The word ‘cartel’ is so old-school that it seems almost strange to be digging it up out of the lexicon and applying it to digital books. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do, to illustrate the point that ebooks, by dint of DRM, are priced disgustingly high.
In recent conversations on Twitter, in which those taking part are frankly baffled by the high prices of digital editions of books, I’ve noted a growing unease about digital technology full stop. Some bloggers argue that ebooks are being thought about in terms of technology instead of ways of making such cultural artefacts (books) more relevant, and developing those artefacts in a different way. Such thinking would take today’s current ‘buy book, then read immediately’ model of print, and have something similarly useful, friendly, and portable. The technocracy that is e-book cartel disallows that.
A while back, we published an item here that discussed the pricing of ebooks, and noting that if a publisher was to compete effectively in the market, said publisher would need to keep its ebooks priced as low as possible: preferably below $10. Imagine our utter shock, then, to see this title, Australian Trade Policy 1966-1997, at Dymocks, for $1.95 more than the print product – making this ebook a staggering $78.95!
Woah, Dymocks – you might be big enough to throw your weight around, but such a price tells me personally that you have absolutely no idea about e-publishing, or the culture that goes along with ebooks. Specialist title or not, that is absolutely obscene. Would you pay for it at that price?
And, if you compare two separate instances of Tsiolkas’s The Slap, this one and this one – you’ll see that the e-book version, in US dollars, is equivalent to the hard copy version in Australia.
Knowing fully well that printed copies are far more expensive to produce – shipping, warehousing, let alone the manufacturing – such prices are enough to make you absolutely squirm. As Australia Literature pointed out, it’s like a cartelisation of the ebook industry: an agreement between major ebook manufacturers and distributors to keep prices high on purpose. It sounds paranoid, but what we’re seeing in the marketplace absolutely bears this out.
Now, a lot of people blame the high prices on Digital Rights Management. Going back in time by two years, this blog post pointed out that ebooks are a dead end, simply because of DRM. What is DRM? It is, as Gadet Lab says, taking a book, which is
freely portable in its traditional format, and turning it into an ephemeral, hardware-specific, proprietary service…
Correct: hardware specific. Or filled with restrictions; note that the aforementioned Dymocks title expects you to pay more than $70 and only be allowed to print 35 pages every seven days.
Digital Rights Management typically locks a book to proprietary hardware – anything from an Amazon product, to a Windows product, to a Sony product. Each one is specific to the manufacturing company, each one has its own quirks, and each one has its own restrictions. It’s technology gone mad, when all we want is an electronic version of a book.
The Gadget Lab post states:
The digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing copy protection, even if the material so protected is public domain or otherwise free. It’s potentially illegal to copy the DRM’d text of the King James Bible, Macbeth, or the Declaration of Independence, for example, if doing so requires you to crack that DRM. And sometimes, the intricacy of that DRM is startling.
Microsoft’s system, for example, had a 5-level hierarchy of DRM systems, which resembled an intensity scale for natural disasters or the diagnostic criteria for degrees of mental illness. Their related patents make ex cathedra moral pronouncements, implying that e-book DRM is necessary to protect the existence of literature and describing the copying of text as “stealing.”
Hit Control-C, go directly to jail?
Normally when you talk about books and stealing, you talk about stealing from the publisher or the author. Not any more – now it’s stealing from whichever manufacturer produced your ebook reader. The DMCA, if this quote above is correct, is another instance of obscenity, if it disallows for copying of public domain or free texts. The potential for true ‘open source’ information to be abused by manufacturers is enormous. What right do technology manufacturers have to ‘protect the existence of literature’? There’s a deep philosophical discussion in that one.
What DRM fixing doesn’t explain is why regular old PDF ebooks cost the same amount as a printed version of that book. The reality of production is that you go “export” on whatever typesetting software you’re using- for print or for screen – and if you know what you’re doing it takes less than five minutes. The only thing that does explain the enormity of the prices, besides sheer ignorance or costs of DRM, is price fixing by the bigger players in the market. But given that the boundaries of who owns what, and where, are melting and changing all the time, good luck pinning it down and proving it.
