Moran looks at the old Barnes & Noble e-book reader application, based on Fictionwise’s eReader. All in all, he writes, it was a very good application, and did everything he wanted it to. Then B&N essentially abandoned it in favor of their much-less-functional Nook application, which wastes screen space, lacks the in-app Wikipedia access of the old one, and won’t allow side-loading existing eReader-format books.

He has some harsh words for interface decisions in iBooks, too, such as the way the bookshelf format makes books a bit hard to find.

What’s the solution? Frankly, I want one app that lets me read all my books, no matter what the app. I am sick to death of trying to guess which app is going to be the best one to stick with, and even sicker of trying to remember which app I have a particular book in. I mean, I have 15 readers loaded onto my iPhone right now. 15. That’s ridiculous. I’ve tried to keep the number I actually use down to 3 or 4, but it’s hard. And how do you count them? Does Instapaper count? How about the New York Times iPhone app? The Elements app? Various comic book readers? Zinio? The various “Vooks”? It’s a nightmare.

Of course, he understands the source of the problem: the competing DRM formats that the different e-book stores use to promote customer lock-in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely that this problem will be solved any time soon (until and unless it becomes legal to strip DRM and convert your e-books into a single format you can use with just one reader, at least).

It’s such a ridiculous problem, and while it may not be crippling the sales of any particular e-book store, I can’t help feeling that it’s holding the market back, myself. Imagine how it would have affected the print publishing world if you could only put any given publisher’s books in a specific kind of bookshelf.

Hey, publishers, you don’t want Amazon’s Kindle taking over the world? How about concentrating a little less on cross-vendor price parity and a little more on cross-vendor book compatibility? Amazon would lose a lot less of its competitive advantage if you could buy an e-book once and read it anywhere.

And you know what the easiest way to do that would be? Stop using DRM. The DRM that keeps your books from being “stolen” also lets Amazon remain on top of the market, by making sure that readers can’t take Amazon books elsewhere, and can’t bring books from elsewhere to their Kindle.

Of course, that’s probably never going to happen, in the current climate. And so the Tower of E-Babel continues to climb.

Taken together, the pieces make some good arguments. The Kindles have always been loss leaders—Amazon makes its money off the e-books (especially now that agency pricing is forcing Amazon to take a 30% cut of every e-book rather than treating the e-books as loss leaders too). That’s why Amazon has been so good about getting a Kindle reader app onto every major mobile platform. Kindle owners tend to buy more books than non-owners, and getting more Kindles into more people’s hands could accelerate the growth of the overall e-book market.

The synergy would also work the other way around: Amazon’s highly-profitable Prime program would become attractive to even more consumers, leading more of them to shift their purchasing habits to buy more physical goods from Amazon, as well as e-books.

Some people have been a bit skeptical of the idea, though. They point out that not every Prime member would necessarily want a Kindle—they subscribed to get no-cost 2-day shipping on their orders, and Kindle e-books aren’t shipped at all. On the other hand, it’s hard to say no to “free”, and it’s a demonstrated fact that often people don’t care for gadgets they don’t have until they get them, then after they use them they discover they can’t do without them. (My parents and cell phones, for example.)

Even if the free Kindle recipients turn around and eBay them or give them to friends or relatives, someone ends up with that extra Kindle, and it still grows the market and gives Amazon additional market share. And who knows? Perhaps Barnes & Noble might just follow suit. And if that’s the case, the e-reader market is going to get that much harder for smaller companies to break even in.

The article was a discussion of the relative e-piracy situations between music, movies, and e-books. My thesis was that, at the time the article was written, the music and movie industries were worrying a lot more about e-piracy than the publishing industry, largely because there was relatively little demand for e-books at the time.

I looked at the philosophy of the Pirate Party, who admitted that file sharing could harm rights holders—but so could progress in general. They felt it was not their job to come up with a new business model for rights holders, but rather to make the flawed current system untenable so the rights holders would have to innovate. I also brought in some interesting survey results that showed significantly more teenagers believed it was legal to copy CDs or movies their friends paid for than ones their friends got for free.

