Licensing restrictions for ebooks

It's safe to say that I read a ridiculous amount of material every day. I'm a speed reader by nature, so the 300-500 items I get daily through my RSS feeds don't seem like much. I read so fast that I'd probably be bored otherwise.

It has its drawbacks, of course. It's very nearly pointless for me to buy books casually anymore; they'll last me a few hours, if that, and then I have to either keep them and reread them, or take them to a second hand store or a willing friend. I do enjoy them, but it gets to be a little bit wasteful.

Ebooks were the perfect answer. I could download books to my little iPod touch, and read them when I have an hour or two to spare. I have classics like Sherlock Holmes that I never get tired of, and a few other free titles from Harlequin and whatnot. I didn't feel the need to buy any ebooks, because I hadn't seen any that really caught my interest - or that would justify the cost.

They're very much something to fill the time when I'm bored and out somewhere that has no books or other diversions around. I have said that I'm not all that enthusiastic about ebooks, but again, that's mostly to do with the price vs. functionality; I always have my iPod with me, and although I prefer real books, it doesn't cost me anything to download an app and grab a few out of copyright titles to keep me amused.

All that might have changed today.

I was reading through my feeds, and I happened to come across a post by Natalie Whipple which mentions a book called Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern. Well, suffice to say, she had me at the title - I wanted to read it, and I immediately dropped everything to look at it a little more. Then I decided I really, really wanted to read it - but it looked like the kind of book that would only last me a few hours. No problem, I thought, I can get it on the iPod if it's not too expensive. I won't have another book clogging up the house, and I'll have another happy little diversion for the next time I'm out and about.

After a further investigation, this is what I found:


In case you can't read it, that's Amazon telling me that I can't have the ebook. It's not available in Europe. I could buy the hardback version from Amazon.co.uk for a mere £9.61, but I don't want the hardback. I want the damn ebook, and I want it downloaded to my iPod so I can read it tonight, if I choose - not in two days time when it ships to me.

Hello, Julie Halpern? And her publisher? I want to give you money. I want to buy your ebook. More than that, I want your ebook to be the first one I actually spend money on. Right now, you're stopping me from giving you money, and I have to question what exactly is going on if you're happy with that.

I mean, I do understand that there are licensing restrictions for physical books. You want to be able to sell the rights to publishers in different countries and different languages, even if the distinction between the US and the English-speaking parts of Europe is largely irrelevant. But really, ebooks? From Amazon? The product is exactly the same. The company you're dealing with is exactly the same. The company sells your book outside the US. Why on earth would you only allow them the ebook rights for within the US?

If this were a movie that had just been released in the US and wasn't expected in other markets for a while, people would already be going to their preferred method of piracy to find it. This is because people will get what they want, when they want, in the form that they want, and trying to sell them what you want them to buy is a waste of time if it doesn't match up.

As for me, I'll have to settle for Sherlock Holmes, and accept that I will not be giving my money to Julie Halpern and her publisher for the time being.

[added by edit]

Alright, after reading Natalie's comment below, and commenting myself, I want to set the record straight here. My post above implies that I'm blaming Julie for the lack of her ebook over here.

That's not what I intended.

I apologise for being a bit of a jerk. No excuses; I take this stuff seriously, and getting frustrated is no reason to get pissy as well with someone for a situation out of their control. So - sorry, Julie. Really. I don't blame you at all.

When I asked, "why on earth would you only allow them the ebook rights for within the US?" I thought I was addressing the publisher. It doesn't look like that though, and for that I apologise. I'll be more clear in future.

As penance, I shall order the hardback from Amazon immediately.

Rejections, Rejections

Let's say you're a writer, and you have set your work free into the wilds of the world with the hope that an agent will find their way back to you. Hopefully with a contract in hand, of course. And time goes by, and the silence only grows - but suddenly an email appears! From nowhere! From an AGENT! Stardom is within your grasp, so close you can almost taste the champagne...

No. It's a form rejection.

It's something I have to handle, being an aspiring writer. You deal with it as best you can, hopefully with good grace and a shrug of indifference. Yes, underneath the veneer of professionalism, it feels like a solid punch in the gut. You take the threads of story, you live and breathe for your characters, you forge... well, something you thought was worthwhile. Something good. But, in some way, it wasn't enough.

That's the hardest part for me. I can't know where I went wrong. I only know that I did, and it hurts a little more than it should. But I also know it won't last, because I have other stories to write, and other threads to follow. I think Van Halen said it best - You gotta ro-o-oll with the punches to get to what's real!

It wasn't the Novel, you understand. It was just a short story. When I start getting rejections for the Novel, I'll probably spontaneously combust from agony and disappointment.

