Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The industry likes to call it “Digital Rights Management”, but that’s not what it is. Basically it’s a way to restrict your rights to use the product or even take it out of your hands. After years of struggling with DRM-laden music downloads, the music industry finally realized that customers don’t want restrictions. For years, the industry complained that they need to have DRM because they won’t make any money otherwise. They argued that if you can copy your file freely, you will copy it for free to everyone else. Now that DRM is gone, the music industry is still alive. Apparently people still pay for music downloads. It seems like the publishers are making the same mistakes again.
Sure, there are sources for DRM-free books, but you won’t find the bestsellers everybody is talking about.
Pricing. Printing books is a lot of work. You have to kill all those trees, produce paper, print the book, display it in a bookstore and finally ship it to the reader. You won’t be able to sell every book you print, which results in additional costs. On the other hand, ebooks are cheap to produce. The author and all the other people involved in writing a book still need to get their money for all their hard work. You still need a bookstore to display your book (online and/or offline). But that’s all you need. No trees, no paper, no printing, and shipping is virtually free. The production of an ebook-file is virtually free too, since it’s safe to assume that the starting point for every book is a digital file. The only thing that will add some cost will be licensing costs for the DRM you don’t want anyway.
Let’s have a look how prices are in real life. As an example, I randomly picked “Becoming enlightened” by the Dalai Lama. Prices for this book (at the time this post was written):
- Hardcover: $16.56
- Paperback: $10.12
- ebook: $12.59
It gets even worse when you start to compare prices in different countries. The same book in Germany costs EUR 17.25 (about $25). The same file, with the exact same production cost will cost you twice as much in Germany as in the US. The price of the paperpack version is EUR 10.99 (about $16), with free shipping.
Availabilty. Not every book is available as an ebook. It’s nice that I can carry more books than I could ever read in my pocket, but this doesn’t help me if the device doesn’t hold the book I really want to read. Again, it gets even worse when you consider the whole world. An example for this would be the popular book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. You can get this book as an ebook in the US. But while it’s no problem to get the original (english) paperback version in Germany, it’s impossible to get an ebook. Considering shipping costs it should be easier to get an ebook than a paperback, but it’s not.
Handling. The books you own can be read by many people. If you find something interesting, you might give this book to a friend. If you no longer want a book, you can sell it. If you enjoyed a book, your kids can have the same experience with the same book. Thanks to DRM, you cannot do any of this with an ebook. You pay almost as much (or even more) as for a dead-tree book, but you just “buy” a license which allows you to read this book. This license might even be restricted to a device.
It’s true that a dead-tree book feels much better in your hands than an ebook reader. But that’s not the problem of ebook readers. The problem is the difference between the old “owning a book” and the new “license a copy” model.
I really want ebooks to work. I love E-Ink displays and the idea of carrying my library with me wherever I go. I could even ignore the problem that if my ebook reader breaks, I have to buy a new one for the price of 25 books so that I can read the books I already bought. When ebook readers get popular, they will get cheaper and when it comes to technology, I’m one of those people who pay the high early-adopters price. But given the points above, I won’t buy an ebook reader even if the geek in me badly wants one. I don’t think any of these points will go away in the near future, but I hope I’m proven wrong. In the meantime, I’ll stick to paper.
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