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Barnes and Noble promotes piracy?
Posted By Kissa
I’ve been visiting the local Barnes and Noble a lot lately. I love book stores and can spend hours in them just wandering around and sniffing the new book smell. I do digress. Right in the front of the store what do I see? An advertisement for the new Nook. I pick it up, look at it and read about the different features.
Here’s the shocker…a sign next to this e-reading device says that they have a class every Saturday to teach you about the Nook. Great idea right? Well I thought so too until I saw one topic of discussion: How to share ebooks with friends.
What? Last I heard that was illegal!!! But there it is in black and white. Maybe I misinterpreted? I hope so but sadly I believe they meant just what they said. Until someone corrects me I won’t be buying or recommending this bookstore to anyone.
Jul 21st, 2010
The Nook has a “share” feature in which you can loan ebooks you have purchased to friends. I am not sure how it works, as none of my friends has a Nook themselves, but I know it is a temporary thing and the person cannot keep the ebook on their device permanently. Like, it becomes inaccessible after 2 weeks or something. I assume they’re giving a tutorial on how to use that feature of the Nook.
I could be wrong, but that would be my guess. I don’t see what B&N would actually stand to gain from teaching people how to commit piracy.
I did find out that the publishers agree for Barnes and Noble to ‘share’ these books. I still have a problem with that because of the way it’s done. Most of my stories are short reads. They now have a feature where you can read one hour free in the store. Well all of my stories can be read in an hour or less. I don’t think this type of thing bodes well for epublishing. And to be fair, I found out that Kindle has the same type of sharing feature. I guess I’d just never heard of this practice before. Thanks for the comment, Dorla.
I guess I see a lot of the sharing as akin to what happens in libraries. Hypothetically, a library buys 3 copies of your print book. But way more than 3 people are going to read it. It’s not the same as sharing an ebook, I suppose, but I sort of have the mentality of “people have a way to read print books for free without spending money, why should we refused to allow that from ebooks?”
Plus, a lot of people go into bookstores, read for an hour or 2 from print books, and never buy anything. That always annoyed me more as a bookstore employee than as a writer. I worked for a struggling indie shop, and we needed people to buy to stay afloat!
Maybe the ebook sharing method isn’t perfect yet – I’m sure there are ways it could stand to be improved. But it just doesn’t seem fair to me that people can have easy access to free print books (not to keep, but to borrow), and yet we would restrict access to borrowing ebooks.
Or maybe I am just too hands-off as a business person.
Dorla, you are right about how people share print books but think of it like this- when you buy a print book that is something you can hold in your hands. It is yours forever and you can do with it whatever you like.
Now, an ebook is virtually a piece of software. The author has created it, the publisher has made it into a file and sells (at a very reduced price below that of the print version) an ebook. That’s one of the great things about digital publishing is the lower cost. You can try authors out before spending an arm and a leg on a series, print book or more ebooks. To copy software that has been copyrighted is illegal. You wouldn’t share your copy of Windows or Microsoft office with your friends, or not legally at least. Now if ebooks were priced equivalent to their counterparts=print books, it may not be such a big deal but as it is now, it hurts everyone from the bookstore down to the author when copies are pirated and shared. And fyi there are libraries who have ebooks within their library. I believe you read them on the computers in the building but I’m not sure. I do know that they pay differently for several people to read rather than just one copy.
I should add that now that I know publishers are agreeing to this practice I don’t have to ban any bookstores! And that is a great thing because I so love to spend money there.