Shatzkin got into e-books at about the same time and in the same way I did: reading them on his Palm Pilot back in the late 1990s. He watched the first few waves of dedicated e-readers fail miserably, and concluded that people simply wouldn’t be interested in reading on a device too large to fit in a hip pocket. He expected the Kindle to be more of the same, but instead it proved successful enough to give the e-book market the jump start it had been needing.

His other mistake had to do with the idea that on-line communities would make natural marketplaces that businesses could target for sales—for example, that publishers could get into direct sales of e-books to their customers, rather than selling them through the various on-line stores. But the failure of OpenSky’s original business model, aimed at doing just that kind of direct-to-community selling, started to change his mind, and then he encountered this article suggesting that the philosophy behind J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore site will lead to market fragmentation as people have to go to separate places to find the books they want. Rowling will probably sell fewer copies of the Harry Potter e-books through Pottermore than she would have through the on-line bookstores, Shatzkin posits, because it misses out on the people who would have snagged the books as low-hanging fruit from the on-line stores they were shopping already but can’t be bothered to go seek them out from someplace else.

Shatzkin does point out that there are some companies—F+W Media, Interweave, and O’Reilly are the examples he mentions—that successfully sell direct to on-line communities (he could have mentioned Baen, as well, but for some reason nobody ever does), but points out that they are all specialized cases that may not be applicable to publishers in general. (And I must admit that Baen, being a relatively small-scale SF publishing imprint, probably is too.) He nonetheless hopes that Google’s e-book sales program could lead to the development of more individualized, community-targeted stores that can help publishing sell more in aggregate by reaching out to particular communities that are not as well served by the major stores.

The idea, writes Joe Wilkert on his blog, is to use the agile model of software startups—”release early and release often”—both to encourage purchases and to collect useful feedback on the manuscript.

Here’s some more info on the book itself from the product page:

Every Book Is a Startup provides a roadmap for publishing professionals interested in bringing a fresh, entrepreneurial approach to the business of book publishing, based on techniques proven effective in the world of tech startups. This book shows you how to apply tech industry concepts such as customer development, validated learning, and pivots to create publishing business practices that are agile, flexible, and highly profitable.

Here at O’Reilly Media, we’ve incorporated many of these techniques into our own publishing business, including “release early, release often.” With that in mind, the initial release of this project discusses two core ideas for how this new way of thinking can be applied to book publishing, and solicits your ideas about what we might include in future releases of this book. What do you want to know more about? Would a variety of case studies be helpful? Let us know!

miniTOC Portland provides an opportunity for Portland’s publishing and tech luminaries to share how they are forging ahead in the publishing/tech/content space. The best and brightest of PDX’s art, business, craft and technology leaders will be gathered for a day of collaboration and connecting around their shared love of the bookish.

If you’re in the area and want to attend, regular admission is $99, or $25 if you’re a student.

Via Joe Wilkert’s Publishing 2020 Blog

Here at Teleread we’ve highlighted a couple of websites that offer a related service. Book Buzzes watches Amazon and alerts you when an author has a new book coming out, while BookWatch is an iOS app that performs a similar service for iBooks. But those are linked to single bookstores and don’t watch for articles, posts and tweets.

Wikert thinks Amazon should just roll out a Kindle product that addresses this need:

Why not just have an author feed subscription via the Kindle? Yes, Amazon sells blog feed subscriptions, but that’s a ripoff and I’m looking for more. I don’t want something I can get via an RSS reader for free. I want a combined feed of the author’s blog, their Twitter activity and any publication/website they write for. All in one. I’d be willing to pay a modest amount for this ($10/year?), at least for the 4 or 5 authors I care most about. And heck, go ahead and include some advertisements in it if necessary.

The easy solution, if you’re an author and you want to do this, is to do it yourself by setting up a catch-all blog that you maintain. But of course the more interesting problem is figuring out a way to create this service for every author, not just the ones good at self-promotion and social networking.

Could a service like Google’s authorship markup help provide the basis for a more automated and scalable solution? The Google approach currently isn’t much help here at solving Wikert’s problem, because all authorship roads lead back to a Google Profile page, and a typical Google Profile is frequently cluttered with third-party content the person finds interesting. But I think it points to a possible solution.

