No pocket paperback, no throwaway edition
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seanan_mcguire's recent post called Across the digital divide, about ebooks and poverty. I have so many thoughts on this I can barely coordinate my thoughts to type. Started to make a comment there; it got long. In a list-y jumble, because really the thoughts are rolling so fast I can barely keep up1) Ebook readers are getting cheaper by the week. Yay. Computer and internet *access*, if not presence in the home, are available for even very impoverished families in all but the most rural areas. Yay.
2) Neither of these facts disproves the basic points, because it's like saying "even very, very poor families can have cars." Yes, many of them do, and almost all of them *could*--if this, and that, and a bit of luck, and someone available who knows the tech, and so on. The ones who don't, are still squeezed out of a lot of resources--and the number of resources only available through these sources is growing.
3) Large sections of the print-books industry are dying. It's not going to go away, but it's going to change *drastically*, because it's founded on a lot of premises that aren't working anymore. The Publisher --> Distributor --> Bookstore --> Customer chain has been broken, and replacing it with Publisher --> Online store --> Customer /or/ Publisher --> Customer means reworking the whole process from the ground up. (And guess who gets screwed over in the reworking?)
4) Mass-market paperbacks are going to be the first casualty. They're low-profit, high-returns items, and leisure novels is what ereaders do best. (They *suck* at academic. And reference. And instruction manuals. And poetry. I could go on; ereaders are built for novels and so far, manufacturers have resisted requests to make them work well for anything else.) If mainstream publishers realize that they really *can* make money on $6 ebooks (like Baen's been doing for the last decade) instead of $13 ebooks, the market will explode, and they'll start chopping mmpb's out of their business plans.
5) The "big 6" Agency Publishers really, REALLY want to kill the used book market. (Mainly because they're idiots; they've never been able to get counts for how much used books cause them new sales, so they assume those don't matter to them.) They want to push the idea of "1 purchase = 1 reader." Possibly, they grumble, "1 purchase = 1 family may read this." The lack of a legit used ebook market means that poor kids who have access to the technology, at home or school, still don't have access to remotely recent ebooks.
6) I buy ebooks. I'm now in a position to spend substantial money (well, compared to my youth) on books, yay. I buy them in digital format because (1) can barely tolerate reading paper anymore and (2) house has no space for new books. I buy ebooks for my daughter, as many as she can stand to read. (She's not yet decided that books are better than fanfic. She may never decide that.) I can't give away the books when I'm done; this is a problem. The tech issue of "if you could give it away to one person, you could post it for ten thousand people and then the author gets no money" does not fix the problem that I can't give my daughter's best friend a book I think she'd like, a book that might spark a longtime interest in reading, insert rant about the glories of used books here.
I can't even *buy* the book for her; ebooks don't work that way. SHE can't buy the book... you have to be 18 to sign up for ebook sales sites. The main problem with ebooks isn't "poor kids don't have access to them" (although that is a problem and needs facing) but "kids, period, don't have access to them unless their parents either give them access to a credit card/paypal account, or hand-pick and feed them each title." There is no "here's $20 for your birthday; go buy yourself some ebooks" option.
7) Why has nobody made a solar-powered ebook reader yet? Solar-powered calculators are cheap & plentiful; solar-powered book-readers shouldn't be a big jump. (Answer: because the marketing departments are thinking of them as "high-tech toys" not "school accessories;" nobody's trying to make ebook readers for grade-school kids. They're trying to make bizarre expensive tablet-things for schoolkids.)
... Insert more mini-rants here. I'm sure I'll think of them eventually. This is a tangled & complicated topic.
X) One of the issues blocking poor kids' access to books is copyright, and the continued extension thereof. (I really, REALLY want copyright law rolled back, and for Congress to declare "all copyrighted works are now reverted to the length of protection they were originally published under"--throw everything published, sung or put on a screen in the US before 1964 into the public domain, and find out how much we can make available for use, sale, charity, translation, sequels... the mind boggles.) Remove the copyright restrictions, and it'd be easy to put together a free, downloadable digital library of something other than "dusty classics."
