I am blown away by the responses to the articles Chris Meadows and I posted over the past week. I am dismayed that in some reader’s minds, I came off as anti-author—if that were so, I would be downloading off the darknet right now instead of blogging to you—but I am delighted that the issues which have left me, and many other loyal e-book buyers, so frustrated are finally getting notice.
Readers like me want to buy books and support authors. But we want to be treated like more than a nuisance or afterthought too.
We deserve books which look nice and are free from errors. We deserve to pay a fair price—not overly high, but not overly low either (most of the objection to the Macmillan price raise was a distrust that they would actually lower it later, when the book aged—they have not done this in the past and mass-market $6 paperbacks still are retailing in e-book for $10 and up!)
We deserve books which are not so crippled by DRM that we can’t read them on the device of our choosing (and yes, we deserve to be trusted that we won’t abuse this freedom—treat us like book-buying fans and not potential criminals who must be thwarted at every turn!) We deserve to simply have the chance to BUY the books and not have them made unavailable due to the vendor we shop at or the country in which we reside.
Here is my call to arms, for readers and authors alike—let’s move into action now. We all know that the issues are, and they are just as bad for authors, who let’s face it could use the extra business, as they are for the customers, who are walking away with fewer purchases and bad experiences.
We need to move beyond ‘the author camp’ and the ‘reader camp’ and into a ‘mutual problem solving camp’ where we can begin to resolve these issues. No more explaining or justifying or defending of why things are the way they are, or how you are I or this person or that person is powerless to change them. No more defensive authors and aggressive readers. Let’s work together.
LET’S STOP TALKING ABOUT WHAT THE PROBLEMS ARE AND START TALKING ABOUT HOW WE CAN FIX THEM!
I put this out there to readers and authors alike: what can we do? What reader initiatives actually have a chance of success? Who can write to or phone or email, and how can we phrase our issue to give it the best chance of being heard?
Would a petition help and to whom can we address it? Can any author organizations band together and help us advocate? Who are some people in the industry who are known to be sympathetic and how can we reach them to make our voices heard?
I want a better e-book environment for everyone. I want readers who can buy and read, and authors to enjoy the fruits of the profits these readers will send their way. But readers like me need the authors to help us. We’ve tried advocating on our own, it hasn’t gotten us anywhere, and we simply don’t know what else to do. And we’re tired of feeling like we have to work so hard just to get someone else to take our money.
Let’s work together. Let’s help each other. Authors, readers, bloggers, commentators I throw down the gauntlet to you. What can we DO?
All I want, as a ebook buyer is to see no georestrictions, a fair price, buyer loyalty programs and the ability to read my ebook on whatever device I choose to read it on. Simple.
End of story. Everyone’s happy.
All I want, as a ebook buyer is to see no georestrictions, a fair price, buyer loyalty programs and the ability to read my ebook on whatever device I choose to read it on. Simple.
End of story. Everyone’s happy.
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Yep, that sums it up for me too. Also better formatted ebooks would be nice and with the covers, too.
While I wholehearted agree with the comment above, the main sticking point is going to be that *fair price* thingy; the current publishing model of “throwing spaghetti to the wall and see what sticks”, or in less polite terms, opening the sewers and seeing what floats, assumes the relatively few successful books have to subsidize most of the rest which lose money, or simply do not make enough to sustain the infrastructure; for ebooks that ain’t going to work imho, so the model has to change and here is where the main publishers are almost guaranteed to fail as pretty much all business history shows (in game-changing environments it is much, much easier to start from zero than turn a huge ship around)
The way I see it, *if* ebooks really take off, most authors with even a moderate fan base will take that with them as they move away from the starvation wages they are paid now and use something like Amazon where under the new terms they make about the same on a 3.99$ ebook like on a 25$ hardcover, while new authors will try either pay their dues in the old system until they can go on their own or maybe a new structure that will allow them to do that from the beginning will appear…
The big publishers dilemma is that without ebooks they hemorrhage slowly against the competition which today is all content including blogs and such, with ebooks too popular they die faster, so they need to find an adoption rate that is *just right* – tricky and unlikely they will pull it out
I like the Hall of Shame idea for poorly formatted ebooks.
http://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/hall-of-shame-an-introduction/
It is interesting that I used to think that all the formatting errors and typos were okay (a new technology and all that) if I was getting a good deal on the ebook.
