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O'Reilly To Release DRM-free Ebooks In July
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Jun 21, 2008 09:45 AM
from the piracy-be-damned dept.
from the piracy-be-damned dept.
andrewsavikas writes "Starting in July, O'Reilly Media will pilot select books as DRM-free ebook bundles (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) priced at or below the cover price of the book.
David Pogue comments on the pilot in the wake of his own recent dustup about ebooks and piracy, covered previously on Slashdot."
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No, David Pogue, Ebook Piracy Is Not a Given 268 comments
adamengst writes "David Pogue recently wrote a widely read blog post in which he explains that piracy is the reason he doesn't make his books available in PDF format. But in this article, TidBITS publisher Adam Engst disagrees strongly with Pogue's opinion, using sales numbers from the Take Control series of ebooks (150,000+ copies sold since 2004 with virtually no copying) as proof that making electronic versions not only doesn't necessarily lead to piracy, it may be the best way of preventing illicit sharing."
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I'll buy a few... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really surprised that we are actually seeing DRM free eBooks, I though this would take much longer to come about... I plan to buy a few to at least support the concept. I hope though the final title list presents some more interesting titles...
Always want ebook. (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the choice, I will always buy an ebook from O'reilly. I can put them on sftp and have them anywhere, they won't sag my shelf and so on and so forth. I also imagine it will be easier to buy because I don't have to drive to a store or wait for UPS. I wish all my textbooks were like this.
Parent
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I do "own" several DRM'ed ebooks. My main problem is that they are locked to a computer/reader (serial number). So if I loose that computer (cellphone etc), I loose access to the ebook.
This is something that really annoys me. If they want to "lock" the ebook, fine. But lock it to ME, not to my computer.
Light contrast and good monitor. (Score:3, Informative)
First make sure your monitor is working well. You can easily check this with a test pattern [entropy.ch] If it flickers or has aliasing you need better.
Try to reduce the contrast in light levels between your monitor and it's surroundings. High contrasts in light level will cause your eyes to work harder and reduce your ability to see fine details.
It's a simple calculation (Score:2)
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation [frimouvy.org]
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Screen real estate (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you love virtual desktops? One for the browser and mail, one for the IDE, one for the PDF documentation and finally one spare...
I'm not kidding, but it is one of the reasons I consider Windows not ready for my desktop.
Parent
Re:I'll buy a few... (Score:4, Informative)
You might have noticed that they're going to be selling a bundle of three formats for one price (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket). With the non-PDF formats you can reflow the text and adjust the font size to fit the screen.
Parent
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While I love the web (I can use various assitive technolgies [textic.com], easily, on most markup based pages, and even some PDFs), I HATE books, and DRMed PDFs put addional barriers between me and the knowledge I'm after..
This is, therefore, potentially, good news for a possible 10%+ of potential O'Reilly readers.
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Different people learn in different ways. I often read books for recreation, but nearly never read books on the subject of my work. It doesn't matter much where the knowl
Still too dear (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should we pay as much, or near to the full price of a dead tree product for a digital copy? The manufacturing and distributions costs are near zero. There's no need for shelf space in retailers either. On top of this, we have little resale options. Ever see legal digital itunes music on ebay in lots?
Re:Still too dear (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, frankly, because of economics. If the ebooks sell at full dead-tree price, why shouldn't O'Reilly sell them at that price?
Also, don't underestimate the cost of keeping a server running and capable of serving out the eBooks 24/7. The actual cost of sending the bits through the tubes might not be high, but the cost of keeping those servers running and cool isn't negligible.
Then there's the issue of value. Lots of people consider ebooks to be more valuable than dead-tree versions because they're searchable and smaller. If they're perceived as more valuable, they'll sell for more. We saw this trend with cassette tapes vs. CDs and VHS tapes vs. DVDs. In both cases, the disc-based media cost less to produce than the tape-based media, but tapes sold for less because they were considered inferior and were in less demand.
Parent
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Also, don't underestimate the cost of keeping a server running and capable of serving out the eBooks 24/7. The actual cost of sending the bits through the tubes might not be high, but the cost of keeping those servers running and cool isn't negligible.
On the contrary, it's quite negligible, if you outsource it to a competent 3rd party. For 100$ you can get terabytes of traffic, within a secure, stable server. Add to that an upfront payment for someone to develop you a website, of a few hundred - thousands of dollars. You will also outsource the checkout/payment to a payment processor, for a small commission.
If you add everything up, you get no more than a few pennies per book, 100-1000 times less than what ebooks actually sell for.
