Too many restrictions

About a week ago, a study about ebook buying and reading habits reported that teens find current ebook platforms too limited when it comes to social sharing:

The E-Book Market for 13- to 17-Year-Olds

• Teens lag behind all other age groups in e-book adoption. Sixty-six percent of 13- to 17-year olds say they prefer print books to e-books, 26 percent say they have no preference and only 8 percent prefer e-books.
• One reason for this resistance: Teens like using social technology to discuss and share things with their friends, and e-books at this point are not a social technology. An increasing number of teens surveyed says there are too many restrictions on using e-books: 14 percent said so in 2011, compared to 6 percent in 2010.

That’s been my overall takeaway, too, while test-driving these various social reading apps recently. There are just too many restrictions to make the experience enjoyable.

But “too many restrictions” is a pretty general complaint. What about some details? Okay, here are two fatal flaws I see in the social reading experience right now:

1. The ebook landscape is too fragmented.

From retailers to technology companies to publishers, every company involved in ebooks today is spending a massive amount of resources trying to simultaneously lock in customers, block competition, and thwart piracy. None of these goals serves the needs of the customer. In fact, progress in any of them makes it increasingly harder for an individual to use his ebooks freely.

2. DRM ruins everything.

I know, it’s always so easy to bash DRM, and how else will you prevent customers from making copies etc? But when it comes to social media, DRM truly is a lethal additive. Social sharing requires a frictionless environment to work–think Instagram or Pinterest–and DRM is almost pure friction.

Imagine the ghostland that Instagram would have become if you had to authorize and unlock each photo, then sideload it into the Instagram app before uploading.

See the restrictions in action

My favorite social reading app of the moment is Subtext, and yet unless those two issues are resolved soon, I fear Subtext is a non-starter, along with every other social reading attempt currently being tested or developed.

Why? Because right now, to use Subtext you have to:

1. Own an iPad.
2. Buy your ebooks from an exclusive subset of retailers such as Kobo and Google Books.

Let’s look at the fragmentation problem: You can’t use Subtext on your smartphone or on an Android tablet. You can’t use Kindle or iBooks or Nook or library ebooks with it. You can’t even review your notes and highlights on the web, for instance from a regular computer or laptop. And about that pesky DRM: If you do buy ebooks that work with Subtext, they won’t work on any Kindle devices or apps, and your notes won’t carry over to Kobo or Nook or Overdrive.

Why would a teenager go through so many hoops, and deal with such an unnecessarily hamstrung “solution” just to talk to her friends about a book? For that matter, why would an adult? Why would anyone? Life’s too short for that sort of nonsense.

I still think social reading apps point out an interesting future for, say, book clubs and classrooms, but until the industry kills DRM for good and stops trying to carve up exclusive little corporate fiefdoms, it’s going to be too much trouble to bother with.

(Photo: niallkennedy)

I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

It’s an unfortunate publicity blow for the anti-DRM crowd, having to go up against a beloved cultural touchstone, but even without Star Wars Day I’m pretty sure most people on the Internet couldn’t care less about the Day Against DRM. Joe Brockmeier at NetworkWorld identifies two problems stunting the event:

1. Lack of funds and professionalism (I agree with him that the logo has an “embarrassing college radical feel”); and
2. An overwhelming lack of interest from the average consumer.

That second problem is the big one, because all of the nerd rage in the world won’t sway a corporation to abandon DRM; that sort of pressure has to come from the general buying public, and so far it hasn’t.

When it comes to DRM and ebooks, as of 2011 most of the public is still getting to know the products and the technology, and the majority of consumers haven’t run into any of what I would call the “big” DRM disasters, like losing access to past purchases because of a platform shift, or having a corporate or legal entity take away purchases without permission. Today’s biggest ebook DRM problems have to do with lending, highlighting and taking notes, and text-to-speech functionality, and I suspect a lot of consumers think of those things (wrongly, in my opinion) as bringing added value to an ebook, not as an intrinsic part of it.

But I think there’s an even stronger, more emotional component to DRM apathy, and it’s that most people still don’t want to be in control of their technology. I’ll admit I’m writing this the day after losing my mind trying in vain to explain to a friend the difference between domain registration and website hosting, so the cynic is strong within me today. But I think the average adult still prefers magic over explanations, at least with respect to consumer electronics and the Internet. It’s almost never too hard to understand, but all the charts, graphics, cartoon characters, pantomimes and puppet shows in the world won’t educate a person who has willfully assumed the role of Ignorant Outsider. You have to want to learn.

Okay, enough lamenting. If you want more control of the ebooks you’ve licensed or purchased, there are ways to remove the DRM. Here’s one way to remove Adobe Digital Editions DRM if you have a Windows PC. On a Mac running OS 10.5 or higher, the best and easiest solution I’ve found for breaking both Kindle and Adobe DRM is something called DeDRM, which you can find easily through a Google search. If you use Calibre, there are anti-DRM plugins you can install.