“Why Can’t I Subscribe to an Author?” [Kindleville]
(Photo: simon.carr)

He points out that Apple has a particularly good change notification and explanation system in its app store updates tab, and it would be ideal to have something similar for books.

I think it’s a huge problem waiting to be solved. Plenty of publishers, including mine, have taken the first step by offering free downloads each time an author makes a big change to an ebook file. But what’s missing is a convenient, reader-friendly system that lets everyone know what’s new. Currently, you have to grab and install the revised edition and then figure out where the changes are. What a hassle.

Meyers looks at a couple of publishers—a technical book publisher and a sports blog—that have change update notification methods, and how those methods fall short. And he sketches out a design idea for an update system that would provide comprehensive information on exactly what points changed, right down to a diff-style window of before-and-after notes.

Of course, even if there was an idea form for tracking book changes, e-book vendors would still need to be convinced to use it. And it’s not clear whether Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple could be convinced that retrofitting such a structure into their stores would be a good use of time and money.

(Found via republication at O’Reilly Radar.)

Misener spoke to publishing consultant Brian O’Leary, who reports that DRM-cracked pirated e-books are becoming increasingly more common—but that doesn’t necessarily mean piracy is having a bigger impact.

O’Leary makes the distinction between the instances of e-book piracy (the number of pirated e-book files available for download) and the impact of e-book piracy (the actual effect on the business of publishing). For O’Leary, the two are related, but different. He says that one way to measure impact is to pick a book, wait for it to be pirated, and then compare sales before and after.

Back in 2009, O’Leary did this for one publisher, O’Reilly Media, which publishes technical books. Surprisingly, he found that sales actually increased after their books showed up on pirate sites. Piracy seems to have boosted sales. O’Leary says people may have been using the pirated editions to sample books before they actually opened up their wallets.

Of course, as Misener points out, this is just one example, and doesn’t necessarily support generalizing to the entire publishing industry. But at least it shows that “piracy harms book sales” is not universally true.

O’Leary also points out succinctly that “Piracy really is the consequence of not meeting consumer demand.” There are plenty of cases where people who would otherwise buy the e-books legitimately are left with no way to get them.

"I think the average consumer cares about getting the content that they want, when they want it, in the format that they want, without a lot of overhead, at a reasonable price," says Brian O’Leary. "I think that publishers who realize that and organize their work and their publishing strategies to address those needs are going to succeed."

Nothing new in that, of course, but maybe if enough people say it, the industry might finally get around to listening.

The first question has to do with the “death of print”. O’Reilly points out that print probably won’t die, but electronic media will transform what a “book” is. He uses an example of electronic maps, such as Google Maps—no longer static things that just sit on the page, they now show you not only where to go but also how to get there, and in some cases what you can do once you are there.

So the question we need to be asking ourselves about e-books is, are there similar transformations that we can expect in what we think of as the book and it becoming electronic. That’s where the really interesting game is going to be played—in making it new. We’re already seeing this in [Rupert Murdoch’s] The Daily. It’s just too close to the current conception of a newspaper. Meanwhile, FlipBoard and news.me did something much more interesting by turning your Twitter feeds into a kind of realtime newspaper. That’s a completely different approach and angle of competition that newspapers didn’t really think about. I look at news.me instead of the New York Times in the morning. The user interface is perfect for using on a tablet, great for scanning interesting news when you want to have your cup of coffee and just see what’s happening in the world. And it’s curated out of my social network. So you know that kind of transformation is going to happen to e-books as well.

He mentions that the technical/self-help book market has changed considerably over the last few years, with reference titles waning as it became possible to find out freely online how to do a lot of the stuff that those books would have formerly covered. As for the books that do still sell, O’Reilly finds that people reading the books as PDFs on the PC are willing to pay higher prices than those who want to read them on their phones. He is still working on finding exactly the right price points.

On the second page of the interview, O’Reilly reiterates his stance on piracy. He finds it is not much of a problem, because most of the pirates wouldn’t have bought it anyway—but the wider-circulated the pirated material is, the more likely it is someone who will buy it will see it.

