Munsey’s Technosnarl

I was thinking of going to the Sony event tomorrow, but I ended up getting Ravens tickets again, so I’ll be maximizing my utility in Crabtown this evening.

Anyway, if someone at the event actually wants to commit journalism, to ameliorate boredom you could ask questions like the following:

• You used to charge as much as $200 a title for publishers to get their titles into your store.  A few publishers, seeking the benefits of exclusivity, paid that amount.  Now you’re going to accept titles from Overdrive, Adobe and perhaps other sources, eliminating the benefits of exclusivity.  Will you be offering refunds?
• The transition from .pdf-sourced .lrx to Adobe .Epub has you going from a 90k-strong title base to a 12k-strong base.  .pdf-sourced .epubs look awful, and have none of the benefits of XML-sourced books, like all the Microsoft Reader files based on the old Open Ebook Specification.  While it’s technically exceedingly easy to convert .lit files to .epub, given that Microsoft pulled out of the IDPF when a slightly modified version of their OEBPS files was approved as “standard” (in a campaign headed by a former IDPF head who now works for Adobe) but not from the ebook market itself, please comment on the legalities of, and your role in, any plan that involves obtaining content for sale on Sony’s device by converting .lit files to Adobe Epub.
• The two companies you’re partnering with, Overdrive and Adobe, have both failed spectacularly in previous efforts to corner the ebook market.  The head of Overdrive has shown himself, repeatedly, to have nothing but contempt for small presses.  So too the head of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Division. As it’s well-known small presses have long memories to go with their tenacity, clearly neither Sony ebook content partner intends seriously to work with the many thousands of presses doing $250k to $2.5 million in sales each year.  Needless to say, Amazon.com, Earth’s largest bookstore, does not share their contempt for small presses.  You’ve promised a clone of Amazon’s DTP store that would address some of the needs of smaller publishers. Has that promise gone away?
• Overdrive and Adobe, your content partners, having, again, failed in the market, appear to have seized upon a regulatory capture strategy, wherein Adobe Epub files will be foisted upon libraries and, later, schools via contracts that keep out other players.  A small segment of the population actually believes that OEBPS-compliant XHTML files wrapped in Adobe’s Adept Digital Rights Managment software are somehow “open,” while OEBPS-compliant XHTML files wrapped in the vendor-specific DRM found in Microsoft’s Reader, Amazon’s Kindle, Mobipocket and especially Topaz formats, Barnes & Noble’s new Ereader, and the forthcoming Google Reader are “closed,” though if a poll were taken it’s a smaller percentage of Americans than those who believe UFOs are real.  You appear to be going along with this charade by deeming your devices to be compliant with an “industry standard,” though no such standard for DRM exists, and, further, Adobe Epub files cannot be read on either the Iphone or the Kindle, the two dominant ebook reading platforms by ebook sales, meaning libraries who jump on Adobe Epub are not really serving their customers.  Have you, despite your 12-year head-start in ebooks, also given up on selling books to the general consumer, and, in effect, want government to bail you out?
• Your latest ebook strategy has you making the device and actually selling titles, Adobe providing DRM, Bowker supplying “neccesary” ISBNs, Overdrive on the back-end, and conversion houses like PublishingDimensions producing the content on behalf of a publisher.  What manner and quantity of drugs must one take before one can actually believe that strategies involving said middlemen, required by “standard” and all taking their cut, will somehow result in lower ebook prices for readers, and more money to publishers and authors, when compared to the Kindle model of publisher+Amazon?

Tags: .Epub, Adobe, Amazon, Bill McCoy, Ebooks, IDPF, Kindle, Layoffs, Overdrive, PublishingDimensions, Sony

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Devices, Ebooks, Odd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.