eBooks: With Courage And Patience,
We Are Getting There
by: L. Scott Redford
Just how do we make the "e" in e-books stand for "easier"? Well, how
about this? Let's scrap the existing digital rights management. Instead
everybody in charge of administering DRM would be re-trained overnight
as digital priests. They would certify "trustworthiness" to those seeking
to download e-books.
Before downloads, customers would be visited by digital priests of their
respective religious persuasions. With great pomp and circumstance, they
would "pledge" not to forward their books to everybody in the world without
compensating the authors and publishers. Break the pledge, and you'd find
yourself in purgatory, hand-copying old encyclopedias.
Or maybe a totalitarian law would work instead. First-offenders guilty
of unlawful content reproduction would have to wear a scratchy wool eye
patch for one year. For a second crime, the patch would be now a mask.
We could set up toll-free hot-lines and reward people for spying on their
neighbors.
The Real Point
See my real point here? No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip--this
complicated issue can't be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and
fear. But e-book standards for DRM and formats would help. I am counting
on the laws of capitalism, which always prevail. A demand will eventually
be met with supply, and I'm hoping that the right set of standard will
break from the pack and simplify the digital content landscape. That will
be a blessed day. Microsoft, Adobe and Palm and the others now have their
own special technology fee tacked on to the price of e-books. And that
complicates merchandising. We e-book merchants would rather not have multiple
cost structures for the same e-book.
Nor do we like consumers to be limited to books published in their chosen
format or suffer multiple technologies just to enjoy a story. Nothing is
more frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld
and forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don't just hear customers
complaints--I myself own a handheld.
Villains not
Who's to blame? I'm thinking nobody. Many authors and publishers break
out in a cold sweat at just the mention of the word "Napster" and can you
blame them? Their livelihood is at stake. They should, however, strive
to better satisfy consumers desire for more content in digital form.
If a publisher has faith in their work, it's now accepted that expanding
to e-book will deliver extra profit and drive hardback sales. Not all understand
this. I still hear some authors express misguided fear that e-books will
cannibalize their hardback sales. Publishing is not a zero-sum game, however--and
that actually can be good. E-books add incremental value to the equation.
Granted, companies tasked with encrypting content for them are an easy
target, for they create the hoops through which we must jump. But the DRM
heavyweights like Microsoft, Adobe and eReader are simply business people
satisfying a need with existing technology.
No glass chin
Let there be no mistake, the future is bright for e-books--sales are
on a steady rise. The industry took a couple of jabs during the Internet
correction, but you'll find no glass chin here. More students are beginning
to see e-books as an alternative for those pricey hardback textbooks. The
computer savvy are learning the ease in pasting code directly from their
favorite Java e-book manual, and there's even speculation that men are
reading more romance as they no longer fear being seen with a floral book
cover. Moreover, the Tablet PC is maturing, and the publishers are slowly
but surely putting even more content in digital form. It takes courage,
but we're getting there. Though it is a word often used in excuses, "patience"
is needed by digital downloaders, me included.
About The Author
Article by L. Scott Redford - [email protected]
Scott is the President of Diesel eBooks with over 35,000 popular and
professional eBooks organized by 50 categories.
Visit the free download section at http://www.diesel-ebooks.com
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