Let’s say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let’s say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome? I think having 100,000 in circulation and selling 10,000 is way better than having just the 10,000 that are paid for and nobody else benefits.

People who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway. We’re delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.

He also points out (correctly) that DRM interferes with the user experience, and you don’t sell more copies by making it harder for people to use your product.

He also suggests that, by making it possible to read a Kindle e-book on almost every non-e-reader device you own in addition to the Kindle, Amazon is “effectively” dropping DRM—a barrier that isn’t a barrier isn’t a barrier. While I wouldn’t entirely agree with that, and I’m sure a number of TeleRead readers wouldn’t either, I can see his point.

When the interviewer presses him on the issue, asking what if Amazon really ditched DRM, making piracy easier, O’Reilly points out that there are a lot of people who can’t or won’t take free stuff but won’t think of paying a couple of bucks for a legitimate copy of it. He adds that there are things that can be done outside of DRM to reduce piracy—locking down accounts that see suspicious downloading activity, for instance—and that DRM has never itself been proven to work.

But to me the analogy is: yes, there are people who break into your house, and if you live in a really high-crime neighborhood, maybe you have bars on your windows. But if you live in an ordinary neighborhood you don’t put bars on your windows just because somebody could easily break the glass and get into your house, because guess what? Most of the time people don’t. And when they do, we send police after them to check it out. The whole model that says we must somehow lock things up so that no harm is possible permeates a lot of our psyche.

On the third page, he talks about the Google Books lawsuit, and suggests that in the future the lawsuit will be looked upon as a textbook case of stupidity—when Google offered an avenue for publishers to compete against Amazon, the publishers sued them instead of taking advantage of it.

Finally, he suggests reasons why people might still want to submit works to traditional publishers even in a self-publishing age.

There are several things that they’ll offer, and they’re at different levels of value. Publishers overestimate the value of some and underestimate the value of others. First off, they offer a marketing advantage. They don’t offer that today in e-books, but somebody will have to figure that out. Building a brand, having lesser-known authors draft better-known authors, building out a fanbase. It’s different for genre fiction versus professional books or even literary fiction. With genre fiction, the brand of the publisher really matters, and in literary fiction it doesn’t, at least not very much. It’s like being plugged into the network of people who share. One of O’Reilly’s advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don’t have that database it’s hard to get the attention of the market.

Not everybody will agree with O’Reilly’s points, but certainly nobody can accuse him of being a newcomer to the publishing business. He’s been around since the ‘80s, and is just about the only publisher of his era still around as an independent company.

As O’Reilly points out, the publishing industry is going to be changing a lot over the next few years. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

Sattersten points out that the main issue at hand is consumer perception of value. Consumers see that everything else digital is cheaper than the physical equivalent, and think e-books vs. books should be the same way. He brings up the example of a print book that’s cheaper than an e-book, explaining “That creates a short circuit in customers’ brains. You don’t pay more for things that are more convenient. You pay less.”

And he addresses the issue of Amazon discounting, and attributes a motivation to Amazon that I hadn’t considered:

What’s interesting is that Amazon is actively discounting books in the 40% to 50% range, and in many cases putting the price of the print book very close to the price of the ebook. There can’t be any margin left at those prices. Amazon, having lost the ability to control ebook pricing, is saying to customers "ebooks and print books are the same." This drives more people to ebooks (who doesn’t want to download their book now?), sells more Kindles, and further cements their place in publishing’s future — both provider of new and destroyer of old (what bookstore can compete with 49% off?). Also, notice how Amazon is redefining short writings with their Singles program. Fewer words, lower prices and, most importantly, a new (not very good) term to attach to the new value proposition.

He also points out a fundamental pricing disconnect between traditionally published e-books at $9.99 to $19.99 being sold in the same store as self-published 99-cent e-books. “The wide range of pricing destroys pricing power.”

He suggests that one way publishers might cope with the new lower price point is to shorten e-book length, and try serializing e-books the way some game companies are now experimenting with serializing their games, splitting them up across two or more 99-cent applications.

