E-Books: Calming the E-Terror of Book Lovers [Part V]
Posted by Ian in Books, Business, Industry ThoughtsWhile this is Part V of the ‘E-Book’ series, it’s actually the first half of a two-part rant, and part two of that will arrive tomorrow in the series’ Part VI, which will carry on from where this one leaves off. There’s far too much to consider with this particular area of the ‘E-Book’ topic to be assimilated in one go.
While many things may not be to one particular person’s taste, there are a number of valid reasons that others might enjoy them or find their use helpful and beneficial. I have no use for a Wankel Rotary Engine, like the one illustrated on the right for instance, but I do not decry the use of them by others.
Electronic books at the outset didn’t have much going for them. The expensive devices had screens that were tiny and too weak to read in bright sunlight, they were prone to so much glare that you had a devil of a time making out the text in all but the softest of light, batteries were replaced constantly (sometimes losing books if the engineering was bad), and the letter forms were only one step from something on a digital watch.
In some forms, e-books and reading devices still aren’t anything to write home about; especially when considering anything using a ‘traditional’ text display method akin to a computer monitor involving the use of a projected light source (EG: iPad, smartphone, laptop), wherein eye fatigue becomes a real concern. As well, it’s nigh-on impossible to sign someone’s e-book, you can’t get a favourite book in a ‘limited edition, hand-bound e-book’, and the appreciation of leather quality, guilt-edging, or silk end papers can’t be had.
To this I ask So what? That’s not a book you’re talking about there, it’s an object, and that’s different. Nothing wrong with having that object, just don’t try and tell me that an electronic book “isn’t a real book”. I’m reading the same words, the same story is being played out in my head, the author’s imagination is being made real… What essential ‘book-ness’ am I missing, Plato?
If I hear one more person lapse rhapsodic about the smell of books, I’m gonna gouge out their eye with my thumb. What, exactly, does this ‘bonus sense’ do to aid you in the appreciation of the words of the story? It can’t have had any influence on the author, can it? If Dickens was stuck for a plot development, and then thought of one after he remembered that the books were going to be bound in cow hide and had a good sniff of the sample his publisher sent him, I’d be starting to investigate what was in that leather other than the usual tanning agents.
If someone a century ago always read a book when sitting in the kitchen and someone was baking bread, then they would logically complain that pocket books let people read outside where they can’t smell what’s in the oven “like a proper book does”. The scent experience, however, has no more concrete connection to the act of reading than does the potentially dangerous bathwater.
The complaints about tiny, shiny, and un-readable screens was justifiable and fairly universally the case until about three years ago with the arrival of models from Sony and Amazon. With the innovation of eInk displays and non-glare glass providing a reading experience nearly identical to reading a newspaper, electronic books have neither anything to apologize for, nor any reason to be seen as ‘useless’. There are huge advantages for both the reader and the publisher with them, and to dismiss e-books today based on that earlier state and refusing to notice what vastly improved state they currently are in is a good way as any to make others stop listening to anything you ever say.
Remember: no one is being asked to throw out printed books, nor is any freedom to continue purchase a printed book going to be curtailed. That’s not my point at all. My home is filled with printed books and Atomic Fez remains committed to producing and selling printed books for as long as there are customers for them. The printed book will be with for a damned long time to come, with the electronic book happily co-existing and increasing people’s appreciation of literature in all its varied forms.
There was an article recently in The Huffington Post about how electronic books may have experienced increased sales in 2009 when compared to 2008, but sales of printed books also increased, so signalling the death of publishing is hardly a smart thing to do. Yes, as Jennifer Havenner points out, a printed book is more permanent than an electronic one, but neither is more valuable in terms of reading are they? Is one version more ‘worthy’ than the other?
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Yes, all this technology is wonderful, some of you are no doubt agreeing, these things are quite shiny and exciting but, you rightly ask, what’s the point? Do we need another electronic goo-gaw? Isn’t this really the publishers’ version of thew music industry selling people their LP collections in CD form, only to then re-master them and again sell them via digital downloads or in DVD-A format, and wring more money out of the same old recordings?
