Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the "real" way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There's an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more "real" simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.

Certain authors have argued this adamantly over the recent years, proudly declaiming the superiority of the old school, dead tree book. Apparently, there's nothing like picking up an odorous book (smells like real) whose binding glue has slowly disintegrated over the years, causing the pages to scatter across the floor and sending all those helpful book scorpions scuttling off in search of a new home. That's real. That's reading. This stuff you do with your eyes on screens? Your brain might tell you it's reading, but it's nothing of the sort.

Fortunately for those of us who believe otherwise, Andrew Piper has visited Slate to set us all back on the path of touchable righteousness. In a lengthy post that reads like a dry historical text populated with anti-tech non sequiturs, Piper decries the falseness of reading books on a screen, because if you can't physically touch it, it's just not real.

Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.

For those of you without skulls to hold your eyes (lucky bastards!), reading is an experience for the body as much as it is for the brain. There's your hands, which will turn pages and... your torso... which holds your limbs and, by extension, your hands... never mind. Here's more:

To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.

At this point, the history lesson begins. The first witness on the stand in defense of "touching is reading" is none other than St. Augustine, whose conversion to Christianity was a defining moment in "hand-to-book" reading.

The original Kindle Fire

At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

Bookmarking. Completely unavailable or at the very least, not the same! Score one for St. Augustine. There's much, much, much, much more history where that came from, weaving together a very long narrative that basically states "humans have hands and like to touch stuff." Along the way, you'll meet all sorts of historical figures (Eugene Delacroix! Faust! Abraham Ortelius!) It's an essay of appropriately essay-esque length.

In between the historical musings are convoluted paragraphs like this:

Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

If I'm reading this correctly (though I suppose I am not, since I'm reading it on an LCD screen), the rise of ebooks will finally allow us to shed our uncomfortable skeletons and return, spineless and triumphant, to R'lyeh to awaken Cthulhu from his long slumber.

And there's this, which one would think was Piper attempting to wrap things up, but actually lies somewhere near the middle of the post:

For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.

Most people call them ebooks.

Piper's article seems to go beyond the normal arguments about aesthetic preferences and move towards touting the moral superiority of print, simply because your hands can touch and feel paper and it's different than touching and feeling an electronic device. E-readers are not... physical enough. And because of that lack of physicality, reading is no longer as real.

But think of all the advances made over the years that just aren't as real as their predecessors, thanks to diminished physical interaction. We fully expect Piper to explore these in further densely unreadable screeds:

• Riding a bike today isn't nearly as real as it was, what with not having to worry about your crotchal region and forearms being pounded mercilessly by the combination of solid rubber tires, no suspension system and a lack of decent pavement.
  
• Driving a car lacks the coarse physicality of driving a team of horses across dusty plains in search of a Slurpee and a pack of smokes.
• Watching a movie isn't nearly as "real" as watching a good old fashioned play, where actors were actual, physical human beings close enough to touch and/or interrupt with an ill-timed coughing fit/incoming call.
• For that matter, making an outgoing call is simply a matter of pressing some fake buttons (or simply mashing a thumb on a fake face in the Contact list). Our forearms and dialing finger have atrophied from under-use going all the way back to the days when friends with the most 0's in their numbers got the fewest calls.
• Today's cold scientific medical community, with its beeping machinery and wires everywhere can never be as real as it was in the past when the common cold was treated with a combination of leeches, heroin and a full frontal lobotomy.
  
• Firing up your local newspaper's website will never be as real as paging through the paper version, admiring the ink stains on your fingers and the box scores informing you that the game ended after press time. The website also can't offer you the physical pain of multiple scratches (picked up while retrieving the paper from your overgrown rose bush) or multiple bite wounds (picked up while retrieving the paper from your neighbor's Rottweiler-infested backyard).
• Nuking a quick meal for the kids? Get over yourself. Real people start their own fires from scratch, by doing whatever it is that Boy Scouts do to earn the "Firestarter" badge. And that Healthy Choice meal? Better get right to slaughtering your own flavorless chicken and growing some equally flavorless rice to accompany it.
• Writing an email can't possibly compare to the physical purity of placing quill to parchment and hand-scratching a lengthy URL onto it, along with "Yo, Ted. Check thiſ out."
• Buying stuff with a credit card online vs. biting gold pieces into "bits" at the trading post, online classes vs. sleeping through Philosophy in an uncomfortable chair, and etc. ad nauseaum.

