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Yes, we want to OWN books
April 1, 2009 | 2:39 am
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By David Rothman
"Do we really want to own books?" asks the Exact Editions blog. "Do institutions really want to own books?"
Exact Editions is "agnostic" on the first question. I’m not in the least. The answer is an emphatic, "Yes," and I suspect that many and probably most paying customers feel the same way.
That is why serious e-book-lovers hate DRM, and why savvy-book-shoppers loath the long-term evanescence of eBabel.
Even as a writer, in fact especially as a writer, I want my readers to be able to own eternal accesses to my writings. Otherwise my books will be less important to them. I remain baffled why so many in publishing are so adamant about their own property rights and so oblivious to those of their customers.
The case for empathy
Why this disconnect? I thought that books—at least fiction—engendered empathy. I’d love to see Adam Hodgkin and perhaps the other good people at Exact Editions explain why they’re simply agnostic. Don’t they themselves own books?
Granted, I’m wildly in favor of the option of the new book-rental possibilities that the EE blog mentions, but they should not substitute for full ownership of books within the limits of fair use. Corporations and their activities come and go, and I don’t want to have to trust them. Just the other day, Microsoft said it would phase out Encarta.
Meanwhile I know of one group of people who will satisfy the urge to own books, whether or not the publishers do. Pirates.
Image credit: CC-licensed photo from Mike Sansone.
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Comments:
David– Not sure what weight the word ‘own’ carries in this phrase of yours: “I want my readers to be able to own eternal accesses to my writings.” Maybe ‘having eternal access’ is enough. Mind you I am a bit of an agnostic about eternal anything! Two points on ‘ownership’. Can you give an example of any digital or ebooks technology which sensible supports the ‘first sale’ doctrine? If there is such a model for digital ownership I think that would probably be worth having (provided it does NOT involve DRM). Second I suspect that in music, art and literature we may be moving towards a world in which we all care more about access than physical ownership. That may not be a bad thing. But I am not sure… agnostic still.
Hi,
I’m a book publisher in Brazil. Our website, editoraplus.org, publishes only new e-books, at no cost for authors or readers – we have one book written in english, but the others are all portuguese ones. We distribute under Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works)
About David’s post: any technology that restricts what I can do with with a book (or music, image, video, etc), restricts also my ownership rights. I can accept this situation if I get, previously, the chance to choose. Offer the possibility to pay less for it; but if I want to own the content and be free to carry it wherever I go – from e-book reader to PC to iPhone to paper without restrictions of any kind, why not offering me the chance to pay more (a little more) for that? I agree with David, I want to own (do whatever I want) with the books, want to call them “mine” books. And would happily pay for that, if the price and costs were fair.
It’s a shame that companys ignore that we, customers, love to choose for ourselves.
David, this is the single strongest argument against DRM. Readers want to own the books they buy. They want to be able to read them for the rest of their lives, they want to be able to share and resell them.
Writers, being readers themselves, also want to own books. But they suffer a slight conflict of interest as the promise (perhaps illusory) of DRM offers them hopes of lifetime revenues.
Publishers don’t suffer the writer’s conflict of interest. Traditional book publishers come from a background where they sold their books to readers who bought and subsequently owned them. But movie and music publishers, radio networks, television networks, come from a rentals background: every time a piece of ‘intellectual property’ of theirs is seen or heard, they got a bit of cash. This is their holy grail, to return to this model forever.
Many book publishers are now owned by larger corporations whose balance sheets are dominated by movie, music, and broadcast sub-entities. These larger corporations — combined with hard economic times that have been crushing the old blood of traditional publishing for decades now — are winning book publishers over to the endless rentals dream.
The library in the cloud! Subscribe and pay each time you read! Readers own nothing, possess nothing — every text is streamed!
Think about every school having to pay, every semester, per-student rentals on Hemingway, Salinger, all the 20th century classics. No more dog-eared copies passed down from hand to hand. Every copy clean and crisp and digitally pure, with ‘extras’ like notes that pop up, comments, annotations!
And a never-ending money stream to the publishers that provides them with financial security, a solid base of revenues upon which to build.
It is indeed a seductive and tantalizing prospect for the publishers.
I don’t think the term “own” ebooks is the best way to go. What you want is the ability to read them without restrictions. I “own” a number of books on tape, but I no longer have a cassette player, and can no longer listen to them. When I bought the books on tape in the 90s it never occurred to me that the players would become obsolete, but there is no obligation for the publishers who made the books on tape or the stores that sold them to me to provide access to the content I own.
Technology goes obsolete all the time. 8-Track, bata, VHS, laserdisc, HD-DVD, software on floppy drives, or programs of discontinued operating systems. But everyone who bought that stuff still “owns” that stuff even though it can’t be used much anymore. Why is digital media so different?
What are the good arguments to give the ebook providers that they should sell them without restrictions? Even a real book is restricted by the fact the psychical product can’t be duplicated. Sure, I’d like to see all my ebook purchases DRM free too, but saying people can’t “own” something with DRM is a false analogy.
I would personally sacrifice the right of resale if I could “own” my books in all other respects. (Let’s get real here, as easy as it is to copy digital files, and as wide-spread as the peer-to-peer ethos is, there is no way any publisher is going to trust the reader not to keep a copy of the file he’s selling without DRM. And if there was DRM to enforce the resale, it misses the whole point.)
The only reason I would want to sell most books anyway is to free up room in my apartment. But my hard drive is a lot tinier than my apartment and has a lot more space in it for books.