And I compared the birth of piracy of music and movies to the state of e-book piracy. Whereas the music and movie industries immediately felt threatened by Napster and Gnutella, mp3 and DeCSS/DivX, book scans had been circulating on the Internet since well before Sean Fanning’s last haircut but—apart from certain irascible types—no one in the publishing industry seemed to feel threatened enough to take action. Why?

Because unlike e-music and e-movies, e-books currently fail to offer a compelling experience in comparison to their original format. Far fewer consumers want to read commercial e-books than printed books, let alone the “It Came from Planet Typo” scanned ASCII versions that make up the majority of peer-to-peer. Part of this is the “Tower of eBabel” that David Rothman likes to harp on, the confusing surplus of available e-book readers and file formats, but I would say a larger part is the lack of a high-resolution, high-contrast screen reading surface that is acceptable to the majority of readers. Add to this the poor quality of most illegitimate e-book scans (though they are getting better as technology improves) and you have the peer-to-peer equivalent of a “Someone Else’s Problem” field: the majority of readers barely even notice peer-to-peer e-books, because they’re just not anything they would be interested in reading.

I predicted that e-book piracy would not be seen as a major problem until we had such a “high-resolution, high-contrast” e-reader. And like magic, it was only a matter of months before the first Kindle came out. Now that we’re on the third Kindle, not to mention the iPad, we’re finally seeing that magic moment start to happen. Maybe they’re not as cheap as “a cheap transistor radio” yet, but they’re already dipping below the magic three-digit divider as sales and refurbs. Given a few more years, lower prices will come, too.

And book piracy is getting a lot more attention lately. When a New York Times ethicist discussed the ethics of downloading (or, by derivation, scanning) a copy of a print book one already paid for earlier this year, you would have thought he was advocating roasting puppies. Then in October, Adrion Hon at the Telegraph was surprised to discover just how easy e-book piracy really was (whereas I was just surprised it had taken anyone so long). Echoed by Nick Harkaway on FutureBook, he warned it was going to be a big problem.

It seems to me it’s playing out just as I predicted back in 2006. E-books are finally becoming convenient and desirable for the average person, taking off among the general public—and so is e-book piracy. And so are publisher fears of e-book piracy. (And for that matter, publisher fears of e-book sales. Just look at agency pricing; I would never have predicted that in 2006.)

In the rest of the 2006 piece, I moved away from predictions and talked about the ease of scanning that promoted book piracy, and led to such things as illicit e-copies of the Harry Potter books, which the publisher refused to release legitimately “citing security concerns”, coming out literally within hours of the books’ print releases. Nobody has yet figured out a way around that particular problem; indeed, scanning has only gotten easier (especially with innovative do-it-yourself scanning rigs such as this one, this one, or this one). And someday it might be possible to scan a book with your cell phone just by riffling through the pages.

And I talked about the inverse relationship between piracy and obscurity, as remarked upon by Eric Flint, Tim O’Reilly, and others. We’ve seen a number of people trying further experiments in publicity, whether or not piracy (or legitimately free e-books) is involved—notably published authors such as Joe Konrath going over to Amazon and selling their titles directly as e-books at much lower prices and making much better royalty rates than through traditional publishers. And Baen has continued to give away freebies, and has continued to thrive even after the death of its founder. Perhaps these methods don’t rely on “piracy” for their success, but they do have a few things in common with e-books circulating for free.

It’s hard to say where we’re going to go from here, but I still stand by some of those original predictions: e-books are only going to get cheaper and easier to read from here on out, piracy is only going to get more attractive, and print publishers are going to have to figure out how they’re going to adjust.

But even then, I said that the e-book wouldn’t kill the print book in our lifetime, and I can’t see that changing. Whether the print book becomes primarily an object d’art (and presumably less attractive to people who just want cheap books now) or not, there are still enough of them around and they are still easy enough to manufacture and to read even in the most dire of circumstances that there will always be a place for them somewhere in the world.

