STEAL
THIS
e-BOOK!
An experiment in unsafe texts
by Danny O. Snow
with contributions from
Richard Eoin Nash
Dan Poynter
Wade Roush
Glenn Sanders
About the Book
Steal this e-Book! is an irreverent collection of articles and letters about electronic publishing by Danny O. Snow, with additional contributions by Richard Eoin Nash, Dan Poynter, Wade Roush and Glenn Sanders. It traced the evolution of e-Books in “ancient times,” 1999 to 2002. Additional reports followed, as shown at:
http://www.u-publish.com/media.htm
In early reports, Snow flatly rejected the notion that challenges in DRM (“digital rights management,” also called copy protection, encryption, etc.) should prevent authors and publishers from earning profits from e-Books. Instead, he argued that booksellers would need to update their technology and business models to meet the normal buying and reading patterns of consumers. He also reaffirmed his long-standing conviction that the inherent power of electronic publishing virtually insured e-Books an important role in the future of publishing.
About the Writer
Harvard graduate Danny O. Snow, also co-author of the book titled U Publish.com with Dan Poynter, has been quoted about new publishing technologies by many broadcast media such as the nationally syndicated “Ask Heloise” radio program, NPR, and Talk America Radio. He has also been quoted by scores of print media including The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and many others. Snow was an early supporter of the Open e-Book Initiative and proponent of “Print on Demand” book publishing. He has also served as a panelist and moderator at national publishing events, as a POD book publisher with Unlimited Publishing LLC, and as a columnist for trade publications such as BookTech the Magazine for Publishers and Publishers Weekly.
Steal this e-Book!
is available in paperback or free PDF download at the following Web location:
http://www.u-publish.com/stealme
…and hopefully free to steal as an e-Book from many other sites!
Special Note for Readers in 2011 and following:
This book was originally released in 2002. In the fast-paced worlds of technology and digital publishing, new developments are nearly a daily event. For this reason, Steal this e-Book! represents a slice of history, rather than the current “State of the Art” in electronic publishing.
The author has continued to publish related material in the years since this book was released. Many more recent articles and letters are available at the following Web location:
http://www.u-publish.com/media.htm
CopyLEFT
© 2002 by Danny O. Snow
NO rights reserved under Title 17, U.S. Code, International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Any part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission from the author(s) and publisher(s), provided it is not re-sold or otherwise used to generate income, tangible or intangible.
All rights to articles from BookTech Magazine reverted to the writer on publication, now © 2002 by Danny O. Snow. Articles from eBookNet and eBookWeb © 2000, used by permission. All rights to article from the PMA Newsletter reverted to the writer on publication, now © 2002 by Danny O. Snow. Article from Internet Publishing Magazine © 2001 by the North American Publishing Company, used by permission. Excerpts from Making the Web Pay by Dan Poynter © 2001 by Para Publishing, used by permission. All other text and entire work © MMII by Danny O. Snow.
Cataloging Data:
Author: Snow, Danny O.
Contributor: Nash, Richard Eoin
Contributor: Poynter, Dan
Contributor: Roush, Wade
Contributor: Sanders, Glenn
Title: Steal this e-Book!
1. Publishing 2. Electronic Publishing
3. Computer Technology, Internet
Table of Contents
This is an e-Book. It doesn’t need a Table of Contents, an Index or other artifacts of the pre-digital age, because it’s fully searchable, and probably has a built-in dictionary, backlighting for night reading and other useful features.
No trees were harmed in its production. No gas was wasted by trucking copies back and forth between printer, warehouse, and bookstore… then back again. There are no unsold copies or returns.
It’s cheap, and available worldwide within seconds at the click of a mouse.
We still love tree-Books, and believe they’ll be around for decades to come… but isn’t it time for readers and writers alike to take e-Books seriously?
Acknowledgements
DANNY O. SNOW GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES the support and encouragement he has received over many years from the late William Alfred, Sam Ardery, Steve Bachmann, Gene Barton, Ted Bayliss, BCS Advertising’s Jeanette Brown and Paul Smedberg, Holly Blatman, BookTech Magazine’s Rebecca Churilla, Kimberly Fabiano, Gretchen Kirby, Donna Loyle and others, Cevin Bryerman, Tom Buckner, Mark Butler, the Carey-Davis family, the Childress family, Cynthia (Ling, Ying), Frank DeFord, Richard Adrian Dorr; eBookWeb founders Wade Roush and Glenn Sanders, Mary Frances England, Burl Frame, Bud Gilmore, Michael V.W. Gordon, Judy and Leslie Harrington, John Hartley, Chuck and Robin Harris, John Wm. Houghton, David Jeffers and family, L. Bruce Jones, the Jones cousins, Florrie Binford Kichler, Brandee O’Brien Kingery, Ane Kjølås, Larry Larkin, Lo, Chuck Loesche, Rock Lofton, The Clan MacAaron, John Mace, Jack Magestro, Tracy Mayes, Richard Eoin Nash, Terry Nathan, Cindy Newman, Mark O’Donnell, Kay Olges, Dan Poynter, El Scotto and Becky, Robert Burns Shaw, Mike Shartiag and tribe, Dave Shearer, Jane Shore, the Snapp-Childs clan, assorted Snows and Parkhouses, Mark Swisher, Rick Sutton, Greg Temple, Bob Zaltsberg, and most of all, his #1 fans (who also happen to be his parents) Harry David and Jeanne L. Snow. He also thanks thousands of readers of his book titled U Publish.com, co-authored with Dan Poynter, whose feedback has been invaluable in shaping the ideas presented here.
Foreword
by Richard Eoin Nash
RICHARD NASH IS AMONG THE “DIGERATI,” the “digital literati” who help today’s readers, writers and publishers envision the future of books. A Harvard scholar, author, playwright, and former rights-permissions specialist with Oxford University Press, he also writes about e-Books for several industry trade publications, as well as speaking at publishing events across the nation.
When I first decided to publish a free e-Book to see if it could be a catalyst of sales for a paperback, he was one of the first experts I queried for advice.
