Amazon Goes Unlimited

Today, the market is talking about the Amazon offer, Kindle Unlimited, which certainly is a smart name as it aims to do exactly what it says on the tin. It should come as no surprise and it was only a matter of time until Amazon entered the ‘all you can read’ ebook subscription arena that services such as Oyster and Scribd have started to open up.

We have long argued that the subscription model is coming and that it starts to change how we relate to books that now can be effectively ‘borrowed on demand’, without having to worry about collecting them on virtual shelves, kidding yourself that you own them when all you own is a limited licence, and also trying to work out how to pass them on to others, share them, or divide the family collection when a relationship splits up.

The greatest challenge to the subscription market is matching the economic model to the reading habits of the members. The book clubs of old used to force feed ‘book of the month’ and expect a regular purchase, but they were dealing with relatively more expensive books and accepted that many people didn’t read on a regular rate. Importantly publishers often had Book Club royalties written into their author contracts. We now have ‘all you can read ‘models which are based on a flat monthly rate with an open to read offer against a digital library. Book s only earn when they are read and ensuing the definition of ‘read’ is a relatively minor but interesting issue.

Unlike other media subscription offers in music and film and even audio the demand and usage patterns of ebooks are very different. An ‘all you can read’ model may appeal to high volume readers who actually don’t need an incentive to read, or buy books and probably read a high volume of what they buy. It doesn’t necessarily appeal to readers who have a more erratic habit, or who collect ebooks today and don’t get round to reading them. So churn rates will be very important both in the early days and within the subscription cycles and will be probably very high compared to other subscription services.

Amazon launched Free Time in the US some 18 months ago. The service was aligned to their Prime subscription model and offered access to several media forms and importantly was aimed at parents for their children. It is not clear how successful this offer is today, but it did have all the right ingredients and if it were extended to align with Unlimited would make commercial sense. Amazon will have learned a lot from this exercise and obviously have a huge volume of customer information and reading habit data to mine and exploit. Unlimited would potentially give ‘family’ offers which cross media, align with Amazon’s core Prime service and effectively lock in customers. Importantly they will be very difficult to compete with as others would appear one dimensional and limited in their potential. However the economics of such an unlimited cross sector offer would be complex and maybe a bridge too far with suppliers today, but Amazon will have learnt much from Free Time that others have yet to discover.

Amazon has aligned Unlimited to their Lending Library and those publishers and authors who opted for this service channel now are automatically lifted into Unlimited. A smart move by Amazon and one that gives them instant traction with both content and users.

So is there room for Amazon, Scribd, Oyster and will Kobo, Apple and the ailing Nook follow? What will Wattpad do now? Can Amazon extend the Unlimited offer to make it even more compelling with premium offers on audio, film, music and even cloud services?

We just can’t see sufficient market for all players as they are position today and it will be interesting to watch the strategy adopted by others. Amazon’s Achilles heel has often been their loner approach and there are many huge subscription services that could be seen as complimentary for others to align with and thereby protecting themselves from being seen a ‘trick pony’.

What’s in it for publishers? What’s in it for Authors? How do digital distributors such as Ingram respond? How does this impact the public library debate and services such as Overdrive? There are many unanswered questions and we are only at the start of a journey which will have many barriers to negotiate, but we now are starting to see a divide between physical and digital which may prove to be healthy. The books may unfortunately remain the same but the divide between ownership and licence, between buying to maybe read or as a gift and subscribing to consume, an incentive to read more as opposed to decorating physical and digital shelves is now potentially up for change.  

This is a good thing for consumers who read. It could be a good thing for digital media users. It may get more people reading. But there are others within the value chain for which this move has many uncertainties.

Related articles:

Amazon Free Time: Give me a child….    Dec 2012

Subscription Is Coming                                  June 2013

eBook Subscriptions Part 3: The future should be significant        March 2014        

Understanding the Subscription eBook Offer      Oct 2013

eBook Subscription Part 2: The Players

We have seen the demise of the traditional book club, but we have to ask, why? Was it a case that they held onto their old model and believed that change wasn’t required, or that that their demise happened too soon before the digital opportunities were possible, or did the new Internet retailers just blindside them, or did they simply just lack vision?

