Fearmongering: Kindle Lending Feature Will Lead To 'Lost' Book Sales?
from the and-burn-down-the-libraries dept
We've already pointed out how Amazon's new "lending" feature for Kindle ebooks is extremely limited, in such a way that it's barely useful, but already we're seeing fearmongering about how that feature is going to create "lost" book sales. Glyn Moody points us to an article at The Next Web, which discusses how some folks have formed a "lending club" on Facebook, so that they can find a larger pool of people to lend books to and from. And, the article's author warns, this inevitably means "lost" book sales:Whether Amazon anticipated users organising themselves into a lending club or not, we're not sure but it's likely to result in many lost sales. After all, most books can be comfortably read in 14 days. If all you need to do to get hold of Kindle books is to request a loan from a stranger online, how many will you actually bother to buy?The article goes on to ask: "can Amazon really do anything to stop this growing?" and wonders if publishers will kill off this feature entirely.
Let's try rewriting that paragraph in a manner that highlights the ridiculousness of the argument:
Whether library organizers anticipated users taking out books or not, we're not sure but it's likely to result in many lost sales. After all, most books can be comfortably read in 14 days. If all you need to do to get a hold of books is to go to the library and take one out, how many will actually bother to buy?And yet, libraries did not kill book sales. At all. Separately, one of the reasons why I still haven't joined the ebook parade is that I like being able to actually lend out books to others. So, by the argument above, it's the DRM feature on ebooks today that has meant "lost sales." So perhaps we should just get rid of that? Limiting the usefulness of ebooks with crazy restrictions makes them a lot less valuable, meaning decreased sales. Ignoring that and thinking that only this sort of extremely limited lending will somehow harm ebook sales is pure fearmongering and is based on very little evidence.
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I hope I won't need to hack the Kindle too...
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Re: lost sales?
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Go get any book you like - try Project Gutenberg and go get something to translate it and just copy it via USB - works a treat.
Of course the same thing would also work with any ebook obtained from sources, shall we say, less reputable than Gutenberg (of which there are many), so it kinda makes the whole DRM thing look faintly ridiculous. Given the ease, I'm not sure how making a legitimately bought book far less attractive than a less legitimate one works as a good business model no matter how much (imaginary) money is "lost" on sales.
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The rule of thumb when dealing with DRM, and mentioned here many times - it only affects legitimate customers. Those who "pirate" will never be affected by DRM so long as one unprotected copy exists, and unbreakable DRM has no yet been invented (and almost certainly never will).
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I've given up hope for sensible options from these people.
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You have to tell them "No, that does NOT equal a lost sale, no more than someone allowing their brother/sister to play their copy of a game does!" and slap them down with the law, by ILLEGALIZING DRM PERIOD!
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Re: "wow, reason 10000000000000001 to pirate something." (Anon..Coward #2)
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Re: Re: "wow, reason 10000000000000001 to pirate something." (Anon..Coward #2)
Of course, I mainly buy second hand books right now (new paperbacks are way too expensive), so I'm probably a "pirate" according to these people anyway...
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the price is the problem
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Re: the price is the problem
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Home Taping is Killing Music...
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The real volume is in books purchased by individuals. Libraries are a few thousand copies, public sales are in the hundreds of thousands. Picture a future where Kindle is pretty much the standard. 10% of the people who buy the book join on of these clubs and make their books available online to strangers. That makes possibly tens of copies made available to anyone else in the group. Everything shifts. Suddenly, you have access to 10,000 potential copies of the book, which are all lent around as many times as they can. You almost always get the book you want right now. On that 14 day schedule, the 10,000 books have 260,000 potential readers in a year.
The libraries? a couple of thousand books, getting about 10 reads a year... 20,000. Let's be generous and say 26,000 reads a year.
So the Kindle just magnified the issue by the scale of 10.
This is a similar issue to why 70s and 80s mix tapes were not a very big issue, but the current level of piracy is. The scale of the copying, the scale of the use is big, that it has to have a negative effect on sales.
In the end, sharing is something you might do with a close friend once in a while, in the same manner you might pass a book onto a family member months after you finish reading it. The only system as discussed would allow everyone to share with anyone without knowing who they are. The scale is beyond the scope of a share with your friends. It's a wholesale bypassing of the sales network.
I can see where they would be concerned, and I can see where TD wouldn't understand why.
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thing of it as relative numbers. Just look around your own city / town / burg. Look at how many libraries there are. Look at how many people in your town might buy a book over a couple of years. It is actually pretty easy to understand the scale issue. I could be off by an order of magnitude and it could be 100 times worse. The Kindle share thing isn't in widescale function yet, it would be like trying to guess music piracy after downloading the first beta of Napster.
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...but of course citing your claims rather than expecting us to just believe your unsubstantiated beliefs is too hard, right?
Whatever you think of TD's claims and Mike's habit of linking back to his own arguments rather than primary sources on historical stories, at least he does actually cite his sources.
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As for the numbers, just go look yourself. Number of public libraries. How many of them each buy 1 copy of a given book? That is your total books in libraries. How many people would buy a book on a Kindle in the future? That potential number is way larger. Compare the two. See what the effects would be if even 10% of those people shared their kindle books with strangers after they finish reading them. Work it out.