Nash is often radical in his views, yet his arguments are compelling. At more than one of his public appearances, I’ve seen fellow authors and publishers come away with a sneaking suspicion that “we have seen the enemy—and it is us.” Happily, the ‘sixties-vintage title Steal this e-Book! and guerrilla marketing concept held enough appeal to his revolutionary spirit that he agreed to write the preface:
To Buy or Not to Buy, That is the Question
by Richard Eoin Nash
The following headline appeared at www.ditherati.com on 19 February 2002:
EXPROPRIATION TAKES COORDINATION
“Open source means to prove that collaboration works better than authority, or private authorship, for that matter.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, predicting that getting people to contribute to his e-book novel for free will help him move units of the print version, Wired News, 19 February 2002
For the digerati of the world, the fact that e-Books sell print books is so self-evident it’s almost beneath contempt.
This book is for everyone else.
This book not only lays out the case for the viability of using wired or wireless technology to deliver content electronically as a branding, marketing, or promotional tool—it is the case. This is the metatextual dimension of the book. As with Tristam Shandy and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, there are nested narratives here.
One narrative is the larger debate about what to do with e-Books. Sell them? If so, for how much? Do we let people copy, forward, print, listen, duplicate, select, cut? (The verbs cascade forth.)
A second narrative connects to the evolution of intellectual property in the 30 years since Abbie Hoffman found a new way to announce that property is theft. In particular it concerns the ever-less-material manifestation of intellectual property, especially artistic works. Less and less material is required to store and transmit intellectual property. The container of the idea begins to slowly disappear, leaving only the idea itself, no more palpable than a swarm of electrons …
… The third is Danny’s own narrative, episodes from the last three years of his life as he comes to terms with what the future holds for an industry, and a practice, that he holds so dear. It’s the story of the market, of the technology, of the companies, but also the story of the writer, an “Autobiography of an X-Book Man.”
The fourth narrative, as I see it, is actually a theoretically infinite number of narratives: the decision each reader (that’s you, by the way) will make as to whether to buy the print book. What might your reasons be to buy? To prove a point, pro or con? Because you find it easier to read as hard copy? As a way to “pay” the author, since he’ll be paid a little when a print book is sold, but nothing at all for the e-Book? Because a friend might like it and s/he would find it easier to read on paper—although you can, after all, forward an e-copy to as many people as you like? What might your reasons be not to buy? Again to prove a point, this time con?
To buy or not to buy, that is our question to you, and so you too are part of the story this book is telling: “a gift that keeps on giving.”
There are no “right” or “wrong” answers to the fundamental question posed by this book: do electronic books compete with printed ones, or complement them?
The electronic version of Steal this e-Book! is free; the paperback is not … and the e-Book is the only form of advertising for its printed counterpart.
It doesn’t matter whether ten paperbacks are sold, or 10,000; all of the print sales will come directly from the availability of the free electronic version.
Whether you prefer e-Book, tree-Book or both, you’ll be right—and you’ll be helping us learn more about what the future holds. With your help, we’ll cast this digital bread upon the waters, and see what the tide brings back.
Preface
— The French verb “voler” can mean “to steal” and “to fly.”
GENTLE READER, Since you’re reading this, you are already a participant in this whimsical “experiment in unsafe texts”—and thank you for playing.
This is a retrospective look at electronic books and electronic rights that traces the evolution of e-Books from “ancient times” (1999) to the present. But it may also have some impact on the future. Here’s why:
After Dan Poynter and I finished the first edition of our book titled U Publish.com back in 1999, we released it in both electronic and printed form. Ironically, even though the book was about new publishing technologies, the company that distributed the e-Book didn’t use encryption at all. I don’t believe that this was a deliberate choice; more likely they just didn’t care enough to pay for it.
Flattering myself, I wondered if pirated copies would show up on Usenet (they didn’t) or if people would buy the paperback that followed in January 2000 (they did).
Dan Poynter wasn’t worried. “The book will be out of date within a year since the publishing industry is changing so quickly,” he said, and he was right. “I’d consider any pirated copies free advertising for the next edition,” he quipped.
In time, we noticed that a substantial number of people who downloaded the e-Book later bought a paperback. That was a pleasant surprise, and it was the beginning of the concept for this book.
After March of 2000, when Stephen King released Riding the Bullet exclusively in electronic form, people in the book industry raised quite a fuss about digital rights management (DRM). Unlike my earlier e-Book, King’s electronic novella, which was distributed by a real publisher, and used real copy protection, was out for only 48 hours before pirated copies began showing up on the Web. And poor Stephen had sold only 400,000 copies at that point.
It amazed me how publishers whined about DRM in the weeks that followed. Jeez, the guy sold almost half a million books with production and shipping costs near zero, and people called it a failure. I longed for that kind of failure.
And I kept thinking about the people who paid for my little e-Book with Dan Poynter, and later paid again for the paperback, bless ’em all.
According to Glenn Sanders of eBookWeb, in a 1998 article he reported, “Three years ago Rough Guides did the unthinkable; they placed the full text of several of [their] most popular travel guides on the Web,” for free. “Ever since Rough Guides placed its content on the site, book sales have increased by at least 20% per year,” he added.
More recently, Dan Poynter related yet another example. National Academy Press put an entire series of e-Books online for free … only to see sales of their tree-Books improve.
Finally, at BookTech 2002 in NYC, other industry experts surmised that e-Books could be good tools to sell tree-Books … but their comments were more like general impressions than hard facts.
That’s when this “experiment in unsafe texts” truly began to take shape. Here’s the plan that emerged: a POD publisher suggested compiling a short collection of my writing about electronic publishing, which they would turn into both an e-Book and a paperback. Like the first edition of U Publish.com, the electronic version of Steal this e-Book! is going out without copy protection. But this time the e-Book is free, the absence of copy protection is intentional, and we’re doing it for a specific reason.
You see, we aren’t planning any advertising or promotion for the paperback other than the e-book. The free e-Book will be the only form of marketing for the tree-Book. Will anyone buy the paperback? I don’t know—but a year from now we’ll have a fairly objective count of how many paperbacks sold as a direct result of the e-Book floating around for free.
If you’re reading an electronic version and want a printed copy, simply follow a hypertext link to the U Publish.com Web site and order one; if you don’t want a paperback, that’s OK too. You’re welcome to the e-Book for free.
