More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
E-book distribution in the real world
September 16, 2009 | 1:58 pm
|
By martinkochanski
I can’t see the point of e-books. They are slower to flick through than real books, you can’t lend them or borrow them or give them away, and if you leave them on the train they cost hundreds of dollars to replace. Nevertheless, some people seem to like them, and as a publisher it’s my job to offer people what they might want. Here is my first look, as a publisher and a citizen of the real world (see above) at what my distribution options are.
A****n
In the third largest country in the western hemisphere, behind the Silicon Curtain, one company seems to be capturing most of the market, or at least most of the publicity. It has hired retired Lada engineers to style a retro-1950s machine which people have to buy if they want to buy its e-books. No-one in the real world is allowed to see or touch this machine, and although a software version is available on the iPhone, that too is not permitted to pass the Silicon Curtain.
Not only are e-book exports into the real world forbidden, imports from the real world are banned also. Only publishers with addresses and bank accounts in the USA are allowed to sign up as suppliers.
Shortcovers
How refreshing, therefore, to turn to a company whose presentation and graphic style remind one of the current century. Free of the USA and all its hangups, Shortcovers covers the world. Download its application to your iPod and you can browse through a vast list of books. The buying experience is swift, slick, and utterly consistent:
Browse to the book you want. - Tap on its picture.
- Tap on the "Read Excerpt" button.
- See an error message.
It used to be a classic of the Iron Curtain that grand restaurants, with acres of starched linen and tons of ornate silver cutlery, would have sixteen-page menus full of succulent dishes that turned out, when you ordered them, to be unavailable. Eventually you would despair and ask the waiter what was available and he would tell you: cabbage soup.
Shortcovers considers it unsporting to bring a game to such a brutal conclusion. Instead, you can spend many happy afternoons browsing through shiny pictures of books hoping that one of them might not generate an error message– because very occasionally they don’t. Unfortunately potential readers of The Snow Cow may have better uses for their afternoons, so until Shortcovers populate their pages with books that are actually available, their site will be good as a diversion but not much use for buying or selling books.
ebooks.com
At this point I did what an innocent member of the public might do, and searched Google. ebooks.com is a jump backwards in graphic design but a step forward in practice. Every book page gives a synopsis, exhaustive bibliographic data, and a footnote like the following:
This book is only available to customers in the following countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Congo, The Democratic Republic of the, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadelope, Guam, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Heard and McDonald Islands, Holy See (Vatican City State), Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea, Republic of, Kuwait, Kyrgystan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, Netherlands, The, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Pitcairn, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Reunion, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Spain, Sri Lanka, St. Helena, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Sudan, Surinam, Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, The Turks & Caicos Islands, Togo, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United States, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Virgin Islands U.S, Wallis and Futuna Islands, Western Sahara, Yemen, Yugoslavia.
This makes the ebooks.com site as romantic as an old-fashioned Telex directory, but I’m afraid that unromantic Snow Cow readers may lose patience before they get anywhere near my book.
So – is the world going pear-shaped? Not quite…
Apple
Apple, unlike Amazon, is an international business. It can deal with a supplier anywhere in the world, and it can supply products to 80 countries, funnelling the revenue straight into the supplier’s bank account. The layout of the App Store is admittedly not the best possible for books, but the App we can get round that by having a clear link to it on our site.
The App Store’s overwhelming advantage is that if a product is listed in an App Store, that means that a customer really can buy it. I thought that all sites worked that way, until I discovered e-books…
The big disadvantage of Apple is that it sells for the iPhone/iPod platform only, and that e-books have to be packaged as applications rather than as ePub files. But if that is the only choice, what else can we do?
Unless we just give it all away free…
The future
Some people may imagine that if Amazon launches the Kindle in Europe then things might improve; but I doubt it. Amazon does not trade as a single international entity, and suppliers have to have separate contracts with Amazon USA, Amazon UK, and so on. Amazon USA doesn’t even know how to do electronic funds transfers to Europe yet. I can’t see Amazon having the skill or the will to match Apple’s international commerce infrastructure.
