As a reader, this does not strike me as against my interests in the long run. I get books teleported to my Kindle instantly -- what isn't to like? (They're cheap, too, but that isn't a huge win for me. I'd pay twice as much as I do currently without thinking twice.) A shame about Charlie's publisher. They've sold me minimally $200 worth of product in the last year, I could not tell you their name if my life depended on it, and they bring precisely zero value to me relative to any other publisher aside from having signed Charlie. If Amazon signs Charlie instead, it will be literally impossible for me to identify any way in which my life changes at a consequence.
The future of publishing will belong not to middlemen like Amazon, but to people who can reliably put out high-quality, profitable books even from middling writers, and who can turn a profit based on the carrot of quality rather than the stick of DRM. That means cutting out a lot of the people in traditional publishing, but it doesn't mean that publishing as an industry will go away.
O'Reilly, Five Simple Steps, A Book Apart and other technical publishers are paving the way here, and it won't be long before someone starts an ebook-specific publishing house for trashy romance or adventure novels and makes a killing.
I'm aware of that argument, I just don't find it credible. The prevailing arrangement is that the publisher pays people to edit and do cover art, just like they pay people to actually print the physical copies. It does not matter to me whose name is on the check that goes to the person who edits Charlie's book -- Charlie, Amazon, the publisher, whatever. The internals of supplier's accounting systems do not surface value to me.
I really wanted to buy an ebook reader when I last visited the States. As soon as I realized that if I buy anything that isn't a Kindle means I can't access all the books I've already bought from Amazon, I knew I'd have to buy a Kindle. This is a bad situation for a consumer, since I'm locked in to a specific platform. Right now it's fine for me, since the Kindle also happens to be the cheapest offering. But fast-forward 5 years, and if there's no longer competition, Amazon no longer has to make the price affordable for me.
Amazon could also eg set very unfavourable terms for authors, so only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.
Of course, other channels would open up in this event, but there would be a massive time lag. And if Amazon didn't squeeze too hard, they could maintain the status quo for a long time.
Monopolies are bad for everyone.
Even as a monopoly, why would Amazon do that? The cost of distributing another ebook is negligible (and may even effectively be negative if the competitive advantages of a larger catalog outweigh the server, bandwidth and other operating costs).
It seems to me that, even as a monopoly, Amazon doesn't really care whether the books they sell are mainstream or non-mainstream as long as they make as much money as they can from them. And that doesn't mean jacking up the retail price just for the hell of it (or squeezing authors for fun). That means trying to gather enough data to estimate the supply and demand curves and pricing based on that (something Amazon is already good at).
I think authors are likely to get squeezed regardless because, like musicians, there are too many that are willing to write for (effectively) free just to get the lottery ticket for the big leagues. On the consumer side, it is important to remember that every book is already a tiny little monopoly of its own, so it isn't clear which way things will go if they are aggregated.
Only mainstream literature is commercially viable in the status quo.
BTW, I have bought a lot of Charlie's books, all in Kindle format.
I really like publishers like O'Reilly and Manning that provide both MOBI and ePUB formats when you buy - that is real respect for customers.
Unfortunately, many middle-aged books have this problem, and unless you can wade through the Amazon reviews (which are not format-specific) and find out, you don't know whether the publisher just copy/pasted a text file and hit PublishNow! or actually had an editor sit down with it, mark chapters, fix typos introduced, un-break words if it was scanned, etc.
Of course Apple later proved DRM doesn't matter and people will pay for a DRM-free product if it's easy to purchase. But that's an entirely different point. As far as I can see the historical precedent is that DRM isn't enough of a deterrent for most people.
I think iTunes actually supports the author's point - how many people were there using iTunes and Rhapsody? DRM seems to have kept the iTunes customer well and truly locked in, at least for long enough for Apple to make a pile of money off their monopoly before Spotify et al. started moving in.
I'll give you an example. I was tempted to buy books from Apress today (they have a all e-books are $15 special). But I weighed the pros and cons and decided to buy them from Amazon instead for an average of $7 more per book because I like having books in my Kindle library that are automatically accessible.
So DRM is irrelevant but it isn't the main deterrent.
Up till then I thought people were just whining but now I see the folly in my ways. I'm definitely for some sort of protection for content authors but there must be another way. Maybe they could have a DR,-like system that allows you to use it on X devices the same way you can authorize a number of devices to sync in iTunes. Still, we can do even better. What about a system that somehow measures ownership differently. Like maybe somehow make it so you have to use a password if you want to transfer a protected file to some other device?
Is that naive? Has it been done? I just recently changed my position on DRM so I still have much to learn. Does anyone know of something like I'm describing and is this feasible technically?
I think Apple would charge you for a whole month, so it probably isn't worth it for 20 tracks, but in case anyone else is in the same boat with a larger amount of music...
Itunes has been drm free for some time now, drm on music is quite... quaint by now.
About two years ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted an e-book reader. At the time, you could only get a Kindle online, and she didn't want to buy one without seeing the device first; so we bought a Nook reader (after she played with it in the store).
Over the next year, we probably bought about $2000 of books on it, when she finally got tired of being envious of my Kindle (which I had recently purchased) and I gave it to her.
She ended up spending like three weeks cracking the DRM on all the Barnes and Noble e-pub books she had purchased, so that she'd be able to read them on the Kindle.
Most people wouldn't have done that, I suspect. They'd have just stuck with whatever platform they initially decided on (and had amassed a collection of DRM-laden files with).
A few years later, after amassing a couple of grand worth of DRMed books, the reader failed - and this presented two problems.
The first was that a replacement e-ink ebook reader that would read DRMd Mobipocket files was now impossible to come across, EPUB having mostly won out in the non-Kindle market. The second was that all those DRMd books she "owned" were locked to a broken device ID.
The only solution was the same as in the parent comment - spend a decent chunk of time breaking the DRM and changing their format.
I buy lots of books on the kindle. However, I wanted to read "Atlas Shrugged" and there was no kindle book for sale so I found it online.
I take the customer is always right approach. I am the customer. I consume content in the way I find most convenient. If you make it difficult for me to pay you to do what's most convenient for me, I don't.
Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not mandatory that every company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements), it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It isn't harmless, but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a $9.95/month subscription fee each out of me.
Where I feel like video needs something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google (as a search engine, not some new service) might be sufficient for ebooks.
If the book publishers get their act together.
...
So never mind, I guess.
Ideally, what I would like would be to be able to buy a paper book, and get the ebook bundled for $X more (say, $2-$5 more). I would have the satisfaction of a book on the shelf, actually owning the book, and then the convenience of an ebook. I would also be less bothered by the presence of DRM. If I could buy DRM-free ebooks from Amazon, I would be willing to pay closer to price parity of the corresponding paper book.
But the last two books I looked up were more expensive as a kindle edition than as a physically printed book. Not the same price -- that would have been bad enough -- but not having it printed was more expensive.
Since I am not interested in more dead wood I didn't buy either.
A rundown of the Big Six and their and their more prominent imprints: http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who...
