth program.

Posted by: Harry Payne | August 2, 2007 8:45 PM

Charlie,

At this point I've given up on a ebook reader from this generation and am holding out (hopefully tail end of this year) for one of the new ultra-low cost PCs. Maybe an Asus Eee. The booken reader is going to be about the same price (if not more) here, and the Eee will do a lot, lot more.

(And I carry a backpack with me everywhere anyway, so size isn't an issue)

Posted by: Andrew Crystall | August 2, 2007 9:15 PM

I think I am missing something. What does the publisher actually do? The picture I have is that they take your book and print it onto paper and sell it. When I started to think about it I realised there must be more to it or you'd get a lot more money for your (wonderful) work.

If after all that is the only thing they do, can't you just self-publish on paper as well as digitally? If they do more, what do they do and isn't that something you could do on your own or at least in collaboration with some other authors?

One more thing: I started to read Accelerando online and fell for it right away. Bought the paperback (I would buy hardcovers but then I could only get about 10-12 books per year instead of 20-30,) after maybe reading two chapters. If I hadn't gotten to read it for free I probably would have waited for it to come to Evil HQ (aka the library). Of course I'm sure you already know that the taste that a free e-book gives as well as the goodwill is a great selling point.

Posted by: Jim | August 2, 2007 9:20 PM

Jim: the publisher does a lot more. They do marketing, which gets your book into bookstores, and they get reviews from people to print on the cover so people buy it. Not to mention editing, proofreading, cover design, and handling all the intricacies of printing, warehousing and shipping all the books.

I put together a book at lulu.com for a friend, and it was a significant undertaking. The publishing companies really do earn their cut of the deadtree versions. It's just that once the deadtree version is prepared, the marginal cost of e-versions is zero.

Posted by: JonR | August 2, 2007 10:04 PM

jim @ 38

"I think I am missing something. What does the publisher actually do . . . If they do more, what do they do and isn't that something you could do on your own or at least in collaboration with some other authors?"

I'll start by declaring an interest: I work for Charlie's British publisher Orbit. We provide a range of functions for authors, including copy editing the manuscript, commissioning a cover, arranging ISBNs, printing the books, exporting data to bibliographic agencies, making sell-in material, selling the book to major retail customers at head office level, selling the book to individual bookshops through our sales force, planning and executing consumer marketing campaigns, sending out review copies to reviewers, following up with those reviewers, analysing sales patterns, following those up with retailers and so on. Meantime we're warehousing stock and reprinting as necessary.

That's a thirty second summary - if I sat down with colleagues to work it out, there'd be a few things that I've missed.

Now, if you break that task list down, there's no reason why someone sufficiently determined couldn't do any of the tasks on the list, though some are more complex than others. In particular, getting access to the retail buyers who control the majority of ordering in the UK book trade is difficult for small publishers (though some booksellers have made steps to ease this difficulty), and even more so for self-published authors. Being part of a larger publishing group helps get the access that's needed to sell-in in the necessary quantities.

I hope that gives some overview of the process.

Posted by: George | August 2, 2007 10:14 PM

Whatever flaws the Orbit e-book has, it sure does have a kick-ass cover. Pure '50s Penguin-inspired brilliance. I've often wished for a return to the plain primary coloured covers I remember being fascinated by in my parent's bookcase as a child. Those old Penguins and hardcovers with missing jackets gave out a aura of adulthood, grown up knowledge and pleasures, that today's complex and expensively art-worked covers have completely lost. Sadly, though you can't tell a book by it's cover, marketers seem to have proved you'll often buy one based on it.

Posted by: David S. | August 2, 2007 11:52 PM

I just wonder how long it's going to take for someone to write an e-book reader for the iPhone. In one shot, they'd have at least a quarter-million new users, looking for new stuff on their $600 pocket computers (with very nice, high-contrast screens that are just big enough).

Instead of doing it as a page, display the text as a horizontal text stream, with a slider at the bottom of the screen to control speed (sort of like the old "speed reader" training machines).

I just tried it with a jpeg of some text from "Alice in Wonderland," and it works fine.

Posted by: cirby | August 3, 2007 12:55 AM

I'm sorry, but the DRM is the deal breaker. I already have the book and three quid for a greppable copy to make it easier for me to, say, pick out passages to recommend to others would be a no-brainer. However, given a binary blob where the quite frankly quite dodgy-looking ebook webshite doesn't give me any confidence that I can even *read* the damn thing after handing over the money, they can go fuck themselves until they get a clue.

No doubt they'll use this complete crippling of their product into unusability such that no sane person would buy it into justifying to some empty suit that they shouldn't have bothered with this e-book stuff.

I seem to work for one of the few publishers that understands electronic media and doesn't bother with DRM on their content. It's rather shame that yours is still stuck in the twentieth century and apparently does not.