We are reminded of the Michael Porter quote, ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is to do act with yesterday’s logic.’

We can’t bring back the BCA or Readers Digest, but we can now see their potential digital replacements. It is too early to judge the new subscription service winners and losers, but it is fair to assume that this new genie isn’t going back in to the lamp and it will have implications across the publishing value chain. 

  

The ebook subscription service that first really raised the bar was Oyster, a US based service which offers some 100,000 titles. The service wasn’t the first subscription based trade ebook service, but it was the first to get the market profile, serious funding and industry recognition. Its ‘all you can eat for $10 a month’ model is to some a somewhat relatively high price point for a service offering such a low range. As a result they must now chase content growth as a high a priority just as much as acquiring and retaining members.

Will the new model’s rewards convince all publishers to join, or will many sit on the fence and watch and so be restricted to those who wish to take limited risks? Without the industry commitment on content subscription offers may fall short of consumer expectations, with it, they might force changes on the industry that it’s not prepared for. Will they be able to sustain potentially high churn rates as readers who don’t read? Will they it offer the full range demanded by readers or will they have to restrict themselves to limited genre where it can focus and specialise? Will it be able to remain when the big gorillas enter the market? These and many other questions are not just for Oyster but for all subscription services and the one lesson from the early streaming and subscription music market was the high failure rates in services that initially competed for that market.

The surprise new ebook subscription service was Scribd, who as an online information service often was at the centre of copyright infringement issues and operating under the protection of a ‘safe harbour’. Not only did they enter the ebook subscription market, but they did so claiming three times more titles than Oyster. Scribd now joins Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library who have some 475,000 titles and have inbuilt the option to supply into their successful KDP self-publishing service and a service also aligned to their Prime subscription.

Others include Entitle who are basically a rebranding of eReatah and who have a tiered membership of 2 books a month for $9.99, 3 for $14.99 and 4 for $19.99. Entitle have closed on $5.3 million in Series A funding. They promote their recommendation engine and selection of their 125K titles, but their price model is both predictable and offers little for the reading commitment they seek.

In the U.S., it is claimed that some 25% of people are reading ebooks, but is this enough to support a subscription model, where it’s not that you read an ebook, but more dependent on how many and how often you read them.

We then have number national offers which are restricted by language or geography with some countries having established serious offers. Some claim Russia is a rapidly growing and significant ebook market and an ebook subscription service called has been launched by Bookmate who are its Scribd type operator. However Russia has a significant pirated ebook problem so to counter this Bookmate, charges some 10% of its customer base (around 50,000 customers) around $5.00 a month for unlimited access to some 220,000 titles in both Russian and English. Is it enough to convert today’s nonpayers to pay for a subscription - only time will tell? However, Bookmate are confident and have plans to expand the service to Turkey and then countries in Southeast and South Asia.

In Europe there are several subscription start-ups; 24Symbols in Spain, Riddo in Holland which teams up two Dutch publishers, WPG Uitgevers B.V. and Lannoo Meulenhoff B.V., Riidr in Denmark. In Germany Skoobe’s  9,99 €/month offer which enables members to borrow up to 5 titles for as long as they wish, has recently been joined by Readfy who offer three subscription plans; free access based on subscribers viewing ads, 4.99 €/month with fewer ads and 9.99 €/month for add free. All the national markets may be seen as limited, but all have the ability to also take English language content and together show market potential.

We also now have an interesting new model appearing in Spain with Nubico which again offers content from major Spanish publishing houses in Spanish, English and Catalán. However it is the joint venture approach of Nubico which joins Circulo de Lectores , a successful book club, publisher and music retailer with more than 50 years in the market, a 50/50 joint venture between Germany’s Bertelsmann and Spain’s Grupo Planeta together with Telefónica, the broadband and telecommunications provider. Telefonica was working on Movistar EBooks, Círculo de Lectores had Booquo, a subscription-based eBook platform and they decided it was better to join together than go their separate ways. Nubico is looking to take a 30% share of the Spanish ebook reading market by 2015 and have set a monthly charge €8.99 which is lower than others and also has given Circulo and Telefonica´s customers a 20% discount. Nubico is also planing to expand into Latin American interestingly backed by the regional presence of Random House and Telefonica.

