The Sony Reader is already available to U.K. book-lovers via Sony Centres, Sonystyle.co.uk and Waterstone’s bookshops or at least soon will be. But how well will it do? Will Reader e-books cost too much for people in Great Britain, whatever the formats—BBeB or ePub? And what happens to pricing of international best-sellers?
U.K. publishers will set local prices, including, perhaps, those for global hits.
And last month our friends at the Bookseller magazine reported that "only Hachette" is "looking likely to price their digital titles below the price of a printed book." Still true—when Waterstone’s opens its Sony-oriented bookstore for the U.K. later this week?
No discounts for renting e-books?
Let’s first address the price question generically; never mind the international angle. Sigh. What’s the point of going E if the prices aren’t lower? I’m not saying every book has to be $5. Perhaps best-sellers could start out much higher to avoid cannibalization of paper sales—it’s a book-by-book decision, and I can recall a Penguin exec saying that high prices were just fine, thank you. But as a rule, if e-books do not come with steep discounts compared to P, I don’t think the dogs will eat the dog food, so to speak. E-books are compact and convenient, but if they come infested with DRM, then you’re renting rather than buying since companies may go out of business or change their plans.
If, on the other hand, Sony and Waterstone’s surprise me and skip the DRM, who knows? Then higher prices might be more sustainable. But don’t count on lack of DRM, at least not in most cases.
Stephen King titles in the U.K. vs. U.S.
Other interesting issues arise. As noted, what about international best-sellers like Stephen King‘s works?
Will at least some Brits figure out ways to buy Readers from American stores—perhaps eBay ones—and bypass regionally based DRM? As I recall, it’s already happening. Or will the DRM not be regionally based? At least here in the U.S., Sony has promised that consumers will be able to buy ePub-format books for the Sony from a number of stores. No geographical limits, right, or are there some after all? Oh, this gets fun.
Related: Sony Reader’s forthcoming debut in Germany (MR). I don’t know the German situation. But in this multilingual world, I wonder if some Germans might buy directly from lower-priced stores in the States, assuming prices are higher in Germany for the same titles.
Also of interest: S&S and HarperCollins in U.S. refusing to sell e-book rights to British houses: Time to be more multilateral than the guy in the photo?
Reportedly the Reader will also be sold in Waterstones branches in Brussels and Amsterdam.
According to a report, the Reader debuts Thursday.
>>>But Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections at the British Library, said the book lover and pleasure reader would not give up the traditional paper book for an electronic gadget.
>>>>He said: “How can you guarantee you are going to have access to the books on the Sony Reader in five or 10 years’ time. If you’ve got a library of 100 hard copy books it’s hard to lose them.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/ebook+will+not+threaten+paperback/2441232
There’s plenty of pundits claiming true book lovers won’t abandon paper books in favour of the electronic variety and while this is a very nice idealistic principle they have completely missed the practical issue: space. Paper books take up space, and if you are an avid book reader it’s very easy to fill up all your available wallspace with books. With ebooks stored on memory cards, book storage space immediately becomes virtually unlimited (or at least, you’d have to own more books than you could conceivably read in several lifetimes to even make a dent in your physical storage space). I grant that paper books have some conveniences that ebooks don’t (they don’t run out of battery, the lighting environment isn’t as much of a problem, etcetera) but when you run out of places to keep them you simply have to look for alternatives if you want to continue reading.
As far as his second issue is concerned, perhaps the industry could do with having something analogous to the computer industry’s Steam digital distribution platform. For those not in the know, Steam is a service where games can legitimately be purchased for download over the internet. Once purchased, games are permanently linked to your account and can be downloaded any number of times and used on any number of computers (though only on one at once), and the company running Steam has made a commitment that in the event their service closes down they will provide a utility to remove the authentication requirements for all purchased games.
Several of the online ebook stores have parts of this paradigm already in place, but none of them seem to have been willing or able to make that final commitment to unlock files if they go under. The lack of a single unified platform is a problem as well.
As far as the Sony Reader itself is concerned, I’m interested in how well it will fare here in the UK.