Mike Shatzkin’s latest blog piece is on the license vs. sale conundrum of e-books. He points out that e-book sales are actually not sales but licenses—which most TeleReaders know already, but a lot of average e-book consumers don’t. Most people think when they buy an e-book, they are buying the e-book. But this runs up against the problems with first-sale rights that digital media present. (I have a bit of a problem with this, but we’ll get to that later.)

Then Shatzkin points out that the misperception is actually being promulgated by publishers, because they have a vested interest in making e-book transactions look like “sales”—if the publishers admitted they were actually rights transactions, they would be required by the standard boilerplate contracts they use to fork over 50% of their revenue rather than the 25% that they have lately adopted.

There is a sort of de facto gentleman’s agreement in place between agents and publishers on this score, Shatzkin says, as the agents know that any of them who tries to twist publishers’ arms over it will have problems finding any publisher willing to work with him after that. For similar reasons, publishers don’t go after authors who kept their e-book rights and publish them elsewhere, even though e-books arguably violate the “non-compete” clauses of authors’ contracts.

Even though authors don’t sell their copyrights to publishers (they license their use) and publishers don’t sell inventory or even production masters to ebook resellers (they license them to replicate and distribute the publishers’ ebook files), the fiction that Kindle or Nook or Kobo or Google or iBookstore is selling the book to you or me will persist. If we had truth in labeling here, it would make the restrictions comprehensible. It would even make consumers understand why Amazon was within its rights (and upholding its responsibilities) when it chose to “cancel” the licenses it granted erroneously for an edition of “1984″ a couple of years ago. We can all recall the high dudgeon among many observers when they infamously reached into people’s Kindles and erased a file they were given by somebody who did not have the rights to grant those licenses to it. But truth in labeling would also eliminate an ambiguity that works in favor of publishers’ margins today.

Shatzkin’s column is technically correct to be sure. But it seems to me that since he’s a publishing-industry insider, he’s coming across as rather tone-deaf as regards the concerns of consumers. If consumers don’t understand they’re being “licensed” an e-book rather than “sold” it, they certainly understand the differences between sales and licenses at least as far as “if you buy something, it’s yours, but if it’s licensed to you, the bastards can change the terms or revoke the license any time they feel like it.”

Amazon might have been “within its rights (and upholding its responsibilities)” to revoke the Orwell books, but it was widely perceived as an invasion of privacy. We don’t have book police to go around to people’s houses and retrieve copies of paper books that turn out to have been printed in violation of copyright. (If we did, one of the most famous American editions of The Lord of the Rings would have been confiscated from its owners shelves in 1993—almost 30 years after its publication!)

No matter whether publishers use the term “sale” or “license” when they talk about e-books, we’ve been conditioned to expect that when we buy a book, no matter what form it might be in, that book cannot be taken away from us. For someone to try invokes visions of book-burning and censorship, which are deeply-ingrained hot-buttons going back hundreds of years.

Indeed, the entire doctrine of first sale comes from a publisher’s attempt to impose a resale license on printed books. Much more recently, a similar decision was reached in a suit about record label promotional CDs stamped with prohibitions against resale. But in another case wending its way through the courts, involving resale of copies of the Autodesk software package purchased new and unopened, a court ruled against the reseller, Greg Beck, because of license restrictions on the sale of the software.

In an interview with AuctionBytes, Beck suggests that if he ends up losing, it could lead to publishers again being allowed to put licenses on their books.

AuctionBytes: how likely is it in your opinion that book publishers may decide to issue licenses for their books?

Greg Beck: In my opinion, it’s almost inevitable that it will happen. You’ll probably see it first in cases like textbook publishers where there is already a strong interest in limiting resale because they don’t like students selling textbooks to the next class that comes along. They’d much prefer if every student had to buy a new textbook.

So I can definitely see the textbook industry adopting a similar model based on this decision, and I don’t think that other kinds of publishers would be far behind.

So, Mike, we don’t like licenses on our e-books—not so much because we can’t resell them, which any sensible person would agree doesn’t work based on the nature of the medium (and, indeed, if e-book prices fall as you say they are, paying less for a non-resellable book sounds like a fair tradeoff). but because they mean that our purchase of them can be reversed at the licensor’s whim. The large print giveth, but the fine print means the publisher can do whatever the heck he pleases. (Not to mention what happens if the publisher goes out of business, leaving us without a way to access that content.)