Perhaps I’ll look again in another four years.

Update: As if by magic, right after I posted this I saw a CNet report on a campaign by New York City to raise awareness of the job costs of Internet piracy (they call it “web piracy”. God I feel old).

Most of it is about music and movies, but there’s also this bit:

"I wasn’t aware that book publishing was being affected by illegal downloading before," [New York City commissioner of media and entertainment Katherine] Oliver said. "But I now know as reading digital books becomes more popular to read on different devices, piracy is moving into publishing. I think this is an international problem and we want to raise awareness."

That’s basically a recapitulation of my entire thesis right there. (Though, as with most commentators, she seems to think that it’s a new problem because she only just noticed it.)

The problem, Stross explains, is that the missing book, The Merchant Wars, fell between two periods of Tor e-book activity. The first few volumes were issued during the ill-fated Tor Webscriptions experiment, which Tor’s parent company shut down after just a couple of days. The later volumes were issued after Tor started up again with e-books in 2008.

But The Merchant Wars was published in 2007, along with hundreds of other titles that fell during the several year gap. And there are just so many of them, making up such a huge backlog, that this particular book (not to mention all of the others) is unlikely to be scanned to e-book form at an acceptable level of quality (that is, without the infamous “Kindle typos”) any time soon.

My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that for Tor to put their backlist online would take on the order of 2000 employee-months of labour. Which is a tall order for a company with 50 full-time staff, to serve a channel that accounts for at best 6% of sales

Stross writes that he has made his feelings known on the matter of having the middle book from a series unavailable in e-book form, but there’s not much that he or his agent can really do. He adds, “If in the meantime you want to download a dodgy scan of that particular book (and buy a mass market paperback for the conscience money), I personally won’t hold it against you.”

Stross says that Tor would like to get all of its digital backlist available in e-book form, but even in this day and age when book publication is moving closer to digital from start to finish, getting that digital information into e-book format can continue to be a problem.

According to Stross’s post, there seems to be a “Tower of E-Babel” problem on the publishing side as well as the e-book side: the move from Quark Publishing System to Adobe InDesign has made it harder to convert older books, which are still in Quark format, to e-books. And a lot of backlist titles’ contracts don’t mention e-books, so those have to be negotiated separately (though this affects Tor’s pre-2001 titles, not mid-‘00s titles like The Merchant Wars).

It’s a bit ironic, but it seems that the volunteer effort of pirate scanners, who scan and proof paper books into e-format as a labor of love (or at least of ego), is doing a lot better job making these older paper books available as e-books (albeit illicit ones) than the publishers who in at least some cases have access to the original electronic source documents.

It’s too bad there isn’t some way to harness that effort to make these books available legitimately.

My new tech support day job has brought home to me once more just what a gap there is between how much the average person knows about computers and how much computer geeks know. In a sense the gap is very difficult to bridge, as people who are experts on a subject are often instinctively hardwired to assume a basic level of knowledge on the part of other people that may still considerably miss the mark.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what kind of advice I would give if someone called me on the tech support line and asked me what e-book reader they ought to buy, or what the differences between them were. (It hasn’t happened yet, but the retail chain my tech support company works with is starting to sell more and more e-book devices, so I don’t doubt I’ll get e-book questions sooner or later.)

This in turn led me to consider what my co-workers ought to know about e-books to be able to answer those questions if they get them, and also what my parents ought to know about e-books if they ever consider getting a device that can read them.

So I am coming up in my mind with a plan for a very basic primer on the most commonly-used e-book formats and the most common e-reader devices. I generally want to keep it simple, to avoid confusing people too much—e-book technology and the Tower of E-Babel are confusing enough as it is.

So this is the rough outline of what I was planning to cover:

Why (Not) to Buy E-books

• E-book advantages (carry anywhere, read on multiple devices, keep your place, instant large-print, doesn’t take up space on your bookshelf, etc.)
• E-book disadvantages (DRM, can’t resell, need to charge up, pricy device, etc.)

