Since I have discovered the joys of ebooks, I have become addicted to your online ebook store. You have such an extensive range. No more waiting and in most cases an ebook download costs less than a cup of coffee and slice of cake. Thanks for your great service.
C.
Brisbane Australia
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eBooks: with courage and patience, we are
getting there |
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By L. Scott Redford
Just how do we make the "e" in e-books stand for "easier"? Well, how about
this? Let's scrap the existing digital rights management. Instead everybody in
charge of administering DRM would be re-trained overnight as digital priests.
They would certify "trustworthiness" to those seeking to download e-books.
Before downloads, customers would be visited by digital priests of their
respective religious persuasions. With great pomp and circumstance, they would
"pledge" not to forward their books to everybody in the world without
compensating the authors and publishers. Break the pledge, and you'd find
yourself in purgatory, hand-copying old encyclopedias.
Or maybe a totalitarian law would work instead. First-offenders guilty of
unlawful content reproduction would have to wear a scratchy wool eye patch for
one year. For a second crime, the patch would be now a mask. We could set up
toll-free hot-lines and reward people for spying on their neighbors.
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| The Real Point |
See my real point here? No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip--this
complicated issue can't be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and fear. But
e-book standards for DRM and formats would help. I am counting on the laws of
capitalism, which always prevail. A demand will eventually be met with supply,
and I'm hoping that the right set of standards will break from the pack and
simplify the digital content landscape. That will be a blessed day. Microsoft,
Adobe and Palm and the others now have their own special technology fee tacked
on to the price of e-books. And that complicates merchandising. We e-book
merchants would rather not have multiple cost structures for the same e-book.
Nor do we like consumers to be limited to books published in their chosen
format or suffer multiple technologies just to enjoy a story. Nothing is more
frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld and
forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don't just hear customers
complaints--I myself own a handheld.
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Villains not
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Who's to blame? I'm thinking nobody. Many authors and publishers break out in
a cold sweat at just the mention of the word "Napster" and can you blame them?
Their livelihood is at stake. They should, however, strive to better satisfy
consumers desire for more content in digital form.
If a publisher has faith in their work, it's now accepted that expanding to
e-book will deliver extra profit and drive hardback sales. Not all understand
this. I still hear some authors express misguided fear that e-books will
cannibalize their hardback sales. Publishing is not a zero-sum game,
however--and that actually can be good. E-books add incremental value to the
equation. Granted, companies tasked with encrypting content for them are an easy
target, for they create the hoops through which we must jump. But the DRM
heavyweights like Microsoft, Adobe and eReader are simply business people
satisfying a need with existing technology.
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| No glass chin |
Let there be no mistake, the future is bright for e-books--sales are on a
steady rise. The industry took a couple of jabs during the Internet correction,
but you'll find no glass chin here. More students are beginning to see e-books
as an alternative for those pricey hardback textbooks. The computer savvy are
learning the ease in pasting code directly from their favorite Java e-book
manual, and there's even speculation that men are reading more romance as they
no longer fear being seen with a floral book cover. Moreover, the Tablet PC is
maturing, and the publishers are slowly but surely putting even more content in
digital form. It takes courage, but we're getting there. Though it is a word
often used in excuses, "patience" is needed by digital downloaders, me included.
Article by L. Scott Redford - scott(at)diesel-ebooks.com Scott is the President
of Diesel eBooks with over 50,000
popular and professional eBooks organized by
50 categories.
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print,
free of charge, as long as the bylines are included and all links
remain active. A courtesy copy of your publication would be
appreciated.
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