E-Book Reader Pricing - Buyer Beware

E-book readers are very popular these days. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. However, even with the greatly increased number of readers available, the Kindle is still the leader of the pack – by a long way.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the e-book reader market - in its commercial format - is still a recent development. The sector is growing rapidly, but it is still in a developmental phase. There is, for example, no agreed industry standard for the format of e-books. It does look as if the majority of new readers are lining up behind the ePub format. The Kindle of course has its own proprietary format – something for which it has come in for a fair bit of criticism in the past.

The theory is that having an industry standard would allow e-books to be transferred from one e-book reader to another and allow end users more freedom when it comes to sourcing e-books. Greater choice and more purchasing options should be good for the consumers and lead to lower prices, It’s easy enough to see the logic. It makes sense.

Amazon, on the other hand, certainly has enough demonstrable experience of offering customers good value for money when it comes to reading - whether it be hardback, paperback, or e-book editions. Their clearly stated intent of selling Kindle books for $ 9.99 or less has led to some fairly terse discussions with many of the large publishing houses who are, even now, fighting hard to protect the sale of hardback editions.

A recent study, carried out by the New York Times, looked at the average book price for the Kindle, Nook and Sony Daily Edition readers. Ten books, five fiction and five non-fiction, were selected from the NYT’s 2009 best books list. It was found that the Kindle books had an average price of $ 13.69, the Sony readers average price per book was $ 15.26 and the Nook had a very much higher average price per book of $ 19.29 per book.

Not much evidence of Amazon using their market domination to profit there. In fact, based upon these numbers, if you read a book a week then the Kindle would save you $ 300 a year compared to the Nook. It would finance itself and you would still have some money left over to buy a few books.

It’s hard to see a scenario where the Amazon Kindle reader winds up as the Betamax of e-books. Adherents of the Sony reader can make of that what they will. In all probability, the main discussion for the immediate future is likely to be between the major publishing houses and distributors of e-books. It will be difficult to define and agree industrywide standards until the main publishing houses accept that different practices will be required in the digital age.

Digital Library On Its Way - But Copyright Holders Need Protection

A court in Paris has found internet search giant Google guilty of infringing French copyright law. La Martiniere, a French publisher, was awarded 300,000 Euros ($ 430,000) in damages and interest. Google was also required to pay a fee of 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until it removes the book extracts from its database. The French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – inititiated the hearing and demanded that Google be fined 15m Euros ($ 21m).

The size of the final settlement is trivial for Google – but there may yet be implications for Google’s plans to scan and make available online as many of the world’s books as possible. Google is currently in the process of scanning and digitising pretty much any book it can get its hands on. Out of copyright books are made available in their entirety. Books which remain in copyright either have snippets of them made available online or have the whole book made available under a licensing scheme.

It’s not the first time Google has found itself in court as a result of their ambitious plan to become the world’s digital librarian. A class action was filed against Google Books by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a number of individual authors and publishers in 2001. Google had, they alleged, breached copyright laws by scanning books from university libraries without getting permission from the copyright owners in some cases.

At the time, Google claimed that it was operating under the “fair use” principle as only short snippets of books scanned without the permission of copyright holders were made available.

In October of 2008 an agreement was reached with Google establishing a $ 125 million fund to compensate authors whose books were made available online. However, the deal applied in North America only and there were problems with books which, even though they were out of copyright in the USA, were still under copyright law in other countries. In addition to opposition from Europe, including both the French and German governments, Google also faces competition from Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo who support the “Open Book Alliance” being driven by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation which scans and digitises books. To date, they have scanned over half a million books, all of which are available free. The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, has expressed his concerns that Google is attempting to monopolise the library system.

Google’s viewpoint, which many will agree with, is that their scanning program will make millions of books, which are currently out of print and which would otherwise be inaccessible to most readers, available. Users of the Amazon Kindle can also access free Kindle ebooks via Amazon’s Kindle store and there are a number of other projects which make certain books available at no charge online. It does seem probable that our reading habits are about to undergo major change and the method of both book storage and delivery will be updated to take advantage of the internet and electronic formatting. However, before that can happen it may be necessary to ensure that the legal framework is in place and that author’s and other copyright holders are not disadvantaged.