Posted by: Peter Corlett | August 3, 2007 12:59 AM

Peter, to generalize wildly, the practices of the publishing industry make sense because they're the boolean intersection of the set of practices that didn't cause some other publishing house to go bust at some time in the past 600 years.

Doubtless if and when your publishing house fails to go bust, others will notice their success and eventually copy it. But for the time being, there are large segments of the industry that are still stuck in the 19th century, never mind the 20th.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 3, 2007 2:07 AM

George@40: With all due respect, I think that's an awfully mechanical view of what publishers do. Patrick Nielsen Hayden once conveyed to me the single best definition of what a publisher does to me:

A publisher make a work public.

That is to say, a publisher discovers, commissions, or modifies a work such that it is suited to some audience. The publisher mechanically prepares the work so that it will be attractive to that audience. The publisher then takes such steps as will efficiently introduce the work to that audience.

By this definition, much of what Google does is "publishing" (and this is likely at the root of the otherwise incoherent publishing industry objections to Google preparing indices of their works, something that has been quietly done in the analog world for centuries without any fuss) -- and it's broad enough to cover a lot of blogging, but not, say, a file repository or a printer or distributor. File dumps, retailers, printers and distributors are critical to the process of making a work public, but they are none of them indispensible in this matter. We can imagine a publisher who doesn't arrange for (or need) a printer, or a retailer, or a file repo, or what-have-you, or any combination thereof, because the publisher has conceived of a novel mode of making a work public.

The critical thing here is that "making a work public" is a complex process, not a mere act of printing, distributing, copy-editing, or any other task that a writer can simply commission. To be sure, a writer could commission or undertake many of these processes, but ultimately, she generally can't perform all of them well enough to compete with a publisher (in just the same way that many of us can write software, but not so well that it's cost-effective to roll our own operating systems rather than downloading or buying one) (and note that my/Patrick's definition of "Publisher" includes Ubuntu and Red Hat as publishers, since they assuredly go to great lengths to make their flavours of GNU/Linux public).

Midlist writers with a lot of energy and limited interest in the reach of their works can make as much money as writers who are signed with major publishers. For example, Jim Munroe publishes many of his own books and make 4-5x per copy over what I make off my books with Tor. But his books reach a much smaller audience than mine do, meaning that his ideas don't reach as far as mine. He makes a little more money than I do in royalties (but arguably makes less than I do from ancillary revenue streams that are fueled by notoriety, such as article commissions, grants, and speaking fees). But he trades reach for his art for income and the moral high ground of not having truck with a corporate publisher.

So for me, having a publisher is a no-brainer. The deal wherein my publisher takes most of the cover-price for my books isn't driven by my slavering need to be legitimized by a Real New York Publisher, but rather by my cold commercial and ideological calculus: if I give my publisher the lion's share of the dough, I'll make more money in the long run, and spread my ideas further, too.

Posted by: Cory | August 3, 2007 2:17 AM

Would stating "I make 5x as much on hardcovers" on your bibliography info page be a bad thing? I mean, there's some kind of terrible worst case where I buy four paperbacks and chuck three into the pulper. (I'll show you a street performer!)

I've not spent one red cent on iTunes after they tightened up their DRM. In fact, after I found out the l33t could no longer break them with impunity, I wasn't all that interested in the add-$0.30 deal.

In case your publisher is wondering, I'm not sure it would be worth $25 to me to see Grubor in hell, so let's not go repricing Singularity Sky.

Posted by: Jay Carlson | August 3, 2007 6:11 AM

There's software out there which can break open eBook formats. If it gets through the DRM it is likely illegal into US law, so I'll not publish a source, or identify a search engine which you might involve in any criminal practice.

Baen are unusual in their attitude to eBooks and DRM, but it isn't, as far as I can see, breaking the company. And I've been able to read books that I wouldn't have bought. Having read them, some I still wouldn't buy. The author can draw you into the story, but...

Over the years, I've come across some pretty poor printed stuff. Some of it transient pleasure, some potential kinetic kill weapons, and not always obvious which is which when you read a sample chapter.

OK, I'm not going to say that e-publishing is a zero-cost operation, but the publisher doesn't get full retail price. You can argue a bit about where the printer is in the chain from authot to reader. Likewise the marketing. Whether the money goes through the publisher or not, what matters is what sticks.

And when Tesco can sell a standard paperback for GBP 3.73 and a GBP 17.99 hardback can be sold for GBP 5, it gets difficult to justify eBook prices.

What I will say is that, whle some classes of book are more fungible than others--a Harlequin or Mills&Boon romance isn't interchangable, but it's not as unique a product as a Harry Potter--the publishing industry seems to be forgetting that they have products that are not tins of beans. There's no supermarket own-brand Charlie Stross waiting in the wings in a cardboard vest and string kilt.

eBooks bypass supermarkets. As an ex-farmer, I see the failure of the publishing industry, even without the Net Book Agreement, to stand up to supermarket price-pressure, as the biggest sign of looming failure. The supermarkets screw you on price, and play a lot of less obvious dirty tricks. I would be unsurprised if they had a higher returns rate, for instance.

