The New York Times, among other journals and blogs, recently published a comparison of the new Barnes & Noble eBook store and Amazon's Kindle eBook store. The review noted pros and cons on both sides: Barnes & Noble's eBooks are compatible with the iPhone, Blackberry, Mac, and PC, but it has no Kindle-like digital reader yet; Barnes & Noble has 700,000 eBooks, compared to Amazon's 300,000; but 500,000 of Barnes & Noble's eBooks are free out-of-copyright books from Google, which can be read on the Kindle anyway; most of Amazon's eBooks are less expensive than the same eBooks from Barnes & Noble; and so on.
I won't get into a discussion of Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon's Kindle in this blog; you can find enough commentary on that by doing a Google search. The New York Times video commentary by David Pogue is available here; to read a written version of Pogue's review, click here.
One observation made by Pogue in his review aroused my curiosity, though. He noted that many popular books are missing from the eBook stores of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Among the non-existent eBooks named by Pogue are Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Anthony Burgess'A Clockwork Orange, the Harry Potter series, and any works by John Grisham.
These books and others are unavailable because their authors and/or publishers choose not to release them electronically.
Why would some authors and publishers choose not to release eBook versions of their work?
Do they believe that eBooks are less profitable than print versions? I don't understand that reasoning. An eBook does not carry the variable costs associated with the paper, ink, and set-up of a printed publication; also, given the varying prices of the currently available eBooks, it would seem that authors and publishers could set eBook prices to generate quite a handsome profit.
Do they believe that eBooks will cheapen the value of good, old-fashioned paper books? That makes no sense. While eBooks may be convenient for travel, I personally enjoy the comfort of the smell and feel of a paper book in my hand. I would think that many other readers do, too. Even if they didn't, authors should present their work in the format that best suits their readers. If readers prefer electronic over paper versions, then give them eBooks.
Do they believe that their works are so popular that they don't need to sell electronic versions? I don't see the logic in that attitude either. Purveyors of ideas become successful when their ideas spread, not when they are limited. The marketplace of ideas is an economy of abundance, not an economy of scarcity. Thus, books (that is, the actual words and ideas, not the paper or bits upon which they are written) become more valuable as they become more plentiful, not as they become more scarce.
I am at a loss for other possible explanations for the refusal to release electronic versions of printed books. I do hope that these authors and publishers will listen to their readers and provide these eBooks soon.
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The reason here is simple: paranoia. The publishers (and some authors) have managed to convince themselves of their own arguments that copyright in a book or song is exactly the same as a physical property right, and that an unauthorized copy is the same thing as stealing.
ReplyDeleteOnce you come to believe that last claim, the next logical step is to treat your customers as your enemies and to do everything you can to prevent them from "stealing" copies of whatever you're trying to sell--even if your efforts mean that you make the authorized versions drastically harder to use than infringing copies and arbitrarily less flexible (see, e.g., the Kindle's disabling audio on certain books).