I love e-books. Have read the buggers for years. From using a dinky PDA to an iPhone, from old CRT screens to wide screen LCD monitors and currently on my plethora of Android devices, I have read books in electronic format for longer than I care to admit.

Which makes it odd for me to say that e-books give me the shits.

Don’t get me wrong, I love e-books as an idea and I love reading them. What I hate is that none of the people involved in selling them, bar a couple of unique examples, really get e-books.

Australians are huge book readers. We represent about half the sales of the UK publishing houses. Not per capita. Half the sales. Which makes Australia a funny case in the book publishing world. The dominant UK publishers own the market lock stock and barrel. They own the distribution system and seem to derive great pleasure from gouging the consumers and screwing over the small retailers. When my favourite book retailer can source and ship a book faster and cheaper from Amazon or the Book Depository the local distributor, the writing on the wall is not looking good to local booksellers.

The Australian publishing distribution system is geared towards large retailers like Angus and Robertson or Dymocks. Small specialty stores? Only an afterthought. If they’re lucky. The publishers are addicted to selling books at huge mark-ups and in bulk. The business model has worked well since the Age of Sail, so why change it?

There is a plethora of small press doing sterling work in wading through the quagmire that is the Australian publishing scene to bring e-books to Australians, like Boomerang Books and ebook.com and readwithoutpaper.com. Amazon, however, is not one of them. Its method of selling ebooks to Australians is to pretend that Australia doesn’t exist until the Australian publishing companies give them the huge profit they demand for releasing their copyright materials.

This is the reason you can order a paperback book from Amazon yet can not order the ebook version for your Kindle. The publishers and distributors are locking down rights for e-books to ensure that the books can be sold at what they consider to be a “proper price”. And by that, they mean at prices that exceed the paperback or even the trade paperback price.

One of the worst offenders in the e-book marketplace is in fact Apple. It was the iBookstore that introduced “agency model” of allowing publishers to set the price of e-books. This happened because the publishers were afraid Apple would pull a fast one as they did with the music industry. Agency pricing is price fixing made legal. So, when you see an e-book on the iBookstore or Amazon Kindle store, and you do not see “Recommended Price” and “Our Price”, you can be assured that the publishers have set a price that can not be discounted by any reseller.

And that brings me to DRM — Digital Rights Management, which is simply the technology used on digital content to prevent sharing and piracy.

DRM does not work. Firstly, anyone who knows how DRM operates can strip it with off the shelf software. The only people DRM hurts are the people who buy a book in good faith and find they can not read the book on any device they want, but only through approved apps and devices.

Ebooks are not expensive to produce. There are little add-on costs, apart from servers and production costs, like editing, marketing and storage. However they are infinitely copyable. As a result, publishers and vendors fall over themselves to add a system to prevent ebook files being copied.

To illustrate, an iBookstore book can be read on a Mac, PC or iOS device. Android or Kindle users? No book for you. Kindle books can be read on many devices, but you have a dedicated ereader not from Amazon? No book for you! Want to use the fantastic Calibre ebook management tool to catalogue and store your books? With a DRM book? No catalogue for you! Use Linux? No book for you!

The unintended consequence is that publishers and sellers can dictate how you read a book, if you can share it, if you can use text to speech (critically important for vision impaired people) or even catalogue it (iTunes to manage your books? I can barely cope with it for music!).

Secondly, I can not take steps to modify the DRM so I can use it on my choice of device or software. I am prevented by law from removing the digital lock of the DRM, becuase, thanks to the Free Trade Agreement, the DMCA in the US provisions are now part of Australian law.

I am limited in how I can use the content, terms are dictated by a company scared that I will release millions of copies via the internet. In fact I am not purchasing a book, I am licensing it. The normal rights I get from owning the physical copy are explicitly removed from the ebook version.

Can you sell books without DRM? Yes. Baen Books has, for over a decade, been selling ebooks without any DRM whatsoever. In any format its user’s desire. And they even have a free book library and produce ebook CD’s of current books where explicit permission to copy and share is given (a list of the disks complete with ISO files can be found at http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/).

Over at the Free Library, the “Librarian” Eric Flint has a great series of essays on the thinking behind the ebook projects. His argument is that sales increase when books are pirated, not just for current books, but for the whole back library. I have bought entire collections after reading free ebooks from the Baen Library, so I can vouch for veracity of this.

Baen realise that books are not just competing with other books, like a traditional books store, but with video, games, web content, movies and music. The problems with ebooks is that Publishers and Retailers are locked in a obsolete notion that one copy obtained free means one less sale, which is a stupid concept. By increasing awareness of books, you increase the market. You may get one sale from 100 shares, but this is one sale you would not have gotten otherwise.

Take as a random pick Ahn Do’s Biography “The Happiest Refugee”. Over at Dymocks, the paperback costs $32. And the ebook also costs $32. WTF?

The only excuse for charging the same price for both the paperback and ebook is that you do not want to cannibalise paperback sales. And that only makes sense if you are a publisher. As a consumer (or even a retailer) this makes no sense. There is no limited shelf space, there is little cost to retail apart from a computer server and online retail costs.

Since production costs are so low, and retail costs are even lower, there is little justification for charging even $20 for an ebook

Again, at Baen. They Get It. An ebook is $US6. If I want to get early access to a book, I can pay for an ARC (Advanced Readers Copy, an unproofed version of the book) for $US15. The extra cost here is for getting a book before everyone else, and for fans of a particular author, it’s a no brainer. You can even pay $15 for a monthly webscription, and get portions of up to 6 books doled out from about 6 months before publishing, recreating the old serialised books of yesteryear.

As much as the dinosaurs in Australian publishing don’t want to admit it, ebook consumption is going to take over from physical books in the next few years. In the same way that Australians were forced by intransigent TV networks clinging to outdated copyright law to illegally download programs they would happily pay for, ebook readers will find a way to bypass DRM software and pirate books they would have been quite willing to buy at a reasonable price, but can’t because the panic over piracy is overwhelming common sense. Again.

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Darryl Adams is a public servent at day, blogger at night. An avid wargamer, RPG player, reader and expert procrastinator, you can read his tech reporting over at itechreport.com.au, or follow him on Twitter @idarryl or google plus +Darryl Adams

Also, see my article in APCMag.com for more on this subject: http://apcmag.com/two-australian-ebook-retailers-reviewed.htm

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