Finally, we have the vertical subscription offers.

The STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) and academic and professional segments have long enjoyed subscription services. Here it is more about essential access to authoritative content, information and references, abstract, citations etc. Scarcity lends itself to subscription both at an aggregated level as well as direct from publishers. The completion is often Open Access and finding the balance is a constant challenge but subscription prevails.

The new subscription segment would appear to be children and associated education. Here service providers want to capture and retain what is seen as a lucrative market. Amazon has its FreeTime which again built on their Prime service offers curated media on subscription and toed to parental control. Epic is a new US service designed by former game developers and publishing industry veterans aimed at children 12 and under and offering unlimited books for just $9.99 per month. The company has closed $1.4M in seed funding.

Some other niche offers will always come to market. Some will succeed and others fail and in many cases it’s down to target community, content authority and brand awareness.

Tomorrow we will look at the new opportunities for subscription services.

Understanding The Subscription eBook Offer

Subscription services are today’s alternative solution to owning what may fast become yesterday’s technology.

Imagine buying eight track cassettes, cassettes, vinyl, betamax, VHS, mini discs etc, today. Yes, some still do but for the majority of us, these are yesterday’s technology both in terms of devices and media. During the last ten years we have achieved many things in the ebook arena and many old formats and devices have come and gone. Do we expect tomorrow to be any different? Do we expect to still be able to read and enjoy that ebook download in say 10 or 20 years? Do we even want to read the book again?

Subscription services coupled with deep and board repositories and on demand technology start to change consumer behaviour and values. Technology devices are becoming media agnostic, or should that be the other way around? Media is no longer confided to what your device can hold or a location but is now dependant on the network, or initially at least.

However as subscription serves and fail to grasp that ebooks are different to journals, film, music and even short form works.

So we have the question of ebook subscription and whether it can follow other media and be successful in the on demand world? The answer is yes and no.

First the yes would appear to be logical. A sort of return to the old book club but not restricted to a limited number of physical stocked titles but open to all titles. A club that cater for the eclectic tastes of readers. A place where readers can discover new authors, experiment with new genre and do so often within an ‘as much as you can read’ contract. A place where authors can show their wares and potentially engage with their readers. In addition it could offer a service where your library is virtual and the shelves never swag under the weight of old book s.

However, the reader has to get value for effectively licenced access as opposed to outright ownership. The challenge is that there is not an average rate of reads per month, per week or per year. To the person who reads a book a week or even more than this the offer may sound like ‘manna from heaven’, but to the person who struggles to read one book a month or is somewhat erratic in their habit, they offer may have little appeal. The point is that we are trying to get more people reading and not just appeal to the minority who are already hooked. This is a serious issue and one of the main reasons for the demise of the old book clubs who found themselves trying to feed a habit which was on the wane as their members became increasingly time poor.

The STM journal market has been built on subscription model but is very different in its creation and consumption model. The authors give their material for free, the articles are often peer reviewed for free and the journals are ‘sold’ back to the institutions on a title not firm commitment basis. In other words there is no guarantee that a said member of issues or articles will be published and there is no refund at the end of the year. The material itself is a ‘must have‘ for the institutions and the publishers offer review and authentication within their value proposition. This is far removed from the trade sector and today’s ebooks that it is somewhat irrelevant.

We must remember that there are two critical people in the value chain, the reader and the author and that any subscription model for any media must also work at both ends of the spectrum.

We have all read about the difference of opinion that has been aired over the royalties being received by artists from Pandora, Spotify and others. This itself does not mean that subscriptions are wrong or not rewarding for artists but says that the contracts and commercial arrangements made were not always in the interests of all parties. We must also remember that the music business entered into such contracts on a different basis than would publishers and the volumes involved are significantly larger.

The LoveFilm and Netflix market is also very different in and although it offers some interesting insights it is very different from the ebook trade and marketplace.