I’m not so sure that’s necessarily the best idea from the perspective of a book reader. Seems to me that kind of thing was tried a few years back in paperback with The Green Mile, and if it had been successful then we’d probably have seen more of that kind of thing. We haven’t yet. On the other hand, being able to pay 99 cents for a chunk of a book would allow people to find out cheaply whether they want to continue reading enough to buy the whole thing.

Still, it would be nice if publishers would try to streamline and reduce inefficiency and bring prices down that way. Getting rid of the antediluvian system of unsold returns would be one way to start. (Of course, given the choice between lowering prices and sucking up extra profit, I’m not too sure publishers can find their way around a price-demand curve, but that could just be me.)

If you’re actually donating money directly, I’ve been told that Japan’s disaster relief now has just about all the money it needs, and it’s better to make a donation to places that can make a difference in more parts of the world, like Doctors Without Borders. But on the other hand, 50% off DRM-free O’Reilly e-books would be a great deal even without knowing your money’s going to a good cause.

The City of Lost Wages

One common theme seems to be feeling deprived of income by pirates. Celine Chatillon wrote:

Every pirated book is a royalty (about 50 cents in most cases) that I do NOT earn. I’m unemployed and in poor health with no health insurance currently… I could have used the money from THOUSANDS of my books that were e-pirated through one pirate site alone (that I know of). These books were essentially stolen from me and my publishers.

But the thing is, how many of those thousands of books actually represent lost royalties? How many people sitting in the comfort of their homes browsing pirate sites would have decided to go out and buy the book if they couldn’t have gotten it free on-line? How many of them would have even bothered to click over to Amazon and order it without having to bestir their lazy butts from their chairs? Probably not many. (They’d probably just have pirated something else instead.)

I agree that even if lost money isn’t involved, piracy is certainly illegal and usually wrong. Authors should have the right to control how their works are disseminated. But in painting each download as a lost sale that would have meant money in their pocket, a lot of anti-pirate authors are fooling themselves, as well as totally failing to connect with any pirates who might otherwise be shown the error of their ways.

After all, the pirates know for a fact that they wouldn’t have bought the book anyway, so the author is not out any money they would otherwise have gotten from them. And using themselves as an example, they doubt any other downloaders would have either. So if that author is so out of touch with reality as to think they would, why should they believe anything else the author says about being hurt by piracy?

An Industry Perspective

There are also some appeals to authority going on as writers discount the opinions of non-publishing-industry folks for their lack of understanding from within the industry. Rowena Cherry writes:

Whenever apologists for those who infringe copyright produce their arguments, sooner or later they cite a professor, doctor, or some institution of higher learning.

The trouble with these folks is that they are not experts in piracy or e-publishing. They are not qualified to opine upon e-book piracy, in my opinion. They live by a different set of rules. They enjoy an educational exemption.

(She goes on to rail against the Chafee Amendment to the DMCA, which entitles non-profits who work with the blind to create and disseminate e-books to them without paying the authors, but that’s another matter that was addressed eight years ago by writer/editor Eric Flint.)

However, there are plenty of industry folks, writers and publishers, who would disagree with the positions these authors are taking. That’s not to say they’re necessarily right (or that these authors are), but they’re certainly not the ivory-tower academics of Ms. Cherry’s comment. So, here are a few examples:

Moira Rogers

Bree, half of the urban fantasy romance writing duo “Moira Rogers”, made a thorough post to their blog explaining why, even though they strongly dislike piracy, they feel that getting bothered enough to go out of their way to fight it is a waste of time they could otherwise spend writing more books that make them money.

I believe firmly that the only solution for piracy is the iTunes solution. Make it easy, affordable, and more convenient than piracy. No, that won’t stop piracy. Nothing will stop piracy. But it’s the first step in regaining some control of the situation. Lazy people will pay, and I’m speaking as a lazy person.

For now? I ignore piracy. (Mostly: I will discuss my exceptions later.) At this point I have no proof that piracy is hurting me. My sales are not going down–but they are slowly shifting to 3rd party venues. I believe that some epublished authors are not giving the growing 3rd party market enough consideration when they look at their first month’s sales totals and scream Oh no, piracy has ended my career!