E-book Formats

• EPUB (Adobe, Barnes & Noble, Apple, DRM-free)
• MobiPocket (Kindle, DRM-free)
• PDF

E-Readers

• Kindle
• Nook
• Sony
• Kobo
• iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad

Now, I know there are a lot more formats and e-book reading devices out there, and I will probably at least mention some of them. But almost none of them have the support of any kind of major e-book vendor, and they’re generally meant for people who already have some sense of what they’re doing.

What I would like to know is whether there are any obvious omissions in my list above (bearing in mind that, again, I’m trying to keep it relatively simple and not confuse people right off the bat). What things should non-tech-savvy newcomers be told right off the bat so that they have a better idea of what they’re getting into by buying an e-book reader?

Please leave me your suggestions!

A large part of it was factors relating to the “Tower of E-Babel” problem we’ve mentioned plenty of times before. DRM with arbitrary restrictions on what can be done with particular books, differing platforms with different access requirements. How books can be found via catalogs and search engines was also a consideration.

A couple of other issues had to do with how the books are sold. Some publishers feature package deals that annoy librarians who don’t want to pay for books they don’t want. And sometimes the content of books is different between printed and electronic versions, with one version having material the other lacks.

The librarians noted that these issues affected not only them, but also caused varying degrees of difficulty for patrons seeking to make use of the material—especially professors using it in classes. I find it interesting that most librarians don’t seem to be concentrating on books for specific reader devices such as the Kindle or Nook. They’re more focused on curriculum and need, and find that a lot of people still read them on desktops or laptops.

As I mentioned a little while ago, my time in the tech support trenches has re-emphasized to me just how tricky the morass of differing e-book formats and availabilities we have today can be for those who aren’t technically-inclined. I find it interesting that even librarians, the information-retrieval specialists of our time, are running into similar issues.

Ben Hutchins, otherwise known as Gryphon from the Undocumented Features shared writing universe that I covered in one of my “Paleo E-Books” columns, has started a blog called “Use Extra Sheets As Necessary” chronicling his experiences returning to college after the better part of two decades away from it.

Yesterday’s post was about Hutchins’s frustration with the present state of educational information technology. He’s not speaking of computer labs here, or even e-textbooks, but rather the systems that professors use to post adjuncts to the textbooks—assignments, hand-outs: the sort of thing that would have been photocopied and passed out in the days when he and I attended our respective colleges for the first time.

Hutchins writes:

The concept of offering things like coursework and class information online (even for regular old-fashioned sitting-in-a-room lecture courses) has reached a stage I like to think of as “immature proliferation” – everybody’s doing it, but no two implementations are the same.  There are no standards.  Every textbook publisher has its own system for offering and delivering such content.  Every instructor has his own preferences.  Quite a few of them have homebrewed systems of their own to add to the mix.  And the university itself has multiple different mutually exclusive online information systems, some of which are preferred by some instructors, some by others.

He goes on to elaborate on some of these systems: FirstClass, Blackboard, a home-brewed Linux system one professor has put together. Not only do they bring about the confusion of having to keep up with several different on-line forums (Hutchins notes that his four classes mean he has to keep track of nine separate data streams), but they also add extra expense, such as the $70 he had to pay on top of an already high textbook price for the privilege of obtaining a product key for one of the forums.

Hutchins wryly notes that he’s returned to college at exactly the wrong time in history—twenty years ago, everyone was using handouts, and in another twenty perhaps some standards will be in place to reduce the confusion. But right now, everyone is doing his own thing, and it just adds more stress to the college experience (which, as Hutchins writes in other entries, is already stressful enough).

It’s worth keeping in mind as e-textbooks proliferate that a goal of bringing e-media to education should be to make things simpler. But right now, it only seems to be adding to the complication. (And if the current confused morass of consumer e-book standards is any indication, we may well have a long way to go on that score.)

Several huge photo blow-ups of the place hang on the wall in the breakroom at TeleTech where I work, in keeping with the building’s “Route 66” decor theme. It was only last week when I googled it that I realized I had actually driven right past it without even noticing it twice while on my way to Carthage. I guess I’d mentally filed it as “just another gas station” without realizing. So as penance, this time I drove out there specifically to see the place.

