Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Some rambling about eBooks, newspapers and the future

Marco Arment writes that Barnes & Noble will be offering discounts on the Nook to customers who commit to certain periodical subscriptions:

  • $119.88 for a year of People magazine gets a $50 discount off the $250 Tablet.
  • $239.88 for a year of The New York Times gets a $100 discount off the $100 Simple Touch or $200 Color.

To me, this mainly speaks to how disconnected from reality the pricing is of electronic versions of periodicals.1 I’m still waiting these publishers to wake up and listen to what Steve Jobs told them (according to Isaacson) about the price point for an electronic newspaper: $5/month. I like the New York Times and I would be happy to subscribe for that much, but no more. Instead, I’ll make do with what little the NYT iPad app doles out for free, or get my news elsewhere.

Subjectively, I feel like this discount scheme also makes the newspaper appear valuable while making the Nook look cheap. Doesn’t seem great for the latter’s brand image. I guess B&N is getting desperate?

It’s a shame. I like the Nook over the Kindle because it uses ePub, which seems at least a little more future-proof than Amazon’s pointlessly proprietary format2.

Sometimes there may be reasons a company wants to make a proprietary format instead of using an existing standard; mainly when the standard doesn’t do what the company’s product needs to do. As far as I’m aware, the Kindle formats do nothing that isn’t possible in ePub. Obviously, tech companies also love proprietary formats for the evil reason of customer lock-in. Even Steve Jobs was guilty of using customer lock-in as a direct justification (again, according to Isaacson).

Me, I mainly just want to be able to read my books a few years from now.

As a programmer, I can’t help but look at formats through the lens of how easy would this be to reverse-engineer if everyone else on the planet suddenly stopped supporting it and all existing software ceased to function? (Which, it turns out, isn’t really that far-fetched). ePub readers are relatively straightforward to implement, since ePub is mainly just based on HTML and CSS, and we can be reasonably assured that that will be around decades from now–although, perhaps not renderable in perfect, original fidelity.

On the other hand, almost all eBooks, in any format, are wrapped in some kind of DRM these days, which means in practice I mostly don’t end up buying them.3 I have no problem buying, for example, games from Steam, so I guess my expectations differ depending on the medium. But still, for lack of any really appealing options, I’m inclined to root for the companies that are doing the thing closest to what I want. But I also think we’ll somehow fare better if we are able to keep some good competition going, and don’t let any one company ‘win’. My hope is that this will eventually force the different vendors to sell stuff that’s compatible with each other, like what happened with music.

  1. Taking a page from our friends at the cable companies, The Boston Globe (a wholly-owned New York Times subsidiary) offers subscription prices where they charge you more for the web-only version, compared to the bundle that includes the same web access and a dead tree version. It’s like they live in some kind of alternative reality where logic doesn’t apply. ↩︎

  2. Apple’s iBooks also uses ePub, although the iBooks DRM is not compatible with the Nook DRM. If there was no DRM, it would be possible to buy an eBook from Barnes & Noble and read it in iBooks, or buy an eBook from Apple and read on the Nook. And wouldn’t that be interesting? ↩︎

  3. Tools exist to remove DRM from Nook ePubs and Kindle eBooks, but not from iBooks ePubs. Such tools are illegal under the DMCA, which is unfortunate. ↩︎