This is simply not an acceptable condition for continued consumer confidence in e-books—the only reason most consumers have that confidence is they don’t know better than to assume that once they buy a book, it’s theirs for good (due in no small part to publishers couching them as “sales”). When and if publishers begin abusing license terms (as the record of licenses in other industries suggests they inevitably will) it could have some serious repercussions for e-book sales as consumers start to realize that fact.

So how can consumers’ rights to the continued use, if not “ownership”, of media that they have purchased from a legitimate vendor be safeguarded? Currently, it isn’t now in a lot of cases: if someone purchased music from one of the small music vendors such as Yahoo or Wal-Mart that required contact with a DRM server to authenticate, and the vendor got out of the music business and shut its servers down, consumers were out of luck. We can’t even (legally) crack the DRM because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids it.

And nothing legally prevented Amazon from reaching into Kindle owners’ devices to remove content they had bought and paid for even if the publisher hadn’t been entitled to sell it. Yes, they refunded the purchase price, but that didn’t help people who had been doing school work based on those books, and it didn’t ease the feeling of violation over having a book they had purchased in good faith yanked away.

Perhaps Congress could enact some sort of compulsory license, similar to the licenses that allow performance of other peoples’ musical compositions, to state that someone who purchases an electronic media work from a legitimate vendor shall have the same right to make personal use of that work in perpetuity as if he owned a copy of it on a physical medium. Maybe there are reasons that would not work, but at least it’s an idea.

29 COMMENTS

  1. There is a difference between an embodied and disembodied book. Buying a paper book is like buying a Kindle or Nook; it’s a display device that you own. It will however only display a single work which makes the commerce of publishing possible.

  2. There is nothing intrinsically “evil” or anti-consumer in selling User Licenses.
    What may or not be “evil” are specific terms attached to specific products.
    Some Licenses are in fact restrictive and revocable while others are anything but.
    If we’re to discuss the “evils” of selling licenses we should at least be specific as to which license we are objecting to.
    In software, as the Autodesk example quoted, some Licenses forbid resale while others allow it under reasonable terms. Some Open Source licenses actually forbid *sales* at all, to ensure the product will always be distributed at zero cost, and others encourage commercialization.
    http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

    And in ebooks there is the ever-present example of Baen; that sells their licenses at reasonable prices, unencumbered by DRM, in any pretty much any significant format, yet still restrict resale. How much more consumer-friendly could they possibly be?
    How “evil” is “evil”?

    May I suggest that after 30 years of home computing, most consumers are *not* unaware of the differences between buying a physical product and buying a license to access a digital product? That they fully understand the difference and accept it as a requirement of the technology? And that they don’t need protecting from thheir own informed choices?

    eBooks are a new medium unto themselves, and a new, separate business, distinct from the old print book business. Trying to graft old school business models and practices (and expectations) unto it is not going to do anybody any good and neither is bringing in the politicians to try and change the rules of the game to try to preserve an age long past.

    Before rushing to bring in the politicians to address hypothetical rip-offs, how about waiting to see if the consumers themselves mind the new regime? The evidence so far is that mainstream buyers don’t mind at all. (Not on music, not on software, and not on ebooks.) And its not because of ignorance; they just understand the rules of the new game.

  3. Felix: If consumers didn’t assume that once they bought an e-book, they always owned it, there wouldn’t have been such an uproar over Amazon pulling those Orwell titles.

    Licenses, at least the corporate ones, can usually be changed without notice, just by sticking a term in them that says, “The corporation reserves the right to change this license without notice.” Uses that the company didn’t even foresee can be relicensed out of commission. But most people don’t even bother to read licenses on software before clicking through them.

    On the other hand, once you own a paper book, it stays yours.

  4. “If consumers didn’t assume that once they bought an e-book, they always owned it, there wouldn’t have been such an uproar over Amazon pulling those Orwell titles.”

    That wasn’t the cause of the uproar. Consumers are familiar with the idea of recalls (with refunds, which they got), and with stolen goods that must be returned if identified. The real cause was the fact that consumers simply didn’t realize how easily a file could be taken from them without their knowledge or consent. (Not to mention the additional irony of the material, adding fuel to the “Big Brother” pyre.)

