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Used ebooks: we need them
I read ebooks. (My friends know this, right? It's not like I'm coy about my obsession with doc conversion, or slow to mention that what I do with fanfic is throw it on my Sony Reader.) I buy ebooks, sometimes, although not nearly as much as I read free ebooks & fanfic. And I'll admit to having acquired some ebooks through methods other than "bought" or "downloaded from author/publisher/official archive site."
And I feel guilty about those. Sometimes.
The older Harlequins? No guilt. They're no longer buy-able at the official site; I'm not cheating anyone out of money by acquiring out-of-print books from someone's free bin. (Also, the official ones are DRM'd, in ways that require me to use IE. Bleh. No.) I grew up "knowing" that Harlequin romances were 10/$1 at the bin in front of used bookstores; I wouldn't be surprised if that's bumped up to 4/$1, but wouldn't expect them to be much more than that.
Yeah, someone bought all those books at the MSRP. It wasn't me. Ever. I didn't grow up in a rich family, the kind that could buy paperbacks new off the shelves. And yes, it says something that, for a long time, ability to buy new paperbacks on a whim was well within my criteria for "rich." Keep that in mind; economics is a *big* part of this post.
These days, I don't read paperbacks unless I really, really can't get out of it. Don't read hardcovers, either; never liked them. Too big. Too heavy. Can't carry the next three in the series in my backpack.
Now, I read ebooks. Lots of ebooks. Or at least, lots and lots of text on an ebook reader; there's no consensus on what counts as an "ebook." (See, a "book" is simple: it has a cover, and printed text, and a binding, and a barcode. Ebooks don't have bindings. Some don't have cover art. They don't have barcodes. Some have ISBNs. Should I count ISBN as the indicator of a "real" ebook? Seems silly; I'd certainly consider a real "book" to include hand-printed, bound-at-Kinko's things. Lulu.com's books are still books.) Fictionwise sells 3000-word short stories as "ebooks." Seems weird to think that a 3k word story is an "ebook" but Te's 160k word fanfic is not. So: for myself, if it's more than 20k words and on my Sony PRS-505, I call it an ebook. (I call the other stuff "documents.") But that's a digression. The point is, I used to read a lot books, and a lot of used books; now I read a lot of ebooks, and ...
There are no 4/$1 used ebook bins at the ebook stores. No $1 each ebook yard sales. No free used ebook baskets in the mailroom at the university. No Bookcrossing for ebooks.
This is a problem.
This is a BIG problem.
None of us who learned to love books, learned to love them by buying every book we read new at full price. We often loved libraries (which have their own ebook problems), but we also borrowed books from friends. Or received them as gifts, and not just new ones. Or bought them at $5/bag rummage sales. Or borrowed them from one friend, loaned them to another friend, who loaned them to someone else, and we eventually sheepishly bought a new copy for the original friend when it was obvious the first book was never coming back. We visited friends who had shelves full of books that they loaned to anyone who wandered through, without worrying about whether one disappeared along the way. We made our own shelves of loaner books. We bought copies of our favorites at Goodwill and pushed them at new friends.
WE DID AN AWFUL LOT OF READING THAT DIDN'T INVOLVE ROYALTY PAYMENTS.
And now, with ebooks... we can't. Or at least, not legally, sort of, not simply & easily.
I don't make ebook rec lists, because I can't loan out ebooks. Because I can't say, "I loved this, here, you try it... for $4.95." (I buy cheap ebooks. Non-DRM'd books tend to cost less.) Ebookstores would like to believe that the free first chapters counts as "try before you buy"--but it's not the same as, "here, read my copy; if you like it enough to re-read or want to loan out, you'll buy a copy of your own."
The current ebook model is a very selfish economy. It wants to lock books into 1 purchase=1 reader, and that's never been how books have worked. It wants to make them like movies, paid-access entertainment, not a focal point for communities and subcultures.