And farmers can't sell eTurnips.

Posted by: Dave Bell | August 3, 2007 10:59 AM

Dave, the publishing industry is clear on the fact that writers are not tins of beans: it's the non-specialist retailers and distributors that are the problem. Yes, the supermarkets in the UK are a huge, looming problem for the publishing industry -- although I'm not qualified to say how that'll play out. What I live in fear of is Tesco deciding to buy out HMV (or, lower down the chain, Waterstones), or to establish their own name-brand book stores, or real book departments within their supermarkets. That would make the current UK high street bookstore blood-letting look like a vicar's tea party.

(For American readers: a couple of years ago, Walmart moved into the UK aggressively, buying fourth-largest supermarket chain ASDA and announcing they were going to go head-to-head with the major chains, Tesco and Morrisons. Earlier this year, Walmart complained to the Monopolies commission about unfair competition. Let me repeat that, to rub it in: the British supermarket chains are such ruthless and voracious sharks that Walmart has trouble competing with them.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 3, 2007 11:43 AM

Please, don't insult sharks.

Posted by: Dave Bell | August 3, 2007 11:58 AM

I'm not particularly worried about the pricing, after all - you're paying for the creative processes that went into the book, and not the object itself; but like a lot of other readers, the DRM is a killer. I have an iRex Iliad, and my wife has a Sony Reader, and we both like to read. If a book isn't available in a format that we can both read, then we're better off with a p-book. Which mostly limits us to Baen at present.

Posted by: Stephen Tavener | August 3, 2007 2:35 PM

Why not discuss the psychology of "Books"? You know, the way they feel and the fetishistic quality that some people can derive from them. Don't most authors have a few books (in material form) that they hold dear? The "human" connection with the actual tablet, vellum, paper...may be important in the long run. I don't think you two (C.S. & C.D.) are suggesting that we ever move to an all digital format for books. Or are you?

Jeff

Posted by: Jeff Minor | August 3, 2007 3:58 PM

I might be tempted, but, I suspect like many people here, I already have paper copies of your work, mainly in hardcover.

I do think Baen are doing Very Sensible Things, and have consumed much of their output in a number of forms. Their ARC gimmick I particularly like - it enables them to get me to buy multiple copies of the same book AND be happy about it.

I still find the printed word significantly more pleasant to read. Perhaps this will change with the advance of ebook readers.

Posted by: Michael Stevens | August 3, 2007 4:08 PM

I buy quite a few ebooks, mostly from Pragmatic Press and occasionally from Baen. In the case of Pragmatic Press, I usually pay 125% of the retail price to get a combined paper+PDF combo. And that's a direct-from-the-publisher purchase with a 50% author royalty, and no DRM.

But DRM is just a huge hassle, because I don't run Windows, and I don't like installing cruddy, blinking spyware. So the annoyance of DRM adds about $100 to the book's effective price, as far as I'm concerned.

Posted by: Eric | August 3, 2007 4:48 PM

Charlie @ #4: For the most part Windows uses character sets that were defined decades before it existed by IBM et al, or later on by the international Unicode consortium.

IIRC even my typewriter had # rather than £.

Oh, and a word to the wise. If you're using Windows XP SP2, there's a new English UK keyboard layout called United Kingdom Extended. It allows you to take advantage of the Alt+Gr key to type lots of Euro chars like ê and ö without breaking into a sweat. It's sort of a Uk version of the old "US International" keyboard that had other so-called dead-key sequences.

-- from my desk in Edinburgh (for August, hurrah!)

Posted by: Mike | August 3, 2007 7:17 PM

Mike, you're not getting what I'm saying: Windows uses it's own bloody stupid 8-bit codeset (and descendants thereof) and what you get when you hit the pound key on your keyboard is not rendered correctly on other operating systems. It's not really unicode compatible, it's not really compatible with ISO8859/1 (or /15) and relatives, and it's a royal pain in the ass.

(And no, I don't use Windows in general, if I can avoid it.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 3, 2007 10:34 PM

I've tried various ebook readers for the Palm, and don't like most of them. The reader i use has compression, so my limited Palm memory goes further. I need to reformat for this reader, so i need it in clear text. So, DRM is a non-starter.

So, i read lots of Gutenburg books. Some, i even convert to audio via 'festival', and listen to them. Now that Librivox has humans reading books, not so much anymore.

HP 7 wasn't available as electronic clear text, so i bought the hardcover. Otherwise, i prefer to read on my palm.

