e-books done right
Just some impressions from the russian e-book market. Russia is what is called “a reading country”. Books are everywhere and are also cheap, so that most people can afford buying books just for the pleasure of reading. Because of that there is no need to buy “only the good ones”, like in Germany.
And then of course there is book piracy. I would rather call this process “popularization”, but sadly “piracy” still fits it. Since copyright enforcement has been unknown in Russia until recently, an insane amount of books has been digitalized and put into “e-libraries”, special portals for text files, either with or without categorization. Books were provided for people to read, not for any kind of profit — most e-libraries started as private collections.
Digitalization has also been the real deal: a book has been dissected, scanned, OCRed, proof-read etc. Since many books had not been available everywhere, e-libraries became one of the first sources for e-books and books in general. Since the rise of PDAs e-reading became even more popular — downloading books was a snap. It have been Russians who proposed FictionBook, an open XML-based e-book format, which became the de-facto standard for the modern e-libraries.
Someday the copyright holders came after e-libraries. The reaction has been as expected: the books have been removed at first notice, so that court and extreme costs could be avoided. Not every author did complain however, since many people bought paper versions of the books after they’ve read them on their PC — to own the ones they liked. E-books were more like a complete preview version. But the whole situation was still unbareable, since e-libraries had an uncertain legal base, their owners could receive subpoenas etc. Everybody wanted just one thing: e-libraries had to stay, the problem was how to do this right.
The solution has evolved and was as simple as it gets: biggest e-libraries founded a company, which signed contracts with authors willing to have their books online legally and also to get payed for that. There has been no changes in distribution channels (e-libraries), no changes in text format (FictionBook, text, HTML, Word, RTF, RocketBook, PalmDoc, Java etc. still were possible). The only three things that has changed were the price for the books of these particular authors, the quality and the availability date of the books. The price has been set to about a tenth of the retail paper version (e.g. 20 roubles vs. 230 retail paper version), available on the release day directly from the publisher. There is no DRM either, and the best thing is: all these books can be read online for free! If you want to pay for a download, there is a wide selection of payment methods available, from text messages to credit cards. Every downloaded book also stays available online for free in your virtual bookshelf.
This was the only possible solution on russian market. I think this is also an example to follow for every other country, since it’s a win/win situation.
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