We have the practical or impractical sides of measuring a ‘read’. Irrespective of whether the overall model is based on ‘as much as you can eat’ or not, the royalty payments have to be based on discovery, access reading or some element that constitutes a ‘hit’. It is only right that the books which are read should be paid a royalty. After all we don’t have to pay to enter a bookshop or library and it is the selection that should trigger payment. However, what constitutes a read? If I select a book open it ead the first page and put it down does that count? If I get half way through it and tire and again put it down, does that constitute a read? If I select a book one month but don’t read it for six months or even over six months, when is the royalty due? These and many more interesting options have to be clear to all parties. Also there has to be measures that obviate counting abuse and provide transparent audit by interested parties.

Finally, there is that often thorny issue of whether the existing author’s contracts permit digital subscriptions, or whether it an assumed right? The transparency also needs t flow to the author’s royalty statement and not be buried in ‘net receipts.’

When we engage with a new business model, or channel, we have to assume that it may be a major source of income in the future and therefore ensure that unlike some other sectors the terms are sustainable and equitable  both today and potentially as the service grows.

So subscription services look attractive to many and should be rewarding for all, but they should be entered into with eyes wide open and not half shut. 

Upload and Wait = Digital Piracy?

Today’s trade press is littered once more with assumptions about the state of book piracy and its impact on revenues and the market. This is an emotive subject which has many issues, much sensitivity and is often divorced of real facts.

Attributor, who monitor the access to illegally posted content through their FairShare Guardian service, have released a report based on their tracking of 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009. It estimates from this that over 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. So they extrapolate, estimate and come up with figures which make many bestsellers and are somewhat questionable!

Four sites that made digital download data available--4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com, and docstoc.com and Attributor found 3 million illegal downloads in the final quarter of 2009 of the 913 books followed. They then claim that based on 53,000 book takedown notices sent out to various Web sites in the second half of 2009, that these sites represent about 30% of all book piracy.

We found ourselves questioning what an ‘illegal download’ was and if Attributor can identify one, why can’t Scribd, Wattpad, 4shared and docstoc? They claim to have found illegal copies of “Freakonomics,” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, that were downloaded 1,082 times and “Angels & Demons,” by Dan Brown, 7,951 times. This would hardly adds up to 3 million.

Irrespective of the numbers, these sites continue to hide behind the skirt of the US ‘safe harbor’ protection and are merely continuing to react on take down notices?

We have written extensively about the Scribd service and its ‘post first and wait’ approach to copyright, claiming they nothing but offer a service and the onus is on the owner to prove ownership and issue a takedown notice. Some would suggest this sounds similar to some sharing services of the past. Attributor claim 53,000 in 6 months last year! So something is clearly no working and all is defiantly not well in the state of sharedbookworld.com.

Tammy Nam, Scribd’s VP of Content and Marketing says that “People used to call us the ‘YouTube of books’ given all of our user-generated-content,” and then says. “But now, given the amount of professional content we have, we’ve become more like the ‘Hulu of books.’ Some may ask why not a reference to being the ‘PirateBay of books.’

Scribd, is less than 3 years old, hosts over 10 million digital documents which it defines as ‘books’ if they run to more than 100 pages. So we even have some issues in defining a book! It now claims some 2 million visitors a day and what it sees as the number one position. Obviously it has been seen by many as an attractive channel and some 150 publishers have joined Scribd and now Scribd has also moved into newsprint and is become the home for journalists to post their documents.

Scribd is trying to be proactive with publishers on copyright. Instead of merely working on a reactive take down basis they now offer publishers the opportunity to provide Scribd with e-book files for sale on their e-commerce site. In doing so the publisher can also allow them to use those files to filter all user uploaded content and if it matches they can automatically suppress the upload. Some would say this is a very clever tactic of getting content and license to sell it based on the premise of blocking illegal files. If you don’t give them the file, the alternative is that they do nothing and hide behind their ‘safe harbor’.

We think someone is kidding someone here and what is still required is proactive protection, accountability and responsibility.

Finally, we would also suggest that it isn’t the publisher we should be concerned about but the author and their lost royalties that they have entrusted with the publishers.

Is Scribd Doing Enough?