However, in any case, I won't be doing what Mr. Patrick Roscoe did! In the category of too-dumb-to-be-let-out-unsupervised, this writer's response to a form rejection is surely a winner. I do so love his use of the phrase, "You lose, silly woman", and the insults he levels at Ms. Lindsay's clients. And the follow-up email... classic stupidity, the like of which you rarely get to read about. It's like watching someone shoot themselves in the foot, and then clean the wound with bleach.

Perhaps the most important things that an aspiring writer can take note of are as follows:

• Agents react badly to insults or snide sarcasm, because they just happen to be human.
  
• Agents talk to each other, and to editors and publishers.
  
• Agents often have blogs that are popular.
• Agents have a hundred other hopeful writers with actual manners in their slush pile who have probably submitted work as good as yours.

In short, all that I have learned so far about agenting and publishing tells me that a writer trades on their reputation, and this is doubly true of aspiring authors like myself. Leaving aside for the moment that Mr. Roscoe was unbelieveably rude to Ms. Lindsay, what on earth was he thinking when he wrote that email? Did he honestly expect her not to reveal his crass behaviour to the world? Did he believe his words were actually justified? One does not simply insult an agent (especially one who works for such an esteemed agency as Fineprint) and expect to walk away with one's reputation intact. Five minutes of anger may have bought him fifteen minutes of fame, but it's probably cost him more than a few chances of publication and, if he routinely conducts himself in this manner, a entire writing career as well.

When I submit my work, I endeavour to follow every guideline, and act with nothing but the highest respect and courtesy towards the submittees. A published author isn't just a person with their name on a book cover; they're also a professional writer, and I think that demands a certain standard of behaviour.

It's alright to rage in private. It's even expected, I would think. But in public, when facing a rejection, it's unacceptable to be anything but businesslike.

Read any good ebooks lately?

The brouhaha over Amazon and the larger publishers setting the price of ebooks has become rather deafening lately. Doom and gloom all around; writers lamenting the death of traditional publishing; the impending Apocalypse. You'd think that everyone has stopped buying books in dead tree form altogether.

Well - it could just be me. I read a lot of publishing blogs, and I get the feeling that many people are uncertain and worried. The Internet wreaked havoc with the recorded music industry after all, and the publishers have had long enough to see how well EMI and Sony are doing with the digital medium. Perhaps they see their own business suffering in the same way. Perhaps they're already forecasting the rates of ebook piracy. Perhaps, perhaps.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the ethics of pirating ebooks when you already own the title in hardcover or paperback. This has already gone around the writers' blogpsphere, and opinion in general seems to be that the Mr. Cohen is talking crazy. The first thing I noticed about the article, unfortunately, is the improper use of the word 'illegal' - downloading a pirated copy of an ebook is copyright infringement, to the best of my knowledge. Illegal and infringing are not the same thing. He also refers to it as theft - again, not the correct term, as theft implies that you have deprived someone else of ownership of an item. A digital ebook copy cannot be stolen, but it can infringe.

Anyway, pointless word games aside - Mr. Cohen states that it is indeed ethical to download a copy of an ebook if you have already purchased the dead tree version, and the writers and publishers that I like to keep tabs on take serious issue with that. Their position, predictably, is that writers and publishers deserve to get paid regardless - that Mr. Cohen seems to be advocating that if you buy a book once, you should automatically gain free access to every version of that book, such as in audiobook format or as a movie or what have you. On one level, they do have a point - but, of course, I don't fully agree with them.

Writers and publishers should get paid, but the point that seems to be missing here is that arguing about being paid will not stop people from pirating books. People will justify it to themselves using Mr. Cohen's rationalisation, or they will do it out of convenience, or they will do it because they have no money, or just because. It can't be stopped, and trying to slow it down may backfire spectacularly - see the RIAA shutting down Napster, for example. People went to the bittorrent networks, and now that that's being restricted or throttled in some places, they're going to VPNs that cannot be traced. The lesson that should be learned here is that trying to get people to pay for music after they've spent years getting it for free is just not a good use of your time, especially when the pirated version is better than yours.

With the price fixing going on at Amazon for ebooks, I'm very much of the opinion that the publishers have not really learned anything. The recorded music industry might be in much better shape if they had made music available cheaply and easily online. It would have sent a great message to consumers - here's the music you want, when you want it; all high quality, with extras like cover art, and it costs very little for this great convenience. But they chose to keep it expensive, and DRM made it inconvenient, and people had no reason to go back to their services no matter how hit and miss pirate material was.

Publishers have the opportunity here to avoid that mistake, but it's not going to happen. Amazon have set the price of ebooks around $9.95, $12,95, $14.95. It varies depending on the release. And you'll buy a Kindle copy that you can only read on your Kindle device, that you can't give to someone else, that you can't doodle in, that is far more fragile, that needs to be charged, that may delete your books without your consent at any time. If it breaks or is stolen, you lose access to your library. And the main trade off is that you can have hundreds of books on one device.