    There’s a lot of arguing over definitions and semantics in this issue, and not enough accepting that ebooks are a new product that must be considered differently than printed books. I agree with Felix: We are talking about digital documents that have more in common with software than printed books, and should be treated as such.

  5. As a consumer, I understand that I’m leasing an ebook and that I don’t own it outright. That’s the main reason the price should be so much lower, it just doesn’t provide the same value as a physical book that I can resell, loan as many times as I want to, or give away.

    However, I also assume good faith on the vendor’s and publisher’s part that I will be able to use that ebook for my use as much and as long as I want to.

    If publisher’s and vendor were to start playing the license game as stated in the post, I wouldn’t hesitate to strip the DRM from every file I have to ensure my use of them.

    This is also another reason to give your business to indie authors who don’t play these games.

  6. @common sense said:
    “However, I also assume good faith on the vendor’s and publisher’s part that I will be able to use that ebook for my use as much and as long as I want to.”

    There are many cases where this assumption has been proven wrong. Just look at fictionwise a couple of years ago when there was a big problem with the distributors licensing and people had many books removed from their bookshelves. Another example is Peanut Press. Anyone who doesn’t strip off the DRM these days from their purchased ebooks deserves to loose access to them in the future. It is just like any computer file. Make sure you have backups and that you preserve them in a format (ie DRM free for ebooks) that you can access and use later. That’s common sense.

  7. As a consumer, I understand that I can’t resell ebooks, and that is exactly why the price should be lower. Leasing and owning should be different prices. It seems that some publishers don’t seem to get this, as when we see ebooks that cost more than the physical hardcover and the physical paperback.

    As for the other licensing issues, the only one which really concerns me is the issue of the company potentially going out of business. For the content to in the future be potentially unusable is a really big problem. This is like “content as a service.”

  8. Well said Common Sense. Too many people hereabouts appear to be too close to the industry to see the wider picture.

    The bottom line is that this ‘leasing’ concept as it is being applied to eBooks is a completely outrage and a scam. No one in the industry is really making it clear to the public that they do not own the eBook. No one. And to ram it home they are regularly charging more for eBooks than paper books. A ‘licence’ should be a fraction of the full price, maybe 25% or less.

    The path on which Mr Shatzkin and the industry is following is, in my view, a dishonest one for a start. I also believe it is commercially very unwise.

    Right now we are at the beginning of the whole transitionary period to eBooks. Only the early adopters have entered the market so far but the mass of the reading public will probably be following from 2012 or so. Early adopters tend to be geeky types and tech savvy. They have some tolerances because they want the new gadgets. The general public do not.

    We are already enduring the provocation of high prices, DRM, geo-restrictions, type quality, device restrictions and the realisation that companies going out of business can take down their eBook collection.

    I would suggest to the industry that when the wider public comes to the realisation about the deeper meaning of this, the piracy and downloading of eBooks is going to explode beyond anything anyone has seen yet in the music industry. The arrogance and grasping greed of this kind of extreme abuse of the principles of copyright will outrage the public to an extent never experienced before.

    The wider public IS aware of the broad differences between buying and licensing. They know a license is worth a fraction of a purchase. They don’t like being mugged by big business and their response will be ugly in my view.

    Readers who can see what is coming have an onus to let their politicians know, as I do. The law is in desperate need of reform and copyright laws need to be rolled back. The publishing industry is in the ear of politicians every day. The public needs to balance that access by writing paper letters to their representatives and making sure their voice is heard.

  9. The Amazon 1984 flap (as Mr Jordan pointed out) was due to the fact that the ebook was pulled without advance notice. Most Kindle customers are well aware that ebook licenses can be remotely revoked: after all, that is how returns are handled. (And Amazon is one of a few vendors that *allow* ebooks to be returned at all.)

    It may be that as ebook mainstreaming reaches trailing edge adopters that *some* people failing to understand the reality of digital media “sales” may become an issue but we shouldn’t forget that for the past few years ebooks have been the domain of early adopters, “techies”, and hobbyists. Hardly digital virgins.

