Another One Bites the Dust15 September It all started with an email:
Inconvenience? Hell, yeah, but we'll get to that later. First, I want to examine a bit why Barnes & Noble did this, and what it might mean for ebooks in general. According to a statement to the Associated Press, BN.com "did not see sales take off as we and many others had anticipated." This is really no big surprise. Anyone who's been following the ebook market for any length of time knows that the average book reader, when faced with the possibility of reading ebooks on a PDA, generally reacts by saying, "You can read books on that thing?" Forget logistics, the biggest hurdle ebooks have right now is letting folks know it's a theoretical possibility. Not that BN.com did themselves any favors with their approach to ebook sales. Like Amazon and a few other "big name" booksellers, BN.com decided to sell ebooks in two formats: Microsoft Reader and Adobe eBook Reader. These happen to be the most restrictive, consumer-hostile, DRM-polluted formats on the market. Both are tied to specific hardware, which must be "activated" to a specific user account, and only a limited number of activations are allowed. Most users found activating ebooks a hit-and-miss process at best, and many customers were turned off of ebooks in general by this process. What does Barnes & Noble's abandonment of the ebook market mean for ebooks? Of course, for the customers (like myself) who have already bought ebooks from Barnes & Noble, this is still a raw deal. Microsoft's activation process is far from flawless, and I have seen problems with Microsoft Reader where the official solution to the problem is to create a new passport account and redownload all your books. Ninety days from now, that will no longer be an option for Barnes & Noble books. So what do you do? The obvious answer is to download Convert LIT (Google is your friend) and convert all your Barnes & Noble ebooks to their component HTML and images. This is simple, easy (if you're not afraid of the command line) and you can even create a batch file by pasting the following lines: for %%a in (*.lit) do clit "%%a" "open\%%a" :end to convert all your .lit files at once. Once you've got all the files decompiled to HTML, you can archive them or convert them into any other ebook format of your choice. Unless, of course, you live in the United States. Here in the US, doing the above is blatantly illegal, a violation of everyone's favorite law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA makes it a crime to crack the encryption on any intellectual property, regardless of the reason. Fair Use doesn't matter, you are a criminal if you crack the DRM on an ebook. Moreover, according to the wording of the DMCA, you're a criminal if you even possess a copy of Convert Lit, since it's also illegal to possess any tools that can be used for cracking DRM. Of course, according to the scrict wording of this rather absurd law, owning a DVD player (which must break the encryption on a DVD to play it) or a personal computer (which must break the encryption on an ebook to display it) also makes you a criminal, but that's beside the point. The point is that in the United States, Barnes & Noble customers now have two options. They can gamble that they'll never have to activate their books under a different Passport account, which would make their existing ebooks unreadable, or they can take up a life of crime. Is it any wonder the general public hasn't embraced ebooks yet? On the other hand, Barnes & Nobles's departure might actually help ebooks in the long run. Yes, ebooks have lost a high-profile outlet, but they've also lost a lot of potential headaches. Palm Digital Media (now owned by PalmGear, but that should make zero difference in how they operate) and Fictionwise and Baen and Blackmask and Memoware and even Project Gutenberg are all still out there, all offering a better consumer experience than Barnes & Noble ever did. If new customers find their way to those sights, they're more likely to become repeat ebook readers than those that tried Barnes & Noble. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |