Will e-books ever go DRM-free?

Books, comics, TV, music
21

A quick (and I think minor, relative to the thrust of your post) factual correction: Amazon’s current publishing services do have an editorial component.

A second aside: I would like to thank you for teaching me a new word. Yes, that’s right. I’m man enough to admit it.

Now then, most of your vision of the Amazon future is correct (or at least, correct if Amazon gets their way), but there are a couple points I have to take issue with. First, paper books are not going away. At least not any time soon, and by that I mean, as I said above, that none of us will live to see it*. Fun fact of which you may not be aware: Amazon publishes paper books. So “you can not lend books any more, period” is just not in the cards, any way you slice it, at any point in the foreseeable future.

But even that is a pretty minor point. The obvious real fear is that your beloved (;)) Nazi Carebear Slashfic or whatever will cease to be available. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see that coming to pass. Let’s take the extreme case: your vision of the future shockingly includes Barnes & Noble, and I’m willing to even cut them out of the loop. Traditional publishers are dead. All current ebook retailers not named Amazon are dead. Apple is dead, so don’t look for help there. Amazon is the one remaining mainstream publisher and accounts for, I don’t know, ninety percent of the total publishing going on in the world.

So what? Nazi Carebear Slashfic is already a niche genre, as are Gothic Vampire Bromance and Alternate Geology Biography. If Amazon doesn’t want to publish these things, other people will, because in no future timeline does Amazon own all the printing presses and internets. And if Amazon decides to lock down the Kindle to only work with their own content, that sucks, but these niche audiences will still be served, because in no future timeline does Amazon produce all of the e-readers, phones, tablets, computers, magical scrolls, and malicious audiobook-reading AIs in the world. The worst that’ll happen is that these guys will suffer for lack of a popular distribution channel… but ask the author of If the Grand Canyon Were in Brazil: the Life and Loves of Chancellor Sour Sam how many airports his book is in right now if you think that’ll be anything new.

*This is assuming that you’re talking from the perspective of someone who is concerned about where this might go and how it might affect their own life. If you are worried on principle on the behalf of future generations, I have this to say to you: do not be. You have your own problems, and besides, it’s very unlikely that our society will make the switch to all ebooks, all the time before Ragnarok happens anyway.

22

Damien, the catch is that there’s always another outlet. You can publish through Bob’s House of Publishing.com, even if they don’t sell direct through Amazon. Does it limit your audience somewhat? Yes. But the effect is like small-press publishing in the olden days, when small presses didn’t show up in B&N/Borders. Online ebookstores that aren’t Amazon become the new darling indie bookstores.

23

This part is effectively false. Sure, paper never disappears entirely, but within five years, ebooks will be 80%+ of sales for prose fiction titles. Within ten years, most prose fiction never has a paper edition, other than maybe a shitty POD printout of the ebook.

24

Have to disagree with you there. It’s super easy for dudes posting on a tech-savvy internet forum to assume that most of the country is at least kind of tech-savvy like they are, but in reality there’s this huge number of people out there who are very, very far behind on the technology curve. Hell, almost forty percent of Americans don’t even have internet access. And that’s pretty much the absolute baseline for modern-day technology. Meanwhile, how many Kindle users are there? Three million? Three and a half million, maybe? That’s a worldwide figure and it’s hovering right around one percent of the US population. Nowhere near enough for ebooks to take over any time soon. No way.

25

Two factors:

  1. People who buy books are disproportionately well-educated and well-off, so the fact that book readers cost $79 and require an internet connection is not likely to be a huge concern.

  2. The Kindle is really weird in its early-adopter pattern, with the most tech-backward group (old people) being a major group of early adopters.

The upshot of this is that ebooks have seen amazing growth, and already sell better than any individual print format – better than trade paperback, better than hardcover, better than mass-market paperback. And those formats are trending down while ebook growth is huge.

26

Older folks love books, so the e-readers offer them a lot of advantages. Not only does it reduce clutter, but most e-readers are easier to hold (especially for arthritic hands) than the standard paperbacks or hardbacks.

27

I hope that this anecdote is not too much of a derail but a local bookstore owner saw me reading my Kindle while waiting for my lunch the other day. She later accosted one of my co-workers and said that she’s had her suspicions about me for some time and that if she ever catches me in her store taking notes again she’s going to kick me out.

Needless to say, I have never taken notes in her store. I have, in the past, browsed there, usually buying something but occasionally not finding anything that caught my fancy.

I suspect that her absurd allegations speak more to her deranged mental state than anything else but, in contemplating how a person can get to a point in her life where she sees a man enjoying a book and gets angry because he did not buy it from her, it occurred to me that brick-and-mortar bookstore owners must be losing a lot of business to Amazon (old news) and e-book readers (bold new world).