Tim O’Reilly

And here’s a post from eight years ago by tech-book publisher Tim O’Reilly, that has often been quoted and re-quoted by others since then. O’Reilly famously referred to piracy as “progressive taxation” that might cost best-selling artists a few bucks but often brings considerably more attention to artists laboring in obscurity.

I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. What’s more, she has introduced me to her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And no, she isn’t downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical forebears in other genres. This is music that is difficult to find — except online — but, once found, leads to a focused search for CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity.

O’Reilly puts his money where his mouth is. Like Baen, all O’Reilly e-books are sold DRM-free.

Eric Flint

And speaking of Baen, writer and editor Eric Flint has long been a proponent of giving things away free legitimately, and dismissive of the negative effects piracy (and other bugaboos, such as used bookstores and, gasp, libraries) is alleged to have. In fact, he’s written so much on the matter, between Prime Palaver and Salvos Against Big Brother, that it’s hard to pick out any one particular piece. But here’s part of a Salvos Against Big Brother column from 2007:

Yes, it’s irritating to authors to see their work posted up on the Internet without their permission, especially when the deed is accompanied by a virtual raspberry from a superannuated juvenile delinquent bragging about it. But the fact remains that the material damage done to authors by such activity is so minimal that it can barely be distinguished from zero— if there’s any material damage at all, which I doubt.

I am not guessing about this. The reason I initially put up my first novel for free online was because I got fed up reading the hysterical howls of some authors in online discussion groups, shrieking that their livelihood was being mortally threatened.

To prove that was nonsense, as graphically as I could, I put up one of my own novels for free. “Pirated myself,” if you’ll allow me the absurd expression. That novel, Mother of Demons, has been available online for free for almost seven years now. And . . .

It’s still in print, and still keeps selling.

Flint (along with his publisher, the late Jim Baen) followed this up by creating the Baen Free Library as an adjunct to Baen’s DRM-free low-cost Webscriptions program—and then coming up with the idea of binding CD-ROMs full of authors’ works into first-edition printings of selected hardcovers—and allowing them to be distributed for free.

One Baen fan even posts downloadable disk images and browseable directories of the CDs on his website—with permission. Many of these disks contain a majority or the entirety of the author’s other works—all available for free. Authors with giveaway CDs include Flint, David Weber, David Drake, and John Ringo. (It’s hard to imagine the Marxist Flint and the staunch conservative Ringo agreeing on anything at all, but they both see the value of giving away free e-books!) Even Lois M. Bujold, who was originally reluctant to participate in Baen’s freebies on the advice of her agent, has put (nearly) every Vorkosigan book on a free CD bound into her latest novel.

Oddly enough, Baen e-books are among the least often pirated of any mass-market books—because the pirates know they can already be had cheaply or freely by legitimate means.

Cory Doctorow

And Cory Doctorow is another author who is a proponent of giving it away for free. While some would say that Doctorow is one of those big-name writers whose reputation means he can afford to give e-books away for free, Doctorow got that reputation in the first place by…giving his books away for free. Before Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, he was only known for being an offbeat pop-culture blogger on BoingBoing—which is well and good for people who read offbeat pop-culture blogs, but they aren’t necessarily the same people who buy books.

In an essay reprinted in his freely-given-away book Content, Doctorow writes:

There’s no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books–but I’ve done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I’ll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher’s expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there’s no way to be sure.

What is certain is that every writer who’s tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more.

He also notes that SF fans are in general very affectionate toward books they like, and tend to be early adopters of new technologies.

Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through “bookwarez” channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF.

Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O’Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, “being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement.” I’d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.

Amazon.com

Over the last couple of years, major bookseller Amazon has been giving away the first books in series for free on the Kindle, and publishers, agents, and authors are often finding that they act as “gateway drugs” for readers to buy the rest of the writers’ series. (Sound familiar? Oh hey, Baen Free Library!)

“Giving people a sample is a great way to hook people and encourage them to buy more,” said Suzanne Murphy, group publisher of Scholastic Trade Publishing, which offered free downloads of “Suite Scarlett,” a young-adult novel by Maureen Johnson, for three weeks in the hopes of building buzz for the next book in the series, “Scarlett Fever,” out in hardcover on Feb. 1. The book went as high as No. 3 on Amazon’s Kindle best-seller list.