So yeah, the actual co
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They've already got the website devoted to this and surely keep staff on hand to add new content, I'd *assume* that they have their own handy dandy custom CMS that they use, if they don't they're absolute morons and how they have stayed in business this long would
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Don't overestimate it either.
Baen, after all, manages to run a quite profitable website selling ebooks for, on average, $3-6. Personally, I tend to buy the monthly ebooks, gaining me 6 for $25. The books themselves are under 10 megabytes.
Many sites can afford to allow more megabytes available for download for free.
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Resale: nothing lost. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever try to sell your old textbooks? You are lucky to get 1/3 rd the value the next semester. The kind of O'Reilly books you would sell won't get you much more. If you don't want it anymore, most people don't want it. You are not going to be losing much this way.
If I'm willing to pay for a print book, I'm willing to pay for the electronic copy. I want the information, not the paper. The easiest place to find it will be the publisher.
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Value to producer, value to user (Score:2)
As noted, you can search them, which brings a lot of value to the user.
But also - do you not want the author rewarded for the effort it took to make a book? Writing a technical book is not like writing a Grisham novel, in terms of the number of people that will buy one...
And finally there is the potential for updates to the book for corrections.
I use O'Reilly's Safari service for pretty much all technical book reading now, because of the benefits it offers. But I wouldn't mind having slightly more "real"
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DRM free eBooks could be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Just like making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet, so is making data unmodifiable. "Lock them for editing" is DRM, and can, has been, and will be circumvented.
Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy (Score:4, Interesting)
DRM isnt the super-breakable trick everyone claims here on slashdot.
One could devise a DRM which procesess all state information within a signed VM. You have multiple exterior checks on the container to guarantee integrity, and once processing the VM, the VM itself checks itself. And if one was to go massively paranoid, a service could be required that satellite service for exterior verification.
Look at this in similar terms of Xen running SElinux with communication via satellite.
Is it crackable? Of course. Will you be found out? Most likely.
Yuo just wait... The next movie player will require a network connection to play videos and music. Blu-ray already uses the VM schematic. All they need is a continuously on connection. All they need is SSH or something similar and the thing'll be damn near unhackable. One would probably have to hook up to the TV lcd chips to record a signal.
Parent
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``DRM isnt the super-breakable trick everyone claims here on slashdot.''
You won't hear me claim that it is always easy to break a DRM scheme.
``One could devise a DRM which procesess all state information within a signed VM.''
No. Because that's an implementation detail. You can't force people to use a particular implementation.
Fundamentally, you have a Big Bag Of Bits (usually a file) that has the information in it. Once you figure out how to interpret the bits, you can get the information out. The only way
Re:DRM free eBooks could be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Excellent idea. Then I can use advanced ebook processor to remove the password, and Acrobat to delete the personal info on the front pace.
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Sorry, but if you can view it, you can edit it. End of the story. Unless you make the format and the viewer proprietary, you are out of luck. Kpdf, for example, has a nice checkbox in Settings > Configure Kpdf > Settings > Obey DRM Limitations.
The time spent trying to limit content usage could be very well spent on something useful. Then again, some people are spending their free time watching stupid TV shows instead of learning math or reading Tolkien. Of course, they are free to do it, but manki
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Formats (Score:2)
While on the subject, what are the relative merits of the various formats? I know PDF from other things, but I know virtually nothing about Ebooks. Can someone enlighten me?
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I have a couple of their "Bookshelves" on CD already, and they are in DRM free HTML. Use them all the time and work great on my laptop.
Well (Score:2, Interesting)
"... priced at or below the cover price of the book ..." [emphasis added]
Well, that's the problem - "at or below" is not enough. If I am to get only the raw information without the physical thing, without the possibility to go to a park with my book (and not looking like a dork with a laptop, or worse yet - a Kindle), without being able to decorate my room with a book, et cetera - it has to cost at least 10 times less (which it doesn't) or be 10 times better (which it isn't). This is the same reason why the
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And where do you derive the x10 rule from? Rules of marketing from what I understood is to extract a maximum amount of money from as many as you can.
Traditional rules also said that the customer was always right. With recent days, DRM and lack of service says otherwise.
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The 'Customer is always right' is a mantra that was sold to customers to make them believe they are always in control - in actuality, a customer is very rarely right when it comes to your business.
Actually, "the customer is always right" is supposed to remind the sales person that their job is not about being right, but about selling and making money. If a customer says he wants to buy X because of Y then you say "yes", sell him X and make money. If you say "no you are wrong", even if you are right, he walks away and spends his money elsewhere, so you lose..
There are cases like a customer saying "what you sold to me is rubbish, you have to give me my money back", where 'the customer is always rig
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
> If I am to get only the raw information without the physical thing
Somehow, that's a peculiar point of view to encounter on Slashdot... the value of a book is its physical instantiation, not the information it contains.
