TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

I think this speaks high of Pogue as he was desiring to assist people with special needs. On the other hand, wouldn’t it make sense to sell a digital edition where their personal information was required for the transaction (I’m thinking Paypal type account that requires authentication of a person’s identity through bank verification, etc.). At least this way he would have someone to hold responsible for the unapproved distribution.

Of course, incorporating a social DRM type solution would be worth exploring. And perhaps a regular DRM solution for the short term (though obviously less desirable).

I’m sure others might mention that having an electronic edition may actually increase exposure and also increase pbook sales. Anyway, I think characterizing an entire industry based upon what happened in these circumstances is less than fair. Certainly he had good intentions. But he should have considered the possible problems with releasing a “naked” file before actually doing it. Perhaps his opinion would be radically different if he had made it available in a DRMed (social or otherwise) format.

He’s lumped everyone in together as pirates which isn’t fair.

However, he also brought up valid points about how giving stuff (in this case e-books) away for free doesn’t work either.

Folks may not like it, but, if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” is true, exactly what is the value of “free” again?

We’ve already seen this whole “pay what you feel it is worth AFTER you’ve already downloaded (whatever)” doesn’t work.

But to write off all e-books because some unscrupulous individuals played on Pogue’s sympathy (he was trying to do the right thing) isn’t fair.

I agree with Don’s first sentence. This speaks very highly of Mr. Pogue. That said, the correct response is that this is, alas, inevitable. Pretty much any book of interest is available on warez sites or newsgroups regardless of whether or not it has ever been released in e format. Scanners are dirt cheap these days, and it’s not a big deal to scan an entire book into PDF and OCR it. Is the result as good as the sort of PDF edition that Pogue is likely to have? No. Is it good enough? Yes.

Other than that, Pogue’s article seems to be a rehashing of Steven Poole’s arguments based on Trigger Happy, which I’ve railed against here, but consider this cluelessness re RadioHead:

“As Mr. Poole points out, that’s fine if you’re already an established name: “If there’s been a comparable success by a band that hasn’t already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I’d like to know about it.””

No there isn’t a Radiohead indie story out there, but there are a lot of bands that I listen to and have actually paid for their music who essentially started by largely giving their music away, and working hard to build a community around their music.

Again, look at Cory Doctorow. Why can Cory give his books away and still report his publishers see very good sales. Is Doctorow uber-famous like Radiohead? No. But he is very well known to the group most likely to be interested in the sort of novels he writes and he has worked his ass off the past decade building up a community around him (and not just in some lame marketing shlock way).

Instead of talking to Steve Pool about why his experiment failed (and, frankly, it was inevitable that it would), Pogue would be better served by talking to John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow or the folks at Baen about how they’ve been able to achieve good sales figures even though so much of what they have in print is available for free on the intertubes. Seriously, if Pogue was correct then Baen should have been out of business years ago since you can download every single novel they’ve ever sold from one warez site or another. The second it comes out in non-DRMed form, someone uploads it.

The problem seems to be, IMO, that Pogue and others are treating the Internet like a bookstore. When I walk into Borders they give favorable display space to some books and others I come across, so to some extent just being there on the shelves is a great inducement for a sale. Just having the electronic version of your book available for sale somewhere on the Internet, however, pretty much doesn’t mean squat and isn’t going to get you anywhere saleswise.