Vincit Veritas

(For those of you who follow me on Twitter (@brookstravis), some of this may be a re-hash, but I wanted to address the issue in a longer form than Twitter’s 140-character message limit would allow.)

I want to preface what I am about to say with the fact that I am, by no stretch of the imagination, representative of any substantial part of the human population to whom these issues might be relevant. My thoughts are significantly influenced by two aspects of my personality: I’m a geek, and I suffer from OCD—specifically fear of contamination/germs—which makes using paper books, well, problematic. That said, Why don’t we take a look at some of the plethora of problems in the academic eBook arena.

Problem 1: eBook Adoption Rates

Based on my—notably small—experience, the number of academic, book-form publications available in eBook format is extremely low, especially when we’re talking about books from smaller (often “university”) presses. For example, here’s my booklist for the course I’m taking this fall:

• Hero of Our Time (Lermontov), Project Gutenberg, Kindle, iBooks, and B&N versions available
• Companion to Narrative Theory (Phelan), Wiley-Blackwell, Kindle Edition
• Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Herman), Univ. of Nebraska Press, no ebook available
• Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin), Univ. of Minnesota Press, no ebook
• Story & Discourse (Chatman), Cornell Univ. Press, no ebook

Of those five books, only two of them are available from the Kindle, iBooks, or B&N ebook stores, and it’s only one if you don’t count Hero of Our Time, since it’s available from Project Gutenberg. The other, Companion to Narrative Theory, is available from the Kindle store—though, I’ll have more to say about it’s pricing, later.

The remaining three books have no eBook options, whatsoever. Zip. Nada. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

I think the most salient fact about all three of the non-eBook titles is that they’re published by “university” presses. In all three cases, I could not find any apparent eBook strategy or plans, even for new or future titles, nor explanations or justifications for lack thereof.

Problem 2: eBook Price

Even when there is an eBook edition of an academic book available, the price can be an issue. Whereas in the trade and mass-market areas, Amazon, Apple and B&N have been able to “encourage” prices down (particularly compared to hardback cover prices), this does not appear to be the case with academic publications.

As an example, let’s revisit the one book from my booklist in the previous section that is available in a Kindle edition, Phelan’s Companion to Narrative Theory. The print list price is $52.95, while the Kindle edition price is $41.02. That comes out to an approximately 23% “discount” for the electronic edition. Compare this to the difference between the print list price for Rework (the new book from the founders of 37Signals): 

• Print list price: $22.00
• Kindle edition price: $9.99
• % difference: 55%

(I do want to point out that, yes, the actual price, on Amazon, for the print editions of both of these books is less than the list price, and significantly closer to that of the Kindle edition)

An interesting point of comparison for Companion to Narrative Theory is its actual “digital list price” of $174.95, which I can only assume was originally set in relation to the hardcover list price of $183.95 (which, in and of itself is insane, at least to me). Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that the economics of academic publishing are ridiculously different from the trade and mass-market worlds, but almost $200 for one book—was it hand transcribed by Cistercian monks?

One last example, that will also serve as a bridge into our final problem area, is Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction, from Palgrave Macmillan. The paperback print edition lists for $30, and sells for around $25 on Amazon (as of this writing). However, the only electronic edition (an Adobe Digital Editions PDF version) from eBooks.com is $125, same as the hardcover. So, let’s see that’s a discount of -416%. In the retail world, we call that kind of discount a markup.

Problem 3: Format/Seller Availability

Historically, there were three major formats for commercial eBooks: Adobe Digital Editions (DRM-wrapped PDF), Microsoft LIT, and Mobipocket (now Kindle), all with their own various flavors of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and varying lists of supported reading devices. Today, there is a “new” format named ePub, which has seen adoption by two major new players in the eBook market—Apple (iBooks) and B&N (nook). Both stores wrap the ePub documents in their own flavor of DRM (fairplay in Apple’s case), but the underlying document is (or can be) the same among sellers. The Kindle (neé Mobipocket) format distributed by Amazon is a strong exception to this. The good news is that all three of these new sellers also make hardware and cross-platform software readers, and in Apple’s case, devices that can read all three, thanks to free software add-ons (though the lack of a desktop reader for iBooks is a glaring omission).

Now, as I mentioned in Problem 1, the one book on my list that was available in an electronic version (that wasn’t also public domain) was only in Kindle format. This isn’t a huge problem—for me, at least—as my eBook reader of choice is the iPad/iPhone, so I can read books from any of the major stores, but the book I mentioned at the end of the previous section, Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction, is only available in Adobe Digital Editions, a format that isn’t readable on the iPad or Kindle, and requires Adobe’s Digital Editions software or a supported device (one of which is the nook). Hopefully, Palgrave Macmillan will make a version available for the Kindle or iBooks soon, but I’m less than optimistic about this, for one reason—the existence of the Palgrave Connect service, through which they sell ebook access to academic and other institutional customers, using the same DRM scheme and PDF file format. Something tells me this is a fairly lucrative arrangement, and that a move to the Kindle or iBooks stores would only undermine the positioning of that offering by “forcing” them to lower their per-title pricing.

Well, there’s my limited, in no way authoritative look at the problems facing academic eBooks in summer of 2010. I’m about at the end of my purchasing window for my class this fall, so I doubt any of what I’ve presented here will change in time to effect me, and I’ll just have to suffer through another anxious semester of using paper books (though they will, at least, be new), and simply hope for the day when I can save my nerves (and back) by carrying all my reading material around on my iPad.

(~6,588 characters. Really glad I didn’t try to do this all over twitter!)

There’s a tonne of posts today about the slick new Safari Reader feature I linked to yesterday. As someone who enjoys reading decent content online, I totally welcome it. I’ve used readability / Instapaper bookmarklets for some time - both on my Mac and iPhone - and, if I’m honest, I’m surprised…

(The following is based on a comment I left on this blog post)

I want to preface this comment by saying that I disagree with Dr. Paul recently (and not so recently) espoused position on segregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I have to jump in here and point out that nearly all of the response since his appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on May 19 ignores the core component position, as I understand it: that legislatively mandated segregation is and ought to be illegal.

My understanding of Dr. Paul’s argument is that absent government support for segregation (active and passive), social and economic pressures would have been sufficient to end “private” segregation in the South. I think he’s wrong, but we’ll never really know, because it was never tried. We went from state-sanctioned/required segregation (including failure to successfully prosecute people who assaulted and murdered de-segregation advocates) to the “public accommodations” component of the Civil Rights Act.

Again, I vehemently disagree with Dr. Paul on this matter, and believe that the public accommodations component of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was absolutely necessary, and, arguably, the most important single part of it. I just want the debate to be over Dr. Paul’s actual position, not some knee-jerk, didn’t-pay-close-enough-attention reaction to it. I think THAT conversation would benefit everyone.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

kreeger:

“And, obviously, such a meta-platform would be out of Apple’s control. Consider a world where some other company’s cross-platform toolkit proved wildly popular. Then Apple releases major new features to iPhone OS, and that other company’s toolkit is slow to adopt them. At that point, it’s the other company that controls when third-party apps can make use of these features.”

Makes sense to me. Objective-C and Cocoa Touch is what makes the iPhone what it is. If other developers write platforms on top of it that begin to lag or fail, and those become widely adopted, the software base also begins to fail.