Fact ...

The more "Big [though shrinking] Six" publishers artificially and absurdly inflate eBook prices, as they've been doing, the more they encourage piracy. And DRM won't save them.

Turow & Authors Guild Not Just Out of Touch on the Subject of eBook Pricing, but also ...

on DRM, "piracy," copyright and other things that go bump in the night. Last month, Mike Masnick @ Techdirt: " ... as the Authors Guild continues to have out-of-touch, fact-challenged people lead it, it's only going to serve to drive younger authors away from the Guild. Smart authors today recognize the maxim that obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy, and many have come to figure out that piracy is nothing to fear if you have a smart business model. If Turow and the Authors Guild really wanted to help authors, they'd focus on helping them understand new business models, rather than supporting ever more draconian laws that will do nothing to help and plenty to hurt."

Video: Neil Gaman Explains How Piracy Helps New Readers Discover His Work, and Thus Helps His Overall Sales in the Long-Run

Scorned librarians and the eBook piracy underground

Violet Blue, ZDNet: "E-books and the ability to share or not to share them: that is the question every publisher and distributor is agonizing over. But no one seems to be answering it with anything short of clutching their petticoats and jumping up on the nearest chair."

Do E-Book Users Need a Bill of Rights? (Librarians Think So)

NY Times: "Libraries may be on the front-lines of this latest battle, one that makes it clear that issues like DRM and lending policies can have troubling repercussions. Although the HarperCollins announcement impacts just lending through libraries, librarians are quick to point out that it isn't simply their institutions that will suffer."

PC WORLD Ponders the eBook Format Morass

Money quote: "Ultimately, what consumers need is e-books that they can buy and read anywhere, using any software they choose on any device they have at hand, whether it be a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a PC. No muss, no fuss. This issue is critical to library management and to the future success of e-books."

EXCELLENT Interview with O'Reilly eBook Guru Andrew Savikas

John Martellaro, The Mac Observer: "Recently, I’ve been exploring and writing about ebooks, something of great interest to me. In the process of leaning more about ebooks — and purchasing a technical ebook from O’Reilly which came without DRM — I bumped into Andrew Savikas, interim CEO of Safari Books Online and the VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly media. According to his bio, he’s also 'the Program Co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference, and is a regular contributor to the O’Reilly Radar blog on digital publishing issues.' I asked him some questions that have been on my mind as I’ve been learning more about ebooks, and he kindly provided some thoughtful answers. ... "

Magellan Media's Brian O'Leary: Data Needs to Drive eBook Piracy Debate

Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Media (via Forbes) Interviews O'Leary: "As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy?" O’Leary (@brianoleary) discusses "the current state of book piracy, how measurement data isn’t sufficient to determine its impact, and why DRM is a poor anti-piracy tool." Note: New Street Communications, LLC never inflicts DRM on the purchasers/readers of its eBooks.

Don't Believe the Rhetoric Behind Google's New "Open" eBook Store

Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine: "Google's e-books are 'open' in the same way that politicians are 'bipartisan' and oil companies are 'green'—the claim makes for good marketing, even if it lacks substance. Buying from Google rather than Amazon will give you no greater control over your books. You're not likely to get any practical benefit from going with Google, either. In fact, Amazon's 'closed' books will soon work on more devices than Google's 'open' books."

Adobe's eBook DRM Adopted By Google

RTTnews: "Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE: News ), Monday said Google (GOOG: News ) would use Adobe's Content Server 4 software Google eBooks' content protection, joining over 200 other publishers and distributors who use the Adobe's Digital Rights Management, or DRM, solution."

DRM ala Google

The Guardian: "A greater concern may be over how the content is protected: publishers are fearful that widespread adoption of ebooks could lead to spiraling piracy mirroring that seen in the music business. But Google says in the page about security for Editions that 'once a Google Edition is purchased and is added to a consumer's bookshelf, it can only be accessed when the consumer logs into his or her Google account. When Google Editions are purchased on our site, a Google account is needed to access the content, reducing the likelihood that consumers will share their login information with others'. It adds: 'Each consumer's Google Edition has a unique coding that caches the book when it is accessed through a browser (as opposed to a digital download) ... This means that the Google Edition is broken down into fragments and temporarily stored in – and accessed through – the browser window. The Google Editions web experience, therefore, is not that of a file download – it is an experience that is optimized for reading in the browser. This allows Google to detect and protect against abuse of each Google Edition.'"

