e-mail standards.
bando?ers@gmail
fair price), what .govs have not seen fit to make available to the
blind.
Burt Henry
Standing on the moon; where talk is cheap and vission's true...
The case for an e-book standard and the death of DRM
By
Andrew Nusca
| Aug 28, 2009 |
end
blogs/bob_livolsi_headshot_aug09
When are e-books going to start acting like real books?
There are more than 20 different e-book formats in the wild, and
they’re all completely incompatible, according to
SmartPlanet’s own Dana Blankenhorn.
So what’s an avid reader to do?
Bob LiVolsi wants to change that. LiVolsi is the founder and chief
executive of
BooksOnBoard,
the largest independent e-book bookseller. BooksOnBoard was the first
retailer to offer to its readers books in the
EPUB standard,
a free and open file format designed so that consumers can read (and
move) their books wherever they want.
You know, like a real book.
SmartPlanet spoke with LiVolsi about the evolution of the EPUB
standard and why reading an e-book will soon be more rewarding than
reading a dead-tree copy.
SmartPlanet: How did the EPUB standard come to be?
Bob LiVolsi: It’s an interesting challenge in the e-book space. It’s
taken a long time to measure levels of adoption. In 2000 they talked
about the year
of the e-book, but in 2002 lots of publishing jobs were lost in
publishing companies for e-books. So it’s been a long ride.
The effort for a standard has been challenging. When the iTunes thing
washed over the world, the tech guys all wanted to be the next iTunes.
That was a
step back: Amazon’s Kindle is all proprietary; Sony’s original reader
was proprietary; and so forth. All the high-tech guys were forcing a
solution that
worked for them onto readers. To do that is insane, even though
there’s a natural evolution for them in that way.
In fall 2007, EPUB was signed off on, but it was six or seven years of
hard work. The intention was to create a standard so users could read
their books
wherever they wanted to, just like a real book. With the EPUB
standard, that was the underlying core vision.
SP: What about publishers? What’s in it for them?
BL: If publishers could produce all of their books in a single format,
you’d lower their cost. First, format conversion is expensive. Second,
you can manage
ISBNs
better, since a lot of publishers have distinct ISBNs for different
formats.
Everybody thought digital e-books should be less expensive than paper.
[But] the economics of publishing are built around building print.
When you go to publishing an e-book, you need to convert to a new
format, which can be tricky. You have costs, more testing, and several
different formats
[to publish]. It’s all incremental cost. So when [publishers] look at
the total picture, e-books fundamentally add cost, and you need to
sell a lot of
them to make it worthwhile. They’re selling better now.
SP: So why do e-books cost less than traditional books?
BL: Amazon sells books below cost; a lot of those $9.95 books,
particularly those in hardcover that aren’t in paperback yet. Barnes &
Noble and Sony are
doing it, and BooksOnBoard has to do it, too, to offer competitive
prices.
Don’t get me wrong, though — at the same time, Amazon’s done a lot of
good PR for e-books.
About 65 percent of everything we sell right now is Adobe format, and
most of that is EPUB. Roughly half of everything sold is EPUB.
SP: What’s in it for consumers?
BL: We take our customers where they find us. Most of our customers
are middle-class folks that work hard to make a living every day. They
are much more
comfortable in the Adobe format, EPUB. Partly because Adobe has a
history of standardization with PDF. It’s a natural evolution, and I
think that’s why
65 percent of our customers are gravitating toward that — a standard
that will be on more and more devices, rather than less and less.
Say you have a Kindle. If you break it, and you have $500 worth of
books already, you have to buy another Kindle or an iPod. A book is
supposed to be a
$6 decision, not a $300 decision. To know that a book can be read on
multiple devices — a laptop, an e-reader, a phone — adds value. It’s
closer to the
way that customers are used to reading books.
In fact, it’s better than a standard book because it can be read in
multiple places.
Our core customer makes less than $60,000 a year per household. That
$300 decision is an expensive decision. The primary place they read is
a laptop or
desktop or netbook, not e-readers. The primary place readers read is
in bed, even an e-book. Most customers who have netbooks bring them to
bed because
of the back-light.
One author told us she reads e-books in the bathtub and gets out when
the battery runs dead on her notebook.
SP: EPUB-formatted books can be read in many places. What’s the
argument for a dedicated e-reader?
BL: I love
e-Ink,
but people are more and more reading on smartphones and computers. The
major benefit of e-Ink is that you can read in broad daylight. But
most people read
in low light — at home, in the office, on the subway, in their own car
as a passenger. Particularly trade books, fiction, things of that
nature.
The other question about the beach is: what happens when sand gets in
your device? I’m not sure we’ve come up with a solution to that yet.
A lot of people adopt e-books because they’re green, but if you’re
making a $5 decision about a book, but a $400 decision is entirely
different.
I’m delighted with e-readers, but for quite some time yet, the primary
place to read will be netbooks, notebooks and smartphones. With
netbooks, it’s a
convergence thing — you get a lot more value with it [than with an e-
reader].
SP: Are e-books growing in adoption? If so, how much?
BL: We’ve grown nonstop since [we launched, in 2006]. We grow 12 to 15
percent a month, every month. This space has been fairly recession-
proof. We do 24/7
support; that helps.
E-book awareness grew out of the fact that the Kindle sat on Amazon’s
homepage for two years now. Most people thought the e-book and Kindle
were synonymous.
Only now are people becoming aware that they can read their books on
their netbooks. As awareness rises, we’ll see a growth in adoption.
But if you can get a netbook for a couple hundred dollars, it’s a hard
argument for a dedicated device. And there’s less room in the
briefcase, of course.
We’ve focused our business around what the customer wants. We were the
first to ship EPUB books, about 14 months ago. We were one of the
first to offer
DRM-free MP3 audiobook downloads. If the industry focuses on
customers, growth will be there. There’s an appetite for it.
DRM’s a good thing if you’re a huge author, but if you’re a new
author, DRM’s only an impediment. But I don’t know how you split that.
Still, DRM won’t
matter if the customer can get easy access to the books.
SP: Can e-books ever replace the musty bookstore?
BL: You can’t get all the way back to the old bookshop, but many of
our readers use Twitter to interact with each other and us. Always be
courteous, know
that the customer’s always right, and if they can’t figure out the
technology, it’s not the customer’s fault. That’s just one element.
We’re looking for more ways to personalize the experience. But if you
know you can help somebody, that’s pretty comforting.