    Let’s not forget this report from last week:
    http://newteleread.com/wordpress/ereaders/pew-breaks-down-gadget-demographic-but-may-have-missed-an-important-group/

    Given the proliferation of PCs, Cell-phones, and media players out there (all of which involve digital downloads) we shouldn’t assume that ebook buyers (by definition a literate bunch) are technological hermits unaware of what has been going on for three decades now.

    People are by now used to the concept of “buying” things that come with strings attached and in many cases they *welcome* those strings. Being able to redownload content at will to any registered device is the single biggest selling point of Kindle, after all. If this doesn’t drive home the reality that what readers are buying is a license to read and not a file, I don’t know what would. And getting updated versions with corrections is another example of the plusses of ebook licensing.

    Mind you, I’m not saying customers wouldn’t prefer more liberal licenses and sales practices (*cough*Baen*cough*) but Licensing itself is way down the list of issues ebook buyers might be concerned with.

    And if government intervention is to be advocated (which I think is a very-bad-thing) I would rather it be directed at price-fixing, not a core trait of digital content of all kinds.

  10. I recently had a conversation on Goodreads about audiobooks from Audible. Most of the other participants were trying to convince me that, because the audio files can be transferred to various devices and backed up on external hard drives, they were unrestricted, “owned” files. These are consumers who use digital devices regularly and are active on the internet.

    IMO, ease of use can lull consumers into thinking they own their files. From all I’ve heard, ADE users are under no such misapprehension.

  11. Great post, it mirrors many of the things I said in the first comment to Shatzkin’s article, and expanded on in a blog post (http://www.davidderrico.com/are-e-books-sold-or-licensed/).

    Shatzkin is very knowledgeable about the industry, but I think you’re right that he doesn’t seem to understand what e-book consumers want. Yes, he has lunch with Big 6 publishing house CEOs, but I don’t think those CEOs are in touch with e-book consumers either. His response to my comment was that I “lost him” when I tried to tell him what my experience as a reader, author, blogger, and avid participant in various e-book forums have been telling me about consumer expectations regarding e-books: call it a “license” or “sale” or whatever you want, but as soon as publishers or retailers interfere with the ownership rights that e-book consumers expect, there will be a huge uproar (like with 1984), and a dramatic uptick in DRM removal (and probably piracy).

  12. A model that makes more sense to me is that copyright is a temporary right granted to the author until it falls into the public domain and a purchase releases the individual from that copyright for their own personal use. The individual can copy it to whatever medium or format they want for their own personal use but they can’t resell or transfer ownership. They have no need to as it will fall into the public domain.

    This is all unenforceable so the publishing industry would be wiser to agree to a fair model that increases the perceived value for the consumer.

  13. “As a consumer, I understand that I can’t resell ebooks, and that is exactly why the price should be lower.”

    This gets said… a lot… yet, without clear guidelines as to what an ebook price should be, it’s not of much use. And if you can’t apply it to anything else (“I understand I can’t resell MS Word, so the price should be lower”), why would it apply here?

    You are buying the licensed content, not a laundry list of what you can and cannot do with it. Unless you are buying a license that plainly gives you access for only a limited time (a rental), there should be no limitation to the price.

  14. Well, Steve, the ‘limitation’ is ‘what the customer is willing to pay.’ If you can get customers willing to pay $100, more power to you, but my feeling is you cannot. And what are customers willing to pay? There is co ‘clear guideline’ because it’s relative to what other choices the customer has at any given time. $9.99 for a current best-seller, and I’ll happily pay it. But if you try and charge me $9.99 for a book that’s available in mass-market paperback for $5, I am going to feel fleeced and you’ll lose me. And if you’re charging $9.99 for an indie book by an author I have never heard of, you’ll lose me too because I could use that same money and get a current best-seller from a known author whose book has been guaranteed to be edited and pre-screened by at least one other person—a guarantee I don’t have with a self-pubbed indie.

    As I wrote in an article for this site not long ago, I think the problem is the publishers are trying to have it both ways. If they want a rental model, they need to charge rental prices. But if they charge full-on retail prices, then the customers will want all the ‘rights’ that has come with that before. I am happy to give up those rights and rent the book if what they are charging me is a rental price, but I don’t think the agents/authors will let them lower the price to $2 a book just so they can say it’s a ‘rental.’

