We have heard all kinds of crazy claims about the negatives of adopting e-books. Every year that goes by, people get more comfortable with the idea of publishing and consuming e-books. Author Jonathan Franzen is certainly not a fan of e-books. In fact, he thinks the world might not work because digital does not feel permanent (at least to him):

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing — that’s reassuring … Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

When changes happen, not everyone reacts to them the same way. Some want to fight the change while others adopt it and use it to their advantage. Mr. Franzen loves the idea of print books being permanent. After all, we could always go back in time to see what a certain author had said about a topic years ago. With e-books, that may be harder to do but not impossible.

Many of us who grew up with printed books have found it hard to switch completely to e-books. The future generations may not spend a whole lot of time around printed books. At the same time, thanks to the richness of the e-book platforms around, they will get a more interactive experience out of their books. Those who do not like the idea of e-books will have enough years to enjoy printed books. The idea of fighting e-books because they are not permanent enough is a bit ridiculous though.

What’s your take?

Those of you who have been following the world of P2P are quite familiar how the clamp down on music piracy got started. For a while, people did get away with downloading music illegally before the lawsuits started to emerge. Devices such as the Kindle are ebook pirates’ best friends. E-book publishers are now claiming that e-book piracy is undermining their profits. Of course, the fact that e-book prices remain quite high has not helped.

As the Daily Mail reports, pirating e-books is not that difficult as long as people do not have a moral issue with the practice:

With a Kindle there is pretty much no protection against pirated books. There are programs which can simply convert any piece of text into the proper format and it will show on your Kindle as if you had bought it

Amazon has been improving its Prime program consistently in the past few months. Amazon Prime members not only get super fast shipping, they also gain access to free movies, TV shows, and e-books to consume on their gadgets. That’s right. As an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow e-books for free. Not all e-books are covered under Kindle Lending Owners’ Library program. But searching for books that are eligible should not have to be difficult.

Amazon has created a section for Prime eligible e-books on its website. At the time of this writing, 5375 e-books are available for free to Amazon Prime customers. You can borrow these books one at a time and read them for free on your Kindle device. This is not a free book ownership program though. So make sure you don’t buy the books you want to borrow by accident. Always look for the above notification before picking up free books on Amazon (just to be on the safe side).

Amazon.com may have had a lot of success selling e-books and Kindles in the U.S. But Jeff Bezos and his team have grander plans for their business. According to Reuters, Amazon will enter the Japanese e-book market with the help of its Kindle devices. Amazon is negotiating with top publishers such as Shogakukan Inc, Shueisha Inc, Kodansha Ltd and Shinchosha Publishing Co to have a smooth landing in the Japanese market.

Just like in the U.S. market, Japanese publishers are concerned about Amazon entering the market and discounting their titles. Nevertheless, Amazon is aiming to take a shot in the Japanese e-book market by the upcoming Christmas. Amazon plans to work with publishers to give them heads up before discounting titles.

The Japanese ebook market was estimated at 65 billion yen ($846 million) earlier this year. E-books have a long way to go to catch printed books and magazines in Japan. Amazon plans to change that. It is not clear which new Kindles, if not all, will make it to Japan.

Credit: WSJ

Should e-books be taxed? When you buy e-books from Amazon, chances are you do not pay taxes on your purchases. Apparently, The Department of Taxation and Finance in New York believes e-books should not be taxed anyway:

Petitioner’s e-books are not tangible and do not include any prewritten computer software. Accordingly, they do not constitute tangible personal property.

Here is how TSB-M defines the characteristics of e-books:

• do not include additional goods and services
• revisions are for the limited purpose of correcting errors
• provided as a single download
• advertised or marketed as an e-book
• have software limitations

Since e-books are not physical products and most of us have already paid taxes on the software or tools that are required to read them, taxing e-books does not seem fair. While it is encouraging to see this approach being taken in NY, we are not confident it will be the case in other states.