One of Piper's closing paragraphs comes so close to getting it right, but he twists it to fit his "ebooks are intangible" narrative. He describes the "connection" the physical book makes when he reads a story to his kids at bedtime:

As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”

While I'm not sure what version of the web Piper uses (Web 0.85b?) that follows "prescribed pathways" (mine goes pretty much anywhere with very little provocation), that's not really where the error lies. The book isn't the "shared column of support," Piper. It's you! Why would you sell your own importance short? My kids like to be near me, too. It doesn't matter if we're reading a book, streaming something on Netflix, watching someone do something funny/stupid on YouTube or slinging Angry Birds across the screen. The important thing isn't the physicality of the object. It's the shared experience. To attribute this to something made of glue, paper and ink is ridiculous, and to further claim that a shift to electronics is robbing us of a part of our humanity even more so.

DRM rears its ugly, malformed, malignant, cross-eyed head again. Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic "anti-piracy" schemes.

Combine this "malware" with digital distribution that sticks the end user with an unfavorable license rather than, say, an actual book, and you've got another ready-made disaster. The Consumerist has the details on yet another paying customer dealing with DRM stupidity. It starts off with this physical analogy.

[I]f reader Synimatik had bought a paperback book a few months ago and picked it up to read now, the book’s pages wouldn’t magically glue shut just because the credit card she normally uses at the bookstore has expired.

Obviously, no one would expect a physical book to be subject to the whims of the publisher or the store it was purchased from. A sale is a sale, even if many rights holders would rather it wasn't. But, Barnes & Noble doesn't see it that way. Sure, you can buy an ebook from them, but you'd better keep everything in your profile up to date if you plan on accessing your purchases at some undetermined point in the future.

Yesterday, I tried to download an ebook I paid for, and previously put on my Nook, a few months ago. When I tried, I got an error message stating I could not download the book because the credit card on file had expired. But, I already paid for it. Who cares if the credit card is expired? It has long since been paid for, so the status of the card on file has nothing to do with my ability to download said book. I didn’t see anything in the terms of service about this either, but it’s possible I missed it.

This is just one more reason to either not buy ebooks, or strip the drm off of the ones you purchase so you can you the book you BUY on all your devices without having to purchase multiple copies for no reason and have access to something you already bought when you want it.

Nice work, B&N. Driving another person away from your offerings with your amnesiac point-of-purchase system. No one's purchase should be invalidated once the payment has cleared. Barnes & Noble got its money but its customer is out both money and a book. Does B&N really wish for its customers to root their devices and strip the DRM out of their purchases just so they can enjoy them at their own pace? Shouldn't the company be catering to its customers rather than treating them like thieves who can't be trusted even though they've already paid?

If this was a one-of-a-kind experience, we could chalk it up to "live and learn." But a whole lot of living has gone on and the only lesson anyone's learning is the most efficient way to remove pesky DRM idiocy from their purchased "licenses" in order to turn them into actual, useful goods.

Nick Bilton, over at the NY Times has highlighted how Apple has been granted a design patent on the electronic representation of turning a page. Bilton leaves out that this is a design patent, which is much more limited. It's more akin to a trademark than a traditional patent -- but... still... The patent in question, D670,713 really does seem to cover exactly what it says in the title: "Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface."

The patent comes with three illustrations to explain how the page-turn algorithm works. In Figure 1, the corner of a page can be seen folding over. In Figure 2, the page is turned a little more. I’ll let you guess what Figure 3 shows.

While design patents are a slightly different than other patents, it really is patents like this that get the public to respect the patent system less and less.

It was about five years ago that we first wrote about best selling author Paulo Coelho revealing that he was eagerly helping create pirate foreign translations of his books, and noting that sales of legitimate copies always seemed to increase whenever he did this -- initially pretending to be someone else, under the username "pirate coelho." The first time this happened was in Russia, where the Russian translation resulted in his books -- which had almost no market previously -- suddenly shot up into huge sales (from less than 1,000 to over 100,000). While he's seen similar success stories elsewhere, it really seems like the Russian ebook market is an interesting one to observe.

