Nostalgia City Mysteries

Mark S. Bacon

Category Archives: printed books

10:43 am - March 27, 2013 -

Psst.  Wanna buy a used ebook?

New digital marketplace could upend publishing, threaten authors

First in a series

Amazon and Apple have applied for patents on systems that will permit them to create marketplaces for the sale of used, or perhaps more accurately previously owned, ebooks and music.  Amazon’s patent was approved in late January, Apple’s is pending.  This could snuff creativity and bring an end to the publishing industry.

Or not.

Authors and others have issued dismal predictions based on reasonable assumptions about how a “used” ebook market might work.

Best-selling author Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild, told the New York Times,  “The resale of ebooks would send the price of new books crashing.”

Author and essayist Ayelet Waldman told Jenny Shank, at PBS.org, that the idea of used ebook sales gave her “a chill of foreboding.”

Here’s the issue:  If a bargain-basement priced preowned ebook, identical in every respect to the new ebook, is on sale simultaneously with the original, who would buy the more expensive product?  (Hint: no one except the author’s mother.)  This may sound like a boon for buyers, but it could be the epitaph for writers of flash fiction books and all other forms of written expression as well.

Of course, as a writer friend of mine pointed out, someone would have to buy an original for there to be a  “used” ebook.  How that notion equates to numbers of “new” ebooks that would be sold remains to be seen, as does a long list of possibilities that depend on the way a used ebook marketplace is administered.

In addition to myriad possibilities for a future resale marketplace, are the larger, darker issues of contemporary ethics, the future of copyright laws plus the influence of evolving technology on the latter two subjects.  This article, however, will be limited to looking at some of the ways a used ebook marketplace might operate.ereaders 2 sml

When you buy an ebook today for your iPad, Kindle, Nook or whatever, you’re really just obtaining a license to read it yourself, period.  The book exists in your ereader or in the cloud, but it’s not really your property.  When someone buys an ebook from most legitimate online sellers, the publisher and ultimately the author receives compensation (such as it is).  The proposed ebook systems would permit buyers to resell an ebook, just as they might resell a paper book to a used book store or via eBay or Craigslist.   When a used paper book is sold, the transaction is strictly between buyer and seller.  If ebook resale transactions are conducted similarly, writers and publishers would be out of luck.   And obviously,  the sale of new ebooks would be seriously compromised.

Apple and Amazon are mum on the details of the proposed marketplace systems–or whether they will be implemented at all–but news reports about the patents in the New York Times and elsewhere provide a little information about how ebook sales might be handled.  Both systems, according to David Streitfeld, writing in the Times, would limit resellers to one transaction per book.  That is, someone could not duplicate a book or otherwise sell it more than once.  Once a book was sold, it would disappear from the seller’s ereader account.

This restriction would probably not allay Turow’s fear of crashing prices.  How low would the price of books sink if a used marketplace sprang up?  Hard to predict as this hasn’t happened in the book market before.  But consider one analogy: prescription drugs.  According to the U.S. Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, quoted in an Associated Press report Mar.25, when a generic drug begins to compete with a brand-name drug, “the price drops 85 percent.”

One element in the Apple and Amazon patents could limit the damage.  Tech writer and author David Pogue reported in the New York Times that publishers and bookstores could,  according to the patents, impose minimum prices for used ebooks, although those prices could be reduced over time.

Jeremy Greenfield, writing in Forbes, offers a possible used ebook sale scenario which would see publishers and authors compensated, online bookstores getting a piece of the action and buyers getting cut-priced ebooks.  (One new online company, Redigi, says it will compensate publishers for “used” ebook sales.)  Greenfield’s glimpse  into the future assumes a used ebook would go for 50% of the retail price.  But if prices drop lower–much lower–what would be left to compensate the people who created the work?

One New York Times reader, commenting on a story about the sale of used ebooks, wrote that he has stopped creating language CDs due to piracy.  His lengthy comment makes fascinating reading.  It took him years to write a Chinese language course, he says, and pirate copies can now be obtained online for next to nothing.  What does this say about the effects of a future cut-rate ebook market?  Certainly Amazon and Apple are not Pirate Bay (a popular site offering hijacked digital property), but would writers stop writing if the price of ebooks (and royalties) drops to pennies?   Could publishers impose strict limitations on resales or simply refuse to deal with online bookstores that offer “used” ebooks?

The subject is, at present, mired in questions.

——–

Next time: The Redigi formula, authors and the brave new book world

 

Further questions

Will Amazon and Apple return a portion of the proceeds from the sale of used ebooks back to the publishers as Redigi says it will do?   Will the publishers then give authors a cut?

If Amazon, et. al. sell ebooks for lower prices overall, would profits decline or would a lively resale market actually be a boost for Amazon?

Would people be inclined to buy more ebooks if they knew they could resell them?

What conditions will publishers require in the new, used marketplace?

How do you set the price of a used ebook?  Is there a comparison with the cost of a used paper book in excellent condition?

Will people choose to keep ebook libraries like many people maintain for their paper books?  If so, will that reduce the number of used ebooks available for resale?