While I was there I happened to notice, amid the shelves of period and Route 66 memorabilia, a couple of old Brownie cameras.

“I used to have that camera,” I said, pointing to the one on the right.

“You don’t look that old!” the lady who was showing me around (the daughter of the Sinclair’s owner) said.

And it’s true, I wasn’t that old. But the camera was.

My first childhood camera, when I was very young, was a Kodak that shot on 127 film. I wish I remembered the exact name of the camera so I could google it; I’ve tried to find images of 127 film cameras online but none of them looked familiar. I think it must have been twenty years or so old even then, or ten at the least—it had that kind of late fifties, early sixties design sensibility to it. I didn’t have a flash so I could only take pictures outdoors, and my parents only bought me black and white film because color was more expensive. But I took a number of pictures, and had a number of pictures taken of me. (Yes, that’s a very little me at right. That’s how old I was when I first had that camera.)

My second was that Brownie Hawkeye, the same model as in the photo above. I no longer remember where it came from, whether it had belonged to my Dad when he was a kid or if he just found it in a second-hand store. Anyway, it took 620 film, and I used it until I dropped it and (alas) broke the lens.

It took great pictures, not least because it used film that was so much wider than the 35mm in common use in that day, and lots wider than the 110 that was the most common consumer pocket format. Hence, it didn’t lose as much quality being blown up to photo size. (And I thought it was delightfully novel using a camera whose viewfinder you actually looked down into rather than holding it up to your eye.)

So, my first picture-taking experiences were with then ten- to thirty-year-old camera equipment. You might think that film for such an obscure beastie would be hard to find. After all, if you want to record on an eight-track or reel-to-reel tape, or for that matter Digital Audio Tape or MiniDisc, you can’t exactly find it at the corner store.

And yet, the corner store was exactly where we got film. Because in those days, you could find a dozen different sizes of film anywhere film was sold, including right down at the local Wal-Mart—including the 620 film that worked in thirty-year-old cameras.

In our current digital world, it’s hard to conceive of any recording medium still being in use for that long. Just the different types of media used on computers alone could fill a page: 5.25” floppies, 3.5” floppies, Zip discs, Jaz discs, Bernoulli drives, CDs, DVDs, flash cards, jump drives. Even relatively “old” media, such as the umble hard drive, can be used in strange new ways—I recently discovered the Thermaltake docking station, which to my amazement allows me to plug and remove a full-sized SATA hard drive into a slot for all the world as if it were a Nintendo cartridge.

To say nothing of the file format changes over the years—for example, going from the multitude of word processors, each with its own individual format, to the eventual domination (and yet continued frequent revision) of the Word Document. Small wonder that digital files are giving archivists conniptions!

But back in those days, there were all sorts of different film formats that were still in use because people still had cameras that used them—different cameras specialized to different purposes.

The technology of film really hadn’t changed much since the introduction of Kodachrome; all the innovation was in new cameras, which could still make great use of old film. It wasn’t like razor blades, where they change the format of the blades every so often and gradually price the older ones out of availability just to make you shell out for entirely new razors.

(And it’s not like today’s e-book readers, either, where every manufacturer has its own format and DRM. Film was a commodity, and film sizes were standards. It didn’t matter if your camera was a Kodak but you bought Fuji film—it would all work just the same.)

127 film was commonly used for amateur photographers, and was also a favorite for gift shop slide sets. 110 fit into tiny plastic bricks that fit film, lens, flash, and battery into a device compact enough to fit in one’s pocket—the predecessor of today’s cell phone cameras, I suppose. (And disc cameras, which I’d forgotten entirely until researching this, were about equivalent I guess.) And there were a number of others, too.

