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The Kindle and textbooks, Orwell and E, the e-royalty dispute, DRM as a library toxin, and Wikipedia vs. vandals
July 18, 2008 | 12:40 pm
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By David Rothman
Here are separate links of the day—although certain of them just may be intertwined:
–Sure enough, talk is growing that Amazon may go after the $5.5 billion textbook market at universities and colleges. A big-screened Kindle is one of the two models rumored to be on the way—something that could display textbooks in more style than the current six-incher does. TechCrunch serves up some intriguing speculation. Also see TC readers’ comments on the pros and cons. Which would you prefer, gang—a $120 p-book you could resell or an $80 DRMed equivalent? Of course, some textbook publishers would argue back that they’re losing their shirts due to sales of used books.
–Closed systems like the iPhone and the Kindle could deprive buyers of already-purchased books if someone sued the publisher and the company had to withdraw a title from circulation. That’s one of the 1984ish risks discussed in Tethered Reading, a must-read post by Michael Bhaskar in The Digitalist, a group blog from Pan Macmillan. But wait, Michael! Just look how Publishers Weekly bizarrely deleted not just my PW E-Book Report archives, but also the blogs of the former PW publisher David Nudo and ex-deputy editor Karen Holt, the woman who hired me. Just when is the global publishing community going to take notice and demand an explanation? Coincidentally or not, the deletion of my archives happened after the former president of Bowker complained in the comment area about PW’s suspension of the e-book blog. Perhaps the Orwellian threats are not just external.
–Simon & Schuster and the Authors Guild are slugging it out again, according to PW. This time it’s over over the 15-percent royalties that S&S suggests for writers of e-books—based on catalog retail prices. Earlier S&S and the writers were at odds over the times when writers could recover their rights.
–DRM can be hell on libraries trying to preserve old content, and Ars Techica explores the latest copyright-related wrinkles. Remember, the DMCA makes it illegal in most cases to bypass encryption. Which exemptions to grant to libraries? (Thanks, Jim!)
–Wikipedia editors may take tougher proactive actions against vandalism—according to the Bits blog in the New York Times. Noam Cohen writes: "The idea, which is called ‘flagged revisions,’ has only been possible in the last few months because of a new extension to the software that runs Wikipedia."
(Updated at 1:07 p.m. Washington time to include the PW example.)
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Comments:
I note an ebook that was apparently withdrawn at some point at the bottom of this post:
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2008/07/frank-herbert.html
S&S “offering” writers 15% for ebooks?! HAHAHAHAHA. Bend over and kiss your own, you greedy slugs. Authors should flood Congress with emails to get a bill passed making it ILLEGAL for print publishers to get e rights under Restraint Of Trade.
How closed is the iPhone? It can read ePub. Can the Kindle?!!? If I was offered a free Kindle or a free iPT, I’d go for the iPT.
It may be my prejudice as recent teacher (I have finally left that trade) that textbooks are the crunch demographic for e-book technology.
Entrenched paper publishing houses, whose works are well below par for the most part, will want to seal the market.
They know that their print empires exist through delicately bound retailing connections. That their often shoddy, but lucrative print runs, are secured by having the right number of books (regardless of quality) available for education and that this fundamental reality permanently excludes small-time print competitors.
It is an oligarchy in other words, secured by a canny use of a defacto situation. Huge potential demand, requiring huge stocks of books (after all what good is a very well written textbook, if the right numbers cannot be secured), produces a system of virtual preorders that only the big-boys can engineer.
E-books must frighten the hell out of them, especially as we are seeing more eink devices and the beginning of a price slide.
The writing is on the wall, but DRM and locked devices offer some hope that future generations of students will be subjected to second-rate texts – or so they hope.
Imagine the effect, maybe just a few years down the track when teachers could pick the best written and most authoritative textbooks would be used. That production runs and retail strategies would no longer be the determining factor, when the oligarchy of textbook publishers was no more.
Digital publishing would not be such a promising field if it were not also such a threatening one – let the battle begin, for however much they struggle, they will not survive.
The US constitution os a $2.5 DRM protected purchase in ebook land, this is kind of the problem. Someone alays goes all the way, the kind of stuff is being mailed to you for free in the paper based world, becomes a DRM protected commercial product. It’s not just the publishes who are acting against it the middle men at the ebook stores arent interested in a success if they arent getting to be the gatekeepers.
If the publishers are scared of ebooks, ebook stores a scared of browsers or non specialized reading platforms, that can cut them more or less out of the loop, the way online bookstores did to a lot of local bookstores.