  15. I’m confused here. How is licensing an ebook different than licensing a piece of software or a song? Why do consumers think that if we use the word “license” it could mean the revocation of the end product? They certainly don’t seem to think that Bill Gates will take back their Windwos 7 or that Apple would try to remove the latest Lady Gaga song from their iTunes Library.

    I think Shatzkin’s almost there. We need to think of ebooks as licenses instead of sales. However, the lack of interst in other analagous industries’ practices (music, and software primarily), I think, could paralyze most publishers. Extremely important lessons were learned by those industries, and I’m not feeling as though the book industry cares.

  16. “Early adopters tend to… have some tolerances… The general public do not.”

    That is exactly the opposite case in my experience. Tech-savvy early adopters tend to be more demanding, even as they accept bleeding-edge tech (that they figure they can fix), compared to consumers. It is the tech-savvy early adopters that quickly provide a laundry-list of absolute must-haves, vehemently argue the merits and demerits of features, and make “Pass,” “Fail” noises and denounce those who oppose them at every turn.

    Once producers fight through the early-adopter morass, they develop a list of features for their device, and the public pretty much accepts it… or not. No drama, just “gotta have it” or “don’t need it.”

    The fact that “average consumers” are now using devices like the Kindle or Nook, and seem to be pretty satisfied with them, while we argue incessantly over things like “licensing” and “format-shifting,” proves the point. Shatzkin’s blog is indicative of the continued techies’ obsession with details and semantics that have helped to make ebooks one of the slowest-to-develop technologies known to Man. Everyone’s over-thinking this.

  17. “(“I understand I can’t resell MS Word, so the price should be lower”)”

    Nobody buys MS Word with the expectation of a resale value. They expect to use it, daily, until it’s so outdated they’re forced to upgrade. An individual ebook doesn’t get used daily. Books that are keepers get reread periodically, but those aren’t that common. A book that’s read once and then trashed is actually kind of wasteful whether it’s electronic or not.

    “The fact that “average consumers” are now using devices like the Kindle or Nook, and seem to be pretty satisfied with them, while we argue incessantly over things like “licensing” and “format-shifting,” proves the point.”

    It doesn’t prove anything unless you can show that “average consumers” understand the implications of licensing and restrictions on format shifting.

  18. “Shatkin’s blog is indicative of the continued techies’ obsession with details and semantics that have helped to make ebooks one of the slowest-to-develop technologies known to Man. Everyone’s over-thinking this.”

    Oh those pesky details. You know, I find this insulting. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you guys who aren’t fooled should just shut up so we can get on with it. Is that it?

    Anyway, I thought that was jetpacks and hovercars.

  19. “Average consumers” don’t need to understand the implications of licensing and restrictions on format-shifting. They want to read a book, not take a bar exam. No one worries about syndication residuals or product promotional fees when they watch a rerun of “Lost,” and they don’t care… they just want to watch the show on their TV, or Tivo it, or buy the DVD, and the heck with the “pesky details.”

    At the same time, they know the “pesky details” that are important… which, in the case of a TV show, are simple: You can’t make a profit showing the show to someone else, without express permission. End of peskiness.

    Until ebook producers and sellers understand that, they’re spinning their wheels… fighting backstage while the customers are waiting for the curtain to go up.

    Since this is a new industry, it needs its own conventions, tropes and definitions… not the conventions, tropes and definitions from other industries thrown over it. “License,” “rental,” “fair use,” “restrictions,” etc, need to be redefined, not borrowed from other industries that are “kinda close to” ebooks. Shatzkin and everyone else are spending too much time trying to shoehorn in definitions from other industries, instead of looking at the realities of ebooks, and writing new definitions that fit.

    And if those new definitions are too convoluted, sellers are going to lose buyers, and this industry will never mature.

  20. The issue is whether the “average consumer” would still be “pretty satisfied” if they did understand the pesky details. And I’m betting they wouldn’t be so satisfied if they did.

    “No one worries about syndication residuals or product promotional fees when they watch a rerun of “Lost,” and they don’t care… they just want to watch the show on their TV, or Tivo it, or buy the DVD, and the heck with the “pesky details.”
    At the same time, they know the “pesky details” that are important… which, in the case of a TV show, are simple: You can’t make a profit showing the show to someone else, without express permission. End of peskiness.”