Thought i've modified, and made multiple copies of electronic books i've bought, i've not handed them out to my friends, or even offered to do that. I understand that the authors often need to make a buck to continue their work.

Posted by: Stephen | August 3, 2007 10:58 PM

Charlie @55: Both ISO8859 and Unicode came along way AFTER the Windows encodings. Are you suggesting they should be arbitrarily forwards-compatible?

Anyway what you get (on Windows) when you hit the pound key is a function of the keyboard driver, the current code-page, the active keyboard layout and the application. If you're saving something to be opened on another operating system then you can either opt to modify one of these on the Windows machine, or have an import filter on the other system (like all the encodings that Word supports).

Posted by: Mike | August 3, 2007 11:19 PM

I think I am with the crowd that is less price sensitive but very DRM sensitive. I have read eBooks on a Palm, but the screens are too small and the experience isn't good enough yet. Having said that, I do keep quite a lot of PDF documents to read on my laptop, and this is how I would read eBooks if they were available in a non-DRM format. Anything DRM'd is a deal breaker for me, not so much as it abrogates my ownership rights, but the unacceptable nature of the restrictions and effects on my computer.

As to price, I think that at ppb +/- 25% is very fair, although I feel that electronic distribution is so inexpensive that I would prefer to see the author receive more of the revenue, but that is for the publisher and author to argue over.

Funnily enough, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the books I would most like electronic copies of, are my illustrated books. I have quite an extensive collection and I would love to have them in a more portable and particularly searchable, format.

Posted by: Alex Tolley | August 4, 2007 6:16 AM

Mike @ 57: What the hell are you talking about? ISO 8859-1 predates Windows-1252, which shouldn't be surprising given ISO's adoption from DEC in 1985. The two standards Microsoft had in 1985 were BASIC and maybe DOS 2.0. My PC World demo floppy of Word 1.0 from 1983 really doesn't count; if I recall correctly from 24 years ago, they did the IBM PC CGA/MDA chargen rom thing.

Charlie @ 55: It doesn't matter at all what stupid codeset Microsoft uses internally. Unicode is an interchange format, and there is exactly zero connection between how various Microsoft tools throw bytes around between themselves and what they should be putting out on the net. Euros, "smart quotes", em dashes---they all map quite nicely into Unicode, and this has been true for years.

That doesn't mean that Microsoft tools aren't royal screwups. For a brief period I was chasing an Internet-related Microsoft job. That was pretty much over when I got SMTP mail from a PM marked as "ISO 8859-1" filled with illegal characters (yes, "smart quotes", etc). I got no response after suggesting that they fix their SMTP gateways to accurately describe the data they were passing, and I suppose that meant that both sides knew we weren't meant for each other.

Posted by: Jay Carlson | August 4, 2007 6:36 AM

I use the ASCII-compatible ISO codes--two-character country code followed by the initial character of the currency name. With the euro being EUR. The only reason for the USD symbol being so portable is that it got used in programming languages.

Posted by: Dave Bell | August 4, 2007 7:55 AM

Jay Carlson @ 59

Yes, you're right and Mike is wrong. I was an observer on the ANSI X3L2 Character Sets and Codes standardization committee in the early '80s, and one of the things we discussed was interoperability with 8859-1. And yes, the MicroSloth tools do a truly bad job of dealing with character sets that they didn't invent. As for compatibility, both Mac OS and most flavors of Unix predate Unicode, and they've all managed to make an accomodation with it. MS just didn't care until very recently when they suddenly noticed the potential market in China and started to drool.

Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | August 4, 2007 8:45 AM

Hi Charles,

First time poster.

I think the whole model for ebooks is all wrong from the get go. I think ebooks would be better served if they were packaged like DVD's on a media card and sold at bookstores. This gives readers more choice, although I admit such a format would compromise precious shelf space as it is. The ebook would look like a DVD package with the media card inside. You could also include extra goodies in the package as well.

Jim

Posted by: Jim Shannon | August 4, 2007 10:14 AM

Welcome, Jim.

I'm sorry to stomp on your first post (and feel free to stick around!) but I'm afraid I think that model's a non-starter, for a variety of reasons -- and I'd like to note that it's been tried (during the 90s, for PalmOS; you can still occasionally find copies of the short-form Britannica on SD card floating around).

The reason it doesn't work well is that the whole draw of ebooks -- for publishers -- is that the cost of manufacturing and shipping ebooks approximates to zero if you can reduce them to a stream of bytes over the internet. This means you can make more profit per item, or lower the cost per item and hopefully boost your number of sales.

Bringing physical stuff back into the equation drags you all the way back to the physical distribution channels which are such a pain in the world of dead-tree publishing. You need to get media cards, burn data onto them, package them, and ship them. They're even less recyclable than paper, and they've got all the same undesirable characteristics (from a publisher's point of view) in terms of shipping physical stuff about. Even worse -- paper and ink are really cheap and don't rely on an external reader: memory cards cost more! (For really large lumps of data, like, say, the aforementioned Britannica, it may be cheaper to distribute data on a memory card than on paper: but my back of the envelope calculation is that you need to be shipping 5000-10,000 pages before this cuts in.)