 

Reminder on my use of Hyperlinks:   Hyperlinks can be annoying.   A few months back I wrote about  how reading on the Internet is contributing to our shorter attention spans and generally making dunderheads out of us.  Hyperlinks are a convenient way to find out more information about a topic, discover a new resource, etc., and of course they are an element of SEO, important to bloggers.  But hyperlinks in the middle of articles invite the reader to abandon his train of thought–weak though it may be–to virtually dash off in another direction, possibly never to return.  Therefore in this blog, all hyperlinks appear at the end of articles.  You are invited to visit the sites and sources I cite.

Publishers can impose minimum prices for used ebooks

Authors express trepidation

Overview of proposed used ebook systems

One price scenario for used ebooks

Writer to stop writing

Categories: e-readers, Kindle, printed books, royalties, used ebook marketplace Tags: , , , , , , ,
7:24 am - February 27, 2013 -

Donna Leon paints a picture of murder

Beastly Things
by Donna Leon
Atlantic Monthly Press  288 pages
$10.20 paperback  $11.99 Kindle  $13.75 Nook

Police procedurals, sometimes plodding compared to their PI and amateur sleuth cousins, usually follow a cop’s methodical investigation.  In Donna Leon’s Beastly Things, Commissario Guido Brunetti moves one step at a time as he seeks the killer of a kindly veterinarian whose body is found floating in a Venice canal, but it’s Brunetti’s ruminations on official corruption, the human condition, treatment of animals, food and life in the Italian island city that make it a satisfying journey and, at times, a disturbing one.

Leon’s fans will enjoy this 21st installment that revisits familiar characters, although the book can be an easy introduction to the series (as it was for me). Beastly things sml All you need to know to enjoy the novel you’ll learn along the way.

The body pulled from the canal was not immediately identified by the medical examiner except to recognize the deceased’s deformity–extraordinarily thick shoulders and neck–caused by a rare disease.  Ultimately Brunetti identifies the victim as Andrea Nava and learns that he lives not in Venice but in Mestre, a nearby mainland city thus setting up a minor jurisdictional confrontation, almost  obligatory in cop novels.  In an interview with Nava’s wife, Brunetti learns that she was separated from her husband, that her husband was having sex with another woman and that in addition to his veterinary practice, he worked part time in a slaughter house.

The commisario follows up these leads, unconvinced that Nava’s wife had anything to do with his stabbing death.  On the trail of evidence, Brunetti invariably stops off in a café for coffee or wine and a snack with his assistant, Inspector Vianello and goes home for lunch with his wife.

As I read this I realized I was looking look for clues;  I read mysteries expecting the plot to proceed apace or reasonably so.  (Even Poirot keeps the little grey cells moving.)  I try to figure out who did it before the detective does.  To Brunetti, (or Leon) life itself is as important as the case.  We learn Brunetti is not the troubled loner of many detective stories but has a good home life and easy relationship with his wife.  His rich, influential in laws are another story, but they don’t figure heavily in this novel.

He’s also sensitive.  When he interviews Nava’s wife he delays telling her the bad news, hoping she will figure it out first.  His sensitivities–and vulnerabilities–show up clearly in a gruesome slaughter house scene, and after, when Brunetti discusses the values of vegetarianism with his family.

You could call him cynical.  He’s an Italian cop; he sees officialdom as a less than ethical system but he manages to go with the flow without compromising himself.  Or so it seemed in this installment of Leon’s series.  The system he’s a part of is explained in an internal dialog Brunetti has when he’s called into the office of his boss, Vice-Questor Giuseppe Patta.   His boss’s decade-long stay in his position was,

“in anomalous defiance of the rule that high police officials were transferred every few years. Patta’s tenacity in his post had puzzled Brunetti until he realized that the only policemen who were transferred away from cities where they combated crime were those who met with success, especially those who were successful in their opposition to the Mafia.”

Brunetti and Vianello visit Nava’s veterinary office then the slaughterhouse where they meet the boss and his attractive assistant.   The detective pair also interview the vet who worked at the slaughterhouse before Nava and they ultimately uncover a dirty secret.

Leon’s prose is effective and her occasional figurative language imaginative.   When Brunetti finally tells Nava’s wife that he’s dead, she faints in her chair.

“…her head fell against the back of the chair.  Then, like a sweater placed carelessly on a piece of furniture, she slithered to the floor at their feet.”

Humor here is of the nod-your-head-and-smile variety, often reflecting Brunetti’s foibles, such as when he visits a hospital.

            “A lifetime of good health had done nothing to counter the effects of imagination; thus Brunetti was often subject to the attacks of diseases to which he had not been exposed and of which he displayed no symptoms.”

 Brunetti is vaguely reminiscent of Inspector Jules Maigret, commenting on social conventions, popping into convenient cafes for a glass of wine and exploring the fascinating corners of his native city.  Rather than Paris, Venice is Brunetti’s beloved home and the city quickly becomes a character in the book.  Brunetti ponders Venice’s palazzos, churches, bars, and even the bothersome portable vendor stalls that block sidewalks.  In Beastly Things, Leon combines the city’s canals along with its natives, its tourists and its bureaucrats to paint a detailed, intriguing portrait.

For more mystery reviews see the “mystery books” tab

Categories: Kindle, New mystery book, printed books, Reviews of mystery/suspense books Tags: , , ,