Needless to say, I will never spend a dime in her store again, which is a shame as I enjoy supporting local businesses and love browsing in a good bookstore. I love books because I love reading and, much as I love my Kindle, I will be very sad if the traditional book publishing industry collapses.

I don’t know if I am a typical Kindle user but, looking back it appears that of the last 30 books I’ve read:

– 5 were on the Kindle
– 1 was from the library
– 8 were used
– 16 were new

Sorry for the topic drift. All of the Kindle books I read were DRM free.

28

Plus: Every book is a large print book. No reading glasses needed.

29

That too!

Anecdotal for sure, but I’ve heard it repeated at B&N a lot: Older people love their e-readers. There is no going back for most of them once they learn to use it.

30

It’s not just anecdote; I’ve seen actual market share things that note how unusual the early adopter profile for ebooks is, skewing MUCH older than most technologies.

Anyway, the point is, the audience for books is naturally closer to the audience for gadgets than the general populace; and the segment that’s less gadgety than typical loves ebook readers anyway. So yeah, the Luddite market here is comparatively small, compared to like Blu-ray players or MP3 players or whatever.

31

My adventures in trying to get a Kindle book with DRM onto a Nook Color convinced me that the best e-reader to get will be one that can run the Kindle app, the Nook app, the Kobo app, etc.

Amazon has exclusives and I think B&N does too. They are all going to try to offer some exclusives to drive device sales. So the way I see it I’ll be better off if I can just run the apps and then I don’t have to worry about DRM.

32

My concern isn’t that niche fiction won’t be available–self-publishing will always be an option, and it’s far more viable in the age of the internet than it ever was before. So that’s cool.

There is a concern in a monopsony market that certain genres will be forced into the niches. The more publishing houses there are, the less chance you have of someone deciding that some particular political philosophy is odious and refusing to touch it. Imagine a world where Angie Gallant is running the sole publishing house. Millions of teenage girls might never know the joys of straightedge Mormon vampire/werewolf romance fiction!

My original point was mainly about DRM on popular works, however. I can very easily picture a future in which every popular book is only available with essentially uncrackable Amazon DRM or the equivalent. Yes, Amazon DRM is easily crackable now. That won’t necessarily always be the case–and when you control the hardware, as they do with the Kindle, you can make it very difficult to crack. See how long the PS3’s DRM survived, for example.

There will, of course, always be piracy. I don’t like the thought of the only choices being “never lend books” or “pirate books”.

The future of books isn’t necessarily grim. A world of ubiquitous, restrictive DRM isn’t necessarily horrible, and there will be unquestionable advantages. It’ll be awesome to have permanent access to the world’s largest bookstore, no matter how small and rural a town you grow up in. It might even be worth the loss of the lending library and the box of books inherited from an older sibling. Personally, however, I’d be happier with the horror of OMGWTF $15!? new release books.

33

I don’t see how DRM is related to the demise of publishers.

34

I only buy DRM-free ebooks. And I cba to work out if a given Amazon ebook is DRM-free or not. (Oh, and I refuse to pay higher-than-paperback prices)

If the retailers won’t do this, I’ll buy the book cheaply second-hand. Publisher’s choice.

35

The demise of publishers comes when Amazon owns enough of the market to muscle them out. DRM aids in this by making it hard for customers to switch stores, just as it was hard for anyone to lure customers away from iTunes with music that didn’t play on an iPod. (Or equally, to lure customers away from the iPod with a music player that didn’t play iTMS music.)

The smart play for publishers at this time is to encourage as many competing ebook retailers to succeed as possible, to prevent any one from achieving a dominant position. That means no DRM, so customers can move freely between stores. Alas, publishers (Baen excepted) are stupid, and are instead demanding DRM.

They may eventually get a clue (as did the music industry) and change their ways. Or not, since customers largely don’t seem to care about ebook DRM at the moment.

36

How would this not be the best possible future for the publishing industry?

37

Yes, but why does that mean the demise of publishers is bad? Your complaints about DRM make sense, and publishers limping into the woods to die is one possible consequence of that DRM, but why do you view that as a negative?

38

Not to mention the bloat. I know how much it costs to produce and print a hardback RPG book, with a certain number of coloured pages, sidebars, art, etc.

It comes out a lot cheaper than the production process for a novel at major book publishers. Which is ridiculous.

39

Sure, DRM as a cause of the publishers’ demise, I get that. But you were listing it as an effect, saying that you’d rather have the negative effects of binty publishers than the effects of heavy DRM that we’d have in a publisher-lite world. The DRM seems likely to be basically the same in either world.

40

There isn’t a lot of evidence that ebooks and DRM are hurting publishers. Profits are steady or are up. All that’s happening is that sales are shifting from paper to ebook, though paper still dominates – I think it’s about 80-20 paper to ebook right now.