The US law firm of Camara & Sibley is seeking class action status against document-sharing website Scribd in a Texas federal court. The charge: Scribd makes it just too easy to upload copyrighted content without permission, and the company should be held liable. We have long said that the DMCA's "safe harbour" provisions which protects websites such as Scribd is reactive and not proactive and act after the horse has bolted. The lawyers are used to controversy and could be said to court it having been those that defended Jammie Thomas against the RIAA.

They now represent Elaine Scott, a Houston author who found her entire book ‘Stocks and bonds: profits and losses’ available for download on Scribd and that the book had been downloaded over 100 times. The case is not about the prompt action on take down but the fact that it was put up in the first place under a ‘safe harbour’ protection and profiting from them until a copyright issues a take down notice. The onus they say and we agree should not be on the rights owners. Kiwi Camara, Scott's lawyer, is quoted in Ars Technica saying, "The West coast technology industry has produced a number of startup firms premised on the notion that commercial copyright infringement is not illegal unless and until the injured party discovers and complains of the infringing activity and the infringer fails to respond to such complaints... Scribd, is one such egregious infringer."

Interestingly he contends that Scribd isn't a "service provider" at all, but a publisher—which would remove the DMCA immunity—and also that Scribd by displaying adverts makes money directly off of infringing works, which could also threaten safe harbour protection.

Wattpad Goes Android

Love them or hate them the self publishing online services are here. Some may say that the likes of Scribd and Wattpad often hide behind their DMCA (digital Millennium Copyright Act)safe harbour sanctuaries and act irresponsibly towards vetting content, others that the service they offer is long overdue and its up to copyright owners to police infringement not the service provider. Its an argument that isn’t going away and is at the heart of much infringement debate – do take down notices work or are they trying to bolt the stable doors after the horse has bolted?

Today Wattpad announced the availability of its popular mobile application on Google’s Android Market. This will now comptiment its iphone and Blackberry and Nokia Ovi applications and means that they have the major mobile smartphones covered. Wattpad claim to generate more than 2.5M visits, 20M pageviews per month from its website and mobile site and over 3 million downloads.

Scribd and Wattpad could clearly be very positive forces into the future and offer both writers and publishers new opportunities. The question is whether the content can be controlled proactively and they can become a trusted player, or whether they stay on the fringe offering so much but never quite trusted by all.

Scribd today iTunes Tomorrow?

Last December Social publishing firm Scribd announced that it has raised $9 million and had hired George Consagra, former chief operating officer of Bebo, as its president. Since then the news has been ‘mixed’, it now claims 60 million visitors a month, has got some support from some publishers uploading their content and on the downside a significant amount of bad press over their hosting of copyright infringed materials. Inherently it is a document sharing site – a YouTube for documents, letting anyone upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail. It claims to have amassed 35 billion words in a mix of books, PowerPoint presentations, legal briefs, and other documents.

Today Scribd has moved up a gear announcing it will be an ecommerce site enabling publishers, authors and owners to charge for their materials so moving from YouTube to eBay, or as they hope iTunes. A logical step and one that should result in a deluge of previously self published materials, publisher experiments and without doubt some more questionable pirate works. The new store will enable users to set their own price for their work and keep 80% of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with DRM security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Scribd has also announced plans for an application for the iPhone next month and that it is also building a database of copyrighted works in an attempt to help filter out pirate works and negate publisher’s fears and frustrations. Scribd may hope that by enabling publisher to make money it can mollify its critics but may be hard for publishers to back a venture that is at the same time seen to be undermining them.

The interesting aspect will be not the mainstream publishing works which will no doubt be poured in by many eager to see if they can make extra revenue at no cost but with self published works. Will it change the vanity market from print on demand to online? Will it bring more short stories or serialised stories to the market? Will it undermine the position of the publisher who will now clearly site alongside every budding author on what may be a level playing field? Will it provide the market tested slushpile of the future? Will the database of copyright be seen to perform or undermine its adoption?

We now await the market reaction and obvious response from others such as Wattpad.

Book Piracy: A Case of Whack-A-Mole

Last month we wrote about the issue of digital book piracy and along with others such as Peter Cox at Litopia, raised the bar on the public awareness of the issue. Today the New York Times wrote an article ‘Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web’, which again raises the agenda further.