Well… in a way… yes and no… there are some similarities… however… ultimately, no.
On one hand, some publishers are not clear on the concept and are making the same mistakes that the music people did. First off, any electronic book has to be cheaper than whatever paperback edition there is, otherwise no one’s going to buy it. The price range for electronic books that people will willingly accept stops at $15 at the absolute most. I can see people grudgingly paying $14.99, but nothing higher. The “sweet spot” sits at just under $10. CDs were more expensive than LPs, but there was an inherent improvement of quality with the elimination of surface noise you were getting by buying the CD. There isn’t any improvement in the words of the book in the new format, so either the electronic book is cheaper than the printed book, or it’s a swindle. Yes, there’s a convenience to electronic books over printed ones, but there’s nothing sufficiently convenient to justify paying more for them.
Large publishing houses have missed this repeatedly, and continue to do so. I’ve seen e-books priced at or even above the price of hardbacks before they’re reduced from their RRP. No one is going to pay the $27 RRP for the electronic edition of The Passage, Doubleday Canada! Not when Random House has an RRP of only $29.95 for their hardcover edition, and your hardcover’s RRP is only three dollars higher at $32.95. You’re nuts!
Another mistaken notion that seems to be wide-spread is that all electronic books must locked off to such an extent that it is impossible to have anything done with them other than for the purchaser to read the book on the hand-held unit, preferably as fast as possible so they come back and buy another book.
Any sort of copy protection mechanism – such as the widely despised “Digital Rights Management” or ‘DRM’ system, as well as the one called “Content Protection for Prerecorded Media” or ‘CPPM’ – have been the bane of music lover’s enjoyment of their legally owned recordings for over a decade now. The complete locking down of music files to prevent piracy was a case of the executives telling their customers “you can’t be trusted, and should be grateful you can buy music at all!” Certainly, the writer of a song and the performer on the record have the right to be paid for that work, which is part of the purchase price for the listener. However, if I buy a CD and then wish to listen to that music on my computer, according to the Music Industry P.R. Geniuses, I’m supposed to purchase the music again by way of a digital download of files in either the MP3 or AAC file formats, which frankly are lousy and even a relatively un-trained ear like mine can tell the difference between those and the original version on the Compact Disc. So not only are you supposed to buy this music twice, you get crap when you have pay the second time. Thank you, no.
By way of illustration of how much a pain DRM can create for the end-user, I’ve had to buy Miles Davis’s 1986 album Tutu three different times, owing to incompatibility of DRM-enabled files. Originally I downloaded it in WMA format from the Canadian on-line music retailer Puretracks and all was fine. Then Windows Media Player shifted to a major new version of some sort, and the new software couldn’t interpret the files’ DRM restriction properly, and refused to play the tracks. After ‘rewinding’ my computer to its previous state before the new software went in, intending to burn a CD from which I would then import the tracks without the DRM, the registry was now found to be in a state that the DRM interpretation was changed irrevocably, and the old version of Media Player was now telling me I wasn’t authorized to play the tracks and burning a CD was also impossible. So then I hustled over to some on-line store through Media Player, and downloaded what ended-up being low-quality files; again in the WMA-format, but at a quality setting half of the one at which my original files were created. After listening to this for a few months, still hating the quality I was hearing, and despising Windows Media Player’s way of doing things, I shifted to Apple’s iTunes. All of my files worked perfectly, but the ‘low-fi’ sound of the files continued to bother me. Once Apple began making it possible to buy high-quality AAC files without DRM, Tutu was the first thing I bought. I then immediately burned a CD and have that to go back to if anything screws up on me again.
[SIDE NOTE: For those who are interested in this sort of techno-geekery, I actually now use Foobar for playing audio, and rip using the Free Lossless Audio Codec (or ‘FLAC’ format) which is a ‘lossless’ one where you lose nothing from the CD’s full range of tone and separation. Vinyl’s “warmth of tone” is something I can’t hear, or simply cannot appreciate for all the surface noise annoying me.]