Now that prices are going up I’ll be much less forgiving of the poor quality of practically every ebook I read (about 15 a month). As customers we need to come up with more ways to demand the publishers produce higher-quality ebooks. I always appreciate when others note poor ebook formatting in their Amazon book reviews.
I really don’t understand why as technology advances things have to become more complicated. With paper books I can
– go to amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk, etc. etc.
– find a book I like
– order it (sometimes paying more for shipping, which is fine)
– read it
– if I move to another country the book can be taken with me no problem
– I can also go to a library and read any number of books for free, lend them to my friends, give them to the thrift store.
with ebooks instead I have to
– decide among a series of incompatible devices (and often not on merit, but on book availability for them)
– go to the device’s store (say, amazon.ca)
– ONLY buy books from amazon.ca, not .com, not .co.uk, for some reason some books are available in one but not the others
– read the book (hoping the drm won’t cause issues)
– wonder about what will happen 5 years down the road if I move to another country (will I lose access to my books?) or if the device I bought will not be supported anymore etc. etc.
– no such thing as a library, can’t lend books (or maybe once in case I AND my friends have a specific device), can’t resell/give them away permanently
why is it that as soon as a good becomes electronic a lot of restrictions not present on the physical form of that good come up? Why is it that I can import a book on paper but not online?
Why is it that people that pirate everything couldn’t care less about any of this but honest people have to jump through hoops and sometimes end up being burned because they supported the ‘wrong’ device?
I have been on the fence of buying a kindle for quite some time now, but all of the above keeps me still firmly in the paper world, which sucks because I’d love to have my library in my backpack at all times, and I’d love to support the authors I love by re-buying their books once again (hopefully for the final time), but I won’t be taken advantage of by companies/entities who don’t seem to care at all about me as a consumer, and that will probably just see their low sales as caused by ‘piracy’ vs by ‘not being able to provide what the consumers want’.
The consumer wants:
– an interoperable format so no matter what device you own you can read things on it
– an easy way to buy books, no drm, because the only people affected by drm are legitimate customers
– the end of these ‘geographical restrictions’, we are in a global society, not in the middle ages
we’ll see if anybody will ever provide this at any point: but given what’s happened with music and movies I am not holding my breath.
Here’s my anti-response:
You figure it out, authors/publishers/retailers. If I like your solution I’ll buy e-books. If I don’t like your solution I won’t. It’s not my responsibility to answer your problems. I’ve got the disposable income and the (ever shrinking) free time. You want them. It’s up to you to figure out how to get them.
I like Smashwords. There are lots of other ebook stores around – many of them look better. But Smashwords has a policy which I think will eventually cause them to come out on top – let whoever’s publishing the ebook decide the price (taking a small cut), and provide each ebook in all the popular formats, DRM-free, no geographical restrictions.
Smashwords certainly has its problems – not many big names, the amount of sheer crud available – but a look at the topsellers will give you an idea of the better quality ebooks available. And published authors do seem to be slowly taking advantage of Smashwords – I’ve noticed a few old favourites appearing.
Paula, I have emailed you.
Ficbot will be making her case and issuing a call to arms on an upcoming episode of The Writing Show. I’m working on the issues and questions now. Let me know if there’s something special you’d like addressed: paula@writingshow.com, or just post a comment in this thread.
Thank you!
I agree with most of what Marco says. I completely agree with his: – an interoperable format so no matter what device you own you can read things on it
– an easy way to buy books, no drm, because the only people affected by drm are legitimate customers
– the end of these ‘geographical restrictions’, we are in a global society, not in the middle ages