TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

By Paul Biba

According to The Bookseller, more than 400 French independent booksellers have signed a petition opposing Hachette Livre’s agreement to sell its books on the iBookstore.

The petition, entitled ‘Does Hachette Livre want to do Without Booksellers?’ and reported by the French trade weekly Livres Hebdo, says the joint advertising campaign by Apple and France’s largest publisher to promote the launch of the iPad in France on 28th May was considered by booksellers “as a sign of great disdain”.

The agreement between the two undermined “the need for publishers to fix retail book prices and resistance to the risk of domination or a quasi-monopoly by one or two large American distributors that impose their terms”. … The petition also says that Hachette Livre is trying “to marginalise French booksellers [for e-books, bowing to] the demands of the American market”

More information in the article.

By Paul Biba

Another one from The Bookseller this morning:

French e-book distributors have launched the first phase of their scheme to create a single online book catalogue and electronic interface.

Inititally, the websites of nine bricks and mortar booksellers: www.appeldulivre.fr; www.arbrealettres.com; www.cultura.fr; www.librairie-ledivan.fr; www.furet.com; www.gibertjeune.fr; www.lamartine.fr; www.ombres-blanches.fr; www.virginmega.fr, and two electronic counterparts, ePagine and Numilog are involved. The last two are handling the sales.

By Paul Biba

Publishing Perspectives notes this question being discussed in the latest issue of ESPRIT magazine by Pascale Fouche – bibliographer and editor of the Dictionnaire encyclopedique du livre. Fouche does not want a lower rate of VAT extended to ebooks:

“A book is an item, printed on paper, which serves the dissemination of ideas,” he writes, “This fiscal definition was used to establish a reduced V.A.T. rate on books. This is why an advertising brochure with less than 48 pages is not a book –- and so on. But according to this definition, the printing process is constitutive to the book. As a result the digital data which is sold as ‘Ebooks’ does not benefit from the lower rate of V.A.T.”

The full article, in French, is here.

By Paul Biba

Eden Livres, Eplatforme and Numiolog and Epagine will bring a single digital book access point on line in July and then expand it in September, according to The Bookseller. In a statement they said: The development of digital books in France requires a rapid solution to permit all bookstores to display a single catalogue with all the available digital titles and for customers to have a single shopping basket.

Eden Livres groups Flammarion, Gallimard and La Martinière/Le Seuil, and Eplateforme Editis, Média Participations and Michelin. Numilog is owned by Hachette Livre.

In October a digital portal will open for independent booksellers, 101libraries.com.

By Paul Biba

Received the following from Nicolas Gary of Actua Litté: just to point a news in France. A publisher In Libro Veritas has just joined Bookeen, to sell an Opus with his name. It’s the eReader Inlibro veritas Opus. I think it’s a big deal for the first time – in France for sure..

Here’s a Google translation from the French site:

What is nice when readers also offers white label ebooks is that you can affix the logo you want. And for 99 cents less than the price announced by Bookeen on its website, the publisher In Libro Veritas – it does not just happen – now offers you to discover its entire digital catalog on a drive with his portrait ebook. …

Ebook reader InLibroVeritas Opus is not just a gift, as noted by Mathieu Pasquini, founder of ILV. It is primarily the convergence of two French companies for the promotion of digital playback, but also the choice “to promote local players near you, away from big corporations that devour everything in their path.” This is really the first association between a French publisher and manufacturer of ebook reader, not only through the appropriation of the object, but especially the idea of propelling the front of the stage such an association.

By Paul Biba

Print book prices are already fixed in France under the Lang Law, and now Serge Eyrolles for the Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE), Benoît Bougerol for the Syndicat de la Librairie Française (SLF) and Laurent Fiscal for the Syndicat des Distributeurs de Loisirs Culturels (SDLC) have asked that a new law should cover ebooks when their content is identical to the print edition. The letter said that other ebooks could be covered by an agency arrangement.

Evidently officials at the Culture Ministry’s new media and cultural industries division, along with French President Sarkozy, consider the matter urgent.

By Chris Meadows

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article on the fragmented e-book situation in France.

To English-speaking e-book fans, of course, fragmentation is nothing new; there has not been a single cohesive format for e-books since they first gained popularity back in the 1990s. In France, a similar situation has arisen: each publisher is releasing books on its own distribution platform.

A report commissioned by France’s Culture Minister proposes that a single platform be created for the distribution of e-books. However, French publishers reacted to this about as well as you might expect Apple, Amazon, and Google would respond to the notion that they should post all their books together on “iAmaGoo”.

