ebooks

Authors who support giving away free, electronic copies of their books have said that it helps generate sales of physical copies of their books and now there's a study that supports that view, although it's interesting to note that the study found that when science-fiction publisher Tor gave away books, it actually hurt sales.

I've always said that once electronic book readers become more popular and easier to use, that giveaway model is going to collapse. I suspect those science-fiction readers are early adopters of book-reading devices and are more than content to have electronic versions of books over physical copies. The aforementioned article theorized that the Tor giveaways were not successful because the electronic books were only given away for a short period of time and it wasn't long enough to have an effect on book sales.

Science fiction author Ben Bova once wrote a novel predicting the electronic book market. He points out that it was meant to be a satire of the publishing industry at the time he wrote it, but is amazed at how prophetic he was.

Just to give you an idea of how electronic books are hitting a tipping point, there are now more e-book apps for the Apple iPhone than there are games.

Meanwhile, Samsung has entered the e-book reader fray with its own device and it has partnered with Barnes & Noble in the U.S. in an effort to help sell it.

There's no word if it will be available here in Canada, but if the government ever lifted its draconian Canadian ownership rules for bookstores, we might have B&N stores here and some actual competition.

With the announcement last week of Apple's new iPad, it looks like Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, will have some serious competition. While the iPad isn't more of a multi-purpose device than the Kindle, many readers are intrigued by the possibilities of the new Apple tablet, especially comic book fans.

If that wasn't enough bad news, Amazon got into a public fight with the book publisher Macmillan over setting the price of electronic books. Macmillan, which operates the science fiction imprint Tor, wants to control pricing, but Amazon wouldn't let them, so they delisted all of their books from their site over the weekend.

It wasn't long before Amazon caved in and agreed to let the publisher sell the books at prices higher than the $9.99 set by the online retailer. SF author John Scalzi thinks the move has tarnished the company's reputation with its users as well as authors.

Amazon has been working hard to get people to buy their electronic books and one strategy they have is to give away free books for people to download to their Kindles although they are primarily public domain classics.

Meanwhile, the company which is most likely to prevail in all of these electronic book skirmishes is Google. They have been quielty digitizing books for years and are slowly building a massive online library of electronic titles and are poised to begin selling them. One author who is pissed off at Google's strategy is Ursula LeGuin. She's been mobilizing other authors against the agreement to let Google sell their books because she sees it as surrendering of copyright to a huge corporation.

In other electronic book developments, futurist Ray Kurzweil is entering into the fray with a new reader platform called Blio. It's not a device, but is software that will run on computers and mobile devices.

While all of this posturing for market share continues, the Chinese are working on their electronic book readers that will ultimately force reader prices downwards and probably outsell all of their American competitors by a wide margin.

Lots of attention is paid to Amazon's Kindle, but it's hardly the only ebook reader in town, Barnes and Noble recently came out with their own device called the Nook. What's interesting about that device is that hackers have already managed to crack the machine which means that it may actually become a more popular device because it can bypass unpopular digital rights managements schemes that publishers seem intent on foisting upon their customers.

In addition to Barnes and Noble, at least 5 major publishers are banding together to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Some are predicting that Adobe will be the eventual winner of the ebooks sweepstakes since more than 100 publishers have signed up with them to distribute encrypted PDF versions of their books. Perhaps the publishers are lining up, but will readers?

Let's be honest. No one really knows where electronic publishing is going, but people are still making bold predictions about the year ahead.

Even though I keep buying physical books, I've found myself more and more looking for electronic versions of certain titles that are on my to-read list. Since I'm not likely to read all of the books on my bookshelves, I figure that at the very least the electronic ones won't take up any more room.

I don't have any statistics to back me up, but I have a feeling that comic book companies make a lot more money licensing their characters for movies than they do with comic books. That doesn't mean that comic books are dead, but they are certainly a niche medium, at least in North America.

That might change with the advent of the e-book. While comic books might not look so great on a mobile phone, some are betting that the mythical Apple tablet would revive comic books to their former glory thanks to the larger screen that this imagined device would have.

E-books certainly have the power to disrupt the publishing business as we know it. Margins are thin enough that even a small erosion of sales caused by the early adoption of electronic book readers that the disruption could come sooner rather than later.

One company which is working toward the new digital future is Harlequin. I've written earlier about their plans to create an electronic-only imprint that would publish across many genres, but the SFWA has oposed the move, saying that it is nothing more than a vanity press.

While you're waiting for the Apple Tablet's arrival on which to read your favourite science fiction comic books, study this list of the top 10 science fiction graphic novels that you'll want to load up on yours after you buy one. If you want something even older, consider the Science Fiction Classics comic book anthologies.

When you are reading everything electronically, you can get rid of your old comic books by turning them into nifty wallets like this one.

Cory Doctorow has made much mileage from the fact that he releases his novels under a Creative Commons license as free, downloadable e-books. He continues to champion the idea that the free electronic books help him sell physical books.

As part of a new column of his with Publishers Weekly, he wants to try an experiment with a previously-published short story collection to help prove his point. He intends to release it freely as an electronic version and sell it in a variety of other physical formats and post his results online.

I can't say that I've ever bought a Cory Doctorow book. I've read some of his free electronic novels and thought they were okay, but couldn't see the point of wanting to buy a physical copy after having consumed the digital version and if I want to read more Doctorow I know I can just download his next free book.