Personally, I plan to e-mail dozens of copies to friends and acquaintances, and post others at Web sites where readers can download ’em for free. You are invited to do the same, whether you want the paperback or not. So go ahead … Steal this e-Book! As the hacker credo goes, “Information wants to be free.” (To which Dick Brass of Microsoft added, “But content providers want to be paid.”) Maybe this book will finally prove objectively that both goals can be achieved at the same time.
— DOS
March, 2002
P.S. Did I mention that paperback copies are available at www.U Publish.com? ;)
Introduction
by Dan Poynter
DAN POYNTER IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED as one of the world’s foremost authorities on independent book publishing and promotion, with more than 80 books in print. In his ‘Instant Report’ titled Making the Web Pay he notes that “… publishers have long been wary of electronic publishing because of a fear of sharing. Having seen all the bootlegging of software, publishers are understandably reluctant to release books as downloadable files that can be copied at the click of a mouse.”
Yet the report itself is available to download in PDF format at www.parapub.com—along with hundreds of other reports, documents, and entire books in electronic form. The following excerpts explain why.
Making the Web Pay
by Dan Poynter
There are millions of Internet users and [the] number of people accessing the Web continues to grow every day. It is not lost on publishers that everyone is interested in searching the Web and buying online. In fact, statistics indicate that if you are not using the Internet as part of your business you will no longer be competitive enough to compete in the global digital economy of the 21st Century.
While computer-book publishers are searching for new Internet-Web manuscripts, all publishers are faced with two different challenges: Getting on the Web and making the making money from it.
The Internet is communication channels, and fortunately, publishers have information that can be communicated. We publish what the Web needs: content. Publishers may use the Web to display their catalog of books and to sell those books in both paper editions and in electronic versions online. Customers may be directed to bookstores for the paper version or they may send an order directly to the publisher. Or they can unlock and access an online edition instantly. Now, how does a publisher get people to visit the site and spend money?
Para Publishing has been on the Web since early 1995. The site has continually been expanded with some very clever marketing devices and response mechanisms. This site is an example of what publishers can do on the Web. The site not only shows products and describes services, it sells them. You may wish to log on to www.ParaPub.com to test some of the features as they are described.
For many years, Poynter has been known as an early adopter of new technologies. For example, he was recognized for implementing one of the earliest fax-on-demand systems, and more recently received the Irwin Award for the best electronic promotion campaign by the Book Publicists of Southern California.
Many of Poynter’s electronic texts are not copy protected, yet his business is profitable. Moreover, he sells both printed and electronic versions successfully. For example, the popular Self-Publishing Manual has more than 175,000 copies in print. The availability of the e-Book has not eroded sales of the tree-Book.
Poynter’s success in marketing electronic texts, starting long before most other publishers, was a big influence in my own experiments with e-publishing, of which this book is the latest example.
Chapter 1: An Experience at OEB
Letter to NPR’s “Weekend Edition”
THIS COLLECTION IS CHRONOLOGICAL. When I say “chronological,” I mean that it’s a series of letters and articles covering events starting in 1999 and continuing to early 2002. They are presented in the order of the events, not the publication dates.
For example, the item below talks about one of the first meetings of the Open e-Book Initiative, early in 1999, though it didn’t actually air until the weekend of June 3, 2000.
NPR Commentary on Electronic Publishing
As an early participant in the ‘Open e-Book Initiative,’ I had the pleasure of meeting with representatives of leading publishing concerns at the headquarters of R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Chicago, early in 1999. The discussion was heady stuff—nothing less than the future of books. At one point, a direct descendant of the venerable R.R. Donnelley himself directed my attention to a panel that slid from the wall, displaying a page from the Gutenberg Bible. The juxtaposition was striking.
As noted ... in your broadcast, these new technologies are still in their infancy, especially in terms of copyright protection. In addition, they are not yet in widespread use by the general public.
Adobe Systems offers special software products named ‘Web Buy’ and ‘PDF Merchant’ designed for the secure sale of content from the Internet. Microsoft and Xerox have recently announced the formation of ContentGuard Inc., which promises to allow a document’s author, publisher, distributor or seller to secure it against piracy, track its movements, and require users to pay before using it.
However, as noted in your interview, Stephen King’s electronic novella Riding the Bullet survived less than 48 hours, before pirated copies started to surface on the Internet. According to The New York Times, the May 23 announcement about the release of Michael Crichton’s thriller Timeline and other titles for the Pocket PC was made “even if it is not clear yet how protected the electronic titles are from hackers.”
In 1999, the first generation of hardware devices specifically designed for reading electronic books (the Rocket e-Book, SoftBook, GlassBook, etc.) became available to public. At present, however, compared to millions and millions of desktop and laptop computers, the number of dedicated e-Book reading devices in use is extremely limited. The new Pocket PC with Microsoft Reader holds the promise of bringing e-Books more squarely into mainstream markets—but again, it will take time before the number of Pocket PCs even begins to approach the ubiquity of the desktop or laptop computer.
Why, then, are major publishers jumping on the e-Book bandwagon?
The answer is simple: the economic advantages of e-publishing are so compelling that the New York houses can no longer ignore them.
By drastically reducing the physical expenses and economic risks that have traditionally been borne by publishers, electronic distribution will change the entire dynamic of what ‘publishing’ means in the new millennium.
Eliminating waste and slashing production costs will change the publisher’s focus from ‘playing it safe’ with commercial material, to a new era of innovation and creativity that benefits readers and writers alike.
No one knows exactly what the future holds, but it seems certain that e-publishing is here to stay—and that it will dramatically alter the way writers and publishers reach readers in the 21st century.
Most of the text above was broadcast by NPR’s “Weekend Edition” over the weekend of Book Expo America 2000. A sound byte is available at the Web location below:
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/wesat/20000603.wesat.04.ram
Chapter 2: Cancel My Subscription
Harvard Magazine, January 2000
THE NEXT ITEM is a letter that appeared in Harvard Magazine. Incidentally, it’s published both in print and online, and Harvard warns its alumni/ae that anything they publish in the magazine will be freely available online to the teeming millions. Personally, I like it when more people read things I’ve written, so this policy is fine by me.
