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‘Does the book industry want to get Napsterized?’ Slate Magazine’s Jack Shafer warns against price gouges
July 16, 2009 | 2:56 am
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By David Rothman
“The book publishers are in the process of picking a fight with Amazon and other sellers over the pricing of e-books. If the publishers are lucky, they’ll lose.” – Slate’s Jack Shafer.
The TeleRead take: Astutely, he warns that the higher prices will lead to lots and lots of piracy, especially as the hardware improves. And not just reader but also scanners. Excerpt:
“No title is safe from file-sharing. As the Instructables Web site detailed a couple of months ago, a do-it-yourself, high-speed book scanner can be made for about $300. The file for a hefty book like Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is about the size of a five-minute MP3 and can be downloaded in a couple of minutes. Does the book industry want to join the digital flow, the way the TV industry has with Hulu and TV.com? Or by its obstruction does it intend to encourage the establishment of a Bookster?”
Notice Jack’s use of the S word–scanner? Damn! When are the book biz biggies going to understand that all the DRM in the world isn’t going to protect against OCRing?
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Comments:
David Rothman said:
“When are the book biz biggies going to understand that all the DRM in the world isn’t going to protect against OCRing?”
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Aren’t consumer-grade scanners an 80′s technology?
Most of those folks are still stuck in the disco era.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the big publishers think they’re in the print business rather than the book business. Either that or there are Hollywood level shenanigans going on in the accounting practices for hardcovers…
It can’t be bad economic education, after all; everybody understands that 20% of $9.99 times a million is a heck of a lot better deal than 30% of $20 times 250,000. Maybe they don’t understand the concept of elastic demand?
As the saying goes: stupidity is its own cure.
I think the biggest protection against OCRing is the lack of quality. If, for example, I could get a free OCR copy of book X with the typical and numerous OCR errors, or I could pay $9.99 for the same book without the OCR errors, then I would pony up the cash.
I suppose there are some people would willingly trade the many mistakes for a free copy, but to me the annoyance factor for the free is the cost and it is more than I want to pay.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the book industry got “Napsterized” *regardless* of book prices. There’s a growing resistance to paying for any kind of media. I don’t see that changing absent major new developments.
I don’t think anyone is really worrying about book scanning if there are already digital copies since the DRM is usually stripped in less than a minute with about as much effort as checking your email. The real use of scanning is probably best described by the Harry Potter books. Everyone knows JKR will never authorize e-versions, so no one really had any apprehension in scanning, proofing, and releasing e-versions within 24 hours of publication. As for OCR technology, it’s come along way since the 80′s. Take a look at the Fujitsu Scansnap which captures 20 pages dual sided colour in PDF and then uses high quality OCR to produce e-documents. If it is good enough for converting business and legal documents, I imagine it would work for books too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tTn8v6zmwM
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oH3mQZLpL8