A bunch of you sent in a more recent story, written by author Peter Mountford, who published his first novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, in the spring of 2011. Not surprisingly, he had set up a Google alert about the book to see what people were saying about it. Eventually it led him to an online forum where a person in Russia kept asking for help translating key words and phrases -- sometimes with comic attempts to decipher idioms:

At one point, he indicated that he was struggling with “white-liberal guilt.” (Me too!, I wanted to chime in.) He postulated that white liberal guilt meant: “the guilt for consuming white substance (cocaine).”

At at first he assumed that it was a Russian speaker trying to understand the book, but when another forum member suggested the Russian guy (going by the name AlexanderIII) just enjoy the book without trying to understand every last word, AlexanderIII admitted that he was working for a publisher doing a translation. Mountford went through a range of emotions:

Holy crap, I thought, my book is going to be published in Russia! Then I remembered that no Russian publisher had acquired the rights, and realized that AlexanderIII must be translating it for some kind of book-pirating outfit.

In the U.S., book piracy is a growing problem. But Russia, I learned, has a remarkably mature black market for literature—particularly for ebooks, no doubt in part because the overhead is so low. Pirated books reportedly compose up to 90 percent of Russian ebook downloads. According to Rospechat, the state agency that regulates mass media, Russians have access to more than 100,000 pirated titles and just 60,000 legitimate titles, with illegal downloads costing legitimate vendors several billion rubles a year.

Of course, I wish one of Russia’s two major ebook publishers had given me a couple thousand dollars for the rights, but neither did. Like many novelists I know, I’m just happy to have people reading my work, whether they’re paying me for it or not. I’m also heartened that Russians care enough about reading to sustain a robust literary black market. In the U.S., you get the feeling that hardly anyone is creating pirated ebooks because—well, who’d buy such a thing?

He then became a voyeur of the translation attempt, debating whether or not to chime in on particularly bizarre guesses, though he's impressed that the rest of the community seemed to do a pretty good job. He actually expresses disappointment that AlexanderIII -- well before finishing the book -- moved on to another book:

In late March, a couple weeks into his work, AlexanderIII unceremoniously dropped my novel and began translating Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone. (A sample query: “Could you please help me out with a difficulty ... ‘you are on fucking angel dust.’ ”) I was shattered. Even my pirate translator had lost interest in my book. But in early July, Google Alerts informed me that AlexanderIII had dropped Lehane and returned to the good stuff.

Eventually he did reach out to AlexanderIII and offered help wherever needed. At first, as Mountford feared, AlexanderIII disappeared, but he did eventually email. It's unclear if Mountford then did assist AlexanderIII very much, but what's fascinating is that Mountford seems equally interested in understanding AlexanderIII's experience of puzzling his way through the book:

At one point in the novel, I describe my protagonist’s mother as having “a sentiment born of her cloying, overly maternal side.” AlexanderIII hypothesized that I had meant “a sentiment born of her memory about hardships of solitary life.” Though completely off base, he was drilling toward the character’s psychological core. I loved that. He misread the text, but he was wrestling with the sentences, much as I had wrestled with them originally.

The whole story is interesting, and it'll be worth seeing if Mountford follows it up with additional reporting on AlexanderIII or other translations in other countries.

Earlier this week, we talked about how publishing giant Random House had very explicitly stated that when libraries buy their ebooks, the libraries "own" those ebooks, rather than license them. They left no doubt about it. Skip Dye, Random House's VP of library & academic marketing and sales was explict: "when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them... this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license."

This raised some questions, such was whether this was true of everyone else who purchased Random House ebooks. Peter Brantley asked a bunch of questions and finally got Dye on the phone for a discussion, where he learned that when Random House says "own," they mean "not own." In fact, at best, when they say "own" they mean "if you fit into this limited category, you have the right to move your ebooks from one approved platform to another approved platform." This is, contrary to Dye's claim, a license. It is not ownership.

As many surmised, the key phrase in Random House’s communications is “authorized library wholesalers.” In the context of the LJ article, Random House was using a definition of “ownership” that you won’t find in Webster’s dictionary, conveying rights where none exist. In fact, Random will not sell directly to libraries or library consortia, although Mr. Dye reiterated that they continue to evaluate many alternative library business models. RH’s approach in the library market is to vet potential library market distributors for auditing, accounting, security, and other business functions, and then permit libraries to acquire titles from that short list of approved bureaus. In Random’s view, libraries “own” the titles they purchase to the extent that they should be able to migrate their ebook catalogs from one platform, such as Overdrive, to another, such as 3M.

