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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Law - "Amazon's Kindle to Sell Law Books" and the implications

Last week a reader referred me to this July 10th article in the Wall Street Journal, headed "Amazon's Kindle to Sell Law Books." It discussed the discounts off print prices for digital works from the Practising Law Institute:

For example, the three-volume "Art Law," by Ralph E. Lerner and Judith Bresler, carries a Kindle price of $220 instead of the $275 print list price, while the Kindle edition of "Copyright Law: A Practitioner's Guide," by Bruce P. Keller and Jeffrey P. Cunard, is priced at $236, a 20% discount from the $295 print price.

"There are a lot of practical reasons to believe that the digital market may well be more profitable for publishers of legal, medical and educational texts," said Andrew Frank, a vice president at market-research firm Gartner Inc. "Since these texts are reference material, the ability to index them and set up bookmarks, which you can do easily with the Kindle, will save time and money for users." * * *

Traditionally, lawyers buy PLI books whose binders allow them to insert new material and discard the old. PLI customers typically receive annual supplements priced at $125. With the Kindle, users will be able to delete old versions of their texts and substitute new books. The digital editions are also searchable.

At the time, I responded to the reader:
I own a Kindle and when I read the WSJ article this morning, thought to myself, of all the books I wouldn't want on the Kindle would be an art law book! I can see readiing ICLEF handouts on a Kindle, but not this!

And the price! Maybe I'd buy Art Law for the Kindle, at an 80% discount. Otherwise, I'd want the printed version that I could put stickers in, highlight, and turn to what I wanted in an instant, etc.

I read throw-away mysteries on my Kindle, and won't pay more than $9.95 for them.

Another WSJ story, on July 16th, is headed "Book Smarts? E-Texts Receive Mixed Reviews From Students." Some quotes:
Last August, administrators at Northwest Missouri State University handed 19-year-old Darren Finney a Sony Corp. electronic-book Reader. The assignment for him and 200 other students: Use e-textbooks for studying, instead of heavy hardback texts.

At first, Mr. Finney worried about dropping the glass and metal device as he read. But eventually, the sophomore came to like the Reader. Its keyword search function, he says, was “easier than flipping through the pages of a regular book.” Dozens of other participants, however, dropped out of the program, complaining that the e-texts were awkward and inconvenient.

Nationwide, universities, high schools and elementary schools are launching initiatives like the one at Northwest Missouri State, testing whether electronic texts that can be viewed on e-book readers or on laptop computers can cut costs and improve learning. * * *

Proponents tout e-books’ potential to do things that old-fashioned textbooks can’t. Since e-books aren’t printed and don’t need to be sold through physical distributors, they should theoretically be less expensive than regular books and can save students and schools money. What’s more, e-textbooks are environmentally friendly, can lighten backpacks and keep learning materials current.

But the transition has sparked controversy among some educators. They say that digital reading comes with drawbacks, including an expensive starting price for e-book readers and digital textbooks. Also, publishers make e-texts difficult to share and print, and it is unclear how well students will adapt, some say. The earliest versions of these devices lack highlighting, note-taking and sharing capabilities, and one leading provider’s e-books expire after several months, meaning they can’t be kept for future reference. * * *

E-textbooks may cost only slightly less than the print equivalent. That’s because publishers don’t want to undercut themselves at bookstores, analysts say.

For example, Human Reproductive Biology, a textbook from Elsevier BV’s Academic Press, costs $65 for the Kindle edition, $66 from Sony’s e-book store, and $49 for a 180-day subscription on e-textbook seller CourseSmart.com. A printed edition costs about $72 from various retailers. Tom Rosenthal, senior manager of electronic product sales at Academic Press, says, “At the moment, there’s not a lot of [cost savings]. What people tend to forget is that we have costs beyond printing and warehousing and distribution. We still have other overheads.” * * *

Many e-textbooks can’t be shared, printed or resold. In a recent study of 504 college students by the Student Public Interest Research Group, a consortium of student activists based in Chicago, the organization slammed existing e-textbook efforts such as CourseSmart for “being on the wrong track.” * * *

At colleges, trials of e-textbooks and readers have been mixed. When Northwest Missouri State ran its trial with the Sony Reader last fall, dozens of the 200 participants bailed out after about two weeks. “The students more often than not either suffered through it or went and got physical books,” says Paul Klute, the assistant to the university’s president, who oversees the e-book program. Students didn’t like that they couldn’t flip through random pages, take notes in the margins or highlight text, he says.

Penn State ran a pilot program last fall with 100 of the Sony Reader devices, and found similar results. The devices are good if you’re using them “on a beach or on an airplane,” said Mike Furlough, assistant dean for scholarly communications at Penn State University Libraries. “But not fully functional for a learning environment.”

The ILB has posted in the past about the high cost of textbooks, which has led to a big secondary market in used texts. Publishers have been looking for ways to circumvent that.

Textbooks purchased for the Kindle generally are protected by the publisher's DRM -- this prevents copying the book, selling it to someone else, printing it, etc. In essence, all the purchaser gets for his money is the right to read the book on the Kindle, and sometimes only for a specified time period. Somehow it does not seem that the price the buyer may be asked to pay -- frequently at least 80% of the cost of a printed book that cannot be resold, marked up, etc. -- is reasonable.

Finally, this next item makes clear that the "purchaser" does not "own" the book, but only a limited bundle of rights:

This entry, titiled "Amazon Pulls Already-Purchased Books from Kindle," was posted July 17th on the blog Smarterware. It quotes a David Pogue story in the NY Times. Some quotes:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

[More] Here is an updated version based on the Pogue story, written by Brad Stone. See also this just-posted entry at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 19, 2009 06:46 PM
Posted to General Law Related