Some of the publishers are doing to e-book files the same sort of thing by using DRM restrictions so that you can’t move those files around to other devices, or their eReader units not giving you a complete set of options on how you’d like to display a file you didn’t load onto the unit through their proprietary software using their on-line store’s purchase process. These are understandable in their prevention of piracy, but when things change in a few years time – as they inevitably will, no matter what the change is, there’s going to be something – those files will instigators of some poor programmer’s migraine as they work out a way to prevent established customers yelling about some new eReader being incompatible with their previously purchased books.
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Even ignoring the arcane nature of DRM and cross-platform file interpretation conflicts, the real question for someone wondering about this new ‘e-book hype’ is one based on that previous experience buying music on LP, then Compact Cassette, then CD. Now the electronic book comes along and you’re wondering if – after getting snookered into buying your books from Amazon in their Kindle Store, or from Kobo in their store, or Sony, or whoever – in a few year’s time the file format changes and you have to re-purchase them all again after you’ve lost your eReader or file formats have been ‘upgraded’ and so on…? Honestly, for the most part, if you’re smart (as with much in life) you’ll be fine.
Kobo is right up-front with how many ways you have simultaneous access to the books you’ve bought. You can have copies of your entire library on every single computer you own, plus your smartphone, plus as part of your back-up files because they even let you download a copy of the ePUB file outside of their software so you can have that as its own entity.
What happens when Kobo gets shut down by someone so you have to shift to the Apple product or Sony’s or something? If Kobo goes bust – Lord knows how, but if they do – or gets bought out by someone, then once your existing Kobo eReader dies you’ve got all those back-up files to re-load on some new e-reading device / smartphone / computer you’ve bought. That’s a pretty big ‘if’, though. If you stick with someone big like Amazon, Sony, or Apple, or with a company like Kobo who’s tied to a big retailer like Chapters, Borders USA and Australia, or with Barnes & Noble’s unit called “Nook”, you ought to weather any corporate merger with nary a problem (granted, people said US real estate was a good investment, and look what happened there).
What happens if you lose your Kobto e-reader or it gets run over by a bus? Simple: you buy a new device (chances are today’s $150 cost will be south of $100 by this time next year) and you re-download the books you still have ownership of. There is no need to re-purchase your books. If you drop your paperback in the bathtub, you might have to buy a new one, but just because electronics aren’t waterproof doesn’t mean you’re risking your library every time you have a soak. The best way not to have the problem at all is this: don’t drop the thing in the tub! You’ve managed it for years with paper books, surely this will be just as easy?
What happens if the file formats change? Actually, let’s say “when” they change! It’ll be like Betamax and HD-DVD, won’t it? I’m screwed, right? No. Firstly, the file formats are pretty stripped down now, there’s a minimum of stuff in them other than just words, really; and secondly, we’re at the point of all of those file formats being readable by just about all of the units available now, and the next eighteen months or so will see the shaking out of the last of them, probably. The most universally acceptable format is ePUB, which can be read by just about any device you can name (CLICK HERE FOR LIST); and which is all but universally accepted by dedicated eReader devices, with the notable exceptions of all three Amazon Kindle units, the very first of the Sony units, and a Samsung model called the “Papyrus” that I’ve never heard of (CLICK HERE FOR LIST). The chances of ePUB being replaced are pretty slim and because 98% of the units use them – even if it did change – the new format would have to be backward compatible with the old format to avoid righteous indignation of a mammoth scale. When Steve Jobs accepts the ePUB as good enough for Apple products, you know it’s not changing soon.
Additional to all of that, even if one’s worst fears are made manifest and the ePUB format gets dumped and there’s no cross-compatibility, Kobo would ensure you still had access through their software to the new versions you’ve already paid for in their old format; and Amazon’s got more than enough customers world-wide that they would be doing the same thing so you could re-download the titles you already owned.
TOMORROW: Why the printed book isn’t the best business model for a company or for our planet; what the whole e-book thing is good for; plus, why you don’t want an iPad
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