Case book and treatise authors (like yours truly) have to rely on our publishers to make good decisions about digital texts, because trouble is coming:
Over at Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody makes an important and troubling point: "the only reason why publishers are really interested in electronic books is that they can use DRM to crush sales of used books beneath their foot forever." Probably true — but the publishers may be being shortsighted.
If — sorry, when — someone cracks the DRM for any given textbook and converts it to a Kindle-readable format, the traditional used-book market won't benefit, but neither will the publisher. Consider in this light this NTY story about digital book bootlegging. It's kind of an individual thing right now — as Stephen King says about the book pirates, "most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer" — but if textbooks go digital then such bootlegging will become a full-fledged industry. Somebody will make money off it, but it won't be the textbook publishers.
I have no idea what the answer is, but somebody has got to figure out a way to keep the academic text market from going the way of the music industry.
You would think that West would be on top of this with their new "interactive casebook" series. You'd be wrong, their model for those books is even worse - the electronic copy of the casebook you get is locked on a West server and the pages DRMmed out the wazoo.
I would give various parts of my anatomy to have a Kindle version of my casebooks for class. Unfortunately, I think the piracy is going to have to happen before the textbook publishers get the message, just like it did with the music industry. (Considering that the same groups of cranio-rectally inverted IP lawyers advise both industries, this isn't a surprise.)
Posted by: MasterThief | 05/20/2009 at 09:03 AM