All I Want For Christmas Are E-Books
So e-books are taking over the world. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a good thing (readers who travel) or a very bad thing (publishers). Either way, the genie is out of the bottle for good. The big challenge is how to tap into the gift market.
If I purchase a p-book (you know, the traditional paper kind), I can read it myself, lend it to others, or give it away. There’s a lot of value in all three of those options. When I purchase an e-book, leaving aside the problem of being trapped on one type of e-reader, I can mainly just read it myself. That’s pretty limiting to the expansion of the market.
Barnes and Noble have tackled the lending issue with the Nook, which lets you lend an e-book to another Nook owner. While the book is out on loan, you get locked out of reading it yourself. But the loan feature has some major flaws, including the fact that you can only lend an e-book title once and there’s a two-week limit to the loan period. Who reads a loaned book in 2 weeks?
So far, no one has created a legal way for the general public to give e-books as gifts. There are ways to cheat to provide free copies to your friends, but that certainly isn’t happy news for either authors or publishers.
The illicit trading of music files is one of the ways that MP3s permanently transformed the music industry. In response, Apple started iTunes and legitimized the buying of music in single tracks. Now a whole “good” portion of the population is comfortable buying music online. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t solved the issue of giving music as a gift, other than offering the ubiquitous gift card. E-books suffer the same fate.
Trouble is, gift cards don’t create emotional connections to a personally selected item, like a particular book can. With books being a popular gift (and my favorite), this is a big issue to solve. Wish I knew how to crack this one. I’d be sitting pretty on the royalties.
UPDATE – Sep. 29, 2010: Just discovered that Apple iTunes offers this service for gifting songs, so hopefully they can lead the way with e-books as well!
UPDATE – Nov. 19, 2010: And now the two big main players (Kindle and Kobo) are both offering this option. Love it!
Tags: Apple iBookstore, e-books, giving an ebook, lending an ebook, piracy
August 25th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
The key is figure out a way to get the publishers to double dip on e-book sales. Something that they currently can’t do.
I’m confused on why publishers need third party vendors like Amazon, Barnes, Chapters, etc to sell e-books. Shouldn’t they setup their own e-stores, sell the books directly to individuals with proper e-reader devices. That way they could purchase back e-books flea market style from users and transfer that license to another user at full price.
The original purchaser feels like they got a deal because they got some money back, albeit just a few dollars. While the publisher is getting full kit on the next sale. This is a better deal they are getting with Amazon, etc.
August 25th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Hi Scott – thanks for your comments. The biggest challenge is how publishers are going to reinvent themselves to the new market. Traditionally they were the “conduit” for written communication. They were needed because of the sheer challenge of production and distribution.
The question isn’t why don’t publishers work around 3rd-party distributers (some of them are doing this), but more why don’t writers work around publishers. Concentrating distribution for ease of sales can make sense (Amazon has proven that for independent publishers and writers).
Publishers need to create a new value proposition to guarantee their existence. Much as record companies are still reinventing their value proposition to music artists.
Thanks for engaging!
November 22nd, 2010 at 5:07 pm
[...] — just in time for the Christmas buying season — a feature that allows people to give e-books as gifts, an e-reader functionality matched only by Kobo. If the Kobo can continue to grow, it has a good [...]