I was going to talk about something totally different and then this unexpectedly got into my head so here we are. So now I want to talk a little bit about ebooks and something that we’re taught in kindergarten is a good thing… sharing.
I’m a big fan of ebooks and I adore my Sony Reader. I have easily around 2,000 ebooks so I’m the first to admit that ebooks are a wonderful thing. The availability of books in electronic format have made it possible for me to discover authors I might otherwise never have been exposed to. And most importantly, it’s saved me some space in my house that is already overrun quite enough with books and bookshelves.
Even with how many ebooks I purchase, there’re still some things about them that I find a bit frustrating. One in particular is the concept of sharing with friends. I own a lot of paperbacks, and even some hardcover books, and it’s not uncommon for me to loan a book to a friend. If I read a book and am absolutely blown away, my first thought usually is, “I have to give this to X to read!” If I enjoy a book, I inherently want to spread the news and introduce the author to some good friends that enjoy reading like I do. Often those friends have gone on to buy the author’s other books, and I wished for a few seconds that I could get a kickback from the author!
As we move into the age of the ebook, sharing has become an extremely controversial topic. Sharing is almost unequivocally seen as pirating, which authors aren’t too fond of as a rule, quite understandably. The most significant argument goes back to number of copies. When I purchase a paperback and give it to a friend to read, there is one copy of the book. I purchased that one copy and even when I give it to someone else, there is still only one copy. We can’t read the book at the same time. In a perfect world, I get the book back when the friend is done with it (though that’s not always been the case, lucky me).
When purchasing an electronic copy, the intention is that you are paying for one copy that you then download to your computer or your reader. Of course, the minute you download a copy to a reader, you’ve technically gone beyond one copy. I purchase ebooks primarily in PDF format. They are stored on my computer and I use calibre to upload to my Sony Reader. Calibre creates a copy of the ebook in a dedicated folder and then moves yet another copy to my Reader. Without any intention of malicious behavior, I’ve now got three copies of an ebook which I only paid for once.
Sharing an ebook with a friend usually means you’d be sending a version of the ebook via email. Of course now you’ve created a few more copies of the ebook, as most email programs these days save a copy of sent emails and the friend has a copy in their email. And from there the number of copies just continues to multiply.
Logically then the only way for me to share an ebook is if I can hand my Reader to my friend, who uses it to read the book. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m extremely protective of my Sony Reader. The sucker was quite expensive, and if we are separated for even a few hours we both start to experience separation anxiety. Plus, if I give my Reader to someone else to borrow I can’t be reading anything on it! So I don’t want to do that. Plus the majority of my friends who love reading like I do, and read the type of books I do, live all across the country. The internet provides the primary form of communication, hence email. In order to share an ebook, I could email it to my friend, delete (and I really mean delete, by removing from Trash) my sent email, my friend gets the email and deletes (again, really delete) the email after downloading the book, reads the book, then deletes the ebook file and empties their Trash on their computer. That is the closest way to approximate the sharing of paperbacks, but boy, that’s a lot of steps and a lot of points for error.
There was an uproar recently when a Kindle reader admitted in an article to reading books she hadn’t paid for but had gotten from friends. Numerous authors attacked her for being a pirate and a horrible person, without doing any research into how the Kindle works. Eventually someone from Amazon clarified that the Kindle is set up so that you can “share” ebooks with up to 4 close friends. This is done by having everyone “share” an Amazon account. You can register up to 5 devices to an account, and if those devices happen to be random friends no biggie. Of course all payment is also done under that one account. If your friends want to always be the ones to pay for the books, that’s their prerogative, but among the 5 of you, you get to share the ebooks that any of the others purchase. Excellent! There’s only one problem…this works for ebooks from the Amazon store only. Damn. Back to square one. (Note that the same applies to books purchased from the Sony store where you can have up to 6 devices, which includes computers and Readers, and they all share the same list of ebooks. Same note about payment applies to the Sony store and, again, it’s only for Sony store books.)
The large majority of the ebooks I purchase do not come from the Sony store, and even more so are not from Amazon, and most of them are DRM free which I’m actually grateful for. But it does mean that there really doesn’t seem to be a good option for “sharing” or “lending” a book to someone to read. On the surface that probably appears to be a good thing, but in the end I think it makes it harder for me to convince my friends to take a chance on authors that I really liked.
I don’t have a solution to all of this, but I’m curious as to your thoughts on the subject. Would you be more interested in a specific brand of eReader if it included a method of sharing books? Do you even want to be able to share ebooks with a few friends? Are you frustrated by the limitation of ebooks as I am?
Authors, how do you feel about readers sharing your books? Are you for or against it? Do you think that the effectiveness of word-of-mouth is decreased by the inability to share books or are they mutually exclusive?
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