E-book Privilege
I’ve been thinking about e-books a lot lately, for some reason. (Amazon still hasn’t restored Macmillan titles, last I checked.) In particular, there’s a debate in the SFWA Lounge about the shift from printed books to electronic.
I think we’re in a very dynamic time. E-books are changing, and we’re waiting to see who’s going to be the dinosaurs and who’s going to follow the superior evolutionary path of the platypus. Will multipurpose devices (iPad, smartphones) do away with single-purpose readers (Kindle)? Will Cory Doctorow single-handedly throw DRM into the abyss forever? Will e-books approach 100% market share, doing away with all but a handful of print-on-demand artifacts?
It occurred to me that there’s an element of privileged assumption going on with some of these predictions. I’ve had this conversation online with people who obviously have stable Internet access and a fairly high degree of tech-savviness. I also see it at conventions, where people whip out their Kindles and iPhones to compare features.
The thing is, these are luxuries. If you’re in a financial position to afford the latest toys, great. But to project near-100% dominance of electronic books assumes that either the reading devices will drop to a price where all readers can afford them, or that if you’re poor, you simply won’t/don’t read.
Tobias Buckell jokingly called for a boycott of Kindles until they bring the price down below $99. (He’s trying to break Amazon’s “monopoly” on the Kindle.) But even $99 is a lot of money, and not everyone is in a position to invest that much extra money every few years (because the technology keeps advancing) in their reading.
I do think e-books are going to be a larger part of the market. We’ve seen cellphone novels take off in other countries. E-books make tremendous sense for certain markets — universities, for example. And the technology keeps advancing. But I don’t think you can assume everyone is going to switch to electronic books any more than you can assume everyone is going to get flat screen plasma TVs.
Printed books are relatively cheap. $7-8 for a new mass market paperback. A buck or less for a used one. I don’t see that going away any time soon. What do you think?
hagelrat
February 2, 2010 @ 10:03 am
Well, I am not worried about print books vanishing overnight. Ereaders are very much luxury gadgets at the moment and I am not convinced there is sufficient market to drive them the way of mobile phones. I remain unconcerned by doomsayers claiming the death of the paperback. 🙂
D. Moonfire
February 2, 2010 @ 1:00 pm
I think there will be a place for both single purpose and multi-purpose. Just as there are people who play MP3’s on their cell phones, there are also those who have a dedicated MP3 player or more specialized device.
Overall, I think some people want one device “to rule them all” while others don’t mind carrying around gadgets in their pockets. It is easier to have the SuperGloriousComputer in your pocket than half a dozen gizmos. Kind of like the 80’s jokes about having a page, cell phone, and organizer on their belts. New products are merged with the old. And even those specialized reading devices will probably gain more features, not unlike today. Originally, they were just glorified text readers, but they are including wireless connectivity. The nook has B&N’s specific new feeds and built in shopping (books for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised when they include music). Most electronics slowly graduate up to more complicated/more features as market forces require them to distinguish themselves.
I can only hope Cory Doctorow succeeds. 🙂 As a geek and somehow who doesn’t use mainstream products, I hate encountering something I should be able to do (record telvision, move my DVD’s to a home server, read a digital book) but can’t because someone wanted to lock up their stuff. I don’t steal movies or music, I buy them and put them on my computer; even when my brother endless asks for my ripped video collection. I still can’t do what I want because I’m being treated like a criminal. Of course, I also think MP3’s are so popular simply because they aren’t encrypted and DRM’d. Most of my CD players have no trouble with MP3, my car plays it, my Linux box and so does my Sansa. Simply because it wasn’t protected up the wahzoo.
Electronic books are a definately luxuries. But, if they become more popular, they’ll drop in price rather sharply until you can get a $20 reader from Walgreens. Yeah, it will be a POS, but it will work. I think the electronic books will really take effect in colleges, as you mentioned. At the end of my masters coursework last year, I noticed quite a few instructors giving out digital “reading packs” instead of entire books. Being able to download those onto a reader would be a great savings in simply space but also easier for research or studying; thought it would kill the resale market. I wouldn’t be surprised if that same thing trickles down into high schools and then into grade school for the same reason. It would also mean the time between updates will speed up, another selilng point for school books, where corrections can be made annually or quarterly. Once people are used to having electronic readers for school, it would be a natural extension to use them in their day to day life. At that point, it probably would be cheap enought that it wouldn’t be a luxury anymore.
