Analysis: eBooks making same mistakes as music industry

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 31 Oct 2007 at 10:16

It's no wonder the book trade wants to keep its wares locked down - the mark-up is enormous. Go to Amazon in the US and Patricia Cornwell's latest tome At Risk can be snapped up for $8, but over at Mobipocket - a French subsidiary of the online retailer - the same eBook costs $22.

If these were audio books, with the associated cost of hiring a narrator, studio and producer then the difference could possibly be justified, but these are bog-standard text files without printing or distribution costs. "The cost is fairly arbitrary," says Clare Christian, MD and publishing director of The Friday Project, a London publisher. "As an industry, we're still finding our feet. They could be clawing back some of the R&D, but it's still too expensive."

Charles Wright, an eBook convert, is typical when he says, "I've never paid for an eBook; there's plenty of free stuff out there, either from libraries or illegal downloads."

There are obvious parallels to be drawn with the ham-fisted way the music industry has tackled the problem of copy protection in recent times, and it seems book publishers haven't learned from this as they make the same mistakes. "They're trying to learn from the history of music - they know there's a threat but they don't know what to do about it," says Christian. "It's an archaic industry, they're dinosaurs really, terrified of anything that threatens their market - they don't want to give anything away."

Given the right tools, such as the locked-down software from Adobe and Amazon, they won't have to, but it won't stop consumers voting with their feet.