One quote from the article which can best describe the problem was made by Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates who said “It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole, you knock one down and five more spring up.”

When Litopia raised the issue of Scribd, some said it was unfair and the site shouldn’t be targeted, as it tried and was responsive when take down notices were sent. Others said the same about Wattpad. Our defence would be to browse Scribd and see the volume of taken downs that have been actioned and where they state the file has been removed. There isn’t a takedown without an infringement!

Some say that piracy is small and only the same as shrinkage and theft in physical stores, but is that a real excuse, or merely a case of apathy?

Plead all they can, the sites simply allow any material to be posted and only if it is a know infringement, or they get a take down notice, do they respond. They may claim that taking proactive action could land them with the liability so to take no proactive action is safer. The problem is that the mechanism of the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act) is inherently flawed, as it is retrospective action and is like trying to put the cat back in the bag – its too late its out its out and having kittens!

The efforts being expended by publishers in tracking infringements is growing, with many large house having to have dedicated staff continuingly trawling, tracking and issuing take down notices. This may work for the large corporate, but is it realistic across the thousands of medium or small publishers? Some may say that it’s like giving each a shovel and asking them to all to ‘wack-a-mole’?

Today we are only talking about whole works and not even attempting to cover part works or content of sufficient size to warrant permissions. Rather than build infringement databases that just generate take down notices, why not address the problem. We are trying to manage a rights business with no rights management.

This has been raised over and over and the proposed BRR registry isn’t the answer but only part of the answer. We have bibliographic agencies who catalogue all titles. We know that you can’t resell a digital file and each rendition and manifestation is unique. We have identifiers which identify genuine booksellers, publishers, libraries. Yet we can’t join the dots up and create a proactive environment. Some may say that we let businesses hide behind ineffective DCMA.

If leadership is not taken, then we may all find that ‘Whack-a-Mole’ becomes an increasing part of the publishing business.

Sky News on Book Piracy

Sky News coverage of Scribd piracy debate

http://tinyurl.com/dxktro

Scribd Trips Out of Litopia

Litopia After Dark started as usual last night and had a special guest – Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd. Having identified and highlighted the issue of copyright infringement in the UK media, Peter Cox had invited Adler to come on the show and discuss the issue of digital piracy on his site. Adler who had agreed, didn’t show and his direct line went straight to his answering machine and record.

Did he get the time wrong? Was he called to an urgent meeting? Did he feel that there was little to answer and little point to the exercise? We will not know what his motives were only the sound of his answering machine.

Whether we like it or not, we all have to face our critics, but more importantly some would say that we must face them when we are found to be in a questionable position. Whatever the rights or wrongs, Scribd had been found displaying copyrighted materials, which could be copied and further infringed. Scribd had an opportunity to support and been seen to support copyright protection.

Book publishing is at a digital turning point where the door of opportunity is opening, but it is also opening the door of infringement. We have seen the damage done by the pirates to other media sectors and should be taking steps to minimise the risk to book publishing. Is the threat new – no. Can we stop books being scanned – no. Can we stop infringement – no, but we can make it difficult.

So we need to ensure digital copies of books are not pirated. We will never stop the hardened copier be they malicious or professional and stopping ordinary consumers has posed a challenge to other media sectors. In these days when it costs relatively small amounts to scan and digitise books its not the digital renditions that are the threat but the physical ones. Watermarking physical copies may help but we would suggest it is inappropriate and ineffective – if they want to scan it they will.

Some would suggest that publishers such as Random House and Simon and Schuster should reconsider their new arrangements with Scribd and others until such time that they have taken proactive actions to clean up their site?

Today we operate a take down notice approach covered by laws such as the DMCA. Yes it works and often the offending material is taken down promptly, but it may be only one manifestation or instance and more importantly, its reactive not proactive. Once the cat is out the bag for a minute its likely to have many digital kittens.