    I’m not even sure how to respond to that it’s so apples to oranges. Those aren’t pesky details they’re irrelevant details. The pesky details about TV shows that are relevant: You don’t buy or own a TV show. You subscribe to a service that provides a constant stream of programming that you watch or not. Everyone understands that. Nobody thinks they own TV shows because they paid their cable bill.

    Ebooks are presented as an alternative or replacement for paper books with the same or greater price; as more convenient; as a more environmental friendly way to read; as a way to keep bookshelves from taking over living spaces. But essentially as an equivalent to paper books. Nobody mentions that there’s also a shift from ownership to temporary custody. That’s a huge shift. To consumers who believe the ebooks=paper books fallacy, it’s as if they buy a DVD of a TV show and somebody says “No, you don’t own those DVDs. You just bought the convenience of watching them at will and carrying them around with you. It’s time for you to turn those DVDs in.” Well, if they’d have know that, they’d have just rented or streamed them from Netflix and not paid $60 for them.

    Anybody who considers ebooks part of their personal library of books – as opposed to disposable entertainment – needs to understand licensing and restrictions on format-shifting or they’ll be in for a rude awakening when a DRM provider fails.

    “Since this is a new industry, it needs its own conventions, tropes and definitions… not the conventions, tropes and definitions from other industries thrown over it. ”

    That’s true. And it needs to also ditch the tropes and definitions of the traditional publishing industry because they’re just as irrelevant.

  21. Well said Joanna. There appears to be a clear split between readers and some industry insiders. I quite honestly don’t know where the idea that average consumers are already reading eReaders. This is utter nonsense. The number of eReaders out there is absolutely infinitesimal, compared with the number of people who read paper books.
    The idea that early adopters have less tolerance is also bewildering to me. I am an early adopter. I buy geo restricted eBooks. I have also bought DRM eBooks. I have also bougth eBooks that I can see are subject to this silly ‘leasing’ concept. I shout about it yes. But ultimately I don’t care, for myself … because I simply remove the DRM, I bypass the geo restrictions and I ignore the Leasing scam and sell eBooks I didn’t like or no long want to friends/colleagues. So as an early adopter I am quite tolerant. I like the gadget so I get on with it.
    When my sister who works in retail and doesn’t know anything about computers or software starts to buy an eReader she will not know how to do any of the above. I told her about a month ago about DRM and that the company she buys from may go out of business in a year’s time. I told her about this leasing scam. She was what we call here “gobsmacked”. What she didn’t say about these scams is not worth printing … LOL. She is typical non-tech mainstream member of the reading public who will be eReader customers in 2012 or so when prices of the eReaders drop to a reasonable level and eBooks start to penetrate that group.

    “This gets said… a lot… yet, without clear guidelines as to what an ebook price should be, it’s not of much use. And if you can’t apply it to anything else (“I understand I can’t resell MS Word, so the price should be lower”), why would it apply here?”

    Can’t sell MSWord ? Huh ? I have bought MSWord second hand on three occasions over the years from someone who always buys the most up to date version. There is a regular market in second hand software original CDs and it is perfectly legal. When I bought the discs I could install it on any PC I chose. MS have no right to take it back or repossess it. So much for that idea.
    I also lease garden equipment. I lease my car, I lease my DVD’s from the DVD shop. I lease my router from my telecom company. I lease my SKY box from Sky. don’t pay the full price in order to lease. So much for that idea.

    There appears to be a perception inside some parts of the industry that the public are soft and dumb. They aren’t. They know leasing is not the same as ownership and as time goes on the public will be made aware more and more by people who oppose this leasing scam.

    BobW:”This is all unenforceable so the publishing industry would be wiser to agree to a fair model that increases the perceived value for the consumer.”

    You would imagine so wouldn’t you. It seems so obvious to anyone who has experience of markets in other products over the decades. But the smell of the green back is potent. Greed is seductive. Self delusion is easily induced in the face of both.

    If the big publishers continue along the same path of leasing/drm/etc. I am 200% certain we will be back here in 2 years reading multiple and length outraged posts by authors and publishers about losing millions from piracy and they will be absolutely right this time. I will be here too, to remind them that they reap what they sew while shedding crocodile tears.