Finally, the packaging and ebook you just proposed -- if it's sized similarly to a DVD -- is exactly the same size as a 100-page paperback. This means that the retail outlets who stock them are back where they started -- only able to stock a limited range of titles due to physical space requirements. Except it's worse than that: readers can't browse the on-chip books in the shop and decide they like and want to buy something they didn't know about when they stepped through the door.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 4, 2007 11:03 AM

Charlie@44

My employer has been going since the 19th century. Its business model actually involves shoving lumps of dead tree through the door daily rather than every six months. Now, fishwrap is a different game to novels, but is it actually sufficiently different to not at least learn something from the looming crisis in the newspaper industry?

The newspaper industry is watching dwindling sales as people get their information electronically. Most newspapers are starting to get it and while they're still killing trees, there is a shift to electronic media. From page3.com to morningstaronline.co.uk, they're all getting into electronic publishing.

But it doesn't have to be just ad-funded websites. You can even subscribe to an electronic version of the print Guardian and Observer. And print it out or cut and paste extracts to mail to your friends if you like.

Now, imagine you had to use some dodgy application written by a cretin, which only runs (or more often than not crashes) on Windows XP, to view news.bbc.co.uk. Would you bother? I sure wouldn't. Why should I have to put up with that for longer pieces of text where user-interface issues are *even more critical*?

Posted by: Peter Corlett | August 4, 2007 1:09 PM

Peter: I assume you're following the current unfolding BBC iPlayer fiasco.

(Apropos DRM, it's not me you have to convince. As I said up top, a while ago I yelled about the ebook market being broken through a combination of price structure and DRM. The response is that one of my publishers are trying to see if doing something different works better. At least one of their people is reading this thread, and I am disinclined to prejudice their conclusions by sounding off here.)

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 4, 2007 3:05 PM

Make that two, Charlie ;-)

I don't propose to get involved in the DRM discussion for much the same reasons as our esteemed author. My employer (or the corporate entity that owns my employer - same thing for our purposes) has a policy on DRM, and there is no benefit to me in putting forward my own opinion. If I agree, I'm accused of being a corporate whore, if I disagree I run the risk of incurring my employer's wrath.

There is one thing I do want to note, though: in amongst the vitriol being poured on large corporate publishers (for little reason I can see except that they want exactly the same thing out of the publishing process as Charlie wants - i.e. to make money from the sale of their/his books) is a kernel of truth. Charlie notes that "large segments of the industry that are still stuck in the 19th century, never mind the 20th". To a certain extent, that's true. Many of the mechanisms have changed but publishers are still doing what publishers have done for hundreds of years. And, given this weight of history and the incredible rate of change of modern technology, most publishers don't understand what's happening online. They just don't. Publishing professionals see the traditional buying and selling of physical items that could be tracked and accounted for suddenly under threat from, in Cory's own words "a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible" (this is from the article Cory linked to, above). And what we don't understand, we fear.

And my point is this: every person who goes online and labels publishers as evil corporate entities or pushers of crippleware, or declares that publishers can go fuck themselves (or inventive, if biologically unlikely, variations thereof) until they produce DRM-free products, is part of the problem. By taking up a dogmatic antagonistic position you force the other party to push back - it's simple human nature. In my experience - and, I admit, it's only the experience of one editor at one company - most people who have to work with this issue (editors and rights, mainly, but also sales and marketing) are trying desperately to understand the changing environment, but this takes time. Meanwhile, is it really so surprising that an attitude of keep-things-as-they-are-for-the-moment is prevalent? It's the same reasoning that leads to most referenda being defeated: if I vote "no" I don't lose anything. If you want a "yes" vote, you don't get it by scaring the population shitless, you get it by educating them.

As I say, I'm not going to go into my personal opinion on DRM because (a) I love my job, and (b) it's still being formed - I'm one of the people trying to come to grips with where we're headed - but I will say that I wish even a small percentage of the energy spent making accusations was spent trying to arrive at a mutually beneficial solution.

Posted by: Darren | August 4, 2007 4:14 PM

Hm, do I get any points for getting my dad to buy all your hardcovers? He lives in the country, and has lots of bookshelves... :')

Posted by: Ted Lemon | August 4, 2007 5:57 PM

Charlie,

On the other hand, the memory cards are a potential use for a "print on demand" type service, no? You select what you want from the catalogue, pay, and it encodes onto a write-once medium and spits out the card with it on.

Oh, perhaps not for novels, but for technical manuals, textbooks and the like, where the alternative is to mail order the physical book?

