makes you wonder whether
all the _talk_ of “piracy”
didn’t create the reality of
_actual_pirates_in_2009_…

our neuroses create our future.

the things we obsess about
often manifest in our world.

-bowerbird

And that sounds like a snarky comment, but truly, it’s relevant. Because I really think that all of this comes down to EASE OF USE.

The proliferation of illegal music downloads in the age of Napster stemmed from the fact that the record industry did not make music available digitally. The consumers wanted it in digital form. If they couldn’t buy it, they would get it for free. And then a whole generation of people learned how to pirate music.

The success of the iTunes store shows that if it is easier for a consumer to buy music (at a reasonable price) than it is to steal, they will fork over their credit card.

Right now, it is anything but easy for the customer.

I can’t read my MSLit books on my Palm – only on my iPaq – and I’ve used up all my MSReader activations, so there’s that pain there. (Six activations sounds great at first, but it’s been eight or nine years since I started with the program so now I need to beg MS for a new activation whenever I change systems and can’t change the laptop and desktop at the same time.)

This is the kind of thing that annoys me.

Sometime soon I’m going to be getting an E-Ink device – either a Kindle 2 or a Sony Reader. That means I’m either going to have to rebuy any DRM’d books I haven’t read yet (and I have a lot of books I’ve already bought two or more times since I buy e-versions of some of my dead-tree collection) or do something about the DRM because neither device will read any of my existing DRM ebook collection.

It’s ridiculous. And Amazon refuses to support eReader, which is the only DRM format that does allow for easy device shifting.

I don’t need a new pair of glasses every time I get a book from a differnt publisher. Books I buy from Borders sit on the same shelf as ones from Barnes and Noble without any difficulty.

Why do so many publishers have a problem with the idea that I just might want to read the books I’ve already bought on my new device?

Why can’t they be like Baen and understand that I don’t want to buy formats, I want to buy books and read them when where and how I like.

@C A Bridges: The length of the lines in bowerbird posts are a DRM-free form of Haiku. Having read many on another blog, I have come to kind of like it.

On the other side of the equation, we have a mess of DRM. One of the technologies used by Fictionwise (sorry, at client’s this week and brain is mush) only authenticates on a set number of devices. This seems, on the surface, to be a no big deal sort of thing…until you get a new computer because you’ve been sharing machines with other household members. Suddenly, you can’t access the books you’ve purchased without undergoing days of frustration with customer service (if you can get it resolved at all). Or, hey!, Overdrive decides to take all their toys and go home. Customers who knew about this had to figure out how to “save” their books. Some publishers stepped up, some didn’t. And it’s not pretty going backward from Kindle format to, oh, something I can read on my iPhone or laptop.

Like I said, readers are not so much opposed to DRM — they really do get it — but they’re opposed to the hoops and barriers caused by DRM. One reader put it best, “Why can’t they just settle on one thing and be done with it?”

I’m working on a pricing post. It’s not a pretty, simple solution when it comes to deciding the price of books. While there are cost savings, there are also costs that don’t just magically disappear.

However, I don’t think it follows that all readers believe that content has to be free. One commenter mentioned the iTunes store as a model. Certainly, everything they offer for sale is readily obtainable for free elsewhere, but people are paying (I do not subscribe to the notion that every pirated song represents a lost sale, and there was some evidence that in the heyday of Napster, sales were increasing). So a lot of education can help — I was told a story over dinner last week of a person who scans books and shares them because she believes she’s doing her fellow readers a favor. If the community of readers expresses disapproval, she might change her mind.

These readers are, basically, asking for some respect from publishers. They’re being treated like criminals, whether or not that’s the intent. They’re losing their books because the industry cannot get its collective act together. They honestly see what you’re “selling” as a rental because, well, history has shown that what you purchase, someone will probably take away. It’s a balancing act, and readers, if the industry is not careful, will give up on you. Right now, they believe in books and publishers and the future.