The case of the other two suppliers I have mentioned is more puzzling. I cannot think of any IT-related reason why they cannot present a customer with a list of items for sale that actually are for sale to the customer; but then they are experts and I am not.
Meanwhile, it seems to be Apple or selling the e-book ourselves.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Forgive me if I am missing something here, but what about Fictionwise or Books on Board? There is also the Sony store, Cooler Ebook store, etc… Again, I must be missing something…
…and if my *house* burns down, my e-ink reader’s *only* a few hundred dollars to replace. i can just re-download my library. on top of that — hey! i can have my notes back, too!
but i know publishers like people to buy books, and don’t care whether they read them. in fact it’s better for publishers if people buy and *don’t* read, because then people have more time to buy more.
don’t worry, though. i still buy print. i just don’t read it unless i have time while i’m at home (=pretty much never. or unless it’s a craft book, which is a different thing altogether. more of a tool.)
i buy electronic copies to read; print copies to ‘have’. and i’m duplicating a chunk of my print collection with electronic purchases. so i’m all good news for publishers; and i am only one of many just like me…
“…you can’t lend them or borrow them or give them away…”
This is not an inherent characteristic of ebooks, this is an entirely intentional crippling “feature” publishers like the author keep trying (unsuccessfully) to push onto ebooks.
If the author can’t see the advantages of being able to hold a library of hundreds of books in the palm of his hand (and hundreds of thousands of books on the hard drive of a laptop) then he is beyond help.
Also, an ebook is *not* the reader device, the ebook is the file of bits a reader device interprets and displays for the person reading it. Again too many publishers want to force the bits to live only on one (or a couple of) physical reading devices so they can pretend an ebook is something physical when it’s not. ebooks are *data*, not physical objects like pbooks, if you don’t comprehend the difference then you have no hope of survival in the 21st century marketplace.
Sony, shortcovers, fictionwise etc. all have georestricted material.
Shortcovers even has georestricted excerpts!
So does Apple (for music, movies). No reason to think they wouldn’t for books.
Full disclaimer: I’m CTO of Shortcovers.
Martin, we share your frustration and not being able to provide a better service to customers outside North America.
At the moment publishers give us the right to sell roughly 50% of our catalog globally. Our service respects these geo rights and prevents unauthorized purchases. However since such a large portion of the catalog is unavailable the customers outside North America their experience is poor.
We are working to enhance Shortcovers so that it shows to each user only the content that they are entitled to purchase (based on their location). We expect to release this sometime in October.
We would love to your feedback – please contact me if you would like to be part of our beta testing program.
Geographical restrictions on books are not an inherent property of ebooks or for that matter of the companies that sell them. Rather, it is a result of different publishers having publication rights in different countries. In theory, the same restrictions apply to the paper books.
Essentially we are looking at one more example of copyright law not keeping up with the times. Now most countries (if not all) in the WTO are also signatories to the Berne convention, because it would be interesting to see if these geographic restrictions are an illegal restraint of trade.
–
Bill
You are using the word “ebooks” without distinguishing the eReader from the book itself. There are certainly eReaders for sale the world over. In fact, most of them are made in Asia. Kindle has gotten a lot of attention because its ease of use has made it very popular here in the US, but there are new eReaders being announced constantly. I moderated an ebook panel at the last Worldcon in Montreal, and our British panelist owned more eReaders than anyone else on the panel. His newest was the Cybook Opus, and it’s a lovely piece of work.
Put simply, there are alternatives. You can buy my e-books anywhere in the world, in multiple formats, read them on almost anything, and all you need is web access and the ability to use PayPal to get them.
Martin, you certainly need a lot of “schooling” on the real e-book world… you’re letting a lot of Amazon hype blind you from seeing the whole picture.
Try stopping at MobileRead.com sometime… the information you get there is very international, covers multiple e-book formats, sellers and sales models. You’ll get much more of the “total picture” there, than lurking around geo-restricted sites like Amazon.
Most importantly: Don’t panic! It’s early yet. It’s not all perfect, but we’re getting there…