That’s very nice. It’s just not ownership. It’s licensing, with benefits. Library customers of RH titles do not have the ability to transfer their titles to an unapproved platform, such as Califa or Open Library; they cannot resell or donate their ebooks; and there is no mechanism for libraries to receive ebook donations directly from consumers. All that libraries “purchase” from Random House is a verbal commitment to assist libraries in moving their Random House ebooks from one approved commercial platform to another. This is the kind of “perpetual license” that academic libraries have traded for ownership. Academic libraries now employ licensing specialists, and see the world through the lens of contracts. In consequence, faculty have begun to develop open access models that revolutionize scholarly communication from within.

In other words, Random House's claims were a load of bull. That's not surprising, but still disappointing. Brantley goes on to say what kind of ownership should be allowed for libraries when it comes to ebooks:

Public libraries seek a different kind of ownership – the kind that appears in the dictionary. The Internet Archive, Douglas County Libraries, Califa, and a growing number of other library systems are running their own ebook platforms, providing their own auditing, accounting, and security. We want to keep ebooks in our communities, run our own services, safeguard the privacy of our users, and be free from overreaching licensing regimes that threaten our services. And increasingly, we are finding publishers who are willing to sell to us directly, seeing the benefits of handing management of digital titles to libraries. Libraries can market e-books to the people that want them, and gather usage statistics in a privacy-protecting manner to help inform other libraries – as well as publishers – about what titles are popular, and where. These are rights and responsibilities that publicly funded libraries should not hand over to commercial distributors that must navigate between the Scylla of publishers and the Charybdis of Amazon. Readers First is an example of the larger movement articulating libraries’ desire to re-forge a partnership between publishers and libraries.

Of course, I'd also argue that this goes way beyond just libraries. Users want to own their own ebooks as well, just like they own physical books. That means they don't want to worry about having the company they bought their books from suddenly lock them out of their collection for reasons they won't explain. It means they want to be able to move those ebooks from platform to platform without permission. It means they want to be able to lend those ebooks to a friend. Some smaller publishers get this, provide DRM free ebooks, and make it easy for this to happen. Random House, on the other hand, doesn't seem to understand the issue at all.

We've discussed, many, many times, how copyright holders in the digital age like to play fast and loose with the definition of what is "sold" and what is "licensed." Just today, we've seen Amazon wipe out a woman's ebook collection. As we've joked, many copyright holders like to play Schrodinger's download in which they'll argue that it's a license in some cases, and a sale in other, based on what benefits them the most at that instance. So it's a welcome surprise to find out that publishing giant Random House is unequivocal in making the statement that libraries who buy Random House ebooks own those ebooks. Michael Kelley, at the Library Journal, spoke to Skip Dye, Random House's VP of library & academic marketing and sales, and Dye left no doubt about it:

"We spend a lot of time discussing this with librarians, at conferences and elsewhere, and it’s clear that there is still some confusion out there around whether libraries own their ebooks," Dye said. "Random House's often repeated, and always consistent position is this: when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them."

He went on to make clear the distinction with licensing:

"This is our business model: we sell copies of our ebooks to an approved list of library wholesalers, and those wholesalers are supposed to resell them to libraries. In our view, this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license."

Of course, this raises a question: does that also apply to the public? It would seem inconsistent if it were just for libraries. If I buy a Random House ebook, do I "own" it, or have I licensed it? And... then how does that fit with various ebook retailers, such as Amazon, whose terms seem more like a license? Either way, it's good to see a company like Random House take such a clear position on this matter, when most big copyright holders prefer to avoid the question entirely.

Techdirt has been warning people for several years that they don't really own the ebooks they have on their Amazon Kindles. The most famous demonstration of this was the sudden disappearance of ebook versions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm (you can't make this stuff up.) But that's nothing compared to what an Amazon customer in Norway now claims the company has done: shut down her Amazon account permanently and locked her Kindle -- all without explanation.

When her ebooks became unavailable, Linn Jordet Nygaard, the customer in question, contacted Amazon to find out what had happened. She received the following reply:

We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled.

But the account holder claims to know nothing about any other account, and so she wrote back asking for more details:

As previously advised, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed, as it has come to our attention that this account is related to a previously blocked account. While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened.