We believe that unlike physical copies of books it is impossible under copyright to resell a digital rendition or make a copy of it to share with others. Obviously public domain works have different issues. So if that is correct, or we would suggest half correct, why not establish a seller licence or approved seller policy. Scribd, eBay, Wattpad whoever can block all digital renditions of books being sold, posted, linked, uploaded unless from an authorised licensed body. In a digital world this is not difficult to achieve if the will is there. Ok there will be ways around it and it may cost money, but its better than expecting thousands of copyright owners to check thousands of sites everyday and issue potentially hundreds or thousands of take down notices after the cat is out of the bag.

More Digital Piracy

Last week we reported on the questionable ebooks for sale on eBay, now today the Times covers similar abuse on Scribd.com ‘Authors fight free books site Scribd for ‘pirating’ their work’ where the paper found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s World without End among many bestselling titles available. The Californian Scribd website claims to be the most popular literary site in the world attracting some 55 million visitors a month.

Scribd operates a ‘notice and takedown system’ under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means that the site is not held liable for actions of its users of which it is not aware. However, are publisher now to employ watchers who sole job is to search and discover infringement and serve notices? Some would say that many already do and their associations are very active but surely the service providers must know that content is illegal or at best dubious. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to spot the questionable items on eBay so why are they allowed to place them?

Everyone’s worst nightmare is that books follow the same route as music and instead of being ripped off the books are merely scanned. Some would argue that by imposing strict DRM you invite the pirates in and others that without DRM you invite the pirates in. What is clear is that digital books are now visible and the cracks unfortunately are starting to appear. We can lock up the digital copy with DRM, embed digital watermarks but the physical copy can be still scanned by increasingly sophisticated scanners. Many of the books that are raising eyebrows are not available today digitally so it’s fair to assume the source is the physical book.

Scribd: Noise or News?

The announcement that a group of major trade publishers were embracing Scribd as a means of promoting and distributing books was interesting. The players include Random House and Simon and Schuster and therefore carry weight. The Scribd service has collected much in its short time and could be described by some as a virtual filing cabinet of stuff ranging from powerpoint presentation, school reports, essays, memos etc.

It has ebooks which can be best described as somewhat long tail and which often expose limited views of stuff you would frankly aviod if you weren’t desperate to pass time.

So we have a repository that can be filled with widgets and ebooks and other book stuff but will that lead to sales and traction or is it merely scattering seeds and hoping for some to take?

Scribd does present a good opportunity to increase viral marketing into social networks and create recommendations but does it pass the ‘so what’ test? Today Scribd remains unprofitable and is still supported by its $14million initial Venture capital

Textbook Piracy

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the increasing number of college students that are downloading illegal copies of textbooks using the same file-trading technologies used to download other media. Textbook Torrents, is one of the sites being used and is reported as promising, ‘more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations.’ They even incite students to start scanning their textbooks, "Scan as many of your other textbooks as you can, and put them up here for others to benefit from. There aren't very many scanned texts out there, so let's change that." Also on the site's forums users often list the books they would like to see uploaded.

The AAP’s director of digital policy, Edward McCoyd is reported saying on illegal files that, ‘In any given two-week period we found from 60,000 files all the way up to 250,000 files.’



Scribd, a document-sharing Web site that opened this year is also mentioned. Scribd promises to remove any content that is uploaded without the copyright holder's permission and banning users that repeatedly abuse that rule.

So far, publishers have largely acted on an ad hoc basis and targeted the sites making the material available, rather than the students themselves.

What we are seeing is de javu. We saw the same in music with the early Napster and Kazza services and although they were different, the drive was the same. If the content isn’t available someone will make it available. If you overprice or value it someone will do it cheaper. If you lock it up and restrict access and usage, someone will free it. Today Academic text is were the most digital content and activity is and it interesting that the problems are now starting to be very visible in this sector. What does this say of the other publishing sectors, particularly Trade?

Scanning a book isn’t a simple task and takes time and effort but when the content isn’t there in the format required, some people will do it themselves, and then they will share it. The current dearth of trade digital content has to be addressed and the existing channels fully supported. We also can't expect consumers to always understand and respect territorial restrictions in a global digital environment.

We can’t expect consumers to buy ereaders in the current content vacuum, as the potential consequences may be bigger than the investments that some are apprehensive about today.