If you buy a Kindle ebook and find that you can’t lend it or make highlights or use the Read to Me function because of DRM, Amazon offers a no-questions-asked 7 day return policy. Barnes & Noble’s official policy is a lot less consumer friendly, but it won’t hurt to call and ask.

(Photo: pfctdayelise)

Jenn Northington at Shelf Awareness posted Monday about a couple of informal surveys she gave in January and earlier this month. In both instances, the respondents were self-selected and the total responses were just over 200, which I think translates into a margin of error of +/- everything. Still, since the surveys went out to Jenn’s Twitter and Tumblr followers only a few months apart, I’m going to assume that many of them took both surveys — and therefore that I can at least guess at how this small group’s attitudes and behaviors are evolving.

Whew! My point behind all of this set-up is that I love to sniff out early signs of how attitudes shift, and while this may only apply to Jenn’s followers, it makes me slightly more optimistic.

The survey only had four questions:

1. Where do you get your ebooks?
2. What devices do you use to read your ebooks?
3. What’s your single most favorite thing about ereading?
4. What’s your single least favorite thing about ereading?

To sum up the answers, the Kindle is still the leader, library ebooks grew in popularity, and if the same people answered both surveys then they’re shopping from and reading on more platforms now than just a few months ago. They’re also pirating more.

But the most dramatic shift in responses was in the “what’s your least favorite thing” category. In January, only 11% answered DRM, but that number jumped to 18% in April. It still lags behind other answers — loss of device and formatting/features are bigger concerns, apparently — but it jumped the most.

What I hope is that this means that the more you read ebooks, and especially the more you read them on multiple devices, the less patience you have for restrictions on what you can do with your ebooks. “Buy once, read everywhere” makes for nice Amazon marketing copy, but I think it also sums up what consumers expect from their ebooks regardless of which store they buy from, especially now that prices are roughly the same across all stores.

DRM works best if you can hide it from customers, but as ebooks grow in popularity the high cost of DRM will only grow more visible to readers. That’s even more likely as long as publishers keep using DRM to ruin lending.

Jenn also asked the respondents to define DRM in their own words, and she shared the results on a public Google spreadsheet. Click the “define DRM” button at the bottom to read the answers. It’s fascinating to see that in addition to the standard “DRM annoys me” and “DRM is a necessary evil” attitudes, there’s still a large swath of people who remain ignorant about the topic, even though they’ve heard of it before or know that it somehow affects them.

(Locks image: DaveBleasdale)

1: “The customer is the enemy.”

Last night I called Amazon and, after making sure the problem wasn’t a glitch, got a refund on a Kindle book I’d bought the week before. Why? Because Hachette, the publisher, had disabled all clipping and highlighting functionality. That’s right, everything. The best part was that this was a new development, because on kindle.amazon.com I could see that other past Kindle edition owners had highlighted and shared sentences from the book.

2: “Don’t make a peep, piracy is under the bed!”

On the same day that I was discovering I’d had my fair use rights secretly stomped on by Hachette (yes, secretly: there’s no info on clipping limits on Amazon product pages), David Shelley, the head of Hachette’s publishing group Little, Brown and Company in the UK, was at the London Book Fair trying to convince authors that piracy justifies low royalty rates:

“Money spent on print and paper will be spent on specialists to fight piracy and that is a team of many people. Piracy websites are proliferating, and we are scanning the entire web, and investing in software too. The costs of this are only getting more expensive, and could spiral way out of control. There are also legal costs, when sites refuse to take down content.”

The most important part of this statement is what’s missing: Shelley provided absolutely no evidence to back up his claims. At least one author in the audience told Shelley she didn’t believe him, and Magellan Media, one of the only companies trying to seriously study ebook piracy, has pointed out that until publishers actually start to measure piracy and share the data, they’re just spreading FUD to serve their own needs.

3: “We think it’s best to be reactive, not innovative.”

The reactive company makes every decision from a position of fear, and consequently chooses rigid and conservative paths that limit future growth. The innovative company explores the edges of the market to look for new ways to create revenue.

Check out what the senior vice president for digital products at Hachette US told the Boston Globe last week:

“We were the first to engage the anti-piracy service Attributor,” Thomas told me. “They go out and find pirated copies on peer-to-peer networks, and they send automatic takedown notices to the websites. Generally, we get good compliance.”

And compare that to what a Random House exec said in the same article:

“I suppose it’s a growing problem, but it hasn’t yet made a serious impact on our business the way it did on the music business.”

Random House reported its digital sales grew 250% in 2010 (The Financial). Hachette’s digital sales grew by 138% (eBookNewser).