And Amazon benefits, too—they also lure existing fans of those writers to the Kindle e-book platform. Of course, not all publishers are fans of this practice, including some who feel it “devalues” books. (Why is it that when publishers say something “devalues” books, what they really mean is they want customers to pay more than they already are? Did nobody teach them about the price-demand curve?)

Nathan Henrion

These Amazon giveaways have been good for more writers and publishers than just those who work with the Big Six. Earlier this year I mentioned Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher, who reported big sales of later books in its series came from Amazon listing one of his titles for free.

Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

Janis Ian

Creative artists who have embraced piracy are not confined solely to the print publishing industry, either. Folk musician Janis Ian discovered that, thanks to piracy, her recordings were finding an entirely new audience.

My site gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When the original Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded “Society’s Child” or “At Seventeen” for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But… that translates into $2,700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.

And apparently her article (please forgive pun) struck a chord with the Internet audience. Even she was startled by the immense response it brought. And though she is talking about the music industry here, her further advice could translate to just about any content industry you care to name with a little search-and-replacing of words:

Do I still believe downloading is not harming the music industry? Yes, absolutely. Do I think consumers, once the industry starts making product they want to buy, will still buy, even though they can download? Yes. Water is free, but a lot of us drink bottled water because it tastes better. You can get coffee at the office, but you’re likely to go to Starbucks or the local espresso place and bring it back to the office with you, because that coffee tastes better. When record companies start making CD’s that offer consumers a reason to buy them, as illustrated by Kevin’s email at the end of this article, consumers will buy them. The songs may be free on line, but the CD’s will taste better.

Give It Away, Give It Away Now

And it’s not only anecdotal evidence, either. At the risk of taking a quick trip to an ivory tower, a BYU study has shown a correlation between free e-books and increases in sales in a lot of cases. (Oddly enough, the only case where there wasn’t an increase in sales was for the free e-books being given away by Tor.com, who only made them available for limited times.)

I will grant that some of the above references are to giving books away for free intentionally, rather than piracy, but there really isn’t much difference in the two practices apart from intent. Either way, the book can be downloaded by anyone who cares enough to figure out how.

It probably does help sales more to give the book away for free on a site like the Baen Free Library where people can download it easily, without having to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to download it illegitimately. (And since I’ve started working phone tech support for a major computer service company, my estimate of the number of people smart enough to figure out how to download pirated e-books has gone way down.) But if letting everyone download for free doesn’t hurt, I find it hard to believe that letting just those who know how do so can hurt either.

Again, this is not to say that piracy is right. The decision of whether or not to give away a book should rest with its author. But the aforementioned authors, publishers, and musician—people who have real-world industry experience, and who make their living from their creative works, not “a professor, doctor, or some institution of higher learning” in the bunch (well, okay, except for that BYU study, but that’s just garnish)—find that it doesn’t actually hurt and in at least some cases helps. So, if piracy actually does help, the question of right or wrong may end up being irrelevant.

The biggest gain has been seen by EPUB format, which seems to account for about 25%, followed by Mobipocket with a respectable 15% or so (not too surprising given that this is the format of the Kindle). Android application files and DAISY files make up the remainder.

Much like Baen’s, O’Reilly’s e-book sales include the right to download DRM-free versions of the book in any available format—someone who has bought an O’Reilly book might download just one format or several depending on their needs.

The chart tracks the total number of downloads in all formats, but does not reveal increases or decreases in overall unit sales (though Savikas notes “we’re already running well ahead of last year’s full-year total with a quarter still to go”). As some commenters point out, this makes it hard to figure out whether the total quantity of PDFs being downloaded has gone down, or whether it’s just that more people are downloading other formats too.

Still, I think that the rise of alternative formats is probably attributable to the rise of e-book reader apps and devices that use those formats—the Kindle’s Mobipocket and most other readers’ EPUB have shown the biggest increases, while mostly-read-on-computer-screen PDFs have been going down. It will be interesting to see what the trend looks like in another two years.

(Found via EBookNewser.)

