“Pearson, Thomson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Houghton Mifflin, and Holtzbrinck–which comprise 85% of the US market–are organizing a consortium ‘to generate efficiencies and promote electronic demand for electronic content within higher education institutions.’ In other words, they’re sharing the cost of creating the infrastructure for what they expect will be an explosion of digital delivery.” – Speech by Mike Shatzkin, founder of the Idea Logical Company.
The TeleRead take: The consortium information isn’t the only matter of interest for e-bookers. Among many points, Shatzkin says that when libraries stock up on ephemeral best-sellers, they’re creating more wares for the used book market–the bane of publishers and authors. Would e-books change the used-book landscape? Also, what about right-of-sale and other fair use issues? OpenReader will strive to address these, and we’ll welcome feedback.
Update, 11:47 p.m., April 15: Quinn hopes to soon post her own thoughts on the Mike Shatzkin paper. Please note I don’t agree with him on everything. For example, I’m more optimistic than he is about libraries and book sales. Still, he’s miles ahead of most publishing experts in appreciating the potential of e-books.
Mike’s warning to these Canadian publishers to avoid direct ecommerce goes too far and I believe is not the best advice. I disagree with him in relation to all publishers, especially domestic. European pubs have traditionally sold directly and via ecommerce for the last decades. It is friendly competition and booksellers are confident enough to realize that this reflects more of an accomodation than a threat to the professional bookseller’s skills. Publishers have too few outlets these days willing to shelve and sell properly their entire backlist books and need to take over the responsibility. They owe it to their authors.
However, Mike is intuitive and absolutely “right on” about the International Rights issues, which are big. I’ve been aware for years of illegalities with regards to geographic territorial rights. It’s been easy and somewhat hidden when it comes to digital editions and their online access.
From the sidelines, I kept predicting that once Rights People “woke up” there would be threats and actions. Mobipocket, as an example, is a French site, yet it sells primarily ebooks with exclusive U.S. copyrighted editions to whomever comes to their French servers to buy.
fine by me…but can we really rely on “national” copyright when there is this thing called “internet” out there?
This is something you can’t do. Even “hardware” products like paper books can mostly be sold around the world, so you’d have to put some kind of artificial restriction on emusic and ebooks? do you knwo where that would lead?
Right…emule, bittorrent, FTP sites…
It’s just like censoring computer games. We have that here in germany. A game appears on the market (example: Half Life). Then you see the reviews and this “Wow…looks cool” and buy it, only to realize that it has been censore so badly that it’s just plain stupid. I can remember quite well, that Half Life was “changed” for the german market…they replaced the scientists you meet at the beginning af the game into robots…if you know the story of Half Life you know how much sense that makes. If you think this through, the main character of the game would have been a robot too…oh…and the alien-human mutants would have been alien-robot mutants…which wouldn#t have worked anyway. But strangely that wasn’t done…well…not really that strange because it would have been completely impossible…
never mind…
the result was, that many gamers in germany, even those gamers who bought the game, went “pirate” and downloaded the original, robot-free, version of the game.
Does that make sense?
Protecting out youth from violence in video games is a noble goal, but there are possible and impossible ways…and crippling the games for a certain market is not going to solve the problem i’m afraid…especially with highspeed internet and cheap flatrates.