Come on Paul, you are smart enough to understand this. Why play so stupid?
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Sorry, "I remember reading it once" is not accurate (the human brain is not a completely reliable source), nor is it anything like what TD does when they, you know, link to external sources. Those links might not always be hard data, but at least they're something tangible to work from.
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No wonder TD does so good, it attracts sheeple. You must be a Republican, your logic matches up perfectly with the Glenn Becks of the world. Don't debate the idea, nit pick on something and avoid actually addressing the situation.
Carry on!
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Maybe if one of you guys presented a point that wasn't based on hearsay, assumptions and "I saw this number once", then maybe a conversation would be easier. In the meantime, I'm sorry that I like to base my views on reality.
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We must all bow before your obviously superior intellect.
You haven't considered that there may be increased sales because of the ease of getting ebooks and storing them on the Kindle.
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So movie rentals follow the same rules?
Or people who watch movies are different from people who read and it is only people who read who would not buy if they could read it elsewhere?
Maybe the auto industry should freak out too since there is rentals, or maybe tool makers should freak out or every other guy that have to compete with rentals of any kind.
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One library? Maybe in Kentucky!
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The hardcover/paperback windowing worked well for many years despite (or perhaps because of--in many cases first reading a book from the library might cause someone to go out and buy the whole series in paperback or the latest in hardcover even) public libraries.
I can't see it working out well for ebooks though.
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What always seems to get missed including possibly by the companies themselves is that the aim is to make money not ensure that every reader of every book pays you to do so. In your scenario you see it as a problem that 10 times as many people read the book for free? How is that bad if the ebook cost you 1/10000th of the cost of a paper book to produce? 1/10th of the people buying it, even for 1/10th the price of a paper book still gets you more profit than you were getting. And as always you don't factor in the 260,000 people you mentioned buying books they wouldn't ordinarily have bought because the community of like minded people they share with led them to obscure authors they otherwise would never have bothered with.
Sure some people will only ever read books for free, but why do you care as long as you are making a profit on the deal? Embrace the reality of technology that's not going to go away, deal with it and you get to make more money or at least get to continue making some money. Play King Canute and rail against the tide and you lose it ultimately.
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Yeah, right. In hindsight maybe, but nobody told the industry at the time when they were busy crapping their pants, nor the movie industry at the time for that matter. They both tried banning tapes and recorders, launched idiotic propaganda campaigns and refused to release content in many cases.
But, both industries came through OK in the end, making higher profits in the 90s than they had before. You know how? By instead of cowering in a corner, trying to attack and ban the new technology, they embraced it. They changed their business models to do so (less so with the music people, admittedly). They offered products people wanted that the pirates either couldn't copy, or which added extra value over and above the pirated version.
That's all that's needed now. They've tried the King Canute act, and it's been exactly as ineffective as it was back then. Maybe it's time for them to try the tactics that let them succeed previously.
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Libraries would have had to fight for existence if copyright of today was rule when starting
Today we would have folks trying to label members of the "junto" as criminals in hopes of getting their activities outlawed
I am afraid today's courts might well go along with it. Congress would, certainly.
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2. Download copy of book from nefarious underworld place of your choice to a device capable of reading it.
3. Delete book and return library book.
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I don't see how that's at all the same thing.
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Really? Guess what? There are a finite number of books available on the planet too!
Yet, book sales continue, libraries get used, people even get their names on waiting lists for books - voluntarily!
I'm not sure you're really making a point at all here unless your point is that libraries aren't all that convenient for you, personally.
If you want a copy of the book to keep - GO BUY ONE! If you just want to read it, borrow it from a friend in the cloud. You may decide you like a book so much you end up buying it after you read it the first time.
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Guess how much money an artist (or more likely, a corporation) usually makes on that.
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People should go there and donate their time to translate and do voice overs of thousands of books that are free and probably will give you a lifetime of good entertainment.
Now that is real entertainment isn't?
No DRM, no restrictions and no one threatening you or calling you names, why would people give any money to crooks that want to slave us and don't respect us?
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Killing the Goose...
People learn to enjoy reading by doing a lot of reading for entertainment. This requires access to a lot of books. currently, people get these books by borrowing from the school library, borrowing from the local library, borrowing from parents, etc. Nobody pays up front for all the books they read while learning to enjoy reading.
Those `freeloaders` then become the next generation of book buyers. If the publishing industry eliminates all the `freeloaders`, they will also find themselves without customers one generation later. This would be a huge loss, not just to the publishers who would go out of business, but also to authors who lose a distribution channel, readers who lose a source of entertainment, and even other industries, like the movie industry that would lose a ready-made source of popular stories.
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Something I didn't see mentioned...
To be fair, I am a happy Kindle owner. That being said, I HATE DRM with a passion, so I backup all of my books after stripping the DRM from them.
I don't know if I will take advantage of the lending feature on the Kindle or not, but I will certainly watch to see how it plays out.
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People can publish their OWN books today very easily, therefore the 'publishing industry' isn't really needed anymore.
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Just a quick comment
Fear of a digital planet.
check out the source code of a program called 'cp' its totally illegal - check source for 'mv' as legal alternative.
bits may not be replicated in sequence without destroying the original bits within a 10 second period
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