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Too pricey…or not enough piracy?
February 10, 2009 | 7:48 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Two articles I saw at inconvenient times and saved for later review happened to be about the same subject matter: the age-old conundrum of why e-books have not had their break-out “iPod moment” yet, after over ten years of commercial availability. As it turns out, they have very different theories.
Slowed by Price?
On CNet News, Erica Ogg takes a shot at the reason. Her headline says it all: “E-book expansion slowed by price.” Why haven’t e-books really taken off yet? The Kindle is just too darned expensive.
At $359 for the Kindle, that’s a luxury device anyway you look at it. Like most consumer electronic devices, getting below $200 is key to capturing a more mainstream audience. Sony is almost there at $269, but it doesn’t have any way of downloading book content wirelessly the way the Kindle does.
However, Ogg notes, there are now alternatives in the form of Google Book Search for mobile, and that Amazon has said they will eventually make Kindle books accessible on mobile platforms—though she does note, as have so many, that “reading long-form content on a small screen will not appeal to a lot of people[…]”
However, it does not seem likely that price alone can be the defining factor. Perfectly fine reading platforms can now be had for less than $100, in the form of older PDAs sold used on Amazon and eBay. (I just purchased a used-good-condition Clié 415, which I will write about in a later installment.) They may not be as easy to read as e-ink—but as the spate of iPhone readers has shown, many readers will sacrifice resolution in favor of price.
But the other article has a very novel theory that seems to have the ring of truth to it.
Not Enough Piracy?
Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian Technology Blog concludes that e-books haven’t had their “iPod moment” because they haven’t had their “Napster moment” either. In other words, there are “not enough pirates.”
Johnson points out that the invariable parallel people draw between the print and music industries when they refer to the “iPod of e-books” may be a matter of apples and oranges. He posits that the iTunes store only came about because the music industry was under immense pressure from Napster and its successors.
The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn’t because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn’t launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.
To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn’t being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren’t forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn’t there to be confronted.
Johnson does not mention that there actually are illicit e-book downloads. The most popular titles, such as the Harry Potter books, are scanned and uploaded as soon as the dead trees hit the streets. But e-book piracy has never had the phenomenal scale that peer-to-peer swapping of music and movies had, or the sense that it’s costing book sales.
Publishers know what’s costing them book sales—it’s the general public’s overall apathy toward reading. There are a few loud complainers about pirates—generally authors, rather than publishers—but whereas the music industry embarked upon a misguided paroxysm of lawsuits versus its own customers, and the movie industry has been suing such torrent sites as it can get its hands on, the only book piracy lawsuit I can even remember was the time Harlan Ellison tried to sue the entire Internet when a fan posted one of his e-books to a binaries newsgroup. And that was a matter of principle more than money.
Without a pirate threat to fail to “beat,” publishers are under no obligation to “join” them. Which could explain why most of them continue to encumber their books with useless DRM, and to charge more than consumers are usually willing to pay. E-books only account for half of one percent of total book sales, and there is no significant pirate threat to make them get serious.
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Comments:
infinite regression:)
not enough publicized piracy because not enough publicized ebooks because not enough publicized piracy because…
once you get interested in ebooks and do some research the piracy part of the article above is just laughable
What makes you need a publicized e-book for a book to be pirated? There are no (legitimate) Harry Potter e-books, but people scan and post them anyway—as they have done for years for lots of copyrighted books.
I think the point is still valid. You can find lots of pirated e-books that never were print books. It’s become easier and easier as computing power (and hence, OCR) has improved. A bandsaw and a sheet-feeding scanner, and boom: instant pirate e-book.
But people just aren’t downloading them enough to worry the industry.
that’s the crux of the matter – people are not downloading them enough, because they are not consuming ebooks enough
so it’s a circular argument in my opinion, or a chicken and egg, what comes first the widespread piracy or the widespread adoption – personally I believe it’s both, feeding on each other, so I am a strong believer that widespread ebook adoption means the death of the industry as is constituted now
not the death of literature or anything like that, just a massive reduction in revenue streams since nobody is selling now or going to sell many expensive ebooks
but i also believe that widespread adoption is not going to happen not because publishers refuse to release ebooks since once a book is popular enough or has a fanatical following irrespective of at large popularity, it’s a matter of time until an ebook appears in the wild, but because print books have too many advantages over ebooks
I suspect we may have to agree to disagree. You say chicken, I say egg, let’s call the whole thing off.