At Last, a Common Sense, Non-Paranoid Consideration of eBook Piracy, and Its Future

Keir Thomas, PCWorld Business Center:

... One of the reasons the MP3 piracy scene was possible was that, along with the capability to shrink music to a 4MB file, it was built around a standard file format, MP3, which was supported by every media player. DivX brought the same standardization to movie piracy. In both cases, an entire ecosystem arose, based around the common file format.

EPUB is supposed to be the e-book standard file format, but by refusing to adopt it for the Kindle, Amazon is taking one step towards stopping a piracy ecosystem developing for e-books. Conversion to a compatible format is, of course, entirely possible, but Amazon may be hoping that the difficulty and hassle of doing so will put many off.

The other strategic difference when e-book readers are compared to media players is that e-book readers usually have built-in bookstore browsers. This was the failing that initially allowed MP3 piracy to gain a hold. In the late 90s, people had MP3 players and software but no legitimate source of MP3s, other than ripping them from CDs. It took Apple and the development of iTunes to bring some order to the chaos, to the extent that now most people are happy paying for music, and piracy is limited to a hard core of people who never had any intention of paying anyway.

While there are still many questions over e-book pricing, statistics released from the likes of Amazon indicate that people are happy making use of e-book stores straight from their devices. While piracy will always be an issue for any organization offering creative content online, all the signs are that those behind e-book readers have thought things through so that they're able to avoid e-book piracy being a necessity, and also less of a temptation. ...

Institutional Libraries Say 'No DRM' - Springer Agrees - Bravo

PW: "“We’re not concerned about piracy,” said George Scottie, Springer Verlag’s director of channel marketing, when asked about the Springer e-book program, which allows institutional customers to lend Springer e-books without DRM protection. Seventy percent of Springer’s business comes from big academic and research libraries, Scottie said, and they are adamant that they don’t want DRM or other such restrictions on the e-books they buy from Springer. Launched in 2006, Springer’s e-book program offers 40,000 titles in the PDF format in the science, technical, and medical category (including some textbooks). ..."

Kindle eBook Lending, etc.

At New Street we don't DRM our eBooks, so the lending thing is not big news in this office. Crave - CNET: "In a forum post today, Amazon made a couple of small but significant Kindle announcements. First, it's soon going to make Kindle newspapers and magazines readable on any Kindle app, 'so you can always read Kindle periodicals even if you don't have your Kindle with you or don't yet own a Kindle.' Second, the company said that later this year a lending feature will come to the Kindle, though it has the same restrictions as the current lending feature on the Barnes & Noble Nook."

ePagine Adobe DRM eBook Reader Released for iPad

eBook Magazine (UK): "French ebook reader ePagine has become the third iPad app to support Adobe DRM protected ebooks, joining txtr and Bluefire Reader. The iTunes description for the free app, which first appeared in the app store on 15th October, boasts 'access to a catalog of more than 100,000 titles' ..."

Study: Arghhhh Matey - E-Book Piracy on the Rise

ReadWriteWeb via NYTimes.com: "As the popularity of e-books and e-readers continues to increase, e-book piracy is also growing rapidly. According to Attributor, a company that develops anti-piracy and content monitoring solutions, the daily demand for pirated books can be estimated at up to 3 million people worldwide. The company's latest study also highlights that the total interest in documents from file-sharing sites has increased more than 50% over the course of the last year. Interestingly, e-book piracy is moving away from large sites like RapidShare to smaller sites and those that specialize in pirated e-books."

