AdAdvantageSuccess Home Page for Internet Marketers!

Home   |   Marketing eCourse   |   Online Marketing Kit   |   Web Hosting   |   Links   |   ClickBank Portal
Advertising Information   |   Blogging & RSS   |   Branding Information   |   Copywriting  |   Traffic Building
Email Marketing   |   Ezine Publishing   |   Site Promotion   |   PPC Advertising   |   E-Books

eBooks: With Courage and Patience, We Are Getting There


Just how do we make the "e" in e-books stand for "easier"? Well, how about this? Let's scrap the existing digital rights management. Instead everybody in charge of administering DRM would be re-trained overnight as digital priests. They would certify "trustworthiness" to those seeking to download e-books.

Before downloads, customers would be visited by digital priests of their respective religious persuasions. With great pomp and circumstance, they would "pledge" not to forward their books to everybody in the world without compensating the authors and publishers. Break the pledge, and you'd find yourself in purgatory, hand-copying old encyclopedias.

Or maybe a totalitarian law would work instead. First-offenders guilty of unlawful content reproduction would have to wear a scratchy wool eye patch for one year. For a second crime, the patch would be now a mask. We could set up toll-free hot-lines and reward people for spying on their neighbors.

The Real Point

See my real point here? No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip--this complicated issue can't be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and fear. But e-book standards for DRM and formats would help. I am counting on the laws of capitalism, which always prevail. A demand will eventually be met with supply, and I'm hoping that the right set of standard will break from the pack and simplify the digital content landscape. That will be a blessed day. Microsoft, Adobe and Palm and the others now have their own special technology fee tacked on to the price of e-books. And that complicates merchandising. We e-book merchants would rather not have multiple cost structures for the same e-book.

Nor do we like consumers to be limited to books published in their chosen format or suffer multiple technologies just to enjoy a story. Nothing is more frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld and forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don't just hear customers complaints--I myself own a handheld.

Villains not

Who's to blame? I'm thinking nobody. Many authors and publishers break out in a cold sweat at just the mention of the word "Napster" and can you blame them? Their livelihood is at stake. They should, however, strive to better satisfy consumers desire for more content in digital form.

If a publisher has faith in their work, it's now accepted that expanding to e-book will deliver extra profit and drive hardback sales. Not all understand this. I still hear some authors express misguided fear that e-books will cannibalize their hardback sales. Publishing is not a zero-sum game, however--and that actually can be good. E-books add incremental value to the equation. Granted, companies tasked with encrypting content for them are an easy target, for they create the hoops through which we must jump. But the DRM heavyweights like Microsoft, Adobe and eReader are simply business people satisfying a need with existing technology.

No glass chin

Let there be no mistake, the future is bright for e-books--sales are on a steady rise. The industry took a couple of jabs during the Internet correction, but you'll find no glass chin here. More students are beginning to see e-books as an alternative for those pricey hardback textbooks. The computer savvy are learning the ease in pasting code directly from their favorite Java e-book manual, and there's even speculation that men are reading more romance as they no longer fear being seen with a floral book cover. Moreover, the Tablet PC is maturing, and the publishers are slowly but surely putting even more content in digital form. It takes courage, but we're getting there. Though it is a word often used in excuses, "patience" is needed by digital downloaders, me included.

Article by L. Scott Redford - scott@diesel-ebooks.com Scott is the President of Diesel eBooks with over 35,000 popular and professional eBooks organized by 50 categories. Visit the free download section at http://www.diesel-ebooks.com


MORE RESOURCES:

An ethical question involving ebooks
Christian Science Monitor, MA - 3 hours ago
... on his set last week, garnering more than 200 comments, some of them rather impassioned, with a post entitled “An ethical question involving ebooks. ...


Nintendo to Ship eBooks for Nintendo DS
PC Magazine - Dec 2, 2008
by Philip Kollar, 1up.com As an English major, I've always been excited by the prospect of mixing my love of videogames with my love of fine literature. ...


Time for a good e-book?
MSNBC - 6 hours ago
Research firm iSuppli said earlier this year that the Kindle has "proven there is a viable market for eBooks with shipments expected to reach 1 million ...
eBook Readers At BooksOnBoard Hottest Gift This Season WebWire (press release)
all 2 news articles


paidContent.org - Gaming Roundup: E-Books On Nintendo DS ...
Washington Post, United States - Dec 1, 2008
?Nintendo releases e-Book collection for DS : Move over Kindle, there's a new e-Reader in town?the Nintendo DS. Well ... not quite, but the game giant did ...


Breaking news: eReader format licensed for Stanza on iPhone
jkOnTheRun, Texas - 4 hours ago
The integration of the “Stanza by Fictionwise” eBook store with the Stanza app enables customers to browse and search for eBooks based on title, author, ...


Battle of the eBooks : The Kindle vs Sony Reader vs Rex iLiad vs ...
Shiny Shiny, UK - 2 hours ago
Ebooks are a natural progression for us 21st century folks, who dislike being tied down by clutter. They're light, easy to use and can store sh**loads, ...


The End to End eBook Distribution System Has Arrived.
Emailwire - 12 hours ago
Selling through physical retail channels, publishers can sell eBooks on flash drives, CD’s or blister cards. Publishers can assign activation codes to ...


Elsevier's 'Referex' engineering e-books database adds 300 new titles
EurekAlert (press release), DC - Dec 2, 2008
... today the addition of over 300 new titles from both Elsevier imprints and William Andrew Publishers to its Referex engineering-focused e-books database. ...


Michael Phelps is Sportsman of the Year| Stay Afloat with Payday Loans
Personal Money Store Blog, WA - 4 hours ago
We like to send our Free eBooks with the occasional funny or informative video. We offer ongoing entrepreneurial and money management training eBooks and ...


Read eBooks On Your DS
Cinema Blend - Dec 1, 2008
By Pete Haas: 2008-12-01 17:26:45 Parents, you now have a superficial educational reason for buying your child a DS this holiday season. ...

E-Books - Google News

Home   |   Marketing eCourse   |   Online Marketing Kit   |   Web Hosting   |   Links   |   ClickBank Portal
Advertising Information   |   Blogging & RSS   |   Branding Information   |   Copywriting   |   Traffic Building
Email Marketing   |   Ezine Publishing   |   Site Promotion   |   PPC Advertising   |   E-Books
Copywrite ©      2006 www.AdAdvantageSuccess.com      All Rights Reserved.