Posted by: Andrew Crystall | August 4, 2007 6:15 PM

Darren: nice to see you again!

Andrew C: an interesting point apropos technical manuals and textbooks is that the market structure is fundamentally different from fiction. In fiction, once I've typed THE END and my editor has signed the cheque, the book is frozen forevermore. Indeed, if I tried to issue a bugfixed and updated version of "Singularity Sky", I can guarantee to you two things: (a) it wouldn't sell as many copies as the original, and (b) a number of folks (a small minority of the readership, but nonetheless a number of them) would yell at me for trying to exploit my market.

In contrast, technical manuals and text books get updated. I know of some academics who make a tidy living from text books that only sell about 2000 copies per print run ... but that's to a new intake of students every year, and every 2-3 years they have to update it, and that's an extra 500-1000 sales to the other academics who need a copy on their shelves.

This distinct usage pattern actually militates against a write-once read-many model, and in favour of pure software ebooks.

Meanwhile, why write onto a write-once memory chip when you can have one of these and write onto a relatively environmentally friendly, recyclable material?

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 4, 2007 7:02 PM

P.S. Just realised that my comment above reads a little lopsidedly. I don't mean to take issue only with the anti-DRM lobby (I guess I pushed back . . .). The "energy spent making accusations" I cite applies equally to the business giants who think it's good practice to sue 12-year-old kids for P2Ping a couple of dozen songs. IMO, both sides need to lay out the issues that vex them and try to find a solution that works for both - or near as damnit.

I'll leave you in peace, now, Charlie!

Posted by: Darren | August 4, 2007 8:06 PM

Peace is in short supply around here ...!

Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 4, 2007 8:24 PM

Darren, with all due respect, I don't think it's fair to say to customers, "Stop telling us how much you hate the new product line that we've promised will be the only way we sell our wares in the future, because it antagonizes us and makes us dig our heels in!"

Customers who hate DRM hate it because:

* It treats customers as presumptive criminals

* Entertainment companies promise that it will be the only way that their wares will be digitally delivered

* Entertainment companies promise that in the future, an ever-growing proportion of their wares will be digitally delivered

* Customers have already had non-abstract, here-and-now, real-world rip-off experiences with DRM -- for example, anyone who bought a Peanut Press DRM ebook ten years ago and then changed credit-cards can no longer read those ebooks (I bought hundreds of dollars' worth of them)

The world is *not* divided into [companies, customers, anti-DRM evangelists]. It is divided into [companies, customers who haven't had enough experience with DRM to hate it, and *much better* customers who *spend more* and have consequently had more DRM experience and hate it]. We anti-DRM campaigners aren't outside agitators: we're your (best) customers.

This is not a case of everyone being too het up about the issue. This is a case of an industry ignoring demand signals from the marketplace. Capitalism has a traditional response for companies that ignore the market: the companies fail.

There is no demand signal for DRM -- no customer walked into Dixon's this week and said, "What have you got that will let me do less with my books?"

OTOH, there *is* a demand signal for ebooks -- especially and particularly for SF ebooks:

http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

If there is a market for ebooks at all, it is a market for sf ebooks.

Yet most publishers will privately admit that the ebook ventures to date have the worst "hours-of-meetings:profit" ratio of any publishing venture in the history of the industry. In fact, the only trade publisher who can claim to have a growing, healthy, widely recognized and profitable ebook line is Baen -- who don't use DRM and see marked, measurable increases in the sales of their books.

I think you are mis-stating the nature of commerce when you equate a vendor who says, "I won't sell you this product under any circumstances" with the customer who says, "I won't buy this product under any circumstances." Readers don't have any obligation to pay publishers for inferior products that they don't want to buy, and when a customer delivers market intelligence about a product to a vendor, the vendor should listen, not complain about the customer's zealotry.

Indeed, this market signal is especially easy to listen to, since it amounts to customers indicating that they will only buy ebooks if they are produced in a way that is cheaper to manufacture (no DRM licenses to buy) and vastly cheaper to sustain (no need to employ tech-support for the inevitable DRM headaches). It is a market signal that tells publishers, "Please spend less on your products so that I can give you more money."

This isn't a new signal, either. There are no DRM success stories: there's no unbroken DRM.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/01/2218256

There's no DRM that has boosted sales of a product. The software industry (who are a priori better equipped to evaluate the technical merits of DRM than the publishing industry) abandoned DRM as bad for business more than a decade ago. The WIPO Copyright Treaty protecting DRM has been in force for 12 years. It's not as though customers have leapt upon a new phenomenon and declared it dead. The DRM experiment is venerable and has failed repeatedly. This isn't science any longer: it's Lysenkoism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/31/comment.drm

Cory

Posted by: Cory | August 5, 2007 3:22 PM

I didn't say it was fair, Cory, I said it was human nature.

