Thanks to improved reading devices, lcd monitors, and availability ebook sales are pretty much doubling in size year on year. While epub and pdf lower the barriers to entry and are pretty much locked in as formats, the embryonic ebook industry is still taking shape so here's my 10,000 foot view, with 5 principles to publish and legislate by.
1. Lending or sharing should be built into the purchase of the ebook
The fundamental problem with drm and anti-piracy legislation is that it tries to prevent rather than acknowledge a basic human behavior. Sharing. Publishers of content need to accept that reading/listening/watching almost always has a social component to it. Half the joy from reading comes from being able to discuss and lend your book to your friends and relatives. If you think about how ridiculous it would be to ban lending or giving any physical possession to another person you are closer to realising why people will never take piracy laws seriously. Sharing with someone is something that should be built into the purchase, drm or no drm. The opportunity is there for the publisher to manage the sharing and benefit in the process from knowing who their customer chooses to share with, and building it into the price.
2. Social drm is the only useful drm for ownership
It is definitively proven that drm does not prevent your ebook/movie etc ending up on filesharing sites, so why exactly would you pay extra to limit your market and inconvenience your audience. Plenty has been written about this. End of story.
3. An ebook is not a book
Seriously. The book as a desirable physical object is not the same thing as an ebook and is not going away anytime soon unless they ban paper. The ebook provides a searchable interface and many other accessibility and portability advantages but not the collectibility or tangibility of a print book. Penguin classics prove that even cheap poor quality books can be collectable. No doubt we will have a true back to the future scenario in the not too distant future where the printed book becomes an exotic item as it was in its early days.
4. Bookselling is dead. Long live booksellers
Some might say the physical bookstore has nothing to do with ebooks but that is short sighted. Bricks and mortar booksellers are under pressure from Amazon and the bigger retailers, and need to evolve to survive (hint: the good ones already understand the social aspect of books), but publishers should do all in their power to assist their survival for some simple reasons. Internet space is an infinite mall but with massive retailers dominating the entry ways and demanding larger slices of the producers income. For all the 'you might like this' genius functions the physical bookstore has the advantage of simplicity with limited space, ease of browsing content of titles, and the physical placement of the store in the 'real' world. The big retailers understand the power of product placement, and a bookstore is nothing if not a product placement/marketing opportunity in someone's physical community that has real benefit to both publisher and the community. The added bonus for publishers and authors is that diversity of booksellers ensures no one retailer controls the market.
This means that publishers must provide a simple mechanism to sell ebooks in physical bookstores, much like other retailers sell phone credit. A reader should be able to upgrade a physical book to an ebook, or vice versa.
5. Pirate Bay is your next public library
It's amazing really when you think about it, but peer to peer is sort of like an inverse library where only the most popular books/movies/tracks are available at any given time where the library would only have the least popular titles on it's shelves (the popular ones are always out). The peer to peer library does not hold the books rather the borrower does, but hey they're still both free services in reality if not in law. The difference is that from a publishers perspective at least the library purchases give some marginal revenue back to the producer, whereas peer to peer just needs one copy to seed.
In a real library however publishers have also been able to monetize (in Australia at least) the act of copying something without suing anyone for years. CAL is there to collect revenue when copying for educational purposes and serves to provide at least some recompense to the copyright holder for lost sales.
Instead of trying in vain to outlaw peer to peer or develop unpopular filters, governments should provide the mechanism to recompense publishers (and authors). Governments can easily add a tax on broadband infrastructure, and future organisations like CAL can provide the mechanisms to distribute revenue to copyright holders. 10% of a retail broadband fee is not going to impact much on access but will make a reasonable pool for combined content producers.
Some users can't or won't pay for their content, hence why governments provide tax funded ways of providing services such as libraries which provide the foundation for a lot of small publishers. Peer to peer just means government funded libraries only need to focus on the less popular ebooks, but someone has to pay something, somewhere for the content, and at the moment the only people who get the income are Google, the bandwidth wholesalers, and to a small extent the peer to peer search engines.
The problem of peer to peer is in fact a good problem to have for content producers. If your work ends up readily available on peer to peer, you're already making good money if your product is available to purchase. The book industry is fortunate in that unlike the movie/tv industry we don't have a myriad of co-dependent industries in a chain all trying to protect their revenue streams, thus preventing people from purchasing the format of choice at their time of choice.
The challenge for book producers is that as the size of the ebook industry increases so does the leakage to peer to peer, and authors don't have other ways of indirectly collecting money for their work. But publishers do have a tool to limit leakage and that is the price of the product. If demand for your product is massive then pricing an ebook at $5 is a real proposition to limit the amount of people that download via peer to peer. It's economics 101 that if the price is low then people are more likely to avoid the black market of peer to peer.