I think that Doctorow's free book strategy will start to unravel once electronic book readers are as common as iPods and other MP3 players are today. That's also the belief of Scott Pack of publisher HarperCollins who said in a in a recent BBC article about book piracy that "the free model works best while e-books are a relatively new concept. If in 10 years time, 70% of all books sold are e-books and the accepted price is £1.99, the publishing industry is going to be in trouble."

The day of the ubiquitous book reader may not be that far off. The Kindle is pretty much the leader in that domain and it's pretty expensive and restrictive, but Barnes & Noble has unleashed its Kindle killer called Nook. I'm kind of hot on this other contender called Cool ER.

Start stocking up on books from Google Books with this nifty program that lets you download PDF copies of full-view books.

Need more evidence that ebooks are starting to go mainstream? The venerable Science Fiction Book Club recently polled its members about their feelings on electronic books. I guess they are making sure to stake their claim to the electronic future if people start purchasing digital books instead of paper ones.

Meanwhile, Amazon's competitors aren't sitting still. Borders in the U.K. launched its own ebook reading device called the iLiad. There is also talk that Barnes & Noble is working on its own reader.

All of this competition will be good for the consumer because it will mean that the inflated prices on these devices will start to drop and any DRM protection on the books is likely to disappear as consumers want no restrictions on their purchases.

While you wait for the prices to fall, here are some free ebooks from Random House's website Suvudu.

The recent news that Tor.com has opened its own online bookstore that features not only its own books, but that of its rivals has generated some discussion in the SF community. It's nice enough, but the bottom line will be can it compete on price with the likes of Amazon?

American book chain Borders has discovered that science fiction fans are active online and has launched its own blog to cater to that niche. The blog is called Borders Sci-Fi.

Do you still buy books? Which bookstore customer type are you? There are more varieties than you can imagine.

It's nice that stores are still selling physical books, and will no doubt do so for years to come, but it might get a whole lot less profitable as the 800-lb gorilla named Google is poised to become a retailer of electronic books. They want to sell texts in an open format that will take on the likes of Amazon and their Kindle reader.

Speaking of the Kindle, here is an interesting article that recounts one man's experience with it in the real world. He seems to like it, just don't ask why question why the books look so ugly on the screen.

It's certainly an interesting period of experimentation for electronic books. A lot of people are giving away books now because the electronic versions are still a bit rough compared to the printed editions, but that will change. Perhaps we'll see some publishers offering free versions of electronic books, but upselling us with lavishly-illustrated, cross-index, hyperlinked enhanced versions. It's a brave new world for book publishers.

Now that electronic book readers seem to be gaining some traction, the rise of book piracy has been noticed by the likes of the New York Times.

One textbook author recently noticed that it was easier to find pirated copies of his book with a Google search than it was to find ways to buy the dead-tree version. He noted that the free copies didn't seem to be helping book sales which contradicts what others have said in the past about how the freebies were good promotional tools. I have always contended that as long as reading books on a screen was uncomfortable, those free copies weren't going to hurt book sales. That time is over.

Cory Doctorow, who is an author who was able to take advantage of that window where free e-books made sense, thinks that the answer is to change how authors license their electronic works. They'll make money with DIY licensing. That will probably work as well as those FBI warnings on DVDs that warn you it is illegal to make a copy.

Making a copy of a physical book is too difficult to do with your desktop scanner, buy you may not realize that there are specialized book scanners that make the job easy. The thing is they are pretty expensive, but building your own isn't nearly as costly or difficult as you might think and the entire process of copying a book can take less than half an hour.

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article today about the future of electronic books. I agreed with much of the piece which essentially said they will change how we read and interact with books and how the format will change what a book looks like, but what struck me was the assertion that it will encourage us to buy more books. Really? How's that working out for newspapers? Not to mention the music and, more recently, the movie industry?

Offering information in a digital format which costs zero dollars to reproduce and virtually nothing to distribute doesn't seem to encourage people to spend very much to possess it. Heck, you can even distribute your book on a t-shirt now.  eReader, an online bookstore for digital books, is trying to maintain geographic restrictions on their electronic books which only makes sense in the old model of shipping physical books. Expect more DRM measures on e-books once they start to make a dent in the already meagre profits of publishers.

In the meantime, people are still buying physical books and it seems that in this recession, science fiction is a genre that is doing particularly well as SF sales are up. If you're looking for escapsim, but still can't afford new books, there are lots of free ones online.  The Free SF Reader can point you to more volumes than you'll have time to read.

The thing that I will miss most if physical books start to disappear is the cover art and I wouldn't be the only one.

So Amazon finally unveiled the long-rumoured Kindle 2 earlier this week with the help of Stephen King who will write a Kindle-only story for the device, but the new gizmo is already being criticized.

The Authors Guild says that the machine's text-to-speech feature violates writers' audiobook copyrights. You think they'd be happy to have a new outlet for their works. Author Cory Doctorow took them to task, saying that their position is untenable.

Existing users of the first version of the machine are ticked that the new one has dropped support for an SD card and made the battery inaccessible.

Like a lot of people, I think that the $359 USD price tag is still way too expensive. Sure, it's cheaper than the $399 price tag for version 1 of the Kindle, but you could buy an awful lot of books for that amount of money. I don't think that adding book jackets are going to make them fashionable enough that people will ignore the price tag, although what do I know, the first version was consistently sold out.

Meanwhile, over in Japan, Fujitsu has been working on an electronic newspaper that would offer a lot of features that the Kindle lacks, although it costs three times as much.

If the topic of ebooks interests you, then you will find this essay by one of the pioneers in the field a fascinating read.