I’m not entirely sure what killed off 127 and 620 film—Kodak stopped making them in 1995, well before the advent of consumer-level digital photography. (And well after I’d stopped taking photos with those cameras, which is why I never noticed when it happened.) Perhaps the rise of cheap fixed-focus 35mm cameras and the benefit to retailers of standardizing on one common format were what really did them in. 110 held out all the way until 2009. You can still buy these film sizes from specialty outlets (at higher prices than you used to pay), but the days of finding them in Wal-Marts are long, long gone.

I’m sure that if you asked a photographer back in the 1990s if computer cameras would ever replace film, I have little doubt they would have insisted that it was impossible, that you couldn’t replace the optical qualities of film with computer graphics any more than you could replace film with video cameras. (Perhaps they would even have waxed eloquent about the smell of the darkroom chemicals, I don’t know.)

And yet here we are, with every film format except for 35mm all but gone, photo developing counters disappearing from the stores where they used to hold sway (such as the K-Mart where I used to work), and even 35mm camera manufacturers starting to discontinue some of their landmark 35mm lines. (Even 35mm movie-making is starting to go by the wayside, with developers such as Robert Rodriguez extolling the virtues of digital.)

It doesn’t seem to be a question of each format having advantages over the other that keeps it around—while there are still millions of perfectly functional film cameras out there, people are giving them up in droves. Perhaps some 35mm and other professional film photography will always be around, but the hearts and minds of the consumers who make up the mass market have already been won over.

It’s really hard to predict what the future holds for books versus e-books. Even though they’ve been around in one format or another for twenty years or more, it’s only been in the last couple of years that they’ve developed any sort of momentum. We’re still at the beginning of the real e-book revolution, and for all the pontification and prognostication on both sides, there’s only going to be one way to find out what the future holds for e- and tree-books: Wait for it to get here.

It’s funny to think that as we’re on the cusp of one digital revolution, I already had another one pass me by without even noticing it until glancing at an old camera took me back. In a way, both these revolutions were prefigured by the one that drew me out to where the camera was in the first place—old Route 66.

As shown in the Pixar movie Cars, the coming of the interstates brought a huge change to the way people travel the road. Was it an improvement? Well, it certainly gets more people from place to place faster (and cargo, too, leading to the near-obsolescence of another industry, the railroad). As to whether it helped overall quality of life, that might be arguable.

I guess what it comes down to is that new things replace old things all the time. You don’t have to look too far to find examples of that. This Techdirt piece talks about how Blockbuster (which is going to have to declare bankruptcy) was caught flat-footed by the success of Netflix—but Netflix is not resting on its laurels with the DVD-by-mail business model that killed Blockbuster, but already looking forward twenty years to when all movies stream digitally.

And it talks about how Kodak was caught flat-footed by the advance of digital photography, despite having ten years’ advance warning—bringing us full circle, I guess. The way that new innovations can drive out the old is called “creative destruction”—and while Techdirt applies it to business models there, I suppose it could apply just as readily to technologies.

It remains to be seen what it will mean for books.

Richmond writes:

Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work in one set of circumstances but not others. And there’s no good reason for the distinction. It’s not as if this is a piece of software that needs to be re-written for each new platform – it’s just text.

The limitation is artificial and it’s only there to prevent unauthorised copying but it’s a wasted effort because anyone who intends to share these books can remove the DRM in no time. As always with DRM, it’s the law-abiding customer who gets punished.

He goes on to explain how he used txtr to get around the Adobe DRM by uploading the e-books to its servers and then downloading them into the iPad app. He isn’t wholly satisfied with that solution, but supposes that “it’s a choice between that or nothing.” (He apparently didn’t investigate far enough to find one of the cracks that allow Adobe DRM to be removed while keeping the book in EPUB format, which would have allowed loading them directly into iBooks.)

Richmond compares the current situation of having his books spread across multiple e-book apps to “having bookshelves in four different rooms and not being allowed to move books between them”—a situation with which I can sympathize, given that I’m now having to diversify my own e-library since eReader and Fictionwise can no longer carry the titles I want to read.

Ironically, Richmond says, all content industries vow not to repeat the digital mistakes of the music industry—but the music industry has actually been getting its act together, while books, film, and TV continue to make it hard for consumers to enjoy their products.

