What’s Wrong With Retailers: E-book edition

As part of my ongoing process of telling the world what retailers do wrong and in an attempt to set the market and retailers on my train of thought I am now tackling e-books. There are several issues I want to cover relating to the current state of ebooks.

Currently in order to read all of the ebooks I want to I need to keep a veritable arsenal of programs on my Pocket PC. At any given time I will have 4-5 different programs installed each accessing its own proprietary ebook format. God forbid the ebook is in a pdf format, which works horribly for ebooks on a PPC. One of two things needs to happen; publishers and authors need to all get together and use an open standard format, or they need to release their ebook in a multitude of formats. If authors who are providing content follow the example of Cory Doctorow, who distributes ebooks in 4 formats and allows fans to convert the novel into any format so long as,

“If you are converting to a format that has some kind of use-restriction options (i.e., no-print, no-copy, etc), these must be switched off”

This gets around the problem of needing 5 different readers on my pocket PC but it is not widely practiced.

The next problem I have with the current state of the ebooks is that many titles are often not released as an ebook, and a good number of titles which are released are often delayed significantly before their digital debut.

When the books are finally released as an ebook the price is often the same as a hardcover new release. This is problematic because the costs and overhead associated with an ebook should be much lower than the hardcover. This is similar to the ability of online music services to offer downloads cheaper than a physical verison on a CD. The lower overhead is relative to how many online stores can sell a product at a lower price than a brick and mortor store.

My Issues with Ebooks:

• Delayed Releases
• Pricing
  • Ebook distribution and overhead should be MINIMAL
• The notion that pirates will steal your book and leave you penniless,
  • DRM will protect your ebook to an extent but an ebook pirate isn’t the same person who would buy your book anyway!
• Many people only read ebooks, so offer them already!

If the marketplace demands a product or a format then give it to them, especially if the overhead is negligible. The few people who may pirate your material is so negligible in the overall scheme that it should not keep publishers and authors from releasing their works in a digital form. I have read exactly 4 hard cover books for pleasure in the past 2 years. I have read at least 20 full length ebooks in the same amount of time. Some of these I actually paid the full hardcover price to gain in a digital form (though I only paid full hardcover price in conjunction with a Fictionwise.com rebate program).