I don't know what to do about this. Handing an ebook to a friend: Good thing; we should find a way to do this. Torrent an ebook for 3515 readers: Not so good; we should find a way to prevent this.
The IEEE is working on a new security thing (that it insists is NOT DRM, REALLY plz don't giggle too loud) that might allow this. You could "loan" your content by giving access to it; anyone who has access could remove your access. That means you'd have to trust them. The IEEE assumes this would prevent open internet sharing; I have my doubts. The IEEE also seems to assume publishers would get behind this; I have doubts about that, too.
Because the BN Nook already has a sharing option--you can loan out a DRM'd ebook, once, for two weeks. Except that publishers have the option to opt out of participation, and most of them do.
Publishers don't want people sharing books. They've never acknowledged how many sales are based on books people already read; they're very fixed on the idea that every ebook downloaded (purchased or not) is a lost hardcover sale. (The constant comparison of ebooks to hardcovers is another bit of neurosis, which is going to wait for a different post.)
Yes, ebooks are different. They don't wear out; you don't need to buy a new one to replace the dog-eared copy with the torn cover. And there's no way to require the book leave your presence when you hand it to someone else.
Still.
The 1 buyer = 1 reader (plus maybe family members who have access to the same machines) is not going to work. It's not how book communities grow. It's not how new readers--people who love books--are made. It's not how hobbyists of *any* sort are made; we don't say, "if you think you'd like bicycle racing, go buy a bike, and..." We say, "you're interested? Try mine. Like that? How about you buy my old one for 1/3 the price of a new one?"
We NEED used ebook markets. Otherwise the ebook market remains where it is: split between, on the one hand, the elite who can afford to pay full price for every book they read, and on the other, the scroungers who either download from unauthorized archives or stick to legit free & very cheap content on the web.
I'm a scrounger. I'm moving away from unauthorized archives... which just means I read even less of mainstream-published books than I used to.
It's not that I mind, really. But I'm raising my daughters to be avid readers ... of fanfic. Because paper books are bulky & a waste of space, and ebooks are fraught with weird legalities. I can't even tell if I can legitimately allow my daughters to read the books I've bought from Fictionwise & Smashwords. (The ToS's seem to say maybe not. Which I think is ridiculous, and I ignore. If saying so costs me access to those accounts, I'll live.) This is not just my problem: Can libraries loan Kindles?
(Crossposted from my journal, with a lot less cleanup/editing than I intended. Ah well, I'm sure the internet won't collapse because I failed to properly beta blog post.)
And I feel guilty about those. Sometimes.
The older Harlequins? No guilt. They're no longer buy-able at the official site; I'm not cheating anyone out of money by acquiring out-of-print books from someone's free bin. (Also, the official ones are DRM'd, in ways that require me to use IE. Bleh. No.) I grew up "knowing" that Harlequin romances were 10/$1 at the bin in front of used bookstores; I wouldn't be surprised if that's bumped up to 4/$1, but wouldn't expect them to be much more than that.
Yeah, someone bought all those books at the MSRP. It wasn't me. Ever. I didn't grow up in a rich family, the kind that could buy paperbacks new off the shelves. And yes, it says something that, for a long time, ability to buy new paperbacks on a whim was well within my criteria for "rich." Keep that in mind; economics is a *big* part of this post.
These days, I don't read paperbacks unless I really, really can't get out of it. Don't read hardcovers, either; never liked them. Too big. Too heavy. Can't carry the next three in the series in my backpack.
