Publishers, still not getting it

I enjoy throwing a good quotation into a conversation, not simply because it can give my statement added gravitas but because a good quote can communicate a point much better than I could manage on my own, and one of my favourites quotes is "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

If you could add something to that quote about pig-headedness and the expectation of a different outcome from the same actions you might have summed up the attitude of the publishing industry to digital publishing. While many businesses may favour long term profitability over their customer's experience, never had we seen it taken to such an extreme as when the record companies deliberately crippled the music they sold to us with digital rights management. They insisted that the only way to ensure the future of new artists was to limited what we could do with the music we bought. Customers aren't dumb and we all proved more than capable of working out that DRM music locked us into proprietary systems. Purchased music would only playback on approved devices and over time as DRM systems fell by the wayside you may find you music un-playable.

Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 arguing that it should stop using DRM. In April 2007, shortly after Jobs' open letter, Apple was allowed to sell music from EMI without DRM, and Amazon followed suit a month later.  While it may seem inevitable now, DRM free music proved extremely popular and one by one the other record companies followed the example set by EMI. Record companies had learnt the lesson that DRM hurts record companies more than it hurts customers.

This was all recent history but the lesson had been learnt, DRM was bad for business and bad for the consumer. Never again would we worry about DRM preventing us from enjoying that which we had purchased. Well, I say never, the TV and Movie studios are trying to prove history wrong by wrapping it's products up in ever more complicated and pointless DRM. And then we come to eBooks, the latest division of the media industry to think they know better than those who went before.

Not for you!Just as an MP3 player is nothing without music, an eBook reader is nothing without books, and despite the progress made by music publishers I was reminded recently that eBooks have a long way to go before they replace paper. I am not a great reader of fiction but I was aware before I bought my first eReader that publishers tend to offer only bestsellers in electronic form. Great if you're a fiction fan, not so great if like me you're a history or engineering fan. But as I recently discovered, the availability of a book is not simply related to how popular it is, where you are can be as big as factor.

Deamon by Daniel Suarez is a modern and popular techno-thriller which appeals to many tech-savvy readers and having heard a number of recommendations, I purchased a copy of the Kindle edition from Amazon. Once it had been delivered to my iPad I settled down and started reading. While it will probably never win the booker prize it was a very enjoyable page turner. So much so that having just finished it I decided to purchase 'Freedom', the second novel in the series, and this is where I became frustrated with the publishing industry.

A eBook version of 'Freedom' was available on the Amazon.com store, but Amazon would not sell the eBook version to UK customers. It strikes me as odd that Amazon.com would sell me a paper version of the book and ship it across the Atlantic, but the eBook version was off limits to UK customers. The same restriction applied at BooksOnBoard.com, but from previous experience I knew I could use dollar gift vouchers to trick them into selling a US only book to a UK customer, but thanks to DRM, the BooksOnBoard version was incompatible with my iPad. I would have to strip out the DRM and convert it before I could read it on my iPad. I spent about 45 minutes trying to buy 'Freedom' (oh the irony!) before I realised that the only way for a UK customer to read it was to buy a physical book.

Once I gave up trying to buy the eBook version, and not wanting to have another fiction paperback sitting on the shelf, I was curious to see if a copyright violating version of the book was available. After less than 10 minutes I not only found the book I was looking for, but it was available in an open format that would work on almost any device and could be easily converted to work with every device. I didn't download the book, having enjoyed Suarez's first novel I was keen to see him get some royalties from me for his second book as well.

This seems crazy to me, I was happy to pay for the book, in fact I spent almost an hour trying to find someone who would sell it to me, but no retailer would accept my money. Yet the same book is available to download illegally for free and in a format that is much easier to use. Having had my appetite whetted by eBooks I frequently find myself failing to to purchase new books because there is no eBook version.

From my perspective there are two major problems problems facing the music, movie and book industries. The first problem is not just that pirates are offering their products for free, it's that in most cases the pirates are doing a better job, however I believe the more significant problem is that they have created a desire for a product that they are failing to meet. While my desire to read books has increased in the last year the number of book I have purchased has dropped significantly. Now, who wants to sell me the book I actually want to read?

Whilst looking for an eBook version of his second novel, I discovered that Daniel Suarez was unable to interest any publisher in his first novel. In the end he published it for free (it's available here). He was only able to agree a publishing deal for his first novel after he proved there was a market for it. His publishers were unwilling to develop a new writer and are now preventing fans from buying his new book. In fact the only reason I may have been permitted by Suarez's publishers to buy the Kindle version of his first book was that it was available for free to anyone who wanted it and could find it.