We always hear from people that certain types of digital content can't come up with scarce "reasons to buy," and yet we always seem to hear of new and creative ways that it's being done anyway. Back in December we wrote about how the TV sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia had turned ridiculous on-air products into the real thing and they were selling quite well. Now, PrometheeFeu points out that the popular ABC TV show Castle has come out with a real book supposedly by the lead character in the show, who (in the TV show) is a professional writer. Not only that, but the book itself has hit the NY Times best seller list. Now, it's not entirely clear who wrote the book (when asked, the producers of the show insist that it was the character in the program), but the book has gotten decent reviews and ABC is pitching the book on its website (including free chapter downloads). One assumes that ABC likely gets a cut of the sales as well. It's yet another neat attempt to combine an infinite good with a scarce one to make that scarce one more valuable. I would imagine that the book wouldn't sell nearly as well if it hadn't been tied to such a TV program.

I've never understood book price fixing laws in Europe, that require books to be sold at the same price. Economically challenged individuals claim that this helps independent booksellers who aren't forced to undercut prices of other book chains. Except, of course, forcing higher prices on everyone actually leads to fewer books purchased, less innovation and less opportunity for those independent bookstores to offer something better. These laws have caused trouble for Amazon in the past. Over in France, Amazon's famous free shipping promotions were deemed illegal for being an effective "price discount" on books. And now a bookseller is suing Amazon in Germany for supposedly violating fixed prices on books as well (found via Michael Scott). In this case, the bookseller is sick of people showing up with printouts from Amazon, and wants to force Amazon to offer higher prices, because apparently consumers must suffer.

Lots of folks have sent in various versions of Amazon's hyped up press release about how it sold more ebooks on Christmas than physical books. While this ought to make some publishers reconsider their hatred of ebooks, there are two points that make this rather meaningless. First, how many physical books are usually sold on Amazon on Christmas day? My guess is not very many. Books are purchased before Christmas day. However, I'm sure plenty of people did get new Kindles on Christmas, and quite a few then went and "purchased" an ebook or two to test it out.

But, again, since this is the Kindle we're talking about, shouldn't Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented? When someone buys a physical book from Amazon, they then own that book and can do pretty much what they want with it, including reselling it or giving it away. When they "purchase" an ebook from Amazon, that's not the case at all. They're quite limited in what they can do with it. They can't resell it. They can't share it with a friend (unless they give up their entire Kindle and all the books on it). And, of course, Amazon can make the ebook disappear at will -- though, it insists it will never do this again. Even though it can. So, congrats to Amazon, for renting more books on a day when such rentals are to be expected and when physical book sales are probably at their very lowest.

As a few folks sent in, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to spend approximately $1.1 billion scanning books. Does this sound familiar? It should. Five years ago, French officials freaked out about Google scanning all those books, and declared they were going to spend $2.5 billion on its own project, called Quaero. And what happened? Well, it turned into a huge boondoggle with a bunch of companies claiming the money, but nothing of substance ever coming from the project, which has now been mostly abandoned.

So, now we've got Sarkozy -- defender and mass infringer of copyrights -- who recently warned that Google's book scanning project was somehow a threat to French culture. So, now he's going to spend $1.1 billion more on a project that we hope will be at least marginally more well defined than Quaero. In the meantime, France's national library is apparently all set to have Google scan its collection of books. Seems easier. In fact, the report notes that the $1.1 billion will go to private companies to scan books, and it's entirely possible that Google could be one of those companies. After all, it's pretty good at book scanning.

PaidContent has the details on an interview with Steve Haber, the boss of Sony's ebook reader business, where he trashed the $10 ebook and praised DRM. And now you all know why no one buys Sony ebook readers. Basically, the product's boss has decided to take an anti-consumer stance. Why would anyone want to shell out hundreds of dollars on a product when you know the company that makes it wants to screw you over?

On the price of ebooks -- a topic of widespread debate -- he insists that $10 can't possibly work:

"The $9.99 price point is not a money-maker. Certain bestsellers are sold at that price for retail, competitive reasons. But you need to have a range. You could go from $10 to $20 even to $100 for an e-book. There's no sweet spot and it's certainly not $9.99."

Well, first, let's be clear. The only reason that $9.99 isn't a money-maker is because publishers are still charging more at wholesale for the ebooks, still pretending that the lack of printing, materials and shipping shouldn't result in a lower price. Basically, the publishers are in denial, and Sony shouldn't be supporting them.

How about DRM? Remember, this is Sony, we're talking about, which has a history of abusing DRM against consumers. It's also the same Sony who keeps having its top execs claim that DRM holds up innovation and that open solutions win in competitive markets. And then they release their next DRM'ed/closed offering. So, how does Haber explain his love of DRM?