  22. People do not understand that they have just bought a license. Example:
    A lot of books at B&N had lending enabled. When Amazon started lending for Kindle a lot of publishers disabled lending for their books, for Kindle and Nook.
    There are a lot of angry users on the B&N board who tried to lend a book to someone that had lending enabled when they bought the book, and now they suddenly discover that lending has been disabled.
    Try to explain to those users that it is just their license that has been changed.

    But even worse is that those people are not blaming the publishers. Just as with the agency prices people are blaming B&N, who can do nothing about this.

  23. MaryK, your suggestion that all ebooks are only to be kept for a limited time and “returned” at some point is simply not true… propagating that idea as gospel, based on some isolated incidents that are not representative of the practices of the industry at-large, is what’s confusing users.

    Licensing is only supposed to prevent certain uses, like reselling or misrepresenting as another’s work. The ebooks I sell are not “rented” to users, they are free to read them and format-shift them, which is the least any ebook user should be able to do. (I’d consider other actions, like lending, to be “options” that are up to the license.) There is no deadline at which time my books will evaporate, or must be returned to me.

    I freely admit that, as licenses go, there is nothing preferable about licenses and agreements that can change after the transaction. The best license, obviously, is one that does not change, and is fair to both sides. However, consumers are very familiar with changing licenses, too, and any institution that practices license-changing better have a very good reason to do it, and ought to advise its customers before it happens.

    This doesn’t merit a condemnation of the license system… merely the need for a clear set of guidelines that satisfy all parties. I’d also suggest that, like software, we should dispense with the use of wording like “license” and instead use “agreement” to define our limitations. For one thing, the word is less negatively-charged; and for another, it makes clear that both parties are coming to an understanding, as opposed to drawing up legal papers.

  24. Reply to Steve Lyle Jordan:

    The situation is different from Microsoft Word, because Microsoft is not selling one version of Word that can be resold, and another version that cannot, and expecting us to buy it for the same price.

    I suppose it would be like Microsoft selling us one version of Word that allows you to keep installing it as you replace your computer, and another version which allows you to only install it on one computer, and expecting us to pay the same price. Or, it could be like one version of Microsoft Word having a site license that allows you to install it on all of the computers in your home, up to six computers, and another that only allows you to install it on one computer, and expecting us to pay the same price.

    Obviously these are not exactly analogous situations, but the point is the inability to resell something reduces value.

  25. ” . . we should dispense with the use of wording like “license” and instead use “agreement” to define our limitations. For one thing, the word is less negatively-charged”

    This MUST be comedy hour ! yes ? LOL

  26. “MaryK, your suggestion that all ebooks are only to be kept for a limited time and “returned” at some point is simply not true… There is no deadline at which time my books will evaporate, or must be returned to me.”

    Not all ebooks, you’re right. But ebooks that have DRM can and will evaporate. It’s as inevitable as the sun setting. Unless you can assure me that no DRM provider will ever go out of business and no DRM provider will ever stop supporting any DRM format and no DRM provider will ever decommission a server without transferring its data to a new server.

  27. “People are by now used to the concept of “buying” things that come with strings attached and in many cases they *welcome* those strings. Being able to redownload content at will to any registered device is the single biggest selling point of Kindle, after all. If this doesn’t drive home the reality that what readers are buying is a license to read and not a file, I don’t know what would. And getting updated versions with corrections is another example of the plusses of ebook licensing.”

    I firmly believe that a good many people don’t understand this and that the number who don’t will increase as ereader devices become more mainstream. I think they see these plusses as conveniences associated with buying electronic, possibly as trade-offs for paying the same or higher prices for a non-physical product. I do not think they realize the strings are strings.

  28. Yes, many consumers may not know the strings are strings; OTOH, many of them will likely never have to worry about it, as the days of “shaky ebook startup vanishes and takes ebooks with them” are over… those are yesterday’s concerns.

    And even if, say, Amazon.com folded overnight, there would be enough sources for help to preserve Kindle collections already downloaded to save most consumers. That is the benefit of having whittled the market down to just a few formats and prominent providers, as opposed to dozens of unaccountable sources.

    So, a lot of these “concerns” simply go away as the market matures. They will go away faster if the industry works on clarifying the agreements made between seller and buyer, and developing a lexicon for it that doesn’t recall other industries and different practices. We need to ditch the existing lexicon for the printed book industry, as it simply doesn’t fit ebooks, in fact, is making them less understandable as a product, to consumers.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.