Now, I read ebooks. Lots of ebooks. Or at least, lots and lots of text on an ebook reader; there's no consensus on what counts as an "ebook." (See, a "book" is simple: it has a cover, and printed text, and a binding, and a barcode. Ebooks don't have bindings. Some don't have cover art. They don't have barcodes. Some have ISBNs. Should I count ISBN as the indicator of a "real" ebook? Seems silly; I'd certainly consider a real "book" to include hand-printed, bound-at-Kinko's things. Lulu.com's books are still books.) Fictionwise sells 3000-word short stories as "ebooks." Seems weird to think that a 3k word story is an "ebook" but Te's 160k word fanfic is not. So: for myself, if it's more than 20k words and on my Sony PRS-505, I call it an ebook. (I call the other stuff "documents.") But that's a digression. The point is, I used to read a lot books, and a lot of used books; now I read a lot of ebooks, and ...
There are no 4/$1 used ebook bins at the ebook stores. No $1 each ebook yard sales. No free used ebook baskets in the mailroom at the university. No Bookcrossing for ebooks.
This is a problem.
This is a BIG problem.
None of us who learned to love books, learned to love them by buying every book we read new at full price. We often loved libraries (which have their own ebook problems), but we also borrowed books from friends. Or received them as gifts, and not just new ones. Or bought them at $5/bag rummage sales. Or borrowed them from one friend, loaned them to another friend, who loaned them to someone else, and we eventually sheepishly bought a new copy for the original friend when it was obvious the first book was never coming back. We visited friends who had shelves full of books that they loaned to anyone who wandered through, without worrying about whether one disappeared along the way. We made our own shelves of loaner books. We bought copies of our favorites at Goodwill and pushed them at new friends.
WE DID AN AWFUL LOT OF READING THAT DIDN'T INVOLVE ROYALTY PAYMENTS.
And now, with ebooks... we can't. Or at least, not legally, sort of, not simply & easily.
I don't make ebook rec lists, because I can't loan out ebooks. Because I can't say, "I loved this, here, you try it... for $4.95." (I buy cheap ebooks. Non-DRM'd books tend to cost less.) Ebookstores would like to believe that the free first chapters counts as "try before you buy"--but it's not the same as, "here, read my copy; if you like it enough to re-read or want to loan out, you'll buy a copy of your own."
The current ebook model is a very selfish economy. It wants to lock books into 1 purchase=1 reader, and that's never been how books have worked. It wants to make them like movies, paid-access entertainment, not a focal point for communities and subcultures.
I don't know what to do about this. Handing an ebook to a friend: Good thing; we should find a way to do this. Torrent an ebook for 3515 readers: Not so good; we should find a way to prevent this.
The IEEE is working on a new security thing (that it insists is NOT DRM, REALLY plz don't giggle too loud) that might allow this. You could "loan" your content by giving access to it; anyone who has access could remove your access. That means you'd have to trust them. The IEEE assumes this would prevent open internet sharing; I have my doubts. The IEEE also seems to assume publishers would get behind this; I have doubts about that, too.
Because the BN Nook already has a sharing option--you can loan out a DRM'd ebook, once, for two weeks. Except that publishers have the option to opt out of participation, and most of them do.
Publishers don't want people sharing books. They've never acknowledged how many sales are based on books people already read; they're very fixed on the idea that every ebook downloaded (purchased or not) is a lost hardcover sale. (The constant comparison of ebooks to hardcovers is another bit of neurosis, which is going to wait for a different post.)
Yes, ebooks are different. They don't wear out; you don't need to buy a new one to replace the dog-eared copy with the torn cover. And there's no way to require the book leave your presence when you hand it to someone else.
Still.
The 1 buyer = 1 reader (plus maybe family members who have access to the same machines) is not going to work. It's not how book communities grow. It's not how new readers--people who love books--are made. It's not how hobbyists of *any* sort are made; we don't say, "if you think you'd like bicycle racing, go buy a bike, and..." We say, "you're interested? Try mine. Like that? How about you buy my old one for 1/3 the price of a new one?"
We NEED used ebook markets. Otherwise the ebook market remains where it is: split between, on the one hand, the elite who can afford to pay full price for every book they read, and on the other, the scroungers who either download from unauthorized archives or stick to legit free & very cheap content on the web.
