What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter 196
New submitter Volanin writes "The e-book versions of the Harry Potter series are being released through Pottermore, and J.K. Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with them, including releasing them without DRM restrictions. 'One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook, the Kindle and Google's e-book service. ... even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.'"
Power to the content creators! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what ebooks are made for. Eliminating the middle-man, and letting the creators own the distribution of their own works. I hope this trend continues. I'm only too happy to buy these books knowing that the creator is getting the lion's share of the profits and not some publishing house.
Re:good on her (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that's not an author right they lost. They gained that right with Apple's agency model.
Otherwise what happened was Amazon was selling books at a loss (to them) in an effort to drive out everyone else from selling e-books. The publishers and authors had no right to say what price Amazon could sell at. So if Amazon decided your books were worth $1, sure they could be paying you $3 for each copy, but you won't be able to sell your next book for any more than $0.50 per copy as everyone thinks your book is only worth $1.
As well, Sony/B&N/Kobo won't be able to compete and exit the e-book market (if they have to pay $3 per book and Amazon's big enough to dump it at $1...), leaving Amazon the only player in town.
Amazon went for the wholesale model - they bought N books for $X, and sold it for $Y (X and Y have no general relation, though Y > X for a profit). Apple went with the agency model - the publisher sets the price, and Apple sells it for that price.
Consumers love the wholesale model - books are cheaper and get discounted, though publishers hate it (devalues the book) as do authors. If you want to see this in action, check out developer complaints about 99 cent games making it hard for other developers to charge $4.99 for games (better ones, of course) and such.
Of course, Amazon could be devaluing the market to be the only contender (Amazon's Kindle store is the largest after all) and with the DRM, once you're locked in and the other stores are gone, Amazon is free to jack up prices.
Re:Funny how she went from (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps she decided she needed more money to give away.
Apparently, she donated ~$160 million to charity this past year, and fell off Forbes' Billionaire list as a result.
What they should NOT learn (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Why can't I add this to my basket?
Due to publishing restrictions, this edition of the book is not available in your country. Please choose another book language."
So, Pottermore may have bought a clue about how useless drm is, but they still don't understand that it's a global economy now and consumers won't put up with that "not available in your country/region" crap any more.
Re:No DRM but has tracking (Score:4, Interesting)
It could be something subtle, non-markup-language-related like inserting zero-width space characters within the text or replacing the Latin letter "O" with the identical looking Cyrillic letter "O" in a kind of individualized code. Unless you know the exact code, or someone "diffs" two copies of the text to determine what's being done, you can't strip it. And, instead of going through a lot of trouble and potential risk to get a watermark-free copy to disperse, you might as well just tell your friend to download a rip from any one of billions of websites. Hardcore pirates have used stolen credit cards anyway, so they're not going to care about some silly watermark.
Although, I suspect we will soon be finding out what happens when Amazon et al add a term to their license saying that you agree to allow them to automatically delete any books from their, er, your device that have an "invalid" watermark, meaning anyone's watermark but yours.