Please understand that the closure of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well. Thank you for your understanding with our decision.

Unhelpfully, then, Amazon simply re-iterated that the newly-closed account was "related" to another, previously blocked account, wouldn't say why, and emphasized that this was an irrevocable ban, even to the extent of refusing to allow the person accused of this unspecified transgression to open any other account at any point in the future.

Again, Jordet Nygaard not unreasonably sought to find out what the problem was so that she could try to address it. This time, she received an email that is not only willfully unhelpful, but positively insulting thanks to a cheesy veneer of bogus sympathy that has been added for good measure:

We regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

Of course, this is a totally Kafkaesque situation: found guilty of a crime you are not allowed to know, with no way to appeal. Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has an interesting theory about what might be the issue here:

I'd further speculate that the policy violation that Linn stands accused of is using a friend's UK address to buy Amazon UK English Kindle books from Norway. This is a symptom of Amazon's -- and every single other ebook retailer's -- hopelessness at managing "open territory" for ebooks.

That sounds very plausible, and means that Jordet Nygaard is essentially being punished for the publishing industry's incompetence when it comes to operating in a global online market, where national boundaries make no sense. Bad as that is, it's only a side issue here. What's most troubling is that Amazon not only closed down Jordet Nygaard's account, forbade her from ever opening up one again, and refused to discuss any aspect of its actions with her, but that it apparently has the capability to lock her out from all Kindle ebooks on any device -- and did so.

If you didn't take the hint when Amazon erased a couple of Orwell's books back in 2009, maybe this latest case involving the alleged remote lockout from all ebooks will finally get across the key message here: those Kindle ebooks you thought you had purchased, are actually only rented to you, and can be denied to you without explanation, and without recompense, any time Amazon wants to. The only ebooks you will ever truly own are those stored in open formats without DRM, which therefore allow backups to be made, and used anywhere.

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We've been talking about the first Humble eBook Bundle, which launched recently, and has taken off really successfully. Over the weekend, it zoomed past $1 million in money raised. As author John Scalzi (whose book Old Man's War is included in the bundle) noted, if Humble Bundle purchases were counted by the NY Times every one of the authors would be on the best seller list. Think about that for a second.

More than 70,000 people have bought these books in just two weeks, and the folks at Humble Bundle passed along the news that the current average price of $13.94 (which keeps on rising, as people pay over the average to unlock all the extras) far surpasses all of their previous bundles. And yet, people keep telling us that there are no business models that work and that people won't pay for stuff when they can get it for free? When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?

Maybe it takes a "digital native" like an app developer to instantly "get" digital publishing. Asking those who've spent most of the ebook era actively fighting the new medium is frustrating for both sides of the conversation.

Rovio, the Finnish developer behind the omnipresent "Angry Birds" game, is releasing its first ebook/app, based on the print version that debuted last year. Mike Cane has a brief but excellent rundown on what Rovio's doing right, and where other publishers are continuing to fall short.

Cane starts by quoting from PaidContent's article on the ebook release, which points out a couple of important aspects of Rovio's offering:

[T]he app is "not just a book," said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO. "We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn't want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive."

"Bad Piggies' Best Egg Recipes" is on sale for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.79 in the iTunes Store and includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make.

First off, the app/ebook is not just a quick and cheap "port" being thrown into iTunes to grab some quick digital dimes. Secondly, the price is well under what most publishers would be willing to charge for a comparable ebook.

Why is this such a frikkin big deal?

[T]hey are selling an app-book for one-tenth of the print version's discount price. ($9.99) One-tenth!

That's a much steeper discount than most publishers would be willing to take, especially on a potential cash cow like this. Sure, one could argue that it's just an app spinoff, or that Rovio made plenty of money with its games, or that there's no "real writing" involved, or any number of tangents in an effort to minimize Rovio's deep discounting. One could even argue that Rovio is leaving money on the table or, as an outsider, just doesn't "get" publishing and price points.

Here's what Rovio has to say about the price point:

"We're not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads," he [Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO] continued, "we're looking for millions of downloads of this book…We're going for massive, massive volume."

Oh, those crazy Finns and their madcap ideas! Volume! It's as if Rovio believes that it can distribute an infinite good at an extremely low price and still make some very good money. Insanity! Mike Cane points out the sheer incongruity of the situation:

He gets it. None of the Big Six of publishing — or the Little Sixes of it — do.

