My 20+ years of consuming various media have left me with over 700 albums, over 300 books and over 200 Videos and DVDs, along with a few LPs and cassettes I still have around somewhere. The clutter that this produces means that the idea of ‘virtual’ media, if you like, is very appealing.
Since 2007, for music I have been almost exclusively downloading. As well as removing the need to buy yet another CD cabinet, this generally works very well. In early 2007 the last local CD shop of any note (Music Zone) closed down, leaving me with a 30 mile journey to the nearest city to buy CDs or buying online. As these CDs will generally be around £10 in price or more, compared to £7.99 normally on iTunes, downloading is even more appealing. The cheaper price is fair enough as the costs of distribution are much lower, plus strictly the quality is not as good as a CD, not that I really notice.
The same is not quite true for films. The online market is currently fairly restricted. With music, I have very rarely found what I have wanted not to be on iTunes, which is not the case for film. Plus the pricing differential is not so great. Many DVDs, even recent films, can be bought online for £5 or less, and s0 £6.99 on iTunes doesn’t always seem so cheap. There is also a size issue. My 700+ albums come to 40-50GB on iTunes, my 200+ films would come to over 200GB. Therefore at present, I am still mainly buying DVDs, with the odd dabble in online films, though I can see the online element growing over time.
So what has all this got to do with eBooks? I made a statement to a group of friends years ago that eBooks would never take off because the companies making the devices and selling the books would be too greedy and price them too high. The recent spat between Amazon and Macmillan over Kindle book prices could support this view, but I now think that the situation around eBooks are generally more complex than just pricing for the following reasons:
- The music industry and to some degree the film industry has been in trouble in recent years with falling sales. Thus they could be said to be desperate to get some legal content online and were thus more willing to negotiate to do this. The same is not generally true of publishing. Though newspapers and magazines may have been struggling to find ways to monetize the internet, and book shops may be losing out to online retailers, the book publishers don’t seem to be doing so bad at all.
- The music and film industries have been suffering, probably since the cassette recorder, from piracy of their works. Whether you believe the figures the industry comes out with or not, it is certainly true that it is much easier to obtain music or films illegally online, than it was when a few cassettes were copied and passed around to mates. The book publishing just industry hasn’t have this problem. Paper books are difficult to digitize, you have to scan hundreds of pages, and though many out of copyright books are now available free online (e.g. Project Gutenberg), most books are not. As an increase in eBooks could see such piracy develop in book publishing, publishers are going to be less keen to get into eBooks and want more restrictions than the music or film industries which already had a big piracy problem.
- The book publishing industry has very much a two tier system. An initial hardback copy is released at £15-20 in the UK, with the paperback at £8-10 a year or two later. The film industry kind of does the same thing with films in cinemas, then rental only, then purchased DVD, but films end up on purchased DVD so quickly these days, the distinction is blurred. The big problem with eBooks is that the hardback/paperback distinction largely disappears. Whether you get the hardback larger print experience or the paperback smaller print experience depends on the size of your eReader, and the content in both cases is the same.
However, despite this the eBook market in the UK does seem to be developing. I had assumed that because the Amazon Kindle isn’t really available over here (you can order from the US Store), and the Apple iPad won’t include books outside the US at launch that there are few options, but while looking for this blog I have been presently surprised. WH Smith, for example, a big high street book seller in the UK has what seems to be an extensive eBook store, and though they seem to be trying to maintain the higher ‘hardback’ price at launch, the prices aren’t too bad (see also Waterstones). Whether this can be maintained if you are buying effectively the same thing that is half the price a year later remains to be seen. The cheapest books for a few pounds are the out-of-copyright books that you probably could get for free legally anyway. There are also eBook stores in the UK from Penguin, Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins among others. All these seem to be using the Adobe EPUB format, which does have restrictions but at least it seems to be a standard format.
eBooks are still at an early stage in the UK, and despite the reasons not to, publishers and booksellers seem to be embracing them. Perhaps the lack of Kindle and Apple iPad books reflects a desire not to end up like the music industry where one store, iTunes, accounts for most online sales, with Amazon a distant second. If this does create a genuine market online with booksellers competing against each other, this should be good for buyers on price. Rather than thinking eBooks won’t happen, I am now going to look into this further, though I am still slightly nervous in moving to them as there is no way back. I can put my downloads onto CD, but printing books myself is not feasible if I decide I don’t want to use the eReader. There is also, however, the small matter of the 50+ paper books I have bought but haven’t read yet, which I probably should get through first.
