On FutureBook, Andy McNab of European e-book distributor Mobcast has posted an editorial about “squeez[ing] the life out” of e-book pirates. He points out that book piracy is nothing new, and that a lot of pirated e-books are low-quality PDF-only versions, which limit their usefulness to readers.
He points out that focusing on taking books down from file-sharing sites is only a short-term fix, and ultimately short-sighted, and suggests that publishers should start focusing on ounces of prevention rather than pounds of cure. He also notes that holding back on releasing e-books out of fears of piracy is counterproductive, as it removes the ability of consumers to buy legitimately the digital copy they desire—and if a book is crippled by too-restrictive DRM, it will also force consumers to look elsewhere.
In order to be successful, legal ebooks need to bring more value to the consumer than pirated ones and we can already see great progress in making this happen. The majority of legitimate ebooks are good quality because they are published by passionate people, who spend a lot of time and resource in making sure they publish worthwhile content. There are also opportunities to profit from additional content (merchandising, games etc) for blockbuster books, and we are seeing more and more examples of this being done very well.
McNab notes that Mobcast is focusing on doing that very thing—making it easier for consumers to find and buy the books they want, and experimenting with new business models to see what works best.
Those are some methods of fighting piracy that I can get behind, and that seem less like throwing money away than what traditional publishers have been doing. I’ve blogged a lot of articles that talk about fighting piracy by improving the experience and reducing prices for people who buy legitimately. Hopefully sooner or later the traditional e-book publishers and retailers will take notice.
(But I do have to quibble a bit with the about-the-author blurb that calls Mobcast, founded in 2007, “an early player in the eBook market”. I was buying e-books from Alexlit and Peanut Press back in the mid 1990s. 2007 is a little too late to call yourself an “early player.”)
No, publishers shouldn’t bother to create high-quality ebooks. They should use automated scanning and OCR the result without making any effort to proofread. Missing pages, whoppers of typos, whatever… it doesn’t matter. Then they should price their printed version very high, far higher than any similar book. That’ll push their Kindle edition to the top of Amazon’s search results.
Why? Because most ebooks are sold through Amazon and Amazon doesn’t care about the quality of ebooks. That’s easy to prove. I just checked, and Amazon is currently selling 486,722 books from a publisher called General Books LLC. With an inventory that large, there’s no doubt that Amazon knows what General’s business principles are. (A search for “Simon & Schuster” only gives 60,635 results.) Here’s what General Books says about their printed and digital versions on their own website:
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Why are there so many typos in my paperback?
We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos….
Why is the index and table of contents in my paperback missing (or not working)?
After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them….
Why are illustrations missing from my paperback?
We typeset our classics paperbacks using OCR software. Therefore, they don’t have illustrations….
Why is text missing from my paperback?
We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book.
http://www.general-books.net/faqs.cfm
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Make your book, print or digital, as lousy as you want. Amazon will not penalize you for that. Then price the printed version high to maximize Amazon’s profit. That and that alone will get you top billing in Amazon’s default “relevance” search. Even more important, that high pricing will get any competitors (who might actually have publishing standards) buried far down in the search results or even rendered invisible in any search but by ISBN. I know. I can give examples of that.
As an illustration, consider Henry Haggard’s Cleopatra, which comes up at the top of the list of General Books’ titles when searching by publisher. That probably means it is their best-seller. How well does that hideously poorly done book do when when you search by the title “Cleopatra”? It comes up as the SECOND item on the FIRST page out of 4,097 results. Even worse, it’s the ONLY Haggard-written edition on that first page. You have to go to the 10th item on second page to find another edition of Haggard’s Cleopatra. Amazon is pushing a lousy edition by a lousy publisher and doing its best to make that edition they one you and I buy.
Yes, if you are an author, editor or publisher with integrity and want to serve your customers well, take care to make your text accurate and add additional material that readers are likely to appreciate. But never, never, never think that in doing so you’ll get the slightest assistance from Amazon. Amazon simply doesn’t care about quality. Amazon sees books at commodities, every one the same. If the title is the same, the book is the same in their eyes.
I might add that it’d actually be quite simple for Amazon to fix this problem. I live in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. Recently, I was joking with someone who codes for Amazon, that he should find the place in Amazon’s search ranking mechanism that, if flagged, can push a book to the top of their search list. Then I joked, he should make sure all my books get that tag.
Here is what it would take to get things right. For classic texts that exists in multiple editions from several publishers, Amazon needs to create a ranking mechanism as to a book or ebook’s quality. That’s what the staff at any legitimate brick-and-mortar bookstore would do. They’d tell you, “That’s not a good edition. It has a lot of typos. Let me show you a better edition that’s also cheaper.” Then Amazon needs to apply that ranking to how it displays search results. Given their openly stated and woeful lack of standards, that’d put General Book editions at the bottom of any search results rather than near the top.
Until that happens, it simply doesn’t pay to create high quality ebooks for the Kindle. Amazon doesn’t reward quality. If anything, it punishes it. And in the world of ebooks, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla. What it does drives the entire industry for good or ill.
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle
I don’t really believe that people are looking for ‘High Quality’. They are looking for professional adequacy. eBooks without errors and flaws.
@Michael, really excellent post.
If only Amazon could add a button for *readers* to vote up/down on editions on the basis of quality, and then get that factored into the search result.