In case you missed it, Amazon is among the companies that have been forced to remove “buy” buttons from their iOS apps to avoid having to pay the Apple tax. While it is awful that iPhone and iPad owners won’t be able to buy Kindle e-books from within the Kindle app, the new process is not that difficult either. All you have to do is find your way to Amazon’s Kindle store on your iPad and choose the right device to deliver your e-books to.

You can download your e-book once your iPad syncs with your account. You won’t even have to use a USB cable to make the transfer. The process is a bit more complicated with other e-reader apps. Still, this just goes on to show that while Apple has made it less convenient for its customers to buy e-books on their iOS devices, the process is not impossible. You can still buy ebooks in old versions of your e-reader apps too. 

With Amazon, B&N, and Kobo expected to bring HTML5 versions of their apps to iOS, people won’t have to put up with this process in the future.

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If you are planning to publish your own e-book some time in the future, the above self-publishing guides are well worth reading. Please share your suggestions.

With printed e-books:

• You can buy one with cash, anonymously.
• Then you own it.
• You are not required to sign a license that restricts your use of it.
• The format is known, and no proprietary technology is needed to read the book.
• You can, physically, scan and copy the book, and it’s sometimes lawful under copyright.
• Nobody has the power to destroy your book.

Mr. Stallman makes a lot of good points. E-books do have restrictions on how we can use them. Buyers do not exactly own the titles they pay for. Reselling digital books is not possible at all. He is certainly not a fan of Amazon:

• Amazon requires users to identify themselves to get an ebook.
• In some countries, Amazon says the user does not own the ebook.
• Amazon requires the user to accept a restrictive license on use of the ebook.
• The format is secret, and only proprietary user-restricting software can read it at all.
• To copy the ebook is impossible due to Digital Restrictions Management in the player. and prohibited by the license, which is more restrictive than copyright law.
• Amazon can remotely delete the ebook using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984.

Amazon is not the only party to blame here. We have all seen how greedy some publishers can be. Boycotting e-books is not an idea that will fly unless publishers start messing up with their prices and terms again. E-books won’t be perfect anytime soon. At this point, we all have the option to buy paperback and hardcover books though. The final chapter on this industry is not written yet.

It seems Apple is finally getting ready to be more serious about iBooks. The company plans to attend BookExpo America conference. This is somewhat uncharacteristic for these folks but is a necessary move for a major player in the e-book industry. Amazon still has a commanding lead in the market (58 percent according to a report by PaidContent.org). Apple is behind B&N with only 9% marketshare.

While Apple relies on its retail stores to reach out to its customers, the company needs to put a better effort forward to make iBooks achieve a more respectable status. Bullying publishers into paying up 30% “iOS tax” is a dubious move though.

Many assume that just because Amazon and other companies are selling a ton of e-books, the industry is a finished business. In reality, it is still growing fast. Just like TV and radio evolved into bigger and better things, there is no reason to assume something similar won’t happen to e-books. Enhanced e-books are the future. The good news is the rise of e-books has given many the chance to get involved in this business without having a big publishing team behind them.

Science fiction author David Gerrold seems to agree that e-books may not be finished products at this point:

… Ebooks represent a shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance.  In the past, publishing required a great deal of time and energy and resources for production.  Books and magazines and newspapers needed a whole industry of typesetters, editors, designers, and ultimately publishers who would decide if a book was worthy of that effort.  But ebooks can be published by anyone who can figure out how to use a computer.  Today, with the growing phenomenon of self-publishing, especially in ebook form, anyone can walk into that same library and shove his book onto the shelf between Sartre and Shakespeare, between Dickens and Disch, between Heinlein and Hugo, and claim the credibility of publication…

I have a suspicion that future e-books will offer a very different experience than what we have on the market today. People do still read books these days (sorry Steve Jobs), but they also rely on video, audio, and interactive content to educate themselves. At the end of the day, the e-book reader you hold in your hands won’t matter. The future of e-books is not about whether Kindle is better than the iPad. It is about social, interactive, enhanced content and more of it too.