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By David Rothman

imageP has it all over E for book signings, Rob Preece says. And no one can accuse Rob of being anti-E—he’s a TeleBlog regular and the guy behind BooksForABuck.com.

That said, Rob, are you sure authors couldn’t sign E in a satisfying way—and I don’t just mean scrawls on CDs?

Space for an image file

One of the advantages of the nonDRMed approach is that it might be easier to include a “space” in an e-book for an image file containing a writer’s handwritten inscription to an individual reader. Tthat would be one way to justify somewhat higher prices for customers with a special loyalty to a writer like, say John Scalzi. And if nothing else, it would be the ultimate form of Social DRM. Someone with an inscribed version, I suspect, is much less likely to turn pirate. Besides, for most Long Tail books, as many have noted, the real problem is obscurity, not piracy. At any rate, autographed E might be a nice rev stream for Long Tail authors with passionate followers.

Authentic sigs and bragging rights in the Real World

image For good measure, incidentally, there could still be some kind of digital watermarking, registration, whatever, to assure that a signed copy was indeed authentic. Perhaps ways could even exist for customers to display the inscriptions in their blogs or print them out for display in the real world. Imagine a Neal Gaiman signature with his photo and personal inscription appearing  in the frame resting on the fireplace mantel shown here.

I may or may not be the first to propose the basic idea of signing E, probably not. Tom Peters, an E-hip librarian, once talked about the possibility of e-book fairs, and he might very well have had virtual inscriptions in mind—my guess is that he did. What’s more, I suspect Tom wouldn’t have been the first, either.

Does anyone out there in TeleBlog Land know of some existing autographed e-books? Any sites to point to? Now, if I can only do something about my horrid handwriting.

Related: John Scalz’s thoughts on Kindles and Owning Your eBooks—plus an earlier TeleBlog item on the same issue.

Image: CC-licensed from Icelight, via Flickr.

 
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