You can’t write about electronic publishing without discussing electronic rights at least in passing. The funny thing is that the conversation seems too often to focus on hardware and software issues.
My letter glossed over the issue of copyright protection because it was written in response to an article about hardware. I was confident that a DRM solution would be found, but didn’t know what it would be. I still don’t.
The “killer app” for e-Books remains elusive, and I still doubt that the answer lies solely in hardware or software. Instead, my hunch is that the solution will be a combination of hardware, DRM and new pricing and business models that fit the normal buying behavior of consumers.
Sure, an “honor system” may sound naïve, but perhaps not entirely so. Look at the software industry: some shareware developers do make money.
Using a similar marketing model, Adobe distributes the Acrobat reader for free, but users are encouraged to upgrade to the inexpensive pro version.
On the other hand, I hear that there’s a brisk trade in black market copies of more expensive software products.
I think that cost is a big factor. When the price is low, consumers will pay for more ease of use, and more features. When the price is high, they are more likely to look the other way at piracy.
Even today in 2002, some publishers persist in charging high prices for e-Books. It’s hard to understand why, when the production and shipping costs are so low.
This undermines a primary power of e-publishing: the potential to charge consumers less, pay content creators more—and still make money.
But the power is there, for those who find ways to use it effectively. The right combination of hardware, software and business model will appear in time. The real issue is WHEN, not IF.
Cancel My Subscription
The sheer economics of electronic publishing virtually guarantee that a substantial portion of all publishing will be electronic in the future. By drastically reducing the physical expenses and economic risks traditionally borne by publishers, electronic distribution will change the entire dynamic of what “publishing” means in the new millennium. Eliminating waste and slashing production costs will change the publisher’s focus from playing it safe with commercial material, to a new era of innovation and creativity that benefits readers and writers alike.
Jerome Rubin ‘46 (“The New Gutenberg?” May-June, page 85) is dead on target in his statement that the weak link in the chain of delivering “content” (books, magazines, newspapers, and more) from writers to publishers to readers electronically is the “user interface” (read: computer screen) where the content is read. The publishing industry has made huge and rapid strides in developing software solutions for the delivery of online content, yet the hardware lags behind.
Technologists and publishing-industry watchers now speculate endlessly about which hardware and software will ultimately prevail in the marketplace, how they will work, how they will protect the copyrights of authors and publishers, and a variety of other issues. But it seems certain that e-publishing is here to stay—and that it will dramatically alter the way writers and publishers reach readers in the twenty-first century.
Like Rubin, as much as I would prefer to save Harvard Magazine the cost of printing and mailing each issue to my snail-mail address, it simply isn’t comfortable to read the entire magazine while sitting upright before a computer screen. As much as I enjoy your publication, I look forward to cancelling my subscription (to the printed version) as soon as a more satisfactory medium for reading it electronically is available.
This item is still available online in the Harvard Magazine archive:
http://www.harvard-magazine.com/archive/00ja/ja00.letters.html#cancel
Chapter 3: Stop the Presses!
Excerpt from U-Publish.com
First paperback edition, January 2000
THE FOLLOWING ITEM is a chapter titled “Stop the Presses!” from the first edition of my book titled U Publish.com, co-authored with Dan Poynter, written in 1999.
For context, note the 1999 estimate of the Internet population at “70 to 100 million users,” and other quaint little artifacts like the reference to PDF Merchant as a “new” software product from Adobe.
More interesting was the prediction that 100% copy protection might prove impossible. Remember that this was written months before Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet was released in “secure” PDF format—and cracked within hours.
Mr. Poynter and I emphasized that the best strategy is to deter piracy, by making the benefits of fair use (and ease of use) outweigh the savings from stealing a modestly-priced product.
Stop the Presses!
What’s important about a book? Does it make a big difference whether the book is printed on white paper or tan paper? Whether the book is 8.5x11” or 5x8” or another size?
While there are a small number of cases where physical appearance is really important, such as picture books for your coffee table or leather-bound classics for your library, usually it’s the words in a book that matter most to the overwhelming majority of readers.
This is not to say that an attractive book isn’t better than an unattractive one, or that an attractive cover and good book design aren’t factors in sales. But generally speaking, people buy books because they want the information contained in them.
With the rise of the Internet, it is now possible to deliver information anywhere in the world in a matter of moments. The kinds of information now available on the World Wide Web are almost limitless, including not only Web sites per se, but also online newspapers, “e-zines” (electronic magazines) and electronic books.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “e-Books” are not physical objects made of paper and ink; instead, they are full length books that can be downloaded from the Internet directly to the computers of an estimated 100 million or more people around the world.
e-Books are also called virtual books, online books, digital books, and a variety of other names. No matter what you call them, they are revolutionizing the entire publishing industry.
Advantages of e-Books:
“Digital books make sense: By eliminating paper and ink, over-the-road shipping, unsold copies and middlemen, Web books sidestep the considerable environmental and economic costs of conventional publishing. Those savings are passed on. Authors typically receive royalty payments of 30 to 50 percent, compared to a conventional industry standard of 5 to 15 percent. Readers come out ahead, too, paying 25 to 50 percent less than softcover prices for most digital books.”
— Cate Terwilliger in the Denver Post, 2/99
When a book is published in electronic form, the publisher drastically reduces almost all of the expenses discussed at the beginning of this chapter that create economic risks: printing, binding, packaging, distributing, shipping, warehousing, inventory, percentages paid to middlemen, and returns of damaged or unsold copies.
The last item is the most powerful one. Because e-Books are generated “on demand” (that is: one at a time, as each copy is purchased) there are no wasted copies. At the same time, an unlimited number of copies is available to the public. By definition, e-Books are never “out of stock.” There is always exactly the right number of copies available: one for every reader, not more, not less.
Electronic books also have powers far beyond those of mortal books. For readers with vision problems, type sizes can easily be increased. Books on subjects that change frequently can be quickly updated, without reprinting. Most e-Books are fully searchable. A library patron will never find that an e-Book is unavailable because someone else has checked it out, nor will there be a late fee for returning it after it is due. A thousand e-Books can be stored in less space than a typical cookbook. Students can copy and paste key passages from most e-Books to book reports without retyping. e-Books can include sound, animation, interactive graphs and charts, and links to online resources.
