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On stolen candy bars, e-books, DRM—and what e-publishers can learn from their customers
December 18, 2007 | 8:59 am
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By Joanna
Amazon Kindle’s is not the device for me right now. There’s no way I will pay that much money for something that only does one thing, and I really think the market is moving more toward multi-function UMPC-type devices anyway. But let’s leave aside hardware for a minute and talk about content.
That area has been a bit of a battlefield, unfortunately—competing formats, beastly DRM schemes and all sorts of headaches that totally miss the point. What will it take to bring in e-book buyers, especially those who own mobile device? Here are my own thoughts. I am reasonably educated, I read a lot, I am Net-savvy and I own more than one mobile device, all of which I am fairly competent at using. I have both downloaded and purchased e-books. I am, in short, an ideal customer.
Please: Customers, not criminals
First, on the subject of format-locking, DRM and measures designed to tell you where and how to read—this is an issue for me because I have more than one device. If I download an e-book on my Mac laptop and then decide I want to take it on the bus with me, can I load it onto my Palm handheld? Could I load it onto a memory stick and read it at work? At the library? If not, that’s a problem, because portability is something you still can have with print. If, as the whole e-ink push seems to indicate, they want to replicate the print-reading experience as closely as possible, it has to be transparent and barrier-free. If it isn’t, then what they are selling is computer software, not books?
Will some people take advantage and copy an unrestricted e-file for their friends? Maybe, but it isn’t just you, and it has nothing to do with E or no E.
The convenience store owner is in the same boat as you and has to budget a certain amount of losses into his bottom line from punk idiots shoplifting cigarettes and candy bars. How about just making the experience nice for your customers, so that they want to come back? ‘This iron fist is the only thing standing between me and my filthy, thieving customers is not the best way to inspire repeat visits.
And if books do get shared…
And let’s say the book does get shared—as thousands of freely available public domain and Creative Commons titles already legally are. What then? Offhand, I can think of at least three books I have in both free e-version and paid-for print version. The most expensive single book in my print library is the Norton Shakespeare, notwithstanding all the Shakespeare I want being freely available on-line. Two of the others were books that I read all or part of on-line and loved enough to want a ‘proper’ copy for my print library. The other was a gift for my mother, who is not as e-friendly as I am. In all of these cases, my free copy actually gained them a sale. The distinguishing point, however, is it gained them a print sale. I don’t know that I would pay for a potentially crippled DRM’d copy of Wuthering Heights, knowing I can have it for free in any format I like off Project Gutenberg.
It may be a brave new e-world out there, but basic customer service is still basic customer service. Make it was easy as possible for your customers to reasonably get what they want, and they’ll buy it from you. It really is that simple, E or no P.
Technorati Tags: publishers,publishing,Creative Commons,Project Gutenberg
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Comments:
“Amazon Kindle’s is not the device for me right now—no way will I pay that much money for something that only does one thing, and I really think the market is moving more toward multi-function UMPC-type devices anyway. But let’s leave aside hardware for a minute and talk about content.”
Well, lets talk about the hardware. I don’t think the market is moving toward multi-function UMPC-type devices at all. The bottom line is these things appear to overwhelm the average user precisely with their interfaces that try to do too much.
There is a lot of value in a device that just does one thing. I have a $400 device in my pocket right now that does just one thing — it plays music (and video, but not very well). I think dedicated e-book readers make a lot more sense than throwing e-book reading in with the kitchen sink on something like those Nokia devices. Yes, as a geek I love the Nokia UMPC-style devices, but you can’t beat dedicated single-purpose devices like MP3 players or e-book readers for just doing one thing and doing it well.
I also think that comports well with how we use traditional physical objects. For example, take that $70 Norton Shakespeare. All it does is one thing. You don’t pick up the book thinking “man, I wish there were a tiny LCD on the cover where I could watch performances of Shakespeare” or “I wish there were a CD player built in that would play readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
I think the future belongs to device divergence rather than the long heralded uber-portable that tries to do everything.
/rant
Brian, hardware, to me, is a separate issue. We could have another article (and another debate) just on that. In this article, I wanted to address the software issue because on so many sites, I keep hearing the same arguments against ebooks, namely that 1) people will not pay for ebooks and 2) people will not pay for things they can get for free. Both of these are not true. I can rattle off, off the top of my head, numerous examples of times people will pay for things they can get for free (Shakespeare, for example, as I mentioned in the article) or times where non-DRM items sell well because people appreciate the convenience, customer service, values of the company etc. I know hardware is an important topic where ebooks are involved, but I wanted to address content here because I think we won’t progress in that area until publishers stop viewing their products as computer software they are protecting from the thieving masses, and start viewing them as books they are building an audience for among readers.