"You need an orderly process to sell books and DRM makes that possible, mainly because it allows content creators and distributors to make money from that content."

Huh?!? What does DRM have to do with making money from content? Absolutely nothing. iTunes sells a lot of music -- and it's all DRM free (finally). You don't need DRM to make money from content. You don't need DRM to have an "orderly process" to sell things. You only need DRM to limit what consumers can do, limiting the value of the content, making it less valuable to pay for.

It seems that the only thing keeping Sony in this business is the fact that the competition is basically just as bad on these issues, but one of these days someone's going to figure this out -- but it doesn't sound like it will be Sony.

We've been discussing some of the problems book publishers have had in coming to terms with the new age of ebooks -- such as by trying to delay the release of ebooks with a "windowing" system. However, there's another issue that's coming up as quite important for back catalog authors. Many of them are looking to sign their own ebook deals with other publishers than those who published their physical books, and they note that the old contracts make no mention of electronic or ebook rights -- mainly because such things didn't exist at the time. But the publishers are pushing back and telling authors who seek to sign separate ebook publishing deals that those deals violate their existing agreements while also seeking to amend older agreements to add in ebook rights and royalties.

Unfortunately for the publishers, they may not have much of a legal leg to stand on. As the article notes, there have already been lawsuits on this topic, and Random House repeatedly lost in its attempt to sue ebook publisher Rosetta Books a while ago. The court didn't find Random House's argument that the phrase "in book form" in its contracts covered ebooks as well. While that case was eventually settled, that only happened after Random House came out on the losing side in the earlier battles. Random House is among the publishers still claiming that "in book form" means ebooks as well, but it must be relying on the likelihood that some authors won't bother to look up those earlier rulings (or hire lawyers who are aware of them).

We've been discussing the trouble that's been going on in the world of ebooks, as publishers are still coming to terms with the ebook era, and it seems that there are similar problems in the older world of audiobooks. TorrentFreak points us to an article by Cory Doctorow at Publisher's Weekly, where he discusses the difficulty he has had in publishing a DRM-free audiobook. Even once his publisher got on board, there were problems. First it was with Audible, the main audiobook seller -- who flat out refused. Yet on a more recent book, Audible was willing to go DRM-free, but Apple turned them down. Yes, Apple. The company that at one point claimed DRM was bad and should be ditched, and convinced the record labels to ditch DRM. Yet, as we've noted in the past, outside of music, Apple is still a huge DRM supporter. So it is with audiobooks apparently. When Doctorow, his publisher and Audible all told Apple they wanted to put a DRM-free copy of his audiobook in iTunes, he was told no. Other audiobook publishers are just as bad, if not worse, apparently requiring ridiculous license agreements, DRM and even software downloads. One of these days, the audiobook world is going to have to come to terms with what pretty much every other digital content provider has realized: making life more difficult for customers is not a way to succeed long term.

Michael Scott points us to an interesting essay on piracy in the ebook space, written by Mike Shatzkin. He talks about setting up the program for the upcoming Digital Book World event, where he didn't even think that "piracy" was a topic worth discussing -- but various publishers told him that it's a big issue to them. Unfortunately, it seems that the reason it's a big issue is not because they're learning to use such things to their advantage, but because they have taken the exact wrong lessons from the music industry and have decided they need technological measures to "fight" piracy. Good luck with that.

Shatzkin, however, lays out a much more reasonable approach, picking up on what O'Reilly does with its books: no DRM, but give people a real reason to buy (there's that concept again). In this case, it's regular updates to any book you buy. So, rather than thinking about it as buying the content of the book, you can think about it as paying for a regular update on a particular topic. It becomes an ongoing service, which provides a scarce good, rather than a single transaction for content. As such, "piracy" becomes less and less of an issue, because the content you get may be quite out of date, and give you reason to pay up for real to make sure you are regularly up-to-date.

But, of course, O'Reilly publishes (wonderful and useful) technology books, where there's an obvious advantage to keeping current and up-to-date for readers of those books. The question is whether or not similar things can be done for other types of books, and Shatzkin has some ideas that are intriguing. First he quotes Tim O'Reilly in suggesting that piracy might really only impact large well-known authors who don't need the "marketing" aspect of free books (as opposed to less well-known authors, for whom "obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy"). But, then he notes that perhaps those big name authors can create a "service" of sorts that competes nicely with unauthorized file sharing as well:

But those authors are also the ones who have the biggest personal followings. They are the most capable of adding material: notes about what they're working on, correspondence with fans or critics, even observations about other people's books, that would add some value for many of the readers of their stories. In fact, a regular "update to my readers" from a top-flight author that is available only in their ebooks, or to purchasers of their ebooks, would be an attraction to many and could serve as a constant reminder that downloading their books from illegitimate sources is cheating them.