For example, if you are reading the electronic version of this book on a computer with an active connection to the Internet, you can simply click on the link below to visit the homepage for this book for regular updates:
http:/www.u-publish.com
Technical capabilities aside, the economic advantages of e-Books are why they are turning the publishing industry upside down. Because the cost of bringing books to market is slashed, the publisher’s financial risks are virtually (pun intended) eliminated. Because economic risks are nominal, publishers can take a chance on books that might not otherwise reach the reading public. More choices for readers means more books sold. More books sold means lower prices, and lower prices mean more are sold.
Instead of investing $8,000 or more on an initial press run, a publisher can now make an e-Book available worldwide for about one tenth of that amount. If the book sells for $5, the publisher needs to sell only about 200 copies to recover his initial investment in full. Since there is little difference in the publisher’s cost to sell 200 e-Books or 200,000, every copy sold thereafter creates a profit.
When economic risks are eliminated, the entire dynamic of publishing a book changes. The focus shifts from “playing it safe” with writers and subjects that have proven commercial potential, to making more choices available to readers, so there is something for everybody. It also allows publishers to take a chance on a greater variety of material, to charge less for books, and to pay writers a larger share of the profits. Everyone wins: the reader, the writer, and the publisher.
Disadvantages of e-Books:
From a strictly technical or economic perspective, e-Books are vastly superior to conventional ones. But they are not without drawbacks.
First of all, not everyone in the world has a computer yet. Although the number of Internet users is huge (estimates range from 70 million to 100 million or more) and growing daily, the fact remains that there are millions of readers who don’t own computers, aren’t online, or both. Savvy writers and publishers won’t ignore these more traditional folks.
Secondly, many people find it uncomfortable to read electronic books on their personal computers. Given the size of most computer screens, an entire page usually won’t fit on a computer screen, unless the monitor is very large or the type is extremely small.
A new generation of electronic devices specifically designed for reading e-Books, with names such as the Rocket e-Book, the SoftBook, the GlassBook, and the EveryBook are just now reaching the market in the summer of 1999.
These e-Book readers are smaller than a laptop computer, usually only 2-3 pounds, and their screens are perfect for reading. With these devices, you really can comfortably curl up in bed with a good e-Book! As an added bonus, they’re backlit so you can read without a light on, too.
It seems likely that lots of them will appear in households in the years ahead. At this time, however, there only several thousand e-Book readers in circulation, compared with millions and millions of personal computers—so for now, most e-Books need to be read on desktop PCs, with the limitations described above.
Of course, it’s possible to print an e-Book on your laser printer, but the resulting hard copy loses its search capabilities and many other features that make e-Books special.
Publishers also have security and copyright concerns about electronic books that deserve consideration. After all, they don’t want a “pirate” to put a copy of an e-Book on a public Web site, and offer unsuspecting visitors illegal copies without paying for them.
Distributors of online content are making huge strides in the protection of intellectual property. To cite just one example, a new software suite named Web Buy and PDF Merchant from Adobe Systems holds the promise of making it nearly impossible to make unauthorized copies of e-Books, for all but the most determined pirate.
Keep in mind, this book costs less than $10. How much time would you be willing to waste, to steal something with such a reasonable price? We do hope the information proves much more valuable to you than $10—but it probably isn’t worth hours and hours of your time, and the risk of prosecution, to steal it.
To skeptics who are still paranoid about pirating of electronic books, we ask this question: suppose an unethical reader buys a copy of any conventional book from any conventional bookstore, then scans it and puts the resulting file anonymously on a public Web site and offers free illegal copies—how can publishers prevent this from happening?
The truth is: they can’t. While the publisher can sue if the culprit is caught, our point is that there are no 100% solutions. It’s similar to buying a security system for your home: if a burglar really wants to break in badly enough, he probably will. The key is deter the crime, making the cost of the theft outweigh the value of what is stolen. In our view, e-Books are already at least as secure as conventional books, and rapidly becoming more so.
Nevertheless, the perception can be more important than the reality. In the immediate future, the security of electronic books will continue to be controversial.
For the author/publisher who distributes from his own Web site, attracting readers and handling technical issues can be a challenge. Few writers have the computer experience, or inclination, to become full-time webmasters:
“But why not just set up your own Web site and sell your book there? Because, virtual book publishers say, people are a lot more likely to visit a site that has hundreds of books than a site that has only one or two. And because publishers have the resources to promote their site and their books. And because they take care of the hassle. They handle the orders, the credit-card numbers, the downloads. All you have to do is wait for the royalty check.”
—Soyia Ellison in the Winston-Salem Journal, 9/9/98
One final drawback to electronic books: in most cases, the reader needs a credit card to buy them. Most e-Books are distributed from Web sites, which require the reader to input their card number before they can download the file.
Some readers don’t have credit cards. Others are simply reluctant to use them on the Internet.
It seems certain that in time, the general public will be more comfortable using credit cards on the Internet, or that some other form of “cyber-cash” will eventually be used by meaningful numbers of ordinary people.
Meanwhile, the best plan is to combine the benefits of electronic distribution with those of more traditional methods. Happily, such a combination is already available, and gives the writer/publisher an unbeatable one-two punch that knocks the socks off any method available in the past.
Since 2000, we’ve published two more editions of the book titled U Publish.com to help readers keep pace with rapid changes in technology and the book industry. Many sections of the book are updated online in between editions, at the Web site named for the book.
Chapter 4: Hacking the Bullet
eBookNet, March 2000
eBOOKNET BROKE THE STORY that Stephen King’s electronic novella Riding the Bullet had been pirated within 48 hours of release. eBookNet later evolved into eBookWeb, now a leading online resource about electronic books and devices for reading them. Founders Glenn Sanders and Wade Roush e-mailed the news to me before the story hit the national wires, with the following item appearing at the U Publish.com Web site the next day.
Hackers Crack Stephen King’s e-Book
Since “U-Publish.com” was released in January ‘00, new information has become available in some important areas:
In the early chapters of the book, the authors discuss the advantages of electronic books in detail, as well as drawbacks.