The publishers suggest, instead, a “hub” whereby retailers would be able to sell e-books from any given platform via one access point. Because French publishers consider control of their file systems to be very important, this may be as close as France’s government is going to get.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

Gallimard and two other French publishers plan to sue Google over the scanning fo their books. This is in addition to the suit by another French publisher, La Martinière/Seuil, that Google lost. That suit is now on appeal.

According to the Bookseller:

Gallimard told an audience at a conference on digitisation that “contacts with Google at the beginning of the year led us to hope for progress on this issue, but nothing has happened,” the French trade weekly Livres Hebdo reported. Gallimard’s legal director Brice Amor told The Bookseller that the hope was that other publishers would join them. … In 2006, Gallimard was the first French publisher to demand that Google withdraw its titles from the US firm’s database. After a pause of six months, Google resumed scanning Gallimard titles and has continued ever since: “We have asked Google for a complete list of our titles it has scanned so far, but have had no reply,” Amor said.

By Paul Biba

A study published by the University of Rennes shows that the critics of the three strikes law were right. Instead of the threat of disconnection deterring pirates, the incidence of piracy actually increased 3%.

Additionally, researchers found that half of all the P2P users who downloaded copyrighted music also buy digital music and videos online. This means that if they were disconnected as a result of the new law than music and video sellers would, in fact, lose paying customers!

You can find more information about the report here.

By Paul Biba

From Resource Shelf:

This new compilation of resources includes:

+ Open Access Digital Collections

+ Select General Resources (Individual Websites Include URLs When Available
Including:

++ Biography

++ French Telephone Directory

++ French Dissertation indexes

+ French Newspapers, Periodicals and Government Documents
++ Newspaper Indexes

++ Newspapers

++ Full-Text Online

++ Periodical Indexes and Bibliographic Databases
++ Government Documents

+ French Archives and Manuscripts

+ Select French Materials from the LC Special Collections

By Chris Meadows

Publishing Perspectives reports that French readers seem to think that brick and mortar bookstores are more expensive than on-line purchasing "when, in reality, book prices are supposed to be the same across all channels.” (Is that true in France? It definitely is not in the USA, but I seem to recall hearing somewhere about European regulation of pricing.)

Ars Technica reports that at a conference on Tuesday, Apple COO Tim Cook said that, since the majority of Apple’s revenue now comes from the iPhone family of devices, Apple now considers itself a “mobile device business” and the iPad will be a natural extension of that business.

A cautionary tale from Jim Macdonald at Making Light: vanity press PublishAmerica is now offering to submit five copies of its authors’ books to Random House’s acquisitions editors—provided the authors order at least 10 copies of that book themself at half-price.

What PublishAmerica isn’t trying very hard to make clear is that there is no guarantee Random House will actually look at those books (indeed, they’ll probably circular-file them the same way they would any unsolicited manuscript)—but as Macdonald says, PublishAmerica doesn’t really care because they already got paid for those ten books.

There’s a difference between self-publishing houses and vanity presses, and that difference should be pretty obvious by now.

By Paul Biba

A Paris court previously fined Google €300,000 in damages and €10,000/day for its breach of French copyright law in digitizing La Martinière books.

Now, Google has appealed the verdict on copyright infringement and is claiming that their use of short excerpts in their index is fair use under French law. There is no indication in the article about how long it will take to decide the appeal.

By Chris Meadows

CrunchGear points to a Reuters story about efforts by five major French bookstore chains to set up a “national e-book platform” to pre-empt invasion by Amazon and Google. They have asked the government and publishers to help in this effort.

However, France’s largest publisher, Hachette Livre, is notably skeptical, saying that publishers and booksellers do not always have the same interests.

France has always been touchy about foreign cultural influences—most famously maintaining an organization tasked with coming up with French equivalents to foreign-language loan words. French interests have also sued Google Books over the unauthorized scanning of French-published titles (and won) before coming to an agreement to work with them.

CrunchGear’s Devin Coldewey points out that the retail chains in question are chain stores run by multinational interests (who have probably been gouging the publishers for years). As for cultural preservation, Coldewey asks the rhetorical question, “[H]ow much culture do you feel the US lost when Circuit City closed?”

I suspect that the retailers’ efforts are probably doomed to failure at this point. Amazon and Google just have too much momentum, and it is doubtful the publishers have as much to lose as the retailers who are seeking their help. Either way, they will still be selling their books.