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By Chris Meadows

At least, that is what this IdeaLogical Blog article on complexity in the e-book market (found via @stanza_reader’s Twitter)  seems to be saying. The thrust of the article is that e-book publishers are threatened by an Amazon monopoly, in that Amazon can control pricing, distribution, and so forth.

But [the publishers] could be saved by an ebook world so complicated that only the savviest players will be able to cover every corner of it. Coming up is the next big multiplier of complexity: when web sites start selling ebook downloads (or access) to the books that suit the vertical interests of their site visitors. The method for exploiting those opportunities in the printed book world was an affililate relationship with Amazon or BN.com because you needed somebody to manage delivery of a physical volume and they did it. In the ebook world, they’re just another unnecessary middle player. The stores will go straight to the ebook aggregators — Ingram or Content Reserve — or work directly with publishers if they have enough product to engage the vertical audience.

Of course, even if this is an accurate analysis, what is good for the publishers is not necessarily good for the readers. In some respects, what is good for publishers might be the exact opposite of what is good for the readers. The higher a publisher can charge, the more a reader will have to pay, after all.

Google Books in the Cloud

Something else brought up in the article as a side point is that Google plans to sell its Google Books as cloud-only: you access them on-line via browser rather than saving them to disk. The article notes, under this system “any concern about piracy goes away. If you can’t grab the file, you can’t ‘share’ it.” The article goes on to claim:

This is game-changing in a very dramatic way. If you’re reading on a web browser, then there are no format issues. And if you don’t have the whole file, there are no piracy issues.

I don’t know about you, but these days whenever I hear someone describe something as “game-changing,” I take a firm hold on my wallet.

What the article does not say is that if there is a way for a computer to display data, there will be a way for the owner of that computer to access (and save) the data. It’s a truism of the Internet age—just look at all the YouTube stream rippers out there. It won’t take long for someone to make a Google Book ripper; the hackers out there will take it as a personal challenge.

Even if that were not the case, I doubt I would ever buy a book I could not access from off-line. I’m off-line far too often for that to be convenient.

 
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