None of this is exactly new, of course, but it is still nice to see it continues to be said. Maybe if enough people speak up, the content industries will begin to pay attention. It probably won’t happen, but we can dream, can’t we?

The paperwork has already been submitted to the European Commission in Brussels, but the two corporations have been keeping most details secret. Not much more is known about their plans, but there seems to be concern that this new development might imperil the plans of German trade association Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (roughly, “Association of German Book Trade”) to create a unified market with its Libreka format.

Shatzkin points out that there is still a lot left to do, however. He includes a litany of points explaining why DRM’s promulgation of the Tower of e-Babel (though he does not use this expression) is such a problem, but reflects that dropping it altogether is probably “a non-starter for the big houses because it will be a non-starter with most big authors and most big agents.”

He points out that the sales of 700,000 e-ink devices was dwarfed by the reported sales of 2 million iPads—so iPad readers only need to buy a third as many e-books to equal the sales revenue from those e-ink devices. (Actually, as of June 22, Apple announced that it had sold its 3 millionth iPad. Of course, the e-ink sales are estimated, since most e-reader sellers are keeping their real sales figures close to their chest.) And he mentions the recent round of price cuts on e-readers.

In short, Shatzkin says, “a much more diversified marketplace is developing for ebooks than publishers would have dared hope for a year ago.” And even more diverse options are coming, which will give consumers more choices in how and where they read their e-books.

Shatzkin concludes by bringing up the “Untethered” conference I mentioned in my last two posts:

There was a conference called Untethered last week. I didn’t go because it was an “all publishing” conference about technology, and I am skeptical about any horizontal approach. But there was a panel of publishing CEOs asked to estimate how much of book sales would be ebooks five years from now. The high guesses were 40-50%. I think they’re low. And if the question is what percentage of the books that are narrative writing are ebooks by five years from now, I think they are way low.

If he’s right, e-book readers and publishers alike may have some exciting times ahead.

“Ernesto” on the peer-to-peer news blog TorrentFreak takes a look at music industry sales statistics and points out that, as much as the RIAA likes to complain about it, piracy is actually not killing music sales. Ernesto notes that the digital music market—which would compete more directly with digital music piracy than the sale of physical CDs—shows no signs of faltering.

If digital piracy is such a problem one would expect that it will mostly hurt digital sales, but these are booming instead. Many younger people don’t even own a CD-player anymore, yet the music industry sees digital piracy as the main reason for the decline in physical sales. Strange, because digital piracy would be most likely to cannibalize digital sales.

Neither the article nor I would claim that piracy is a good thing, but as the Government Accountability Office noted last week, its effects are often grossly overstated in the studies that the various ‘AA organizations like to cite.

As I read the article, I wondered: what is going to happen when e-books make up a greater fraction of total publishing industry sales than they do now—enough to start cutting into physical sales, as people who would have bought paper books buy electronic ones instead?

Will e-book piracy—which has gone on for at least as long as there have been peer-to-peer networks, with only a few major legal skirmishes—be cited as a factor? Will piracy affect the sales of e-books in ways that digital music piracy does not seem to have affected the sales of digital music?

Or will people prefer to buy their e-books from the legal source?

It’s a good question, especially given that there are a number of key differences between the music and book industries. Most digital music is sold DRM-free these days, meaning that there is no disadvantage to consumers over the pirated media, plus the advantage that they know exactly what they’re getting.

The e-book market, on the other hand, is currently locked-down and fragmented by a confusing morass of multiple e-book and DRM formats. Consumers have little assurance that the e-books they buy today will still work for them tomorrow if the merchant selling them decides to get out of the e-book business. (Case in point: Fictionwise’s decision not to make a high-resolution iPad version of its eReader app.)

Consumers are left with the tongue-in-cheek advice given by xkcd’s hat guy (which, ironically, was about digital music in its original context, before iTunes was able to get rid of its own music DRM): if you crack the DRM, you break the law. If you pirate, you break the law. You might as well, the hat guy says, just pirate to begin with and save yourself some trouble.

