[A2k] Slate: Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered?

[Malini Aisola]

http://www.slate.com/id/2222941/?from=3Drss

Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered?
By Jack ShaferPosted
July 15, 2009

If the publishers force Amazon to raise prices on e-books, that's what
will happen

Authors and book agents also fret that low e-book prices will
"cannibalize" hardcover sales, which will "undercut the sales and
royalty potential of the printed hardcover," as one agent puts it. One
publisher of a hotly anticipated book is delaying the e-book by six or
more months because he fears cannibalization. But it's not clear whether
Kindle sales cannibalize print books or add to them. In a May
presentation, Amazon's Jeff Bezos dropped numbers that indicated some
migration: "Today there are 275,000 books available for the device. On
Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are
sold in that format." That 35 percent figure is from May. In February,
it was just 17 percent, but these percentages don't tell us a lot unless
they come with total sales.

While publishers, authors, and agents are well within their rights to
attempt to maximize profits by forcing e-book prices up, their efforts
may backfire. Put off by higher prices, readers who have grown
accustomed to $9.99 Kindle editions may choose to flout copyright law
and turn to the lush "pirate" markets for books on the Internet. It's a
simple matter of querying a search engine to find thousands of e-books=E2=
=80=94
best-sellers included=E2=80=94that can be imported without charge into a Ki=
ndle,
a Sony Reader, personal computer, or smart phone.

What has kept illegal e-books from taking off? First, all the electronic
reading gadgets on the market are subpar, if you ask me, making the
reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and even cereal boxes painful.
The resolution is poor. The fonts are crap. The navigation is chunky.
Not since the eight-track player has modern technology produced such a
heap of garbage. If you're looking for the reason e-books constitute
just 1 percent or 2 percent of all book sales, stop the search. Second,
the hassle factor is too great. Only a student or a deadbeat with a lot
of time on his hands is going to want to search the Web and scour the
torrents for, say, a free, bootlegged copy of A.J. Liebling's The
Telephone Booth Indian. It's as tedious as fishing! Third, not all
bootlegged e-books are created equal. On finally finding that free book
you so desire, you may find yourself wishing you had purchased the legal
edition: Your bootleg may be filled with typographical errors, thanks to
the slipshod application of optical character-recognition software. If a
nicely produced Kindle version of The Telephone Booth Indian that
doesn't have to be monkeyed around with can be easily nabbed for $9.99,
which it can, why bother breaking the law to obtain an inferior edition
for display on a rotten device? It's like using an acetylene torch to
loot a kid's piggy bank.

Right now, the electronic-book market finds itself roughly in the same
place the market for MP3s was in 1999, the year after the release of the
first portable MP3 player. First adopters of e-books, who are filling
their devices with content and proselytizing to their friends, have it
better than the early MP3 users. The iTunes store, which was established
in early 2003, was among the first online sites where music fans could
easily buy music files, a la carte, from a huge selection. The other
commercial sites, wrote the New York Times, were "complex, expensive and
limiting" and "failing because they were created to serve the interests
of the record companies, not their customers." Basically, before iTunes
arrived, if you wanted portable tracks, you had to rip your own, borrow
collections from friends, or grab "free" tunes from the "pirates" at
Napster or other file-sharing sites.


It doesn't make me a defender of illegal file-sharing to say that the
music industry goofed by waiting until 2003 to agree to sell individual
tracks for the reasonable price of 99 cents. Its absence from the
electronic-music market in those early years allowed illegal
file-sharing to take root and spread, and it helped shape the
perception, especially among younger consumers, that music "should" be
free.


So far, few consumers think books should be free=E2=80=94a fact that I attr=
ibute
to the klugy Kindle and its affordable Amazon store. I conducted an
informal census of friends and associates who read lots of books, and I
found none who partake of the bootlegged variety. But that could change
in a matter of months if the book industry insists on 1) jacking up the
price of e-books and 2) withholding potential best-sellers from the
e-book market. Cool devices that make electronic reading painless are
just around the corner, and the e-book market is about to explode. If
publishers insist on pushing prices too high and curbing availability,
consumers could rebel=E2=80=94as they did with the sharing of MP3s=E2=80=94=
and normalize
the trafficking of infringing e-books.

My sense that not all publishers understand their readers is shared by
Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. "Publishers are in denial
about the economics of digital content," she told the Wall Street
Journal this month. "What we've seen in other industries and in the
evolution of digital content is that consumers are not willing to pay as
much for content that is separated from its physical medium."

Obviously, it's easy to exaggerate the parallels between the book and
music industries, but it's only a matter of scale. Every e-booker who
decides to sidestep the book industry by downloading unauthorized copies
is a potential seeder of the illicit market. As long as he takes the
right precautions, it's not very likely that he'll get caught.


--
Malini Aisola
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 500, Washington DC 20009
malini.aisola@keionline.org|Tel: +1.202.332.2670|Fax: +1.202.332.2673