I see it the other way around.
A couple years ago, I bought the PDF rights to a Ruby on Rails book during its development -- I needed the info immediately and couldn't wait for it to go to print.
I had a copy center print it up, spiral-bound, and I also used it in soft form on my computer. Later, when the book actually went to print, I bought it again. (It was a good book.)
I realized that I didn't like the officially printed book as much. My spiral-bound version was larger and easier to read and laid flat on my desk. Since I knew that I could print another if necessary, I didn't hesitate to write notations in it. Finally, the searchability of the PDF actually changed the way I read: I didn't have to refer to a table of contents, I didn't have to refer to an index, and I didn't have to thumb through pages looking for pertinent information.
Parent
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I've had a copy center print out a few GPL books before and supplementary PDFs that came with a textbook I purchased. PDF is wholehartedly a much more convienient format, especially with the ability to bookmark, highlight and write notes on the page. And I agree, having a digital copy means you can make unlimited markups of the text and start with an unmarked copy without having to buy more. I actually edit my documents using PDFs in this fashion rather than use Word's (or similar) text markup. Because of t
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You get the extra value of being able to carry it around on a thumb drive in your pocket wherever you go, search the whole book instantly, and a host of other advantages of computerized viewing, such as zooming in for those with poor eyesight.
Yet because you're worried that you'll look like a dork when you go to the park, it shouldn't cost more than 10% of the paper version?
You certainly have the right not to buy the books at that price, but I doubt that so many people will share your sentiments that they w
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I don't think this will work for fiction, but the kinds of books that O'Reilly is most famous for, tech. books, it will work fabulously.
I already have this pretty much with a Safari subscription. For the programming titles, electronic copies are so much better than dead tree copies. When doing the exercises or working on the examples, you can just copy and past the code into your text editor. There's no need to copy files from a CD-ROM or download them from a book-related website.
Same for a lot of the other
Good move, pirated books are very easy to find (Score:2, Interesting)
Interbook (Score:2)
As its developer I'm clearly biased, but I still think Interbook [thinkpress.com] technology is the best mix of having a physical book in your hand, saving paper, and having electronic resources available on the internet if desired. It can be protected by basic DRM (type in word x on page y to continue) or none at all at the publisher's discretion.
Pricing Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't mind purchasing digitally unrestricted files, but not for "at or below the price of the book". I've seen way too many Kindle books that are nearly priced the same as the printed counterparts and gives me no advantages of my printed counterparts (can't give it away, sell it, write in it, requires no additional expense EG batteries, etc.). I'm talking tech books. Some are priced okay, others that I've had an interest in are nearly $50-70. I've seen one Kindle book that was $135 while the printed counterpart (no longer in print) was selling for roughly $15 used.
I don't know what would be a good price point for a ebook, but considering bandwidth is relatively cheap compared to printing and binding and shipping a book, I don't think an ebook should be priced similar to the printed counter part. With DRM-less ebooks, perhaps it is less of an issue than with DRM encumbered ebooks, where a dead machine or defunct ebook publisher can render your collection useless (has happend to me, which is why I don't buy encumbered ebooks anymore).
To me, an ebook should be pricsed roughly 20-40% of the price of the book if it was printed. Keep in mind, retail books are already highly marked up from what the retailer pays the publisher/distributor. It should be 20-40% of the whole sale cost of the book (because other publisher/distributors/retailers don't usually offer the ebooks for sale anyway, so it need not be priced according retail value, but wholesale value).
The other thing is, while certain very-hard to find books, or other in-demand little-supply books could command a premium in print, ebooks are not scarce. They are, for all intents-and-purposes, unlimited supply. So they should not reflect prices of scarcity or high-print costs.
Until the pricing of any ebook reflects something more realistic considering the what we have to sacrifice to use and that the publisher has so little overhead costs associated with the distribution of the digital media, then I still am not convinced to purchase.
I do applaud O'Reilly for doing this. They produce great books and if more publishers follow suit, then maybe, just maybe, the landscape will improve and the Ebook market will become more viable.
Thanks,
Leabre
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I don't know if 20-40% (a markdown of 80-60%) is really reasonable. I'm not entirely sure where this attitude comes from that bits should be vastly less expensive, just because the distribution costs are near-zero.
Newsflash: Printing a technical reference doesn't actually cost anywhere near the majority of the book price. That $50-200 book you bought might contain a few hundred pages with lots of glossy color pictures (if it's a very nice book).
Compare that to the price of, say, Harry Potter 7. 784 pages
ebooks should be bundled (Score:4, Insightful)