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E-books of most Penguin U.K. titles to appear simultaneously with p-books—with .epub for READERS
April 11, 2008 | 12:25 pm
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By David Rothman
Ugh, what was that? No one wants to use .epub? Hachette, home to imprints like Grand Central, the former Warner Books, is already using .epub for distribution, at least here in the States. Meanwhile Feedbooks has brought .epub to the public domain fans.
Now we’ve learned, via Bookseller.com, that the Penguin sites in the U.K. will offer .epub directly to consumers, as of September.
All new black-and-white Penguin titles will appear at the same time in .epub as on paper, another helpful development.
Other than the IDPF itself, the organization behind .epub, the TeleRead blog has been the biggest of advocate of .epub, while also providing a platform for those pushing for much-needed improvements in the format. So we can’t resist going into brag mode here.
Two details:
- I don’t know if the .epub books from Penguin will be DRMed. I’d hope not. This would be a great opportunity for Penguin try a mix of social DRM and watermarking instead. If DRM doesn’t muck up the works, you’ll be able to read Penguin’s .epub books on variety of devices. For example: a future Android cellphone (FBReader is on the way), an OLPC laptop (already running a FBReader port), a Sony Reader (if Sony sticks to plans for .epub capabilities in Digital Editions for the Reader) and a Cybook Gen3 (Bookeen‘s Lauarent Picard wants .epub capability for the Gen3). Hello, Amazon? Time for you to recover in part from your recent POD PR disaster by finally agreeing to let .epub display natively on the Kindle, ideally without DRM? Come on, Jeff Bezos. You’ve talked up DRMless music. Be consistent rather than fixating yourself so much on customer and supplier lock-ins, as if you’re Rockfeller hoping to get lamps to burn only his oil.
- Ideally the prices of E will be lower. Penguin says the e-books will sell for the same as the p-books. But if there’s no DRM—again, I don’t know—that could considerably increase their value. It would mean you could own a Penguin book for real and display it on all your devices.
At any rate, major kudos to the gang at Penguin, and I hope that the U.S. arm will follow through if it isn’t doing so already. I wonder if Jeff Gomez, author of Print Is Dead book, who now working as an executive for Penguin in the States and who is aware of the hassles of eBabel, might have had something to do with .epub move, at least in terms of advice. Another interesting question is whether Penguin will encourage retailers to offer the .epub format directly to consumers. I hope so!
Backlist digitalization ahead as well
Making things sweeter is the news that Penguin will publishing its 5,000-title backlist in E.
“The first simultaneous print/e-book titles,” the Bookseller reports, “will include Zoe Heller’s new novel The Believers, and the paperbacks of Elizabeth Noble’s Things I Want My Daughter to Know and Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence. Also in the schedule are a new edition of The Three Musketeers by Dumas from Penguin Classics, The Rough Guide to Ultimate Adventures and DK’s Battle at Sea.”
The Bookseller quotes Genevieve Shore, Penguin’s digital director: “We have seen in other markets that the digital bestsellers are the same books making it to the top of the bestseller lists and we know our readers expect both editions to be available at the same time.”
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Comments:
While I offer eBooks at a considerable discount to paper, my costs of paper production are far higher than are Penguins. And I’ve already noted the issue of angering bookstores by appearing to be competing with them (as bookstores currently do not sell eBooks in-store). I certainly think I could develop a business case that eBooks offer a higher value experience and should sell for more. Unfortunately, while I believe that they do offer a higher value experience, I also believe that we’ll need to offer a discount to encourage new customers to give eBooks a try–as well as to cost-justify the still significant investment that dedicated readers involve.
I was interested in the BOOK suggestion. I wonder, though, whether the long-term answer isn’t HTML, perhaps enhanced with the ability to add bookmarks. I know lots of people hate reading books on their computer, but increasingly, just about any device you buy supports HTML. While one big reason for ePub is that it allows DRM, this isn’t really a big issue for me.
It’ll be interesting to see whether specialized markup for books will dominate.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
The problem with e-book pricing is that digital content is perceived to have low value – whether this is a historical accident or whether the tech companies needing to sell the hardware, storage and access skewed the perception that way is a matter of debate and can be argued either way.
So in the e-book market offer the bid is very low while the offer high, hence its negligible size.
[...] article was brought to my attention via the TeleRead blog. David Rothman’s article makes some interesting points, in particular he wonders what kind of [...]
I bought an ebook from the Penguin UK website a week ago. I still have net been able to download it and 3 emails to customer support have gone unanswered. Buyer beware!
Buyer beware indeed. I bought a book to read on my sony reader. No luck, Adobes paranoid DRM does not allow me to actually READ the book I paid for.
Hi, Edwin (and David Rendall). Sorry about your eBabel/DRM problems. Confusingly, the Sony Reader at present can only read NONencrypted PDFs. It’s an easy mistake to make. When the Reader first came out, I warned Sony this would happen. This is yet another argument for ditching conventional DRM and standardizing on the .epub format. Here’s to simplicity! Thanks for writing in, both of you, and I hope that both of you will keep us informed as to whether you get refunds or other help. Thanks. David
P.S. Sony is supposed to come out with Digital Editions soon and at least let owners of the PRS-505 update. DE will be able, apparently, to read Adobe-encrypted PDF as well as .epub. I’d welcome Sony or Adobe updating us on DE.
[...] asked to wait another couple of days. *sigh* I can’t say this bodes well for Penguin’s recent committment to providing more ebooks. They really, really must get their support sorted out before expanding [...]
I mailed Penguin about the problem. They immediately offered me a refund.
I’ll probably give it another try as soon as the prs-505 update is available.