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Should a publisher be able to zap your e-book as part of a recall?
April 28, 2006 | 2:01 am
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By David Rothman
Here we have a major publisher tossing big bucks at a Harvard student, Kaavya Viswanathan, only to find that her book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, was plagiarized.
So what if this opus–rated two out of five stars by Amazon readers–had been an e-book? Should the publisher have had the right to zap the copies of identifiable customers from afar as part of the recall? I suppose most TeleBlog readers would say no. But I wonder what publishers would think. Or how about the writer Ms. Viswanatha plagiarized? The issues are academic at this point, but with increasingly sophisticated DRM, that could change. What do you want–a “defective” book or a forced refund?
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Comments:
Pulling e-books from the virtual bookstore “shelves”, yes. An optional refund and return, yes. Preventing purchasers from re-downloading the book (ie, to another device) until the rewrite– maybe with some store credit or something– okay. But remotely deleting or disabling files on a user’s computer, no. You don’t have to worry about getting a recalled p-book ripped from your hands if a Borders employee sees you with it, and I don’t see a reason for e-books to be different in this regard.
While the inability to resell e-books could hinder this in digital form, for what it’s worth, copies are already appearing on eBay, with asking prices as high as $62.95.
The problem with that argument, QAC, is that the reason “you don’t have to worry about getting a recalled p-book ripped from your hands” is that it is completely impractical for p-books. The voluntary nature of recalls of all physical object types is historical and completely based on practicality. In the digital world, there’s no significant practicality barrier to stop some e-publisher from using a business model that gives him the right to remotely zap your books. That’s essentially what all of us Windows XP users agree to when we click ok on the Automatic Updates EULA.
If people feel as you do about books, then such business models will fail. But if people feel about books the way they feel about software, they might not fail.
You’re right, the motivating factor behind the current recall model is practicality. All the same, it’s a standard that’s been set with physical objects (ie, p-books), and if people perceive e-books as being a type of book more than a type of software– which I imagine is likely the case– I’d guess that publishers zapping e-books would cause an uproar, bad publicity, driving away customers, etc.
Or maybe people will just get used to e-publishers having the final say, even after they’ve bought the book, if that sort of business model becomes an expected part of digital purchases.
For a clear reason why digital publishers being able to ‘zap’ content is a bad idea, go read ’1984′ and pay particular attention to what Winston Smith did for a job.
The premise of this entry assumes that you have DRM’ed books. Personally while I have and read quite a lot of ebooks on my Nokia 770 and Ebookwise 1150 (20+ full novels in the last 4 moths and lots of short stories, magazines…), I do not touch and would not touch DRM’ed books. There is Guttenberg and french language alternatives (www.ebooksgratuits.com/ebooks.php), Baen, Fictionwise multiformat, various authors who post works online for nominal prices, and scanning/ocring for the few books I want to read and I have only in print.
If I cannot get my ebook as a text or html file so I am sure I can port it anywhere I want, I just do not touch it in eform.
Personally I think that the thousands of years of “book culture” of actually owning the book in whatever form, rather than renting it which any DRM model ultimately implies, will make any DRM model for books a failure.
Incidentally the posibility that you mention in this thread, namely of a publisher recalling ebooks, occured recently when Tor backed out of the deal with Baen/Webscriptions of offering Tor ebooks through them (non Drm’ed as Baen insists on any deal with them). There were a number of ebooks offered for several weeks and to my regret I got only two of the three I wanted since I thought I would have all the time to get more, and one day the Tor ebooks were recalled, but of course nobody tried to take back the purchased books.
Liviu
There’s a more insidious possibility that Richard hinted at: rather than pulling the ebook, the publisher could just “update” the content remotely when the edits become available. That sounds like a dream when you’re talking about textbooks or reference books, or typo/spelling correction. But when it comes to content, it’s troubling. Something like Windows Automatic Update for ebooks could be used to push content changes on users that don’t want it, or even worse, aren’t aware of it. I don’t know that it would be used for revising history, but it’s still a worrying thought.