B&N Nook for Android Now Supports EPUB Side Load and SD App Storage

B&N Nook for Android now supports EPUB side load and SD app storage | ZDNet: "It seems that every week something comes along on the Google Android platform that raises it higher on my personal smartphone rating scale. We saw Froyo come to my awesome HTC EVO 4G this week and now just a couple weeks after Barnes & Noble released the Nook app we see a MAJOR update that just propelled the Nook Android application to the top of my ebook reading application list. The new Nook for Android 2.1 application, available in the Android Market, enhances my reading experience by giving me access to all of my DRM-free EPUB files, the ability to store the application on my microSD card, and much more."

Cory Doctorow on DRM, Lockdowns and Authors' Rights

Cory Doctorow in Publishers Weekly: "... I've been ... attempting to discover which online booksellers exist to serve the interests of copyright owners, like me, and which ones are seeking to unfairly bind copyright holders (and consumers) to their platforms and, as a result, diminish our negotiating power. I'm happy to say that after much work, I have persuaded three major retailers to offer my e-books without any technology or license conditions that would prohibit my customers from moving the e-books they've purchased to a competitor's device: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. ..."

Authors Guild, Turow, Piracy Redux

Re: My earlier post of today regarding piracy and Authors Guild prez Scott Turow. A friend just sent me this open letter to Turow written a week or so ago by Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media Consulting Partners. O'Leary hits many of my same points, only better. Note especially this:

I do believe that there are markets in which digital book piracy is a net loss - college textbooks may provide the most direct example. But I also believe that there may be markets, and authors, for whom piracy helps improve awareness, trial and paid sales.

That’s why we started studying the impact of piracy on paid sales almost two years ago. On an admittedly limited sample (something we’d like your help to grow), we’ve found an apparent correlation between piracy and subsequent growth in paid sales.

Now, you recently told GalleyCat’s Jason Boog that “…the larger problem for us is the pirating of books”. I ask, simply, “How do you know?”

There are no reliable studies of the impact of piracy in the book business. Because our sample set is limited, I include our own work to date in that bucket. The studies that are cited most often are based on sampling techniques that try to track the instance of piracy, then apply an assumed number for “substitution rates” (lost sales).

The Government Accounting Office recently “assessed the assessments” of digital piracy and found them all lacking. That’s not the final word, but it’s an indication that conclusions drawn on the limited data available are premature, at least. ...

The Grateful Dead, The Economy of Ideas, And Reconsidering the Notion of eBook Piracy

I'm just now noting month-old comments from Authors Guild president Scott Turow citing the "pirating" of eBooks as a large problem.

Two points.

1) I wonder how he has quantified this. I mean, what's the methodology? Given the extent to which all the major players load their editions up with DRM, I'm skeptical of the risk.

2) More importantly, however, I wonder how much of a detriment piracy actually is. Are we even correct in viewing piracy as something we actually want to avoid? There's evidence that piracy (in my view: free word-of-mouth) grows reputations and thus fuels legitimate sales.

So, the question: Do we need DRM? The Grateful Dead used to create a dedicated space at their concerts for people who wanted to record bootlegs of the band playing live. They encouraged the exercise and, in effect, gave away their work (their "content") for free. In turn, the band's reputation/fanbase grew exponentially.

As regards books, per Michael Shatzkin, there's little evidence file-sharing reduces sales. Shatzkin points to science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who "does the best he can to give away as much of his content as possible." The result? Doctorow's sales continue to boom.

I am reminded of a statement in "The Economy of Ideas," that seminal 1994 essay by Grateful Dead lyricist, EFF co-founder, Berkman Center Fellow, and (now) New Street Communications Editorial Advisory Board member John Perry Barlow: "The increasing difficulty of enforcing existing copyright and patent laws is already placing in peril the ultimate source of intellectual property - the free exchange of ideas ... unbounded intellectual property is very different from physical property and can no longer be protected as though these differences did not exist. ... if we continue to assume that value is based on scarcity, as it is with regard to physical objects, we will create laws that are precisely contrary to the nature of information, which may, in many cases, increase in value with distribution."

Here is Barlow making the same point - click the center "play" button: