Ebooks

It's hit the news that Kobo Says You’re Not Allowed to Share Your Account – Not With a Spouse, Your Kids, Anyone -- someone finally wrangled an answer out of them, wherein they said "Legally, only the account holder has license to use the material."

Kobo's not alone in this; very major ebook store, and most of the minor ones, has a clause like this. Kobo is probably the first one to confirm in writing that it means "you are not allowed to let your spouse borrow your ereader and read the books you bought from us."

No wonder ebook sales for YA books are lousy. Kids can't buy books directly, and stores won't promote them because that would mean saying, "share your purchases with someone else."

( Sections from other ebook stores TOS, with overuse of the phrase 'personal and non-commercial' )

Sale at Smashwords until July 31; hundreds of free ebooks, lots of discounted ebooks. (Use the tags at the top to filter for 100% off, 75% off, 50% off or 25% off.)

Hmm, I should download a cluster of the free short stories and post mini-reviews to sps on the theory that I'm willing to read up to 5000 words of just about anything, and it'd be nice to find good unknown authors.

Anyone up for the idea of a read-and-review fest at some point, where a bunch of us download a given collection of free ebooks and post thoughts about them?

The Shatzkin files has a post about Data helps us understand ebook pricing impacts, with lots of chewy thoughts about how pricing & popularity get tangled together; Shatkzin's opinion is that $.99 books and $19.99 books shouldn't be listed together because they're aimed at such different markets there's no point. "Comparing apples to broccoli," he calls it.

And he posts a link to Dan Lubart's blog which has a nifty factoid worth noticing. His ebook had reached #1 on the charts for its sub-category at Barnes & Noble--and then the next day, it was at #127. This was unheard-of. B&N doesn't have Amazon's activity numbers that can reorganize the whole chart in a matter of hours, and their numbers just aren't that responsive to user activity. (Amazon's rankings go up by page counts & sample downloads. Dunno about B&N.) Anyway, after some digging, he noticed a trend:

# of titles below $3 - ranks 1 - 125: 0
# of titles below $3 - ranks 126 - 200: 65

Barnes & Noble seems to have declared that ebooks that cost less than $3 can't be in the top 125, no matter how well-loved they are. Those ranks are reserved for more expensive books.

So far, this is speculation; there's no proof, just the flat numbers that currently, the top 125 ebooks at B&N all cost at least $3--one day after one of them held the top spot.

Someone has to say something about it specifically, right? Google ebooks went live yesterday.

Google's ebook store has gone live. It has an app you can use to read its books on a desktop/laptop, and apps for many mobile devices. It works with Adobe's Digital Editions DRM. Some of the books are read-online only; some are downloadable as PDF/epub. Some of the epubs are just raw OCR (optical character recognition) of the scanned PDFs, which means they're loaded with typos (if that's the word... OCRos?) and the formatting is atrocious.

pir8fancier posted a link (and most of the text) to an article at salon.com: Is Google leading an e-book revolution? (My answer? Hell no. When you enter a marketplace 10+ years after it's been established, you are not "leading" anything. Google may add new twists to the commercial ebook game, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with, but when an elephant joins the dog-and-pony show, that's not "leading a revolution." Not even if it's a second elephant.)

Still, they'll bring ebooks to people who hadn't tried them before, because they're readable RIGHT THERE IN YOUR BROWSER, no special downloads required. And most of those people will scratch their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about, because book pages displayed in a browser aren't actually much fun to read. Oh, and non-US people? Pretty much screwed. Googlebooks are very limited for them.

I'm not unhappy with the store, but I'm not bouncing with glee, either. I am *sharply* interested in the results of the lawsuit, which are still pending. (I suspect that nothing available in the store is covered by the contentious parts of the lawsuit.)

The large ebook stores online (amazon, diesel, booksonboard) would like you to believe that *of course* you should have to give them personal info, and tie your purchased ebooks to a small set of devices (device includes your computer and ebook readers), and that it's perfectly reasonable that you can't reformat your ebooks--afer all, you can't reformat a paper book, right?

Well, yes. But you can look at a paper book's format before you buy it, and decide that the font is hard on your eyes or the letters are too cramped to read, or the table of contents sucks, or that it's just too thin for the price they want. You often don't have that option with ebooks. And with a pbook, when you're done, you can give it to a friend, or sell it, or cut it up and make paper mache out of it. With an ebook... the publishing industry, like the recording industry, has worked very hard to convince people the digital equivalents of these actions are illegal. (Some other time, I'll post about copyright law and ebooks. It's a mess.)

But some ebook publishers offer books without DRM--"digital rights management," sometimes called Digital Restrictions Management. They offer books, usually in several formats (because without DRM, it's a minor matter for them to do so), that you can reformat, or read on any device you have handy. You can also give them away to someone else; some publishers tacitly encourage this (Baen); others tell you it's forbidden (Fictionwise).

( Inside: List of some non-DRM publishers I've found )