(Yes, some of those "dusty classics" are glorious and modern kids love them. However, there's a whole lot of DWEM bias in recommended reading lists, and a whole lot of unconscious sexism & racism in most of those books; making a library that avoids the worst of those issues cuts down the selection a great deal. Also, it means not reading anything involving modern technology--you know, the stuff kids will be working with their whole lives.)
Changing copyright in ways that allowed easy digital versions wouldn't bring them to the absolute poorest kids, but *nothing* is going to bring back the huge numbers of used book stores and yard sales packed with 4-per-dollar paperbacks.
We need ebook readers to get cheaper (it's happening; yay) so that, like a record-player or cassette deck, they're available even for very poor families--and we need enough cheap, good content for them that those families have a reason to come up with the one-time expense of the device.
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I've seen it pitched as a helpful thing for pre-schoolers; I haven't seen it pitched as "buy one for your 12-year-old." Because your 12-year-old can't buy books, and unlike the preschooler, isn't likely to expect a parent to be controlling their reading habits.
It's noteworthy that none of the ebook readers are being marketed *to* children. That they're not competing with the DS/Gameboy market. None of them are being made sturdy enough for average kid use--and none of the content for them is marketable to kids.
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This is one of the things which stops me buying more ebooks and digital content, as an Australian. It is extremely frustrating to get all the way through a purchase process for some digital content (be it an ebook, or a song, or a game, or a movie), handing over information and details and credentials, and then at the final hurdle, just before the company is going to let me download the flippin' thing (so, after I've given them my credit card details, even) to be told "oh, sorry, you're not in the right country (or at least, your IP address isn't in the correct range), so we can't legally sell this to you". It's one of the things which keeps me away from digital content, and one of the things which has stopped and still stops me from purchasing an ebook reader. For me, it's a lot easier to just order the paper version and find some space on the shelves when it arrives - at least that way I know I'm getting the actual book.
(Purely on a consumer affairs note, might I point out that filtering by IP could work just as well on the actual "items for sale" list stage of the purchase as it could on the "is the consumer legally allowed to purchase this?" stage - thus preventing the various big online sellers (yes, Spamazon, I am looking at you) from engaging in what could technically be considered fraudulent representation toward offshore consumers.)
I'm starting to see more and more ebook readers being used by folks on the trains these days, but even so, I'm not sure what kind of content is readily available for Australian readers.
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Which means there's some nice support on the AU side of things for rorting or spoofing the IP address or whatever. (Doesn't make it easier to do, though.)
In regards to "what's available" (without going through all that)... everything I read. I don't do DRM, so I don't run into anything with geo-restrictions. I buy from Smashwords, Baen, Fictionwise's multiformat books, AllRomanceEbooks; I read a lot of fanfic from AO3. I get free legit downloads from all over the place. I'm not saying (or thinking) "everyone should be happy without the Agency 6's ebooks!" Just that, there is plenty of other digital content available, enough that I'm never tempted to buy DRM'd ebooks.
Once in a while, I'm tempted to install Adobe Digital Editions to get a freebie, but I distract myself with fanfic and by the time I look back, the offer's usually over.
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Yes yes yes this! How does the publishing industry think new readers are created, anyway? By not allowing even limited lending of ebooks, they are really shooting themselves in the foot in terms of future markets.
Great collection of rants overall; thank you for sharing them.
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Until recently, publishers had *nothing to do* with readers. Publishers sold truckloads of books to distributors. Distributors sold to bookstores. Bookstores cared about individual reading habits--and they were sharply aware of the used book market, in tandem with and in competition with their wares.
Publishers' only awareness of used books was "those things that people buy that don't give us profit." They never thought of them as "those things people buy for decades before they can afford our wares."
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ETA: Since the argument in my own head about kids using libraries is kids in rural areas not having access, I just went to the library website for the area I went to high school which is a pretty depressed area of the US and extremely rural. They had access to ebooks - certainly not as many as I have here but considering the size of the library itself, a reasonable start. I had my own library card there. I don't know that I even had to get parental permission for it.