What would explain Hachette’s fear-based approach to ebooks? I have a feeling it has a lot to do with where Hachette’s executives are getting their news from these days. Attributor’s business model depends on selling anti-piracy services and consulting to publishers. To sign up new clients, it has to convince them that piracy is one of the four horsemen on the apocalypse. Here’s a different take from someone who tried to check out the company’s findings, and who concluded that “Attributor ebook piracy numbers don’t add up.”

I don’t earn or lose money on Hachette’s business model, so other than having to get a refund on a crippled Kindle edition, I guess I shouldn’t care too much. (The taking away of fair use functionality really irks me on a more fundamental level, however.)

Dang, I was totally going to pirate about 20 lines from this book. Foiled again!

 

But what I’d like to point out, one more time and just in case someone from Hachette reads this, is that every pirate isn’t a customer, and every customer isn’t a pirate.

Although sometimes, if you do everything wrong, you can make those two groups overlap a little more.

(Photo: takomabibelot)

Okay, it’s true I was basing my statement on my own experiences starting around 2006, when I began to take a strong interest in ebooks and found, to my shock, that lots of publishers were pegging digital editions to the hardcover price. Now in 2011 there are thousands of $10 new releases on the big ebook stores, and I can’t open Google Reader without seeing another story about an author making money off of $3-or-less ebooks.

So I concluded that prices in general have gone down. But after seeing the Teleread comments, I thought it might be fun to find an actual price list from 2004 and compare it to today’s prices.

This simple spreadsheet comparing ebook prices in 2004 and 2011 combines a 2004 bestseller list created by the Open eBook Forum, and current prices for those same titles on the Amazon Kindle Store as of March 8th, 2011.

First, I want to point out that I’m fully aware my crude spreadsheet doesn’t provide a big picture overview; I’m not trying to prove the Teleread commenters wrong, in other words. This comparison merely shows how a specific ebook collection has changed in price over the past seven years.

The simple conclusion is that if you were to buy all the books on that list in Kindle format today, you’d pay about $67 less than in 2004. That savings is somewhat misleading, however, because of the relationship between price and release dates.

If you look at just the 26 titles which are still for sale today, only the 11 most expensive ones dropped in price. This subgroup includes two dictionaries, a bible, and 8 new releases in fiction, and in all they account for a drop of $93.

Unfortunately, since the 2011 savings is about $67, it’s clear that the remaining 13 titles crept up in price over the years. A slightly more accurate observation, then, is that the overall cost only dropped because there are no new releases on the list.

But there’s a bright spot in this subgroup, too. The average price of those 8 fiction new releases in 2004 was $17.21, which is a little higher than the $12-15 range of most Big Six new releases on the Kindle Store today. (I left the dictionaries and bible out of this calculation, but if you add them in, the 2004 average price jumps up by 50 cents.)

Is this good news?

So is this worth cheering? On the minus side, the majority of titles on the list went up in price; but on the plus side, at least they remain pegged to mass market paperback prices, which also rose during this period. These ebook editions haven’t gotten any cheaper relative to paperback, but they haven’t crept higher relative to paperback either, which I think counts as a mild win-by-default for consumers. *

Although I didn’t count them in my comparison above, I also found that two of the books on the list are available for free in 2011. The ebook freebie, whether as a marketing strategy or because of volunteer efforts in the public domain, is much more common today than in 2004. I’m not sure how to place a dollar value on this category, but I think it has a real effect on total annual cost for many ebook consumers, and counts as another improvement from 2004.

But the most positive change, I think, is that the average price of a mainstream fiction new release has gone down — perhaps not from Amazon’s unilateral (and subsequently unsustainable) pricing strategy in 2008, but certainly from where we were in 2004 when publishers called all the shots. I consider this a clear win, and I think it probably wouldn’t have happened if Amazon hadn’t come along.

As everyone who follows the industry knows, Amazon tried to force a $10 ceiling on new releases back when it first introduced the Kindle, and although big publishers successfully fought back last year and raised the ceiling to the $12-15 range, that’s still far below today’s average hardcover price. Amazon pushed for a very low price point, publishers pushed back, and the result in 2011 is somewhere between the two extremes.

The future looks cheap

Big publishers will probably want to keep pushing for higher prices in the coming years, or at least keep raising ebook prices to match mass market prices, but there’s a new twist now that might undermine that strategy: indie publishing.

The last couple of years have been all about Amazon, but 2011 is shaping up to be all about indie publishers and authors — and they’re even worse than Amazon when it comes to discount pricing. They’re aggressively pushing prices in the other direction, and getting lots of favorable media coverage in the process, which I suspect will speed the normalization of the $0.99-2.99 price range in consumers’ minds.

In another year or so — depending on whether the current discount authors are exceptions — $9.99 may be considered a premium price point, and $14.99 an impossible sell. (It already is to people like me who tend to shop for ebooks a lot.)

