There is no mechanical determination between technological innovation and economic process of production: innovations become what the actors are economically. How economic actors seize innovations is at least as important as the technological potentials recorded in them. There is no technological determinism mechanics.
At least what I said then that the French publishers had made me a criminal, capable of suppressing DRM an eBook.
past 2 months, I am the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle . The supply of books is huge, instant delivery and books no longer have any weight, except that (very small) machine. Ideal when you are mobile, therefore, or you want to read books in English without having to wait 10 days to be delivered.
I certainly have lied to me and discover a U.S. residency: there are restrictions on the export of certain electronic books (eg Stiglitz and the last Delong). To get them, we must live in the United States.
But this is not much against the desolation of the desert landscape of French publishing. The legal supply of new books is virtually nonexistent. Worse, publishers have failed to agree: there are thus two main sites. First, epagine.fr , which includes notably Gallimard and Seuil, in a weird business model where you buy them at various bookshops in France, we can choose, and not directly to the publisher. There is also Fnac eBook , where there are particular Albin Michel.
This offer four features:
1) it is scattered, which implies a search for where to find the book you seek.
2) it is very low: a few thousand pounds in total. No funds, almost exclusively a selection of novelties.
3) it is expensive: Fnac sells almost the price of paper (eg the last Cohen / Askenazy costs EUR 05.22 EUR 23.75 cons on paper), which makes no sense since the benefits of electronic publishing is to achieve significant cost savings (reduced printing costs for the formatting, no store, no stock, etc..).
4) it is in two formats: ebook and pdf (for some books, you can choose between the two), protected with a DRM, which restricts the reading material: the reading lights that accept these formats and Adobe for playback on computer.
It is this last feature that turned me into offender: my Amazon Kindle can not read these formats. French publishers have, in fact, extremely afraid of the big bad American. They do not allow it to sell any of their books, and they sell their few in a format not compatible with the reading light from Amazon.
And thus I discovered how it could blow up the protection for able to read books that I legally bought on my Kindle. And I mainly read English books, or books not covered by copyright.
What is fascinating is to see how the French publishers are trying to play point by point the causes that have made innovation a source of growth possibly the origin of creative destruction major in the music industry.
If illegal downloading has developed, it is indeed:
1) because the legal supply was difficult to find and limited-at least more limited and more difficult to access than the offer not legal.
2) sold at a price unrelated to the actual cost almost as expensive as traditional material supply, without offering content (nice cover, etc.).
3) with DRM protections limiting the type use legally purchased products, making the offer attractive non-legal, since it does not have such limitation.
Worse, one feels that the traditional French actors are engaged in a desperate strategy of rent-seeking legal: they hear, as music publishers, obtain legal protection by the state allowing them to cancel most transformations entailed by technological innovation. It seems they are trying in particular to secure the creation of a single price of the eBook, set at a level close to that of paper.
What is troubling is that the government is listening to them: rather than promoting the consumer (by imposing a single format, for example), and consider aid that would fund the conversion of actors that innovation renders obsolete the French government seems to believe also that some laws will deny technological innovation. This is a mistake: the innovations become what the players do, but they never stopped to exist the day the state said they should not have been.
0 comments:
Post a Comment