Sci-fi pros focus on e-books at Denvention 3
Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.
Since then, I've been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I've been pretty lucky--the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I've also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.
A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals--writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.
This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there's a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and the way the e-book market is actually developing.
Several panelists in two of the panel sessions, for example, strongly asserted that digital rights management (DRM) for e-books is ineffective, commercially impractical, and unacceptable to most users.
But these claims are simply inconsistent with the facts. Amazon's Kindle, according to various published reports, is selling very well, as are Kindle books. Citigroup estimates that Amazon will sell 380,000 Kindles this year, 150,000 in the fourth quarter alone.
Anecdotally, I can report that the Kindle owners I know (and others I ran into at the Worldcon) are happy with the gizmo and regularly buy books in electronic form rather than buying paper copies.
I'm having the same experience myself. I'd be happier if I could read Kindle books on my iPhone 3G or my Mac, or if I could print individual pages or copy text into an e-mail, but I figure that I get 99 percent of the potential enjoyment from just reading a book. At least with fiction; I still regard the Kindle and the Sony Reader as marginal for much nonfiction and completely inadequate for textbooks.
(Incidentally, I need to write another blog post about the Reader. Sony has recently released some updates for the PRS-505 that make it much better for reading PDFs and add support for Adobe's Digital Editions service.)
Also, the furor over DRM on music downloads seems to be dying down, and Apple's sales of music, TV shows, and movies through the iTunes Store continue to grow rapidly.
Obviously, DRM is commercially practical and acceptable to many consumers.
I think the disconnect in this case lies with the philosophical positions some people have taken against DRM, positions that generally date back to well before commercial electronic publishing was well established. Now that electronic publishing--with DRM--is achieving significant success and user acceptance, these people need to rethink their positions.
That said, Baen Books continues to offer DRM-free e-books through its WebScription Ebooks service, and completely free books through the Baen Free Library.
Baen's a smallish publisher, and what it's doing here isn't necessarily transferable to the major publishing houses, but it's good to see someone offering an alternative to Amazon's Kindle Store and Sony's eBook Store.
There were some other interesting topics addressed in Worldcon panels this year, and if I have time, I'll write about them here--but I have to get caught up on Siggraph 2008 from last week, and the Intel Developer Forum is this week. Busy, busy.
Peter N. Glaskowsky is a technology analyst for The Envisioneering Group. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
www.ereader.com
i have used on windows laptops, palm treos, windows mobile and and iphone.
My Father in law has a kindle, and while nice, it is one more thing to have to carry around. I always have my mobile device anyway. I can store multiple books and download new ones over the air.
Cant't beat it in my book ;-)
Don
Some day, the Kindle will be a footnote in history, like the Rocket eBook (not as small a footnote, I grant you). But what happens when all those Kindle books you bought won't work on TNGT (the next great thing) to come along? As you said, it would be nice if you could read your eBooks on your iPhone, Mac, or other platform -- but you can't, solely because of the DRM. You have seen the end, but refuse to accept it as a limitation because of your infatuation with the Kindle itself.
This is the bane of all ebooks with DRM. This is why any ebook reader that requires DRM will ultimately fail in the reader's eye. It WILL come back to bite you, and you WILL lose the investment you've made in your eBook purchases -- at least those books with DRM. You will NOT be able to leave your books to your children nor donate them to a school nor pick them up and re-read them in just a handful of years.
Your Kindle will one day die, and so will your DRM "protected" library.
In August 2007, the Mobipocket DRM severs were down from August 15 for more than a week. During that time, no-one could buy new DRMed Mobipocket eBooks, or download eBooks for a new device.
In April 2008, Microsoft announced that the PlaysForSure DRM server was going to go away soon. Those who had purchased DRMed music were left with a few months to download - and when they next upgrade their machine, their music will become useless.
In July 2008, Yahoo announced that their music store DRM server was going to close. At least Yahoo have had the grace to offer refunds.
It's unlikely, but perhaps we'll have "In May 2010 - Amazon drops Kindle AZW support for EPUB. No new devices will be enabled for existing books. When your existing device dies, so will your Kindle eBooks."
Even if your DRM provider stays around DRM introduces hassle and problems. It just takes a while for people to find out.
Mobipocket eBooks for example: the DRM doesn't sound too bad -- you can register four devices, and change the registered devices at will. So you have a device and you buy books. The you get a new device, and add that ones ID to the list, and you HAVE to download ALL the eBooks again. And do the same thing every time you get a new device.
Baen have been doing DRM free eBooks since 1999. They don't seem to have had any major problems with copyright infringement. OTOH, the Harry Potter books haven't been issued in eBook form at all. And they have all appeared on the internet for download with a matter of hours of being released as paper books.
DRM does not prevent ebooks appearing in illegal downloads. It just makes things harder for the people who actually pay for the ebooks.
As has been shown with Music, the best way to combat illegal downloads to is make legal downloads available in a convenient form, for a reasonable price. DRM makes things less convenient.
As people have learned to avoid DRM on Music (e.g. all Amazon's music downloads are DRM free), they'll learn to avoid it on eBooks.
You do not buy DRMed content, you only rent it for a time determined solely by the people you get it from.
- Green, environmentally friendly: the trees and tonnes of fuel you save by not printed and transporting tonnes of books, newspapers and magazines worldwide.
- Saving publishers transport & warehousing costs, focusing on online sales
- Saving professionals and students the weight and effort of lugging kilo's of study & reference books around at work and university.
Look what digital music has done to the business; it's a paradigm shift, but much more music has now become available to much more people. We need this for books as well !
Hardcopy 'paper' books should be a curiosity like gramophone disks.
1) Every major commercial e-book DRM format?eReader, MS Reader, Mobipocket?has been cracked, and the cracks can be located in under five minutes with Google. Because not every country has DMCA-like laws, these tools can never be eliminated; they'll always be hosted from some country where it is perfectly legal to crack encryption. And it's not as if people who break encryption for their own private use (as opposed to file sharing) are ever likely even to be noticed, let alone prosecuted under the DMCA.
As the DVD consortium learned, you just can't have a working encryption scheme where the receiver is also the attacker. If you give someone both the key and the lock, they can engineer their own method of inserting it and turning it.
(Now, I don't have a Kindle, so I don't know whether Kindle e-book files can be downloaded from the Kindle onto a computer, or downloaded to the computer instead of the Kindle?if you can't remove the files from a Kindle to work with them, of course you can't crack them. But the point still holds true in general.)
2) Even if DRM were as secure as Fort Knox, print books aren't, and anybody with a bandsaw and a sheet-feeding scanner can have a complete copy of the book on the net within hours. (The Harry Potter publishers found this out to their dismay, when they adamantly refused to bring out Potter e-books citing piracy concerns?and complete copies of all the books showed up on-line within hours anyway.) DRM is straining at gnats while swallowing camels.
So, DRM is both pointless and useless. Its only functions are to treat every paying customer as a potential criminal (how insulting!) and to prevent those customers from making use of their legal rights to make fair use of the books they purchase. And to add insult to injury, DRM costs money to create and implement, so it drives up the price of the books. Customers have to pay extra for something they do not even want!
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by Steve Jordan
September 8, 2008 7:22 AM PDT
- As the music industry has demonstrated, there can be a level of DRM that is satisfactory to both industry and consumer, and therefore commercially successful. Publishing DRM is certainly not there now, but many of the posts above are certainly good arguments for the fact that DRM needs to be molded into a better system that works for users and publishers, which I don't think is impossible.
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