I'm a scrounger. I'm moving away from unauthorized archives... which just means I read even less of mainstream-published books than I used to.
It's not that I mind, really. But I'm raising my daughters to be avid readers ... of fanfic. Because paper books are bulky & a waste of space, and ebooks are fraught with weird legalities. I can't even tell if I can legitimately allow my daughters to read the books I've bought from Fictionwise & Smashwords. (The ToS's seem to say maybe not. Which I think is ridiculous, and I ignore. If saying so costs me access to those accounts, I'll live.) This is not just my problem: Can libraries loan Kindles?
(Crossposted from my journal, with a lot less cleanup/editing than I intended. Ah well, I'm sure the internet won't collapse because I failed to properly beta blog post.)
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Not everyone. But there'll be wide enough demand that the cracking programs will get simpler & more easily accessed. (And publishers will demand their removal. And ISPs will comply. And they'll pop up on other blogs, in other countries, who aren't held to the DMCA. And they'll be torrented, handed around from computer to computer with no central source, and publishers will be put in the odd position of considering whether to file multithousand dollar lawsuits on random college students for handing out 500kb of coded script.)
Doctorow made a good point when he said that "It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in."
They -- the publishers, the government, whatever -- could stop "piracy" ... by destroying the useful parts of the internet. (Which would then shatter back into individual bulletin boards, only with broadband connections.) They cannot, however, end filesharing without ending what makes businesses run.
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To quote from the Jargon File:
"Copy protection is a way of keeping legitimate customers from accessing their rightfully purchased software while providing an intellectual exercise for the pirates."
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Baen's model wouldn't work for everyone, but I really wish every publisher would look at them and say "which aspects of this can we use?" rather than "oh, that's only because they're a niche, genre market with a core group of devoted customers." (Which would work just as well for Tor, but that's owned by one of the big 6 companies who freak out at the idea of non-DRM'd ebooks.)
And I especially love Baen's attitude to ebook sharing--that popularity is good for them. They don't have all the books on the CDs in their free library, but they encourage distribution of the CDs. They encourage "read it & pass it along to a friend--yeah, even the ebook version that means you keep a copy."
They're aware that, eventually, this'll cause problems; when 80% of all book sales are electronic, at some point in the future, they won't be able to count on ebook sharing driving physical sales. But for now, ebooks are a niche, and they *can* use them to push hardcover sales. Other publishers seem to have missed that--that while many ebook customers won't buy hardcovers, if they're happy with the ebook, their friends will buy pbooks.
technical companies start publishing their manuals in either a usable PDF format
I dread more companies publishing PDFs, because they're so oblivious to what makes a good PDF. And I know they're not going to use ePub or Mobi, because those require rethinking the whole layout. But otherwise, yes; am looking forward to more nonfic ebooks, more *practical use* ebooks.
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When I got my reader, I decided beforehand that while I'm perfectly willing to pay for ebooks, I only will do so if the price is less than a paper copy (come on, people, be real!), and doesn't include DRM. I just don't want to deal with the crap.
So far, I haven't even found the need to buy, there is SO MUCH free stuff that's worth exploring (and can be so easily explored now!), and then there's all that fanfiction.... I've read stories on my eReader that I never would have online, because it's so much more convenient and pleasant to read in eInk wherever I like, instead of on a backlit screen on a computer at a desk (or at best, on the laptop).
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E-ink is nice, though. I like being able to make PDFs with fonts of my choice, which I couldn't do on the PDA.
Costs less than paper, no DRM: yep, that's my requirements. If I really want to read it & can't find it that way, I'll buy a used paper copy, chop the binding & scan it myself. Hey look! Non-DRM'd ebook that nobody got royalty payments for! (I grant that this is not, and is not likely to become, a popular solution.)
And yes... LOTS of free content. Lots of it's good. It's just that there's no central repository for that, no easy rec lists like The New York Times Book Reviews; you have to find it on your own.