Monday, October 23, 2000		Article

Will Napster happen to e-books?

Whether it is Ed McBain or Colleen McCullough, one author will be $ 1,00,000 better off at the end of next week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, when the biggest literary prize in history will go to the best original electronic book.

But publishers and agents at the show already have 5,00,000 reasons to be interested in e-books: that’s how many downloaded Stephen King’s novel, Riding The Bullet, in its first two days online this summer. Many didn’t pay for it, and lots didn’t read it, but King showed beyond argument that e-books can reach a mass market.

Electronic book publishing has many of the same risks and opportunities as electronic music publishing. By delivering text direct to the reader’s computer screen, the e-book could slash production and distribution costs, and allows creators to deal directly with their audience, bypassing conventional publishers and retailers.

But it also raises the spectre of mass piracy. Phil Rance, founder and managing director of Online Originals, a London-based e-book publisher, sums it up: "No one wants Napster to happen to books."

Indeed, the MP3 saga may have put the frighteners on an industry that generally operates some way behind the "bleeding edge". The Meta Group, a leading US-based market analyst, says publishers are far too concerned about protecting their rights: "We believe all recent legal manoeuvring over

Napster is like putting a finger in a dyke that is already overflowing.

Publishers need to deal with reality and come up with new ways to exploit wide electronic distribution, asking the question: "How can we use the inevitability of wide distribution to our advantage?"

At the moment, most publishers would like to limit the use of e-books to the person who bought them, or to the computer used to download them. If that can be done, e-books become just an extra revenue stream in a publishing industry that would continue to operate the way it does today, according to Terry Robinson, business manager for Adobe’s e-paper group.

"If you’ve cracked the digital rights aspect, you’ve cracked the market," he says.

Robert Nichols, Books Director at BOL — a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, the world’s biggest publishing company — agrees. "Rights management is absolutely critical: that’s the key comfort area they want addressed.

Publishers just pull down the shutters and say, "until copyright is secure, we’re not going to talk."

But Rebecca Ulph, an analyst at Forrester Research’s London office, is not sure the two industries are all that alike. "Something like 7.5 per cent of persons in the UK are responsible for about 75 per cent of the book sales, and until e-books are routinely available to technophobes on the high street, they’re never going to be more than a niche market,’’ she says.

The US sales of dedicated e-book readers costing around $ 199 to $ 599 bear this out. NuvoMedia’s Rocket eBook (www.rocket-ebook.com) and SoftBook Press’s SoftBook Reader (www.softbook.com/reader/) have been slow to take off, and even slower to reach Europe. Last year, the BOL signed a deal with Rocket, and it launched an e-Book in Germany this April, but Nichols says it is unlikely to reach the UK until next year.

The process was slowed after Gemstar International Group Ltd, which produces TV programme guides, took over both NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press at the start of the year. In the USA, Thomson Consumer Electronics has just produced a new model, the RCA eBook, with a built-in 56k modem for downloading content, but it is too early to judge how it will do.

Andrew Rosenheim, managing director of the UK’s Penguin Press and acting head of the company’s digital media operations, believes that if the market is going to take off, it won’t be due to sales of dedicated e-book readers. "I think it’s going to happen in handhelds," he says.

"Convergence is happening. People aren’t going to want to carry a mobile phone and an e-book and a laptop computer. They’ll want something that will do everything and read."

That is the way Microsoft is heading with its PocketPC software, which is used by the Hewlett-Packard Jornada, Casio Cassiopeia and Compaq iPaq palmtop computers launched this summer. The PocketPC software includes electronic organiser functions, e-mail and Web browsing programs, an MP3 player, and Microsoft Reader e-book software. And millions more are already reading documents on Palm and Psion handheld though often not in copy-protected formats.

— By arrangement with
The Guardian