And that’s not even getting into the problems some people have had with quality issues in the Kindle e-books they paid for.

In order to beat piracy, stores need to offer a more compelling product than the pirates do. That’s what iTunes is doing, by offering something just as good but more reliable than pirate wares, at a price that makes the decision to buy legally an easy one—but is by and large what most e-book stores are not doing. When push comes to shove, e-books may have a harder row to hoe than e-music.

Publishing Perspectives

To English-speaking e-book fans, of course, fragmentation is nothing new; there has not been a single cohesive format for e-books since they first gained popularity back in the 1990s. In France, a similar situation has arisen: each publisher is releasing books on its own distribution platform.

A report commissioned by France’s Culture Minister proposes that a single platform be created for the distribution of e-books. However, French publishers reacted to this about as well as you might expect Apple, Amazon, and Google would respond to the notion that they should post all their books together on “iAmaGoo”.

The publishers suggest, instead, a “hub” whereby retailers would be able to sell e-books from any given platform via one access point. Because French publishers consider control of their file systems to be very important, this may be as close as France’s government is going to get.

I find it interesting how much some things are universal. We have a confusing “Tower of E-Babel” problem over here, especially with regard to the third-party e-book readers whose manufacturers do not run their own e-book stores. But it appears France has its own “Eiffel Tower of E-Babel,” though in that case it seems to cause more trouble for retailers than for consumers.

And both countries seem to have about the same likelihood of resolving it any time soon.

Related:

• France: Hachette Livre wants publishers to join their digital platform; Google and Amazon must agree to publishers’ pricing
• French book retailers seek help to create ‘national e-book platform’

Libraries from around the world were visitors this year. Wright State University Libraries did an article on Read an E-Book Week and produced lapel button templates. Several libraries in Canada and the U.S. contacted me for the templates so they could produce buttons for their own staff.

Visitors came from 137 countries speaking 74 languages. Countries included: U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, India, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, Peru, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Cuba and American Samoa.Two websites partnering for the week were non-English speaking: one from Spain and one from Venezuela.

The intent for the website was to be content rich – to provide more than just a list of places to get free e-books. Aside from the participating partners page, two very popular pages on the site were the review of the PocketBook e-reader and Sara Rosso’s article on the benefits of e-books. The high hits on those pages indicates that people came for information as well as books.

Several independent blogs asked an interesting question during the event – “Where are the major book publishers?” Good question. Since most of the major book publishers offer e-book versions of their print books, it would be nice to see involvement from them next year. Participation doesn’t have to mean giving away a free e-book. Public reading events using all manner of devices for reading e-books would be one option, or a reading challenge through their book clubs.

Rita Toews

founder – Read an E-Book Week

Gizmodo

The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa.

And don’t expect that DRM to be going away any time soon:

You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will rage with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at leasttry to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?

It also explains why every device except the Kindle reads EPUB, and the way the Kindle’s Mobipocket-based formats and Barnes & Noble’s eReader-based format hark back to PDA legacy formats.

I found it particularly interesting that the article complained about the chance of getting an eReader-format book when you want an EPUB-format one, given that we carried a story about someone in exactly the opposite situation.

The article concludes with the suggestion that creating custom apps to contain books might be the way to go. (I’m not entirely sure whether it’s talking about appbooks, or just individual apps from specific publishers.)

One amusing note: at the end, the article suggests that scanned-comic piracy will “explode” when the iPad comes out, now that a good screen will exist for reading those colored pages.

I suspect that Buchanan probably has not checked out the Internet comic piracy scene lately, given that it is possible to find just about any comic you want on BitTorrent already. But just wait—as soon as the iPad comes out, I’ll bet you that even though the amount of it does not change much, everybody will be Macaulay Culkin-faceslapping in horror how much of a Problem it suddenly is.

I don’t agree with everything the article has to say, but it makes a good primer on the “Tower of E-Babel” problem. Worth a look.