Security concerns are among the most important. New technologies, such as Adobe’s Web Buy and PDF Merchant software and the upcoming Microsoft Reader, hold the promise of making it possible to distribute electronic books online, while protecting the writer’s copyright. If you are planning to publish an e-Book, it is crucial to make sure that adequate copy protection is used.
Even with “industrial strength” encryption, security can present a problem for authors of books with widespread public appeal. As reported on 3/23/2000 by eBookNet, a leading online resource center for electronic books, a major development that illustrates the issue has just occurred. Click on the link below for the full article titled “Cracking the Bullet: Hackers Decrypt PDF Version of Stephen King e-Book” by Glenn Sanders and Wade Roush:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000620153828/www.eBookNet.com/story.jsp?id=1671
Here are some excerpts:
“Pirated PDF versions of Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet have been circulating on the Internet since March 17. While many ISPs have forced members to remove the decrypted files, they are still available from a Swiss site, providing stark evidence of security weaknesses in PC-based e-Book distribution systems. The episode has irked the companies developing such systems, who complain that export restrictions have kept them from using more powerful encryption techniques…
“The developments could temporarily slow the adoption of Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) as a common standard for commercial e-Books. It is still uncertain how crackers disabled built-in encryption mechanisms, which are intended to allow only one person at a time—the purchaser—to display a PDF e-Book on a computer screen. But Simon & Schuster and the commercial distributors of the e-Book are trying hard to limit the damage to Mr. King’s legal rights, and e-Book industry insiders are equally anxious to fix the apparent security weaknesses exposed by the decryption…
“Some in the industry fear that the pirating episode could give publishers another reason to hesitate before releasing more of their books on open, general-purpose devices such as PCs and handheld computers, which are considered to be more vulnerable to security attacks than closed, dedicated devices. A 1999 study of e-Book security commissioned by the American Association of Publishers concluded that ‘Current general-purpose devices do not provide a trusted base for applications since they were not designed from the beginning with security in mind ... No matter what protection the e-Book system provides the content en route, when it is decrypted for display, it is potentially vulnerable to interception.’”
Chapter 5: MS Reader and PDF Go Head to Head
EBookNet, April 2000
MICROSOFT MADE A MAJOR PUSH to capture the fledgling e-Book market in 2000. By releasing an XML-based alternative to PDF, it could use its market muscle to get Microsoft Reader installed on millions of computers (not unlike the bundling of the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system) and move e-Books more squarely into the mainstream of our culture.
While Adobe had an early advantage, due to the many millions of copies of Acrobat already in use prior to 2000, Microsoft had the power and resources to get its competitive product widely and rapidly installed on the computers of consumers—whether consumers thought that they wanted it or not.
Following as it did shortly on the heels of the Stephen King incident, the MSR roll-out included a lot of discussion about DRM issues. But Wade Roush and I suspected that in the long term, the contest would be decided more on the basis of business models than technology. Our hunch was that the availability of content, and the price, would prove more important than the software itself.
Microsoft Reader and Adobe PDF Go Head to Head
by Danny O. Snow and Wade Roush
“May you live in interesting times,” reads an ancient Chinese curse. For those who follow electronic books, these are interesting times indeed. Major new products specifically designed for delivery of online content have set the publishing industry abuzz, amid a flurry of controversy over early efforts to bring e-Books more squarely into mainstream markets.
Web Buy and PDF Merchant software from Adobe Systems rolled out early in 2000, promising secure delivery of online content across a wide range of hardware and software platforms. Meanwhile, industry watchers are closely following the introduction of the new PocketPC devices and Microsoft Reader, designed to make electronic content almost universally available to the reading public.
On March 14, Simon & Schuster released Stephen King’s electronic-only novella Riding the Bullet, and received orders for more than 400,000 copies within 24 hours. As the first electronic-only bestseller, the book marked a watershed in the history of publishing. Yet within 48 hours of its release, pirated copies of King’s story began to surface on the Internet, raising new questions about how to prevent e-Book piracy.
In this climate of upheaval, we’ve compiled the following comparison of new products from Microsoft and Adobe.
Any fair comparison of these products must reflect that Adobe Web Buy and PDF Merchant are already publicly available, while the full version of Microsoft Reader with ClearType has yet to be released. For this reason, the amount of information available about the MS Reader is less detailed. It will be possible to make a more meaningful comparison when Microsoft Reader is available (in “mid-2000,” according to Microsoft). EBN readers are encouraged to weigh these factors before drawing conclusions about either product.
In order to present a balanced view of both products, EBN interviewed senior representatives from both companies in April, 2000. Jeff Ramos, director of marketing for e-Books, responded for Microsoft. Mark Heisten, former PR manager of ePaper Solutions, and Rebecca Michals, senior PR manager of ePaper Solutions, responded for Adobe.
Below, we list each company’s responses to a series of questions from eBookNet managing editor Wade Roush, and guest columnist Danny O. Snow, co-author of a new book about the latest publishing technologies titled U Publish.com … available in both electronic and printed form. Additional notes have been added in a few places where the writers felt that additional commentary might help put the comments of those interviewed in better context.
What are the technical requirements for your product?
Adobe: There are different requirements for Web Buy & PDF Merchant, depending on the product and features used:
Acrobat Reader with Web Buy and Acrobat with Web Buy, Version 4.05 or higher of either product on the Windows or Macintosh platforms.
For File locking and key distribution:
Windows NT®, Intel® i486, Pentium® based, or Pentium Pro based personal computer;
Microsoft® Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5, running Microsoft IIS 4.0
128 MB of RAM (recommended)
40 MB of available hard-disk space
CD-ROM drive
For Key distribution only:
UNIX ®
Sun Solaris 2.6 running Netscape Enterprise Server 3.63 or later
Microsoft: Microsoft Reader will operate on desktop and laptop computers running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows NT, as well as on the next generation of Pocket PC devices powered by Windows, using the CE kernel. It will also be supported in the future on purpose-built book reading devices. There are three primary components of Microsoft Reader:
The client software with ClearType, which delivers a paper-like reading experience on-screen
Tools for the creation and/or conversion of content to Reader format
Distribution software that includes digital rights management support as well as industrial-strength distribution capabilities.
How is copyright protection achieved?
