From: Scott Matthews
Subject: E-Books and P2P
Hey Tim,
I'm engaged in a debate that compares the book publishing industry to music.
Some obvious constraints shield books from P2P (you can't "rip" a book, so to speak; and people don't really want to read e-books anyway). However, it seems to me that your books would be the first to succeed as e-books.
As I understand it, you consider P2P beneficial to the music business, but you avoid it by not offering your books as unbundled paid downloads. (I'm aware of Safari.)
I'm a small software developer (Andromeda), and I consider P2P to be a threat. I've also bought a number of your books over the years, and so I'm a little troubled by a stance that seems to reinforce a culture of disregarding copyrights of authors like me.
I'd love to know what you think.
Scott Matthews
Well, I'm a qualified proponent of P2P. My argument is that if the music industry worked to establish a business model that gave customers what they want at a price they are willing to pay, they wouldn't be competing with free "pirated" services. That's what we're trying to do with Safari and other online publishing initiatives.
I do have concerns about economic disruption during the transition to new business models for online content, and navigating the transition is non-trivial. But publishers have a choice of clinging to the past or embracing the future, and trying to make the transition as gracefully as possible.
So you have to separate my position as a publisher (experimenting with a number of business approaches to see which works best) from my position as an industry commentator (seeing the shape of the future and being clear about the direction we need to go, even if I don't yet know all the details of what's going to get us there).
I'm not at all in support of people disregarding copyright. By the way, many of our books are available on CD, in a form that makes them fairly easy to rip to P2P networks. We face considerable illicit copying, and we regularly ask people to take copies off the net--and very often, they respect our requests. But when they don't, we don't argue for copy protection or stronger laws; we just accept it as a cost of doing business during a transitional period in which we haven't figured out the rules for the next generation of technologies.
However, I also try to tell publishers (of both music and books) that giving away free copies can be a strategic marketing tool, especially for fungible works. A lot of O'Reilly products aren't fungible; if there's only one good book on a topic, and potential customers are highly networked so they will learn about it, giving it away for free reduces the total market. If, on the other hand, you have a product (say fiction--see Baen Books as an example) where there are lots of authors trying to get noticed, free copies can increase your readership. There's no single answer.
I also argue that even on the free services, eventually business models will evolve that will require someone to take over the ecological niche we call publisher. Publishers have evolved on the free content web, because in a flat namespace with huge amounts of content, no one can find anything. So pretending that new technology changes the rules in a fundamental way, rather than just threatening your current business model, is disingenuous. That's the whole point of my Piracy is Progressive Taxation paper.
Tim
Hey Tim, thanks for taking the time. However, I'm afraid that perhaps I wasn't clear enough.
You must know that lots of people like me would prefer to purchase single e-books to keep and read offline. It appears that you're concerned that filesharing (of one sort or another) might have an adverse impact on your legitimate hardcopy/e-book/Safari-service sales. Is that why you don't offer your books as unbundled, pay-for downloads?
I hear a lot about the benefits of P2P. But in the name of moving the dialog forward, it seems only fair to acknowledge the downsides, too.
I also think that coders are traditionally concerned with and respectful of copyright. All too often this issue is cast as an epic struggle between "freedom" and "the RIAA," but we're vulnerable to P2P, too. . . .
Scott
Actually, that's not why we don't do it. It's based on my beliefs about the ultimate failure of the stand-alone e-book model. (Well, maybe not "ultimate." If we ever get a really good e-book device, perhaps epaper, then stand-alone e-books might work.)
There are two reasons why I think stand-alone e-books aren't the way to go:
Cable television shows us that subscription packages are a better business model than pay per view. The current Internet is the equivalent of basic cable, and the premium packages (the movie package, the sports package, etc.) are just starting to be defined. We designed Safari as one of those premium packages--not just one book, but a library of books. We ultimately hope it will become "the technical information library" for the Internet.
That doesn't mean that we won't ultimately do PPV as well, but we want to put most of our effort behind what we think is the superior business model. A service like Safari takes advantage of some of the benefits of the new medium. In particular, you can search across a large database for possible answers, and pay when you are convinced that you have found what you want and are ready to drill down.
From what I know of people who have experimented with a lot of downloadable e-books (and from our own experiments on Amazon), Safari revenues and revenue growth are far ahead of what we would see from downloadable books.
I've always believed that a new medium causes content to morph. E-books are a bit like early movies, which were just filmed plays. Only later were many of the techniques that we take for granted in movies perfected and adopted.
In this sense, Safari is still flawed, since it still emulates the printed book too closely. But as an XML database now containing thousands of the best technical books in print, it's much more amenable to powerful future applications than encrypted PDFs or other stand-alone e-book formats.
We're extremely interested in starting to build services that use the Safari database as a back-end. In short, we believe we're starting down a more interesting evolutionary path.
Tim
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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.
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Dillusion
2003-09-09 18:03:55 anonymous2 [View]
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O'Reilly Ebooks
2003-10-16 15:20:10 camerond [View]
Your comments on ebooks are insightful, but I would like to add my personal experiences as "real-world" dilemmas/opportunities.
I agree with you, that the ebook is still a very much transitional technology, and what we end up with after the dust settles may well have little in common with what people are experimenting with/publishing now. But, we do need something now.