McGuire explains that, as digital information, there should be a lot more that we can do with e-books than we actually are doing with them now. The idea that e-books should be confined to being simply digital representations of paper text without additions or improvements, he feels, is there only because businesses are too scared to envision how the face of the publishing industry could change if the digital nature of e-books was taken to its logical conclusion.

What’s striking about this state of affairs — though not surprising, given the conservative nature of the publishing business, and the complete unknowns about business models — is that we define ebooks by a laundry list of things one cannot do with them:

• You cannot deep link into an ebook — say to a specific page or paragraph chapter or image or table
• Indeed you cannot really "link" to an ebook, only various access points to instances of that ebook, because there is no canonical "ebook" to link to … there is no permalink for a chapter, and no Uniform Resource Locator (url) for an ebook itself
• You (usually) cannot copy and paste text, the most obvious thing one might wish to do
• You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal, written in 1942 — even if they are from the same publisher

McGuire adds that the EPUB spec is essentially a way of making a book into a self-contained website that doesn’t look like a website. Given that an EPUB e-book is a “website” already, he argues, all that is really necessary is for publishers to produce APIs that let e-books interface with the Internet to allow people to do far more with them than it is possible to do now.

Of course, there is a lot that McGuire does not say. Such as that for this to happen, publishers are probably going to need to give up on or at least radically alter the way they do DRM, because DRM is all about keeping e-books locked away from copying, and locked into that bookseller’s own specific platform. Opening books to web interconnectivity will at least require some considerable re-thinking of how that DRM works.

And I think there’s also a bit of “if you build it they will come” built into the assumptions McGuire makes. Do people want books to “live properly within the Internet”? I don’t entirely buy that people don’t want it to happen “because we just don’t know what business would look like” if it did. Maybe that’s how businesses think, but something that a lot of consumers are thinking about is privacy.

It’s evident that people are still worried about privacy, even if we now live in more of a panopticon age than ever. Witness the recent kerfuffles over Google’s Buzz implementation revealing private details of users’ accounts, Facebook’s ever-evolving privacy policies, and LiveJournal’s new crossposting-to-Facebook feature that threatened to include comments from private or friends-locked journal entries.

And books and one’s reading habits are often entirely private matters, especially if the books in question are e-books. Certainly when I’m reading I don’t want people intruding to ask me what I’m reading or how I like it. And erotica e-books have historically been very good sellers for the very reason that they have no revealing covers to give away what they are. And people are happy with that.

So when I think about Hugh McGuire saying that the distinction between e-books and the Internet may disappear, I then think of the average reader scratching his head and wondering, “Why would I want my e-book to be connected to the Internet? How will that make my reading experience any better? I’ve never needed my paper books to be connected to the Internet before.”

Given that nothing about actually reading a book requires that it be connected to the Internet, and a connection to the Internet could potentially reveal things that the person reading the book doesn’t want revealed, I’m just having a hard time seeing why this is all that desirable.

From the Tools of Change blog comes important information for those with disabilities:

For years we’ve supplied our digital files to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, our books are made available worldwide, and we’ve really enjoyed working with Jim Fruchterman and the Bookshare team along the way (I’m also on their Advisory Board).

 

Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Bookshare provides, and either don’t qualify for access via Bookshare, or would prefer to pay for the ebooks. Through a collaboration with Bookshare, today we’ve started making DAISY files available within our ebook bundles on oreilly.com for more than 800 titles. If you’ve already bought an oreilly.com ebook, you can find the DAISY files on your account page at https://members.oreilly.com or http://oreilly.com/e on a mobile device.

 

Our mission at O’Reilly is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators, and making our books available in accessible DAISY format helps us accomplish that mission.

 

There’s more details on the DAISY format from the DAISY Consortium, including a list of software and hardware reading systems.

One reader that isn’t mentioned in the O’Reilly article is the new Sharp device (pictured above). Sharp’s President Mikio Katayama becomes the latest electronics exec to trash-talk the iPad, claiming the device will “rival” Apple’s tablet and may well feature a color LCD display and possibly even glassesless 3D. (Cool, that would mean we could finally read Google Books without needing special goggles!)