Whether you think that’s the right direction prices should move probably depends on whether or not you earn your living from publishing. Consumers, however, have reason to cheer.

(Image: Hanan Cohen)

In other words, this isn’t about digital titles specifically. It’s about HarperCollins taking advantage of the ebook transition to enforce a very short lifespan on new book purchases. If they’d had the technology to do it with printed books, believe me, books would be crumbling into piles of dust every 12 months at your local library.

Earlier this week, a Booksprung commenter asked, “Does anybody know, on average, how many check-outs a typical (print) library book lasts before it has to be replaced due to loss, damage, or wear and tear?” I didn’t, but now we have some answers thanks to a video posted by the Pioneer Library System.

Although it’s true that librarians have a wry sense of humor, you might not feel like watching the whole thing. Here’s a summary.

Main takeaways:

• Of the five physical books on display — each of which have been purchased once — the library would have had to make 13 total purchases at this point, with a 14th being triggered after one more checkout of “Sooner or Later.”
• The most popular book has been checked out 120 times. Its spine is damaged and needs to be repaired, but otherwise it’s still lendable. The second most popular book been checked out 65 times, yet it’s still in excellent condition.

Here are the stats on each title in the video:

“Metro Girl” by Janet Evanovich
Checkouts: 65
Condition: Excellent
If this were an ebook: 3 purchases

“Ruby Holler” by Sharon Creech
Checkouts: 39
Condition: Slight spine damage but otherwise good
If this were an ebook: 2 purchases

“Coraline” by Neil Gaiman
Checkouts: 48
Condition: Good
If this were an ebook: 2 purchases

“Swimming to Catalina” by Stuart Woods
Checkouts: 120!
Condition: Damaged spine but repairable
If this were an ebook: 5 purchases

“Sooner Or Later” by Debbie Macomber
Checkouts: 25
Condition: Nearly perfect
If this were an ebook: 1 purchase, but only one checkout left

“HarperCollins 26+ checkouts” [YouTube via Teleread]

Related:
“HarperCollins tries to justify its new library policy”
“How your next ebook loan might sap your library’s book budget”

The blog MobyLives points out that at least HarperCollins still permits ebook lending, whereas Macmillan and Simon & Schuster refuse to let libraries lend their titles at all. But in some ways I find HarperCollins’ policy more damaging, in that it’s designed to sap more money from library cupboards, which are already dangerously bare. Of all institutions for a publisher to go after in search of profit, the library has got to be one of the worst.

MediaBistro writes that there’s now a blog up called Boycott HarperCollins, where you can check whether the publisher is still enforcing the self-destruct policy, and read a sample letter you can copy if you want to ask HarperCollins to rethink its position.

But whether you boycott or not — and let’s face it, a boycott is unlikely to do much harm; one way publishers actually benefit from lousy brand recognition is we never check which publisher is behind which book — there’s another way you can fight back on behalf of your local library. Don’t check out Harper Collins titles if you can find pirated versions of them online. You can download the cracked title, read it, and then delete it in a recreation of your very own library experience, and thus leave your beleaguered library’s self-destructing version available for a future patron.

(I should note that you can also donate actual money to your local library, of course. My suggestion above is directly related to the HarperCollins issue.)

(Photo: ricardo266)

It can even open some DRM’ed Nook ebooks (the older pdb format). But it can’t open any DRM’ed epub files, meaning all Kobo and many Nook titles are shut out. It can’t open Kindle titles at all.

Then there’s Bluefire Reader, a new app that came out last year. It handles DRM’ed epub files just fine; I tested it with a book I recently bought from Kobo, and whether I pre-authorized it first on my desktop using Adobe Digital Editions, or just sent the .acsm file straight to the app so it could download it, it worked without a hitch.

Overdrive’s iOS app is also supposed to work with DRM’ed epub files, but the latest update keeps crashing on my device, so I can’t test it.

All of these apps indicate that there are good alternative ebook readers out there, and sometimes they even work with with ebooks from major retailers. All it would take is a little cooperation from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Kobo, and any or all of these apps could offer a smooth, seamless reader experience regardless of where you bought your book. So long as they don’t offer their own ebook stores online, there should be no need to include In App Purchase buttons anywhere. Apple may think otherwise, of course, but it might be worth a shot.

Amazon will almost certainly refuse to do this, because its whole strategy involves creating a walled garden as impenetrable and all-encompassing as Apple’s platform. Hell, it owns Stanza and won’t give that app the ability to open Kindle titles.

So while this is an unlikely solution, I think it’s worth nothing that a solution nevertheless exists. Even if Amazon refuses to play with others, it might be a worthwhile strategy for smaller publishers who can’t afford to hand over nearly a third of each sale to Apple.