I think we've discussed this enough, you and I, that you know that I respect your position, and I'm not looking to debate the issue - I can't for the reasons stated above. But I do think I raised a couple of fair points:

1. that education, not antagonism is the way forward (from both parties)

2. that both parties have valid concerns

As long as producers refuse to recognise consumers' right to enjoy a legitimately purchased product via any delivery mechanism they choose, the consumer has a right to be unhappy about it. But by the same token, a producer has a right to try to ensure that their goods are legitimately purchased, surely?

Let's say a DVD producer announces "Fair enough, we'll remove all DRM so that you can rip/copy/burn/etc this product that you purchased onto any device you own." That's good news, isn't it? That's what we, as consumers, all want?

So what's the answer when they then say "OK, we've done as you want and made the product as user-friendly as we can. Now help us out. We trust that you won't post a free copy of the latest film onto the web for all to download for free - but we also know there are people out there who will. So how do we stop that?"

That's a fair question, isn't it?

Posted by: Darren | August 5, 2007 4:35 PM

Darren: "but we also know there are people out there who will. So how do we stop that?
That's a fair question, isn't it?"

It's a question, but the wrong one. The assumption is that a freely available copy of some product will replace the legitimate paid for copies by some [large?] fraction and thus reduce profits - let's call it large scale pilfering.

The first issue is how do you even know that is true? Whenever I read about this, particularly from the RIAA, we get some stats on a guesstimate number of P2P downloaded tracks with the usual 'see how much we lost for each of those tracks!' It happened even back in those ancient days when blank cassette tapes were available to copy vinyl albums.

First assumption - just how many of those freely available tracks would have actually been bought if only available in paid form? Demographically a lot of those tracks are downloaded by students. They don't have a lot of money to pay for stuff. Back in the vinyl days, we just shared albums. Similarly with software. MS Windows might be copied to death in China, but guess what, the average Chinese is not going to be able to afford $150+ for a copy of Windows, so he would buy something else - like Linux. So my first point is don't assume that free copies represent a major loss. The pilferage rate might actually be quite small.

Now let's turn to the abuse of the customer. Again, let's think back to the days of vinyl records and cassette tapes. Remember how carefully those records were handled and how fast they wore out? Many of us made cassette copies to extend the life of the product. Digital media distributed as CDs and DVDs also get damaged. Preventing users from making backups to ensure preservation is just plain annoying. Now add in DRM that attempts to lock product to a particular machine and the content will obsolete as soon as as the machine dies or is replaced by the new model. Fancy having your DVD collection made unplayable when you buy a new HD DVD system? It's bad enough that DVDs have country code restrictions for no real reason (especially the old libraries), but think of the outcry if dead tree books couldn't be read outside the region?

How else are revenues "lost"? Well libraries offer free copies of books, CDs and DVDs as long as they are returned. Used books, CDs and DVDs can be traded for no value to the publisher or creators. Are they truly "losses" to the industry (Charlie has covered this in an earlier thread). The ludicrous nature of this was spelled out with Google's book scanning project. Books that would never be republished or see the light of day were being made available in classic "long tail" effect and who complained? - the publishers. And it is not just books. There is a vast collection of old and new media that is unavailable because it costs too much to republish in digital format. Enthusiasts and other entities want to make it available at their cost and yet the copyright holders want to restrict that too.

So the issue is much wider than eBooks. But let's address the eBook issue specifically.

The formats are not fixed, and new readers will emerge in due course, we just don't know in what form - as dedicated eBook readers (I personally doubt the utility) , as super-lite PCs, as phones with extensible large screens? But whatever the device, the content that was paid for should be transferable to any of those devices, even if it means some digital reformatting. My books can transfer from house, to briefcase, to hotel to airplane. Why shouldn't eBooks be the same?

So bottom line, eBook publishers are basically saying, I cannot treat my purchase like other purchases because a small minority will find a way to give it away for free and some people will enjoy it without having paid for it, even though there might be other legitimate avenues for them to do so without payment (like sharing or borrowing or buying used at a steep discount).

If publishers managed to do for dead tree books the same as they want for digital ones, guess what, I'm going to spend my money in different avenues. And that would be bad, because I am one of those rare heavy book purchasers who actually buy hardbound editions and represent your major buying demographic.

Good rule in business, don't piss off your good customers, because we won't stay your customers if you do.

Posted by: Alex Tolley | August 5, 2007 10:02 PM

I must admit I do like the dead tree version of books. No humming or purring of electronics while you read.
....Although I would have downloaded the Atrocity Archives had I not already purchased a hard copy just last week. Is there a soft copy of Toast?

Posted by: Gary | August 5, 2007 11:43 PM

Darren, I feel like we're talking at cross-purposes.

Let's stipulate for the moment that it's fair for producers to want to stop their customers from posting stuff to the web.