Colour me unimpressed, to be honest. Part of the reason I don't own one already, despite being a geek, is that I don't want to pay for what I view as less functionality. I'd rather have a paper book that doesn't need batteries, that I can spill coffee on without it being a disaster, and that I can sell to a second hand store or give away once I'm done with it. I'd rather have a library all around me instead of one locked up into one little white tablet.

I really think they should drop the average price of ebooks to about $3 to $5 across the board, and less for out of print titles. They should be portable to any device, and DRM free. Publishers should concentrate on making ebooks bought from them a hundred times more convenient than trawling bittorrent networks, and set the prices good and low wherever possible. Offer ebook discounts to book clubs and libraries, for example. Bundle the ebook with the paper version. Let schools pay a set fee for all ebooks released, and let their students order the paper version or audio books at a discount - and include bonus material where you can. Make it simple, make it cheap, make paper books worth hanging on to - and believe me, they have not gone the way of the dodo yet, so there's plenty of space there for a company with a great marketing team to make money.

It galls me that publishers have the most powerful communication medium in the history of mankind at their disposal, where their customers are closer than ever to them and to each other, and all they seem to want to do is drive people farther away. From the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, they seem to want to stop people from spending money on their books; they seem to be working very hard to kill all the wonderful possibilities of the Internet with shortsightedness. I hope I'm wrong, and the Amazon price-fixing works out, but... well. Time will tell, I guess.

On the art of bullshit in advertising

Barry Eisler has an interesting blog post up right now, on the nature of bullshit in advertising. It's such a prevalent theme in advertising and marketing; politically correct, culturally sensitive, badly designed, emotionally appealing, and entirely illogical. I would guess that a fair number of people today don't even see conventional advertising, because it's simply too passé, too bland - or in Barry's case, it sets off their bullshit detector.

I'm almost waiting for companies to realise that advertising needs to become far more sophisticated in how it reaches consumers. Those of us who swim in the seas of the net are used to having control over our browsing experience, for example, and many will use ad blockers to strip offending elements out entirely; money well wasted, there, for the companies who pay Google for a chance to grab attention. An entire generation has grown up with the concept of downloading content on demand, and inevitably such content comes ad-free (courtesy of the pirates, naturally). How do you reach consumers with your products when they can choose to keep you from their gaze, or when they're completely uninterested in you?

Make advertising = content, as Techdirt likes to say. It applies in real life just as much as on the net. Strip out the bullshit, and give consumers a reason to come looking for you. Kulala.com have the right idea - their planes are advertising for them, obviously, but they're also funny and interesting. They draw attention honestly; this is content, after all, and you can enjoy it even if you are not a customer. There are plenty of other examples around. They all seem to be succeeding in their own way.

I hope there's a place for traditional advertising in the future, but I can't help but feel that it will have to change as the world becomes more technologically savvy. It has to be less intrusive, more intelligent, and better designed. Bullshit meters are only getting more sensitive, after all. It's something worrying and exciting at the same time, because I keep thinking about promotional ideas for the Novel - and while mine involve very few traditional avenues, I know publishers will have a whole host of ideas that are 100% focused into them. I worry about the effects of bad advertising, because I've seen it often enough.

I'm probably being pessimistic. This is something to think about after I've gotten an agent and a contract. In the meantime, I'll just have to sort out the look of the blog and see how I get on - but I will have no ads, and there will be no bullshit allowed here. Like Mr. Eisler, this will be my little contribution to the cause of keeping it real.

Something for all those who want to be published

I think I've found the greatest blog in the world.

I usually find great blogs by stumbling from one website to the next in a haphazard way. This one, however, I found after trying once more to find information on submitting to agents and publishers. It's the blog of Lynn Price, the editorial director of Behler Publications, and I must say I learned more in the last two days of reading that I did in the last two months of searching.

It is wonderful - absolutely wonderful - to finally gain insight into the process and business of publishing. Lynn has a great perspective because she is a writer as well, and she understands the (frequently neurotic) creative process.

What really made me jump for joy was the posts where she talks about characters, plots, etc - the nuts and bolts of good writing, and what she, as an editor, looks for in a submission. Behler wouldn't be interested in the Novel - they don't publish that type of work - but good writing doesn't change from one genre to the next, and I trust that what she says is good, solid advice. And I was overjoyed when I examined my own writing, based on that advice, and found that I'm doing it well.

I know I have the skill to be published. Not at the moment, of course - I wouldn't show a second draft of anything to my own mother, let alone an agent - but I'm confident that with a lot of hard work, I can get the Novel into shape and find it a publishing house. And even though it's not possible, I wish it could be Behler.