Untangling and understanding the ebook supply chain
Peter Balis, John Wiley and Sons; Niel Del Young, Hachette Book Group; Leslie Hulse, Harper Collins; Andrew Weinstein, Ingram Digital; Mark Coker, Smashwords
Ingram: in ebook supply chain a lot of posturing going on and in a gawky stage. Roles are still shaking out. Still a role for wholesaler in the supply chain. They provide multi-publisher aggregating platform for retailers. They keep track of all the retailers selling the publishers’ books. For majority of US publishers, enforcing territories by the billing address of the purchaser seems to be becoming the standard. Adobe platform is something to watch for 2010 – they are trying to foster innovation. No shortage of 4 color ebooks out there, but since Amazon/Kindle dominates the conversation this means that most people don’t even know about them.
Wiley: understand how supply chain operates, but don’t have a standard operating procedure for digital, but upstream and downstream. Basic formats are PDF and Epub. One reason that ebooks may not have cover is that the publisher could not get the digital rights to the image. Especially true of older books. Wiley can’t afford to deal with small retail accounts and an aggregator makes sense for them. No good way to audit sales make by retailers. Majority of titles they see are not hacked ebooks, they are primarily manuscripts, galleys and scanned paper books. Blio/Microsoft should be watched in 2010.
Harper: had to do a big effort to get the digital rights and establish the royalties for digital. Many times had the digital rights but no royalties were established. Need wider adoption and implementation of Onix. Incomplete integration with Onix is hurting ability to get ebooks distributed. Is a need for an independent auditing body for digital sales. Dark horse for 2010 is Blio/Microsoft.
Hachette: just because we go to Epub doesn’t mean that all the people downstream in the chain can take the file and so delayed implementation until could make this work. Hachette currently restricts ebook sales to US because territories can change daily and hard to flow this info out to supply chain. Also hard to track supply chain to see if proper territorial information has been transmitted down the chain and complied with. Blio/Microsoft should be watched in 2010.
I’ve been enjoying these summaries and have found them helpful. Interesting about piracy happening from Galleys (perhaps ARCs?) and the like. As a publisher, we’ve had similar problems with advance data–not in terms of piracy of course, but in terms of early metadata “polluting” vendors’ websites with inaccurate informatoin when vendors don’t bother updating from our ONIX feed.
Speaking of which . . . Paul, could you please correct the spelling of Onyx? Let’s not perpetuate this error. Onyx is a black gemstone. ONIX is an acronym that stands for “ONline Information eXchange.
Not sure what this means from a behavioral standpoint. Should we decide that piracy is simply an intractable problem and go on? Or perhaps we should eliminate the paper option as soon as possible. One thing to consider–if eBooks aren’t being pirated, could this be because DRM actually works–at least in terms of increasing the cost of piracy. I don’t really believe it’s easier to scan a pBook than to break DRM but it is at least a plausible argument that needs some facts to contradict it if we’re going to use this statistic as a justification for abandoning DRM.
Again, as a caveat…I don’t like DRM, don’t use it for books sold through my site or most of my distribution. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see piracy as a significant threat to our industry.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Hmm, the publishers have Blio on the Brain.
Do they know something we don’t?
On piracy: what do the BPHs mean by piracy? The for-profit counterfeiters or the nickel-ndime “hobbyists”?
“enforcing territories by the billing address of the purchaser seems to be becoming the standard.”
How about instead we move to a standard where concepts such as ‘territories’ which are outmoded in this digital age are done away with and customers are allowed to buy books with their money regardless of where they live?
I get why we used to have territories where physical books were concerned, but they truly make no sense in this day and age, and all they do is cost authors and publishers money by preventing legitimate customers from spending money they want to spend.
Regarding this: “enforcing territories by the billing address of the purchaser seems to be becoming the standard.”
How about instead we move to a standard where concepts such as ‘territories’ which are outmoded in this digital age are done away with and customers are allowed to buy books with their money regardless of where they live?
I get why we used to have territories where physical books were concerned, but they truly make no sense in this day and age, and all they do is cost authors and publishers money by preventing legitimate customers from spending money they want to spend.
That is pretty hilarious. They only sell in the USA because they are not competent enough to handle different territorities? They change daily?
So Ireland moved to Africa recently? Or New Zealand joined the Russian Federation? Next week they’ll switch? 🙂
Or in other words, it appears that going forwards people not in the USA may as well do the same thing they do for other media for products from these companies.
The comments of the panel and the responses above are so astonishingly out of touch with the real world, it’s not even funny.
At least 90% of pirated ebooks are NOT scanned copies: they’re ebooks from every single major publisher with the DRM removed. It takes literally seconds and the DRM is so insecure in the first place, it’s laughable.
Once the DRM is removed, the ebooks can be converted to ANY ebook format (again in seconds) and distributed at will to owners of Kindles, Sony eReaders, and iPads, all of whom can simply load up the ebooks and read them for free.
That, I’m afraid, is the state of the market. Unfortunately, publishers are sitting by and letting it happen, all the time uttering meaningless nonsense like “the majority of pirated files are not hacked ebooks”.
They are. The elephant is already in the room and with sales of Kindles and iPads increasing at a phenomenal rate, it’s about to break free.
There’s only defence against ebook piracy: don’t publish ebooks.
No, the only defense against copying is not to publish at all. That is amazingly obvious.