It's an interesting idea, and I like the proactive thinking on ways to compete by allowing something that isn't really possible in the paper book format. Though, I'm not sure if this method works precisely. After all, we already have the example of Paulo Coehlo, one of the best-selling authors of all time, who purposely "pirated" his own book and saw his sales increase tremendously. On top of that, he is already doing many of the things that Shatzkin suggests, but for free on his own website -- and it's working wonders. It's building up a much more loyal following for Coelho, and is allowing him to run interesting experiments like having his fans make a movie out of one of his books. All of this has only opened up more opportunities for Coelho to make money by both building his overall audience while also making his fans ever more loyal and ever more interested in supporting him.

If you thought that author Sherman Alexie's views on the Kindle were quintessential luddism, you haven't seen anything yet. Reader JonMontgo alerts us to a rather stunning opinion by novelist and poet Alan Kaufman who goes into full rant mode, calling Google Books and the Kindle to be the end result of Nazism. It's hard to read this and not wonder if someone flipped a bit somewhere. He goes on and on, making wild cognitive leaps that have no basis in reality. The basic summary is that Nazis used "high tech" methods to more efficiently exterminate the Jews, and thus, pretty much any modern technology that hasn't been carefully reviewed to make sure it can only be used for good purposes, is a continuation of Nazi efforts. Furthermore, the Nazi's hated books, and thus, these new technologies are really designed to kill books, and claims that paper books are killing trees are simply propaganda from people trying to destroy books. Seriously. Here's just a bit:

Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

Now, to be sure, there are reasonable concerns about the electronic trail we leave in using technology. And there are concerns about who really "owns" the digital book you access, and how much control you have over it as well as how much data you send back. But comparing it to the Nazis and concentration camps? That goes way overboard. And yet, Kaufman hasn't just leapt off that board, he's done so gleefully, in great detail:

The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis, like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way. And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were not put on trial.

The victorious Allies did not mandate that technology, which had been turned to such murderous ends, must pass an ethical standard review from an international body, like a UN of technology. No such body of decision came about. To the contrary, even while the war crime trials of Nazi chieftains were in session, American and Soviet governments were recruiting high-level Nazis to their intelligence services, military armaments industries, and space programs. So that, while in jurisprudence terms Nazi social and political values were delivered a blow, the Nazi fascination with technology merged seamlessly with that of their conquerors: us.

Normally, I would just call Godwin's Law, and move on, but this is just beyond bizarre. Automatically assuming that all new high tech is a straight line from the Holocaust is just sickening and delusional beyond pretty much any level of standard luddism.

We recently wrote about how booksellers were freaking out over the "price war" between Amazon and Wal-Mart, whereby they're starting to offer certain books at a very cheap price to bring in more customers. The whole thing was a bit silly. Reader Robin Trehaeven alerts us to a fantastic opinion piece in the Library Journal by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in which she does a superb job mocking what she refers to as the "accessibility paradox" where those who are used to being gatekeepers to information at the same time as they're supposedly promoting the benefits of greater information, suddenly start whining when information really does get more accessible. This includes those booksellers:

I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

But most of her brilliant sarcasm is directed at those in her own profession, who both work hard to get information for free, at the same time they complain about how the internet has made it so easy to route around librarians:

It strikes me that this issue is somewhat parallel to the love-hate relationship that many academic librarians have had with the Internet. Although our complicated relationship is improving, there are still some silly assumptions floating around. Oh no, our reference stats are down! Hurrah! People are able to find answers without our help. That's awesome! Anybody can publish on the web, unlike scholarly journals which are peer-reviewed. Fine, but don't tell me all peer-reviewed journal articles are shining examples of reason and academic brilliance. A lot of them are finely-sliced research rehashing the same findings, or are closely examined and exquisitely detailed trivia. Besides, there are plenty of examples of peer review failing in spectacular ways--and examples of wonderful peer-reviewed journals that were born free online.

But this is my favorite: Unlike information you find on the web, we pay for the information in our databases, and you get what you pay for. No, actually, with what you pay for you get a lot of junk that you don't even want, but you have no choice.

You want this journal? You have to subscribe to this pricey bundle. Either that, or you purchase one article at a time for your users, something more and more libraries are doing. You spend less, but the information never visits the library--it goes straight from the publisher to the desk of one user. All the library gets is the bill. Apart from failing on its merits, the argument that paid is better than free is self-contradicting. We can't tell students that purchased information is by definition better than free and, at the same time, beg faculty to recognize how broken the current system is and please, please, please make their work open access.

It's a great overall column, and nice to see a librarian lay the smackdown on hypocrisy within the bookselling and librarian worlds.