The PIRs will be reversed as soon as Rudd and Co. realise that an ever increasing percentage of bookbuyers buy their books from overseas, and it’s destroying Australian book retailing. This is simply a matter of time.

Finally, I couldn’t care less if the useless elitist Australian publish industry shrivels up and dies. Actually, I could care… it would be GOOD, based on their current rent-seeking behaviour. In the meantime, I’ll buy every single book from overseas, and save about 50% on each.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/local-bookstores-social-hubs-and-mutualization/

I’m quite confident that pretty much any DRM scheme they come up with will fail. Though I do only buy ebooks in formats that I know are easy to break (thanks Microsoft!) – I want to make sure that I can transfer them to new devices in the future and not have to rebuy them in a few years time. Book publishers should look to the experience of the music and movie industries to see what works (many people will buy if its easy enough) and what doesn’t (DRM). Baen Books (http://baen.com) are an example of a publisher (sci-fi/fantasy) that sell their ebooks with no drm at all.

Adobe have just announced big expansion plans re ebooks – presumably further development of ADEPT, and as ePUB is now emerging as the mobile device friendly file format it will be ‘interesting’ to see how their DRM processes evolve. Which also makes Amazon’s use of a modified proprietary mobi file format look more like a grand case of inbuilt obsolescence.

In fact, ebooks offer publishers the opportunity to once again have adequate control over territorial rights. As it is internet based, each user comes with a handy ISP which immediately identifies their geographic location.

That is quite easy to get around if you want to, especially for small files like ebooks where you don’t need a lot of bandwidth (just bounce off a server in the country you want to pretend to be in). From what I’ve seen in practice for things like audio books they use your postal address for credit card details to decide which country you reside in. But the bigger worry of ebooks for publishers is that DRM doesn’t work and if they don’t make it easier to buy them than it is to just torrent them for free, then people will do the latter.

BBB

With the new International Kindle and its wireless download (can anyone comment on how well that works?) yes Australian consumers can download ebooks. However the titles that are available HAVE to have clear instructions from the originating publisher that yes they do hold territorial rights for ebooks to the Aust market (and by extension, contractual arrangements with the author(s) allowing the dissemination of their IP in the digitised format). It is the legal responsibility of the originating publisher to ensure that the information they provide to Amazon is correct.

In fact, ebooks offer publishers the opportunity to once again have adequate control over territorial rights. As it is internet based, each user comes with a handy ISP which immediately identifies their geographic location. Which can then be matched to the stated territorial rights for the particular ebook they are requesting. For books now in the public domain, this does not apply. Which is why Amazon had that god-awful stuffup with Orwell’s 1984. A ‘publisher’ had merrily told Amazon they had held copyright for an ebook edition in the US market. They didn’t (Orwell’s copyright is fiercely defended by his son, Richard Blair) – though you can download it from Project Gutenberg Australia because in Australia, Orwell is in the public domain. An American ISP would prevent download of that.