I think there’s also the fact (which I meant to mention in the article itself but forgot) that there’s considerably less difference between how you consume a CD and an mp3 (in both cases, you stick things in your ears and press “play”) than there is between the experience of reading a paper book and reading an e-book.
That gap is narrowing with e-ink, but it will always be there to a certain extent. I suspect that’s the real reason we don’t see more e-book piracy—to the average downloader, mp3s are fungible with CDs in ways that e-books just can’t be with tree-books. So of the declining number of readers who would reach for any book at all, only a small percentage of them would consider e-books workable enough that they’d be willing to try pirating them.
But perhaps that will change as better e-ink readers hit the market…
Chris, I think you are over-simplifying the CD/MP3 comparison. It is easy to forget that when pirated MP3s started becoming popular they were absolutely terrible when compared to CD purchases.
First, it could take five to ten minutes of searching to find what you were looking for. Most people had modems which meant the download of an album was easily an hour-and-a-half long (often engaging the only available phone line). Once the music was available, it was often poorly labeled (if labeled at all) and improperly ripped. Rather than listen to music on my portable CD player, car, or nice home stereo system, the individual was forced to listen through the crappy computer speakers using a clunky media player (CD burners and discs were expensive).
The technology for digital music eventually caught up and the “market” exploded. Many artists cried foul and declared it the end of music. Publishers tried to shut down the electronics, software, and network providers through whatever means they could find. After a few unsuccessful starts, some of the more entrenched players were convinced to try a new tactic: easily-available product at a price people were willing to pay.
As we keep rehashing, the market for ebooks isn’t as great and that market is split many ways in how the customers wish to use the product. Taking those two factors into consideration, it’s no wonder that publishers are mostly indifferent to electronic distribution. But you’ll see the same thing as the music industry: (at least) five years from now, publishers will wake up to the fact that providing a simple, DRM-free file to an online bookstore and collecting checks will yield significant revenue with almost no expense or overhead.
People are scared to death (or at least the brink of bankruptcy) of significant change in a proven system. The change is inevitable, and, at some point, the industry will be dragged kicking and screaming to common sense, but not before they’ve given everyone else a chance to take the first steps.
Bring along movies, television, and video games to the party and there will be so much money funneled into the entertainment sector that we’ll spend all our time complaining about how we have ruined the next generation of children.
Hrm, I didn’t mean to write so much. With that word count, no one is going to read my post without an e-ink device.
I agree about the piracy threat. Right now the threat is nowhere as grave to print publishers as it has been to music labels. The threat is real and growing, but too many readers (who skew older and more resistant to change, it seems) continue to insist that they will stick with pbooks until the day they die.
Newspapers are in another case, however. Their business model is failing, and they are desperate to latch onto something that will pay them better than online banner ads. Something like Plastic Logic, perhaps, or Kindle, or even iPhone, subscriptions. I personally would like to see cableTV monopolies add ‘newspaper channels’ to their lineups, now that people are moving to hdtv lcd screens.
And ‘books’ should then follow their past history venturing into digital, by latching onto other devices – in this case readers for newspapers.
Perhaps this is unwise to say, but I’ve pirated a few books for my iPod–and it’s certainly an interesting experience. I own each and every book that I’ve pirated, in print, but I wanted to have the portability, and to compare the experience of a “real” book versus an ebook. For the record, while you might claim that ebook piracy is difficult, it isn’t. If you’re familiar with certain programs, it takes a few minutes to find a download, and a few minutes to download the text. (Text files and pdfs, after all, are much smaller than mp3s; limited piracy isn’t such a problem when you only need one or two seeds.) Using Stanza, it’s easy to read the books, too; there’s vague talk of Stanza incorporating tilt-to-scroll technology, but for now, a tap of the screen flips your page. It’s simple. I’ve built up a semi-decent digital library, including a few free books and a few paid ones, and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed it.
That being said, the simplicity and convenience doesn’t make up for the loss of the actual book. An iPod can hold a near-infinite amount of text, true, but you lose some things. I have no problem with reading on the screen–honestly, an iPod screen is fairly big–but one of the magical parts of a book is that, if you’ve read it enough, you can flip it open and find a random excerpt easily. You can also get a sense for how far you’ve come. There’s something about a physical book, about turning a page, that’s lost in the translation to digital.
I can’t see ebooks becoming the next “big thing” or having an “iPod moment” until they manage to add something that physical books don’t have. Portability? Backlights? Convenient things, sure, but are ebooks better yet? I can see avid readers adopting both forms, but not ebooks on their own–at least not for some years.