Well, I said ebooks need to be cheaper to get the new format(s) to take off, and lo! Orbit Publishing is now offering a $1 ebook per month, available from an impressive array of ebook providers, ie all of the big ones including Amazon, Fictionwise and Stanza (which is powered by Fictionwise anyway).
Also in that post, I said copyright protection hurts more than it helps and should be dropped, because it is complicated and intimidating to normal users, and that pirates were never going to pay for the product in the first place – they want it free or not at all (I can see this with the google searches for ‘[book title] free pdf’ that sometimes hit on my site; it’s not like they were searching for the legit version and accidentally found a pirated version, they were never going to pay).
And lo!, right again – bow before the power of my prescience! – in a way…Apple is dropping copyright protection on the songs sold through iTunes. Hopefully this trend will spread to other digital entertainment media.
Hopefully also, Apple won’t continue to charge to upgrade their purchased music: they charge 50c per song to upgrade previously-bought protected songs to iTunes Plus (DRM-free). But if I had just waited until Plus became available before buying, I would have only paid between 0c to 30c – that’s right, they charge more if you bought early. If they do this now with every song I’ve bought, the cost will be onerous (and very annoying, since barely two weeks ago I bought myself three albums – if only I had held off a little longer instead of giving myself a Christmas treat…). Perhaps in my recent post on how to choose your hourly rate, I should have pointed out the need to not punish your regular clients/early adopters with random pricing bands.
Digression over. Electronic books have actually been big in Asia for some time: one explanation I read is that the trains are just so crowded you can’t even open a paperback (let alone a newspaper), so being able to read ebooks on a screen was adopted quick-smart. I read this in an airline magazine, where I also read that Barbara Bush was paid a stupid amount of money to not divorce George W until after the elections, so take it with a grain of salt. But you can see evidence of the early adoption on iTunes, where very many of the ereader/book apps for iPhone/Touch are Asia-orginated or focused.
