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When the iPod was announced, Steve Jobs offered what was perhaps the best deal that the music industry could get out of the changed environment. He bluntly told them they’d have to compete with the pirates rather than indulge in business as usual. That meant.

1. Offering guaranteed quality. A lot of bootleg music was poorly done.
2. Offering quick service. Finding a pirated song online often took more time that the saving in cost was worth.
3. Offer storage so it could be downloaded later and to new devices. When you bought, you bought for life.
4. Price songs cheaply—99 cents per song no matter how popular.
5. Sell songs individually rather than only as albums.

Others know better than I what the results were. I suspect the music industry became less lucrative but perhaps, under those new rules, more economically viable than it would have meant had it not changed to live in a world where piracy is easy.
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Publishing needs to do the same. It needs to come up with ways to add value so buying a legal copy in one’s own country makes practical sense. Some of the factors that Jobs suggested for music should work for ebooks, including making the ebooks look better than the PD versions and pricing those whose copyright has expired elsewhere a bit cheaper. After all, these are books that have been earning royalties for half-century or more. The costs of writing editing and publishing them have been written off long before.

It is also true, more with books than music, that improved versions with added benefits might attract customers and those additions could be copyrighted everywhere. In the 1960s Tolkien’s UK publisher made some blunders and perhaps put The Lord of the Rings out of copyright in the U.S. due to a technicality. One of the measures Tolkien took was to create a revised version, fixing mistakes and tweaking the plot slightly. Users, already partial to T0lkien anyway, had a choice between the now-flawed Ace version or the new and improved version from a legit publisher. Under pressure from readers, Ace gave up their bootlegging.

And yeah, I realize the core problem. The larger publishers are even worse than the music industry at adapting to change and thus far they’ve not had a Steve Jobs step forward to force them to adapt. That’s why Amazon has been beating the daylights out of them. That’s why they’re attempting to protect sales by extending copyright law in one country to other countries—an effort that doomed to fail in the long run. They need to adapt to change rather than fight it.

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Publishing with an electronic-based publisher like Amazon rather than a traditional publisher has advantages and disadvantages. One of the good things is that by default, anything you publish through Amazon’s own publishing branch, Kindle Direct Publishing, is available for purchase in EVERY country where Amazon operates an e-book store. (You can choose not to do that if you prefer to negotiate separate deals for international publishing.) As Amazon adds additional countries your book becomes available there as well. And unless you choose to withdraw it, your book will be there forever (or at least until the company changes its mind).

That doesn’t mean that Amazon will make any effort to promote your book in other countries. (Mostly they don’t even try to promote it in your own.) And the royalty rate that the author gets is slightly lower because of currency exchange fees. But at least a sufficiently interested reader can get the book.

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That would be a tragedy. In case you don’t know why, Spider Robinson wrote a story about it back in 1982: Melancholy Elephants. It won the Hugo Award. You can read it on Spider’s site: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

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The more I learn about publishing industry, the more despicable it appears to me. Authors, agents, publishers: a pox on all of them! None of them has the reader (without whom they wouldn’t exist) in mind.

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I want to see writers and publishers thrive. But there are better ways than hyper-extended copyright terms promulgated by globalization. One strategy would be national library endowments (libraryendowment.0rg). Companies like Holtzbrinck, not just writers, would benefit.

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For ten years now, we’ve had geographic restrictions where the major publishers prevent ebooks from being sold to countries where they don’t have the right to publish them, even though people in those countries could quite easily order the paper version of that book to be shipped overseas to them.

Of course, you can argue that’s because ebook matters come under contract law, while the Gutenberg issue involves copyright law, but that’s just splitting hairs. Both cases involve information hosted on the global Internet, posted in a country where it is legally available. If it’s all right for a German to be able to download a free copy of an ebook that’s commercially available in his country, why shouldn’t it also be all right for him to buy an American ebook that might not even be available in his country at all? Especially since he could just as easily use that same Internet to buy a dead-tree copy of the same work with no impediment.

What’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If all that counts is where the file is served from, it should count the same for commercial books as for public domain ones, whether the reason for it being served from there is that it’s licensed for that country or out of copyright in it. If the Internet is truly global, it should be global for everything.

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