Personally, I like reading paper books better than ebooks, simply because the media is easier on the eyes. But there are many situations in my work where an O'Reilly ebook would be most helpful. When I am travelling, I am often also trying to solve a programming problem to be applied when I return. I carry the lightest laptop I can find, but lugging 15 pounds of books around with me nullifies any advantage I had with the light laptop. Unfortunately there is not always (read almost never) convenient network access over which I could use Safari, and when there is access, it is quite expensive. Having an O'Reilly book on CD would go far in making my trips more tolerable. As far as costs, I would be willing to pay a premium, as I'm sure many, many others would for the convenience.
I know that there is piracy of your ebooks from the "Bookshelf" series, I have written to people at ORA about some particularly blatant sites I have come across. But I would be surprised if the copying from these sites [from people who would otherwise have purchased the books] was significant.
Unfortunately, many of the books which I use on a frequent basis are not in your series for purchase, whereas others of little/no interest are bundled with desirable books. Safari, on the other hand, presents much more choice, but IMHO is designed for professional programmers who can be online constantly, not people like me for whom programming is only an occasional function in the course of their job.
I realize that in designing a product, you have to make choices. But why not give persons who have already purchased particular books the option of creating a custom "bookshelf" from their holdings on CD or by download?
early 1980's and took years to recover as a
similar market transition took place. Publishers,
even forward-looking ones like O'Reilly, are
right to be nervous.
Every video game system since the Atari 2600
computed a cryptographic hash on the contents of the media
(or of an initial portion of the CD or ROM).
Originally, all games were made in house by Atari.
As demand grew, other games companies got in on
the action. Then small developers. And hobbyists
who fancied themselves as game programmers.
Then novices who fancied themselves game programmers.
The 2600 became a platform, just as the net
(Gnutella, FastTrack, HTTP, FTP) is a platform,
rather than a product of specific commercial
interests. Tragedy of the commons kicked it.
It went something like this:
Boom in demand; Segmentation and healthy competition
as Intellivision, Coleco,
and others got in on the action; Rapid inovation;
Lack of quality control as 3rd party developers
play gimmicky angles with cruddy games and
yet-another clones; lack of consumer confidence;
no commercial model for rewarding innovation;
excessive segmentation; no financial reward
or incentive for innovation.
I'm not suggesting that hobbyists can't build
excellent games - some of the best 2600 games
are now hobbyist creations, long after the
fact. Only that new, small companies have no
interest in preserving the commons, and a platform
is a form of commons.
O'Reilly and other publishers offer product.
It is their name brand. Collecting a fee for
for the name brand gives customers a level of
quality assurance. This differentiates ORA's
work from my own documentation efforts, which
can also be found floating around on the
Internet. Work like mine dilutes the value of
content on the Internet, and though inferior
to ORAs, people are as likely to bite on it
rather than hold out. Tragedy of the commons.
Work right now revolves around how to make the
idea of a platform and the idea of a product
compatiable.
I assert that these two distinct entities aren't
compatiable. Not in this way.
If a product is put on a platform, then you have
the tragedy of the commons - money spent doesn't
go towards development of the product, it goes
towards the platform. People pay for Internet
access but not content. They pay for computer
hardware but only games to a lesser degree,
if they pay for them at all.
Building a platform doesn't pay. No single company
made a fortune building the Internet. IBM
didn't take the lions share of the design of the
PC. Atari created the 2600 and found cheap
knock-offs collecting most of the sales of
ROMs for the thing. It makes little sense for
a publisher of music or books to want to support
P2P, thought it is obviously something that
must be delt with.
Cable television isn't a platform. The cable
company controls content to protect its interests -
both politically and quality. They control the
means of access, the fees. You can get
satellite TV, but it is a competiting, though
similar, product. Game consoles as well. You
can't buy XBox games from someone besides
Microsoft, and you can't buy Playstation-2
games from anyone but Sony, but you can pick
which product you want. You'll never see
copyright-challenged content aired on cable, nor will you
see improperly-licensed software for sale in Best Buy.
It is easy to see why some commecial interests
want to turn the Internet into somethine besides
a platform - some proposed RIAA legistation
would let industry pull the plug on your website
without an investigation or excuse.
Safari is a bit of a platform, but it is closed,
so I'm going to call it a product. Even if
multiple publishers are involved. It is exclusive.
Not for the first time, I think ORA is almost dead on.
The Founders Copyright, inexpensive pocket references,
and other ORA innovations make the illicit P2P
nitch smaller (and I'd love to see P2P go legit).
ORA can do nothing about the economy. Programmers
shoudn't be paupers and technical publishers
should be thriving in a modern, scientificly
minded society. Most of all, they aren't trying
to compete in an area where things are traditionally
free - the commons.
Because the Internet is "free" and cheap clones of
things exist and people tend to bite the cheap clone,
the Internet is a currently a lame platform for brand
name product delivery. Just as your cable bill includes
the cost of programming and the access, perhaps ISPs
should make bulk media purchase deals with providers.
It used to be, when you got a dial up account, you got
access to an NNTP server, a Unix shell account that
was set up to do CGI scripting, and everything associated
with a Unix shell. When you move into an apartment,
often it comes with cable, because the apartment management
has made a deal with the cable company (or vice versa)
where by the entire complex gets cable for far less than
if each person would to buy it individually. The cable
company makes more money than they would otherwise, and
the apartment complex has a value added service.
Perhaps access to Safari and similiar collections of
media could be marketed to major and minor ISPs.
Random thoughts, endless rants,
-scott scott@illogics.org