Adobe: PDF Merchant encrypts PDF files and allows the encrypter and seller to control permissions for printing, copying, and annotating documents to fit their business model. When content is sold to a customer, the seller has several easy-to-set options for locking content to a user’s CPU ID, user ID, local hard disk, or portable media.
We license our encryption technology from RSA technology, which provides the highest level of encryption available for worldwide use. To further enhance security, we leverage industry-leading certificate authentication from GTE Cybertrust.
Microsoft: We will be talking about our digital rights management technologies in the near future. We recognize the importance of digital rights management to owners of content and have invested heavily to develop a system with which we believe they will be supportive. We are quite confident that our solution in this area will find wide scale adoption by authors, publishers and retailers.
Note from eBookNet: Since this interview was conducted, Microsoft and Xerox jointly announced the formation of ContentGuard Inc., which will market digital rights management system based on the Extensible Markup Language. Microsoft has taken a minority stake in the spinoff company (formerly the Xerox Rights Management Group) and says it will integrate ContentGuard technology into Microsoft Reader as well as many of the company’s other tools for authoring, distributing, and viewing content.
Like PDF Merchant, ContentGuard’s Extensible rights Markup Language (XrML) will allow a document’s author, publisher, distributor, or seller to secure it against piracy, track its movements, and force users to pay before using it. Xerox has published an example explaining how this process might work for an electronic book.
At a press conference announcing ContentGuard’s launch, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said “If we do this right, it will have benefits for everybody—rights holders, business, the publishing industry, and consumers.” However, he added that “Not all of these technologies will be available the day ContentGuard launches. It will take our engineers a while to get them integrated.”
Microsoft has also recently announced relationships with R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. and with Barnes & Noble (both the .com and brick-and-mortar companies). Both RRD and B&N have substantial interests in protecting the intellectual property of authors and publishers, and have likely been coordinating their plans for distributing Microsoft Reader documents around the introduction of XrML.
How does MS Reader compare with Adobe’s Web Buy and PDF Merchant?
Adobe: One of the largest obvious differences ... is that the Adobe digital rights management solution is shipping today and tens of millions of potential customers already use Acrobat or Acrobat Reader and can easily and securely purchase content.
Adobe’s solution is also cross platform and cross device—today it operates in the Macintosh and Windows environments on the devices that most of us are already using—i.e. your desktop or note-Book computer.
Adobe PDF is the de facto standard for the print/publishing industries and most content today is available in PDF (or PostScript) or easily convertible to PDF.
Therefore, our solution is designed to work well with existing workflows with only minimum incremental effort.
Our strategy is based on partnerships with others in the commerce chain that provide a wide variety of industry standard solutions. [We] believe that the only way to get a Microsoft solution is to work directly with them.
Any other solution is based on technology that is not yet commercially available or tested and this creates a great risk in terms of the reliability of the proposed solution, the time market needed to implement a new solution as well as the risk that customers will not adopt it. Acrobat and PDF have been around since the early ‘90s and there is no question that they work and are widely used.
Microsoft: PDF is a great solution where you need to ensure that a document will faithfully reproduce when printed to a fixed page size. In the future, though, one of the key consumer benefits of e-Books will be the ability of content to dynamically re-flow across multiple devices—allowing consumers to move their e-Books from their laptop to the Pocket PC and then back again, as just one example. Or from a purpose-built reading device to a PC. This was one of the factors which collectively drove the formation of the Open e-Book Authoring Group and the Open e-Book Publication Specification, which has been adopted by a very broad cross-section of the e-Book community, including Microsoft, Nuvomedia and Softbook. Microsoft Reader has been designed to facilitate that kind of “re-flow” across the broadest possible range of devices. We believe that flexibility, coupled with Microsoft’s digital rights management solutions, will be a very compelling customer proposition.
Note from eBookNet: From the two companies’ marketing statements, it is difficult to discern major differences in the functions provided PDF Merchant/Web Buy and Microsoft Reader with ContentGuard, except that Adobe’s system is specialized for PDF documents while Microsoft has said that Reader will be compatible with any document packaged using the Open e-Book (OEB) format.
The share of the e-Book market ultimately won by each product may depend less on the technology itself than on the partnerships and licensing agreements each company is forming with organizations in the publishing and bookselling businesses.
When do you anticipate that your products will be in widespread use?
Adobe: Most of the customers that we have publicly announced are either e-tailers or service providers that are integrating PDF Merchant in their ecommerce solutions. We are working closely with several publishers and will be announcing specifics as they become available.
Microsoft: Pocket PCs containing the Reader will become available this spring. A Windows and NT version will be available in mid-summer along with the opening of the barnesandnoble.com e-Bookstore.
Note from eBookNet: Since these interviews were conducted, Microsoft’s delivery projection for MS Reader has been revised to “summer.” On April 19, Microsoft and three major consumer electronics manufacturers (Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Casio) announced the availability of new palm-size PCs running Microsoft’s PocketPC operating system. A version of Microsoft Reader comes preinstalled on these devices, but eBookNet has been unable to determine whether this version includes copyright protection functions. Fewer than three dozen book titles are currently available for Reader, and all are public-domain works that do not require encryption for copyright protection.
What are the differences between Microsoft’s ClearType and Adobe’s CoolType?
Adobe: Here is another one of those areas where it is hard to comment because Microsoft has not begun shipping ClearType and our information is limited. The general approach behind the solutions is fairly similar in that they both take advantage of sub-pixel addressing on color LCD screens. My understanding is that Microsoft is focusing primarily on the Windows CE platform and that their technology only works within the Microsoft Reader, and with a limited set (6) of TrueType fonts. In most cases, the author of the document will not be able to use the typeface s/he originally intended, and readers of content will similarly be restricted by not being able to take advantage of the tens of thousands of typefaces available.
Adobe CoolType is platform and device independent and will work with all of Adobe’s applications regardless of font type (TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, Type 3, etc., etc.). Authors can retain control over the look and feel of the documents and not be restricted in their choice of operating system. Adobe has 18 years of rendering type to screen and print and the algorithms we have implemented provide the highest quality reading experience commercially possible today.
