J. Yep. I wish publishers would worry more about revenue and less about protecting their paper infrastructure, regardless of the value of paper books and bookstores. Here in the States, at least, people spend just a speck of their incomes on paper books, far, far less than on other forms of recreation, etc. The present system is already a failure by those standards. Enticing, affordable multimedia books at fair prices and without silly DRM restrictions could change the picture. Let’s hope that both technology and publishers’ business sense will improve over time.

L: Believe it or not, I hadn’t Baen in mind, but, yes, I’m pleased to give ‘em credit and in the past have cited Baen as a great example. By wide distribution, I mean timely distribution in many languages, at least of Potter-style best-sellers, before the pirates have a chance to find downloaders. I say downloaders rather than customers, since many pirates offer free e-books simply for the challenge, and because high prices of E or lack of e-books, period, make them look like social benefactors. As for Point #4, I meant the use of ads in books to make them free or keep prices down—while also offering, as an option, adless editions.

Thanks, both of you. As usual, commenters are adding value to the TeleBlog—thereby strengthening the case we keep making for interactive books.

David

I had to laugh when I read your list of things publishers could do to fight piracy, because, and I’m sure you’ve already heard it before, Baen already does a lot of that and has for several years with success as a part of their WebScriptions site.

1. Offer e-book with or ahead of p-book. Check. In fact, you can even get electronic Advanced Reader Copies (ARC) of books. Who else does that?

3. Keep prices reasonable. I dunno about anyone else, but I’d say check. For the stuff that you have to pay for, ie. not yet in the Free Library, typically ranges between $4 and $6 for individual books that have already been released, or $15 for the ARC. Or you can pay $15 to get a bundle of e-books for all of the p-books released in a particular month, both hardback and paperback. And going back to point 1, you can subscribe for forthcoming months, and for the stuff thats still in the works you’ll start getting access to part of the books about 3 months before the publication date. And they guarantee a minimum of 4 books per month on the bundle buy. If they don’t have that many new books being released the difference is made up from their backlist. And frankly, I doubt they have to do that very often, because they usually have 5 to 7 books released each month with at least 2 of those being new hardbacks. Sounds darned reasonable to me.

5. Use No or Social DRM. Check. Baen doesn’t do DRM. Especially considering that one of the (many) formats they release all of their e-books in is HTML.

6. Recognize the real bottom line. Check and Double-Check. Considering their whole e-book thing started as an experiment in 1995 with what became their Free Library, and discovering that they could release a book electronically for free, and cause not just other books in its series to get increased p-sales, but that book too. And then it grew from there into what they have now. And honestly, when was the last time you saw a Baen book being pirated? Need I say more?

Not sure what point 2 actually means to evaluate it for Baen, and for them point 4 would be silly. If you know about Baen and Webscriptions, you don’t need ads, you’re probably already sold on it.

All in all, I am firmly convinced that if the publishing industry as a whole bothered to pay attention to what Baen’s been doing for years, we’d fairly quickly see piracy of most new books wither on the vine. And if they’ld bother to do the same for their backlist, piracy for fiction would probably just plain go away.