What does DRM have to do with accomplishing that goal? There's no unbroken DRM. DRM-only tracks sold through the iTunes Music Store are broken and made available on P2P *180 seconds* after they're made available at iTunes.

So, what, exactly, is legitimate about the publishers' use of DRM? It doesn't stop illicit copying -- the dominant mode of illicit copying is to google for a cracked version of the file you seek. IOW, you don't have to be a super-nerd DRM cracker, you just have to know how to use a search engine. The set of people who know how to use a search engine is 100 percent congruent with the set of people who might buy an ebook.

Publishers' use of DRM only burdens and harms honest users who want to do the right thing and pay for what they get. What is the legitimate case for doing this? Not just from a customer's perspective, but from a shareholder's perspective: what's the bottom line case for spending money to make your product less attractive to the customers who *don't* want to steal it, without appreciably inconveniencing the users who *do* want to get it without paying?

As to the fair question of "how do we stop copying?" The answer is probably, "You don't." You just don't. The Internet is a machine for copying. It is inconceivable that it will get worse at copying. So it's not a fair question.

The fair question is, "How do we cultivate a business where copying benefits us, or at least doesn't harm us?" That's a question I think your customers stand ready to help you answer.

For starters, the customers in this forum who've said, "I won't buy these books if they have DRM on them, but I will if you get rid of it," are telling you something about how to build that business.

Every customer who buys a DRM ebook would also buy the non-DRM ebook -- no one logs into a website and says, "Oh crap, they've only got the open formats here, better keep my money." So if you remove the DRM, you get to keep 100 percent of the sales you would have had, and you get to add the sales from all the people who've said that they'll buy it without DRM. And you get to toss out the cost of DRM licenses and support for all those users who get shafted by it. And you sustain the goodwill of all the customers who would otherwise have hated you because your DRM screwed up their books, computers or both. We *know* that in this instance, the author will delight in having the DRM removed, so there's no additional negotiation cost on that side (there are undoubtably internal negotiation costs between Orbit and its French owners, but one hopes that those would be recouped in the form of new norms that will allow you to continue selling books this way, capturing 100% of the DRM-willing customers as well as 100% of the DRM refuseniks, avoiding DRM license fees, support, and loss of goodwill).

You may be asking, "Well, what about the customers who would buy the ebook, but only if there weren't any pirate editions (derived from the non-DRM version) floating around?" The thing is, hackers can generate a pirate edition from the DRM version almost as easily as they can from the non-DRM version. So this potential group of customers is a write-off no matter whether you use DRM or not.

The only way to lure more paying customers into an ebook market is to offer them a superior service and experience. iTunes is instructive in this matter: every song for sale in the iTunes Store is also available as a pirate song. The quality of the iTunes experience is better than the quality of piracy experience -- even when you factor in the gigantic minuses created by Apple's DRM.

I don't have the entire answer, but I think the starting principle must be "first, do no harm." Don't punish the paying customers. Don't waste money on technology that alienates loyal readers.

Acknowledge that copying is only going to get easier, not harder, and work to cultivate a copy-friendly business. Your customers have always had the option of borrowing books, buying them used, etc, and you've contended with that superbly. When I was a bookseller, I saw the customer life-cycle, from cost-conscious student to spendy professional. I knew that today's used customer was tomorrow's new customer.

There's a segment of the book-reading audience that wants to give you money -- for books, for ebooks, for services, etc. Focus on how to give them the very best experience -- even if doing so makes it easy for cheap students and other freeloaders to scarf down the hors d'oeuvres without buying anything.

My Wikipedia editor friend says that her life philosophy is "Don't let assholes rent space in your head." IOW: don't let the bad actors dominate your agenda. Focus on the paying customer, not the freeloader, and on capturing the largest possible paying customer market. How about giving bonuses/recognition/whatever to the customers who distribute the *most* copies of an ebook, or whose distribution results in the *most* sales of the print book? If nothing else, it'll help you identify those customers who love to promote your products and to figure out smart ways of harnessing them.

Posted by: Cory | August 6, 2007 6:21 AM

I shall be purchasing this book because £3 is well within my budget. It is effectively the price of a pint and a packet of crisps and that's a fine price.

I did have a rant recently about Lois M Bujold's new book which costs over $20 for the eBook whereas the hard cover is available at amazon for $17.

I'm not fussed by DRM limitations. Its been cracked and since your ebook is published in Microsoft .lit format there is a very simple program to convert it into something DRM free. I have to say that I quite like the Microsoft reader anyway so I'm happy to read in that format but it is nice to know that if/when Microsoft and I go our separate ways I can still read the ebooks that I bought.

BTW I do not think authors should make all their books available for free, old ones sure because the marketing value outweighs the potential revenue, but not the current bestsellers. I do think they should be made available in DRM formats and at a price which is reasonable ($5 or so) but it s