Electronic books have been around in different forms for the past decade. A non-commercial example is
Project Gutenberg, an online library containing thousands of free, mainly copyright expired titles, which can be downloaded in a variety of open formats. It offers well known titles such as
Pride and Prejudice and
Oliver Twist, combined with more obscure works. Interestingly enough, even though it is available here for free,
Pride and Prejudice sold 110,000 copies in 2003 and is consistently in top 1000 books sold by Amazon. This begs the first question – why are the sales of this book so high when an electronic version is available freely? Is this due to the “classic” nature of the book or is it a wider reflection of the public attitude toward electronic books?Although Amazon itself has jumped on the electronic book bandwagon, offering them for download on its US web site sales are not particularly high – they are definitely not top sellers – and the selection of titles available is particularly poor, outnumbered by audio books – why are publishers not releasing more electronic books? The costs to the publisher, one would assume would be minimal – in the age of Microsoft Word and the Paperclip, manuscripts are already being produced in an electronic format, which could very easily be sold to the consumer with minimal effort by the publisher. But publishers are not willing to make it that simple, if we look at the current state of the music industry we can see why.With the growing prevalence of high speed internet access, one of the main concerns of the music industry has been protecting its properties from copyright infringements. Online stores such as Apple’s
iTunes Music Store offer music for sale, but in a protected format, limiting distribution and sharing. This is one challenge facing book publishers; they are reluctant to release electronic versions of best sellers in an unrestricted format. The reason being that they do not want it being distributed on
P2P networks or multiple copies being printed and shared because of the obvious impact it may have upon sales. There is a reluctance to follow Project Gutenberg, releasing text in an open format, and instead there is a push towards adopting a form of
DRM in electronic publications – and this is where problems begin to show.Like what has been observed in the music industry, fragmentation is evident in the publishing industry when it comes to electronic publishing. Apple began selling music in one format, interoperable with their popular iPod portable music player. Hot on the heels, companies such as
Sony and (the new)
Napster released their rival stores, trading in a totally incompatible, protected music format - One which wouldn’t be recognized by an iPod. Similarly in publishing, Microsoft has launched its own
Reader software , Sony is developing its own e-book hardware/software platform called the
Librié and many other companies are developing competing e-book platforms and protection schemes. Like the music industry, publishers have not agreed on a single standard and as such the market is becoming fragmented – until a clear winner emerges there is little value for the reader in having a collection of e-books which they need multiple types of hardware and software to read. Although the delivery method of the text is much enhanced, the lack of a single unifying standard takes away the convenience of a book.Of course, this has not yet answered my first question – Pride and Prejudice is still one of the best selling books worldwide, it has been available electronically, free of charge and in an open format for the past decade, yet there has been no significant decline in sales. Why? Perhaps, aside from the technological factors surrounding electronic publishing, the reason for its non-acceptance is more a social one?Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon realizes there is a difference between his company and physical bookstores:
“We will never make Amazon.com fun in the same way as the great physical bookstores are … You’ll never hear the bindings creak and smell the books and have the tasty lattes at Amazon.com”
He is admitting that there is a big difference between his store and its real-world counterparts, and the same is true for electronic books.Many people have commented that sitting down with a book is an intimate experience; you have tactile contact with the pages as you turn them and you can smell the inks and paper used. A book is something you can curl up in bed with, read on the beach or in the bath. With electronic books you get none of this, you stare at a bright screen – making your eyes tired, certainly not what you want when you are trying to read the latest
Dan Brown bestseller. Portability is also an important aspect, even if you have a PDA or laptop, its not suited for all environments and can still be bulky. If you are giving a gift, would you rather it is a tangible, hefty book or an intangible collection of ones and zeros on a remote computer?Similarly, how many times have you been to somebody’s house and glanced at what they have on their bookshelf? It tells you something about the person, something you wouldn’t get if they just had a computer in the corner. A book is a personal object; one of my earliest childhood memories is of reading a book. I can pick it up, twenty years later and immediately be filled with nostalgia. A computer on the other hand is a lot more impersonal, and too be honest I’d be concerned about it still working after twenty years!Even assuming that technological incompatibilities and limitations will eventually be resolved, it is hard to imagine that the social drawbacks will be as easily, or quickly, resolved. With this in mind, I do not see “dead-tree” publishing disappearing any time soon, and replaced with electronic publishing.Having said all that, there is perhaps one area of electronic publishing which I see as being done well, and potentially growing. I have personally used a company called
Pragmatic Publishing, a small publishing house serving a niche market of computer programmers – offering titles on best practice, and the “next big thing” of the moment. Their titles are available in both “dead-tree” forms, from themselves or Amazon, and in electronic format. You can download a book, in unprotected
PDF format, at a reduced price immediately, the only form of protection is that your name is embedded onto every page. You can also order the print and the electronic version at the same time at a special price. As a customer that is quite valuable to me, because I can dive right in immediately with the electronic version while the print version is in the mail.The company also offers “beta books” – books still being written. You can subscribe to download PDF chapters as the author writes then, and offer feedback which helps shape the final product. This idea has taken off in software development communities, which are already collaborative by nature. However, as good as this idea is, it is something that would only work effectively in such niche areas – don’t expect to see a beta of the next
Harry Potter title!
