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The 800-pound gorilla of e-books: Tech company, retailer or others? Or no one in particular? Best outcome!
August 7, 2009 | 5:05 am
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By David Rothman
Over at Harvard Business Review, Rita McGrath says Amazon could lose out to Barnes and Noble’s multidevice approach.
But wait! Hasn’t Jeff Bezos himself given strong hints that Amazon will work to get Kindle books on a bunch of platforms?
Considering the far-from-gung-ho reactions to B&N’s current e-bookstore, I wouldn’t worry that much in Jeff’s shoes, at least for now. Amazon still has more of a chance of dominating e-books. B&N so far has tuned out me and others pleading for the chain to try to ditch traditional DRM in favor of no DRM or social DRM so people can own books for real. Talk about a stubborn refusal to consider this major product differentiation!
Meanwhile, writing for the Guardian, Victor Keegan notes how power has flowed from traditional publishers to Google and Amazon and, perhaps, Apple in time.
One way for publishers to win back their lost power
But can’t publishers mitigate and perhaps even reverse the above by insisting on a standard e-book format without proprietary DRM (a major negative even with a multiplatform approach)?
Keegan talks about the possible end of book ownership. But you can have ownership if you phase out DRMed anything in favor of nonDRMed ePub, the core format on which major publishers have agreed. Let ePub be plain vanilla ePub, not Adobe-ized ePub or Sonyized ePub or B&Nized ePub or, in the future, maybe Amazonized or Googleized ePub. No 800-pound gorillas!
DRM vs. max inventory
DRM and other proprietary baggage can get in the way of readers locating what they want, even at Amazon, where, despite all those hundreds of thousands of titles, I still can’t find Saul Bellows’ masterpieces in E. Proprietary tech jacks up costs and makes books less likely to be candidates for conversion.
Quartet’s Don Linn is right, right, right when he says great lists aren’t enough—that publishers also must navigate labyrinthian distribution systems. DRM-enforced proprietary approaches just add to the complexities. Perhaps Bellows’ heirs are insisting on “protection.” But they might well be open to something less onerous like social DRM, especially if they understood the piracy threat from scanning of paper books.
For now, publishing is horridly dysfunctional. But do we really need an 800-pound corporate gorilla to fix it? I’d hope not. Amazon’s Orweilian episode and Apple’s seeming attempt to squelch e-book competition make me wish more than ever for a mix of an open format and an open distribution system built around standards rather than bureaucracy or any one corporate hierarchy. No gorilla worship, please.
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Comments:
Goodness, what kind of diet have you put your gorilla on? He’s gone from 800lb to 600lb in no time!
LOL. Actually I fattened him after checking Wikipedia and finding some 800-pound mentions. Nice to have attentive readers. David
Addendum #1: Googling within nytimes.com, I find that “800-pound” is a bit more popular. So it isn’t just Wikipedia alone.
Addendum #2: I caught and changed that stray “600-pound.” No slimming now!
That is exactly the conclusion that music publishers arrived at, although perhaps too late.
p.s. How, how, how could the Harvard Business Review have that article which misses the fact that there’s already a Kindle iPhone app, one has been promised for Blackberry and the Bezos quotes you mention. Crazy. It’s like me saying Pepsi will beat Coke in the Cola wars because they offer diet sodas.
I have used Ebooks since mid 1990s on various devices — PPC, Palm, cell phones, iPhone. Love them, but feel that the book publishers and retailers are going the way of the recording companies on this — confused! I would recommend that they get together to SUBSIDIZE EBook readers, as mobile companies have subsidized cell phone prices. Offer a Book Club subscription in return for a year or two based on level of reader “purchased” , with a minimum book purchase requiremnt or monthly fee. I would RUN to get one that fit my pocket with a book service subscription if the reader were made affordable this way. I see NO OTHER WAY for this to happen otherwise to any worthwhile extent.
I am attempting to rep[lace EBooks with audio books right now, as so many are =free through my library. I am tracking it at: http://myyearofaudio.blogspot.com
We’ll see how all this goes…
Well, lazy researcher that I am, I just checked Wikipedia, and learned that 800 lbs would be truly enormous:
[quote]
Occasionally, a silverback of over 183 cm (6 ft) and 225 kg (500 lb) has been recorded in the wild. However, obese gorillas in captivity have reached a weight of 270 kg (600 lb)
[/quote]
Now back to ebooks… Even if Amazon were to discontinue the Kindle tomorrow, the current state of the B&N store is completely unacceptable. They have no compatible reading devices. Sure, you can read the ebooks on Mac or PC, but nobody (or very few people) or going to read whole books sitting behind a workdesk, and the iPhone or Blackberry screens are too small for me. If B&N wants me to switch to their ebook store, there needs to be, first are foremost, a way for me to read the dang ebooks, so they’re not going to be any kind of competitor until the Plastic Logic device comes out, and then a comparison may be possible.
So in my book, B&N is just a monkey for now.
Greg,
It’s not as if there are only two choices… full-fledged PCs and Macs, or iPhones. There are lots of devices in-between, including PDAs, netbooks and UMPCs. And not everyone has the same needs or desires when reading; there are quite a few of us who don’t see the need for a dedicated reader, when we already have something that will serve as well.
B&N’s multi-device strategy is indeed a good one, because it eliminates the $300 entry fee (plus books) for the Kindle experience, it opens up e-books to many more eyeballs worldwide, and it provides more choice of reading experience with less dominating control. If all we need is SW reading apps for existing devices… well, that’s a lot easier to create and disseminate than manufacturing Kindles for every potential buyer, and I’ll point out here that Amazon has so far demonstrated an inability to keep up with serious Kindle demand on a timely basis… they can’t manufacture readers fast enough to get them into every set of hands they’d like.
B&N may be a monkey right now, but it’s got the potential to grow up to be the Mighty Joe Young of e-booksellers.
I would like to add that the EReader DRM which B and N uses is very close to Social DRM- it’s encrypted with the name and credit card of purchaser and can be used on any number of devices with the EReader software installed- PCs, Macs, PDAs, Dedicated Reading Devices, Smartphones, etc. As long as you right down the credit card number, you’ll always have access to your books even if the B and N servers go offline.