Given that, it is important to note that an improved reading experience, while very important, is only one key factor. Adobe believes that availability of content from a variety of sources that can be easily read on a variety of devices is much more critical to providing the best consumer experience possible.
Microsoft: [We] do not have technical information on CoolType, but understand it to be remarkably similar to ClearType in principle.
Note from eBookNet: Neither Microsoft nor Adobe invented subpixel rendering, which was first applied to computer monitors by Apple II programmers in the late 1970s. (See Gibson Research Corporation’s excellent Subpixel Rendering Web site.) The basic technology is in the public domain. eBookNet’s belief is that ClearType and CoolType are essentially equivalent technologies that deliver more or less equal improvements in readability on color LCD screens.
What kind of e-Books can readers expect to find available for these systems? Will any of them be free?
Adobe’s PDF is currently the most widely used format for distribution of e-Books worldwide. As mentioned above, Adobe stated that it is “working closely with several publishers and will be announcing specifics as they become available.”
Microsoft is currently distributing 29 public-domain titles for Microsoft Reader on a CD-ROM accompanying the new PocketPC devices. Microsoft also stated that a wide variety of content will be available from Barnesandnoble.com and other providers.
EBN’s projection is that a large amount of content for the MS Reader will become available through third-party content conversion service providers. This model can be contrasted with a system in which content creators (primarily writers and publishers) release their work directly to the public. The availability of free content is likely to depend the provider and its business model.
Is your system suited for extended reading on a handheld device?
Adobe: One of the nice things about PDF is that you don’t need a dedicated device to read PDF files - any personal or desktop computer running the Macintosh, UNIX, or Windows operating system will do! This is extremely important to most consumers as it means that they do not need to buy (or carry) an additional device to participate in the e-Book revolution.
Some of the dedicated devices that are being built are quite nice and I am sure that some consumers will purchase them. Several alternative device manufacturers are implementing PDF solutions such as Everybook, and last month Adobe announced plans to bring PDF to the Windows CE platform, and in conjunction with Palm Computing to the Palm platform. In January, we made a PDF Viewer available for Java. Adobe also publicly announced and showed our plans to enable reflowing of PDF documents to better support different size screens.
There will be additional device manufacturers announcing their support going forward.
Microsoft: The cornerstone of our strategy for the Pocket PC is to give users the power to read whatever they want, wherever they want. If the market wants a device purposed exclusively for reading e-Books, that’s what we’ll give them; if they want a device that offers a broad range of other applications and capabilities, we can offer that, too. The real power of Microsoft Reader with ClearType is that content providers will immediately be able to address the 150 million PCs that are currently in use worldwide via the MS Reader. That’s a huge increase over the current market for dedicated reading devices, and we feel it represents a significant growth element in the emerging e-Book market.
Related Reading
Adobe PDF:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html
Open e-Book Initiative:
Pocket PC Home Page:
http://www.microsoft.com/pocketpc/
Microsoft Reader:
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/
Subpixel Rendering:
http://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm
Extensible rights Markup Language (XrML)
Microsoft, ClearType and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Chapter 6: Turning Content into Gold
BookTech Magazine, September-October 2000
THE POCKET PC rolled out in tandem with Microsoft Reader. Now Microsoft had both an alternative software product, and a hand-held device to run it.
Unlike earlier efforts to popularize e-Book reading devices, the release of the Pocket PC offered consumers features such as word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail in a hand-held unit, in addition to e-Book reading. Like Microsoft Reader, the Pocket PC also had the market strength of major manufacturers behind it. Finally, it was designed to address some of the weaknesses of previous e-Book readers, adding features such as a color screen and improved text display.
Perhaps most importantly, the release of the Pocket PC triggered a flurry of new entries into the e-Book market by media giants like Random House, Simon & Schuster and Time Warner, later to merge with AOL. Suddenly it seemed possible that large numbers of good books could become available in electronic form, as big media companies followed Microsoft into the market for electronic books.
Yet the Pocket PC was expensive, and sold only modestly. Likewise, major publishers asked high prices for their e-Books, sometimes higher than the printed versions!
When consumers didn’t rush to buy millions of Pocket PCs, and didn’t download scads of expensive books, the momentum was lost.
Here again, we see the power of consumer choice over technology. Industry giants misjudged the factors that drive consumers, and failed to harness the fundamental strengths of electronic publishing. As we’ll discuss later, this led to the collapse of iPublish.com and other e-publishers just a short time later.
The item below is a full draft of an article written for BookTech Magazine, rather than the heavily abridged version that appeared in print.
Turning Content into Gold
Special to BookTech Magazine by Danny O. Snow
In ancient times, alchemists sought in vain for the mythical “Philosopher’s Stone,” fabled to transmute base metals into precious ones. The lure of turning lead to gold was irresistible, but the Philosopher’s Stone proved elusive, and the alchemists faded away after centuries of fruitless searching.
In recent times, publishers have been equally tantalized by the potentials of electronic publishing: a way to make books available worldwide without printing costs, without warehousing and inventory, without shipping, without returns, without waste. The lure of these possibilities is irresistible to publishers, yet to date, the right combination of hardware, software and marketing to make e-publishing viable has proven as elusive as the Philosopher’s Stone.
Enter the Pocket PC with Microsoft Reader, now publicly available: some experts are convinced that the eqivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone is now within the publisher’s grasp, while others believe that viable e-publishing remains a tantalizing myth. Either way, the release of these new products, and a flurry of important new business alliances related to them, represent an important, possibly historic, development in the history of publishing. This article will explore the strengths and weaknesses of the Pocket PC with Microsoft Reader, as well as a few examples of how publishers are responding to its release.
Hardware & Software:
The term “Pocket PC” applies to a handheld computer with a variety of uses, including reading electronic books, as well as word processing, e-mail, web browsing, audio files, etc. There are currently several such devices on the market, including Casio’s Cassiopeia; Compaq’s iPAQ; Hewlett-Packard’s Jornada, and Symbol’s PTT 2700 and run under Microsoft’s “Windows-powered Pocket PC” operating system, a mini version of Windows CE. Although it is intended as a multi-purpose device, the Pocket PC is of special interest to publishers because of its potential as a tool for reading electronic books with better performance than earlier products, as explained below.