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Kids with Overdrive access: I'm checking; apparently you can't even see the TOS without downloading the software & starting to install it; it pops up a "click to agree to terms" section during the install.
Adobe Digital Editions requires being over age 13, and parental consent (or emancipation) for 13-17 yrs.
Ebook access in libraries is *pathetic.* SF Public library has 5700 Overdrive ebooks... and over five million physical items, in a 7-story building. ("Items," because that includes CDs and microfiche archives.) Tiny niche hole-in-the-wall bookstores have a bigger selection than SF Library's ebooks. It only seems like a big number because it's new and shiny.
Overdrive costs to belong to; small publishers can't just donate library books to them. Self-published books are right out.
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ADE sucks in many, many ways. Do you know off the top of your head if Calibre limits usage due to age? It has a reader. ETA2: Of course you still have to have ADE on the computer to get the library files unless you only pull the mobi files./ETA2
SF Public library has 5700 Overdrive ebooks...
eeek Our numbers are higher than that. (Fiction = 17,325 & Nonfiction = 10,831) They've switched to mostly epub it looks like in the past year or so but that includes some mobi and too many pdfs. ETA: I'm not going to count the audiobooks, music or videos available on Overdrive. There is just no easy way to count things on our site without opening multiple pages with a calculator at hand. /ETA
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I *loved* Neopets, because they allowed under-13 with a written notice from a parent. I faxed in my permission for KtE when she was 10.
The whole web is, technically, frighteningly closed to minors. Which mostly works fine, because nobody *cares* if kids are lying about being old enough to click the "I agree to these terms to comment at this free blog site" button, but when it comes to schools assigning online reading and downloads, the sites have to be legitimately available.
I checked ebook sales sites; I found one (BooksOnBoard, I think) that allows minors to have accounts on the site at all. Of course, to *use* it, they'd need to have access to a credit card or PayPal; more barriers. (But they could presumably download free ebooks as they're available.)
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I wonder what the ToS looks like on the typical VISA gift card. Do you know?
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Mobi, yes, is different. Considerably older software, not US based... but possibly, there's something hidden about it, because Amazon bought Mobipocket (which was why they stopped selling PDF ebooks in 2007 and switched to Mobi for the Kindle). There's no mention of that on the Mobi site; not sure if it tangles into the Overdrive access.
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Which is a really nice change.
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I am now so tempted to go to my library's next "Yay ebooks!" demonstration just to ask why they bother having ebooks for kids in epub format.
Mobipocket, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any such restrictions.
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You know, as an author who does not get a cent for any book that is recycled through the system, it would be nice if we could also get a cut of that resale. We don't. And what happens is that the minute your book appears in print, you have now competition from the resale market. And since the market is now, literally, global, you're totally fucked. Within a month of my books appearing in the market place--even being sold at dramatic discount--there were copies of my books being sold for less than a dollar on amazon, since everyone uses their marketplace. Because the used booksellers make their money on the shipping and handling. They don't care what the fuck the book sells for. So, yes, this model doesn't just hurt the publishers. It's hurts and actually KILLS the author. How many books can you recycle through this system? With Internet access a fucking ton of books.
During that entire Joe Scalzi's blog/Macmillan/amazon smackdown I was shocked at how prevalent was the demand for really cheap books. And when authors chimed in that, um, I'm not making any money, the response was, essentially, tough shit. So when you're talking about super cheap books, whether it's through a used bookseller or a market that now expects its e-books to be dirt cheap, remember that there is an author who is on the other side of that equation who finds herself in the position where she literally cannot afford to write books. If I tell myself that I write purely because I love to write, that's certainly one option. But has become just that. A labor of love. Most authors I know are in this position. I do not expect to make any money at. And when I mean money, I mean like $1000. I don't mean five figures. Readers want either free content or super cheap content. Authors never seem to appear in this debate. Ever.
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There's no umbrella org empowered to make deals for new types of marketing. I don't know why gift ebooks are so complicated, but I've got no trouble believing there's some legal wrinkle involving rights that could be worked out, but would have to be established differently for each publisher, and it hasn't been worth the hassle.