I’m also using MP3 players as an example. You can buy a cheap one at Walgreens now for less than $20. Yeah, it won’t work, but it wasn’t that long ago that music players cost a couple hundred for holding 16 songs at 32 kbit/s. In many ways, I see this as similiar to how music industry went from CD’s (physical), to highly DRM’d music (iTunes) and accessible music (iTunes today, Amazon MP3s for the most part). Books are in the same place, we are in the fledling digital releases. Many of the books are encrypted, but sooner or later, there will be a push to strip the DRM off and just have it accessible like music is today.
I also think movies and TV are in the same place. You can get the “digital copy” as part of your DVD, which is DRM’d and unusable for me. Fluffy can get many, but not all, her shows online and frequently does.
Jim C. Hines
February 2, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
But, but the Mayans predicted the end of publishing in 2012!!!
KatG
February 2, 2010 @ 7:05 pm
Yes, exactly. I finally lost it on Scalzi’s blog because I just cannot take this attitude of “how dare the entire bookselling and publishing industries not completely change themselves to accommodate us, 3% of the market, because everyone knows that we will take over everything and therefore should be given whatever we want now cheap. Steve Jobs said so. Now where did I put my $500 iPad and extra cost keyboard dock with $400 in video downloads?”
And worse, it’s morphed with the authors must be free of publishers mythology, so there’s a lot about how this dispute proves that authors need to sell direct to retailers like Amazon, who will give them lots of money and puppies and a pony! Or even better, to the customers themselves, thus saving you from having to share any money with those dastardly publishers and middlemen. So apparently, Hines, you are supposed to set up a business that sells them POD, print and ebooks on demand, in multiple formats, and color and black and white ink, for cheap. Get on it, will you? It’s not like you have another job or a family or anything.
And this with 10% unemployment in the States and authors begging for short story donations on-line because they’re about to lose their homes. Maybe we are the Roman Empire after all. Or maybe I should just stop following this dispute for awhile.
I’m ready… just have to wait for my wishlist - Dylan R. E. Moonfire
February 2, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
[…] blogs that I realized I was working out my thoughts on other people’s personal space (sorry, Mr. Hines). Most of it had to deal with the Macmillan and Amazon war going on, but some rather well-thought […]
C.A. Young
February 3, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
I definitely agree that the hardware element will price whole swathes of people out of ebooks. I can’t quite afford a Nook, Kindle, or iPad right now. In fact, the thing that keeps me from considering an iPad is that it’s not a device that will meet all of my needs.
It’s an excellent dinking around tool. It is not, however, something I’d want to write on for 20 hours a week. My netbook, however, does beautifully. (It’s just less good at being something I want to read books on.)
Jim C. Hines
February 5, 2010 @ 10:54 am
I think in the long term, we might overcome this to some extent when and if we incorporate everything into cheaper multifunction devices. Better and cheaper cellphone technology might reach a wider audience than the single-purpose Kindles, for example. But I still don’t necessarily see e-books spreading as broadly as cheap paper.
(Assuming the paperbacks remain as cheap once electronic cuts into print runs and eats away at that bulk printing savings…)
Jim C. Hines
February 5, 2010 @ 10:59 am
“…it’s morphed with the authors must be free of publishers mythology, so there’s a lot about how this dispute proves that authors need to sell direct to retailers like Amazon, who will give them lots of money and puppies and a pony!”
::Twitch::
Yes, I’ve read some of these comments and posts. They make my brain hurt. I’ve been refraining from writing a long rant on this, in part because other people have done so already and partly because I don’t want to keep obsessing over this stuff.
But come on. Publishers are made of people. At least with my publisher, it’s people who got into this because they love books and they love SF/F. They’re not demons incarnate.
And I’ve watched friends try to do it alone. I’ve published with a tiny print-on-demand press. I’ve seen the difference, and I’ll stick with my publisher, thanks.