What if the Big Six started massively discounting their frontlist titles, going for that volume instead of trying to bleed each reader for the most they could squeeze out of them? They'd be able to transition their businesses to e faster and make lots more money in the process — and also help to thwart piracy!

Yeah. What if? Unfortunately, that's still largely open to speculation as none of the publishers seem willing to try it out. Even in the wake of a DOJ investigation into price fixing, prices have tended to move up rather than down (or remain unchanged) as publishers burn through remaining discounts. Even after various self-published authors have demonstrated the ability to make a living selling thousands of cheap ebooks rather than dozens of expensive ones, the tendency is to price ebooks in the same neighborhood as their physical counterparts.

Mike suggests deeply discounting the frontline titles and making more money through volume. But even if publishers aren't ready to take their current bestsellers down that road, what's stopping them from knocking the price of their back catalogs down to an impulse purchase level? Making the back catalog a bargain bin could turn casual fans into completists and give readers a reason to dip their digital toes into unfamiliar waters.

But, if nothing else, Rovio's pricing strategy has to, at the very least, highlight how many publishers are overvaluing their digital offerings, as if charging unrealistic prices will somehow prevent "devaluation." In reality, these higher prices simply show the huge gap between what the publishers desire and what the customers actually want.

UPDATE: Cerys from Kobo has responded with further details on the pricing bug and what Kobo is doing to rectify the situation:

A bug in our online system resulted in a small group of US-based customers being offered international pricing instead of their in-country pricing. In the large majority of cases, there was no price difference, but for some books where publishers set two different prices, the international one was displayed. This issue has now been resolved. We will be working directly with those customers affected over the next month to examine their accounts and provide them with a refund should it be owed. We will be contacting affected customers directly, but in the meantime if anyone has any questions related to their account, we ask that they please call our Support Line at 1-855-732-3662. 

Canadian ereader manufacturer Kobo hasn't really endeared itself to its customers in recent months. A few months ago, it botched the debut of its Kobo Touch ereader in Japan, falling well short of the promised 30,000 launch titles. In addition, its desktop software tended to turn new ereaders into shiny bricks. As the complaints mounted, Kobo's parent company, Rakuten, decided the best course of action was to hide all online reviews.

A new set of issues has arisen, this time centered around Kobo's ebook store. eBook prices at Kobo seem to be strangely liquid, responding to stimuli only known to Kobo itself. The Digital Reader dragged these pricing inconsistencies out into the open earlier this month. While holding off absolute judgement until more data was in, Nate Hoffelder took time to point out the mutating prices, which bizarrely increased for many logged in customers.

While some retailers like Amazon like to selectively discount prices in order to get you in the door, other sites like Kobo prefer to jack up the prices charged to their regular customers.

Earlier today Mike Cane hooked me up with a friend of his on Twitter. @RevBobMIB was browsing the Kobo eBookstore this morning when he noticed something odd. The pricing seemed strangely inconsistent, and after checking the price of the ebook mentioned above he discovered a fascinating secret about Kobo.

As you can see in this screenshot and this screenshot, Kobo offers some of their customers a lower price than the price offered to other customers. Here is a composite, and please note that I have seen these prices as well:

Hoffelder pointed out that prices may vary in different markets and some price fluctuation is normal, depending on geographic location. But Kobo's inexplicable price shifts aren't related to market or geographic variances.

Kobo is changing the prices shown to a single customer, browsing from a single computer, getting online from a single IP address.

This post generated plenty of response, including some commenters raising the theory that this was possibly a database bug and not Kobo attempting to draw in new customers with low prices while making up the difference by gouging returning customers.

After exchanging some emails with a Kobo programmer, Hoffelder was able to draw out the real story.

A lot has happened in the couple weeks since I reported that story. After exchanging a few emails with a Kobo programmer it became clear that this was not a simple bug, nor was it a consistent one. While I still don’t know how the bug works I do know that the simple and obvious solutions don’t fix it.

And oh yeah, the bug is still happening today.

So, not a "feature," but a bug. This clears Kobo of any ill will towards its most loyal customers, at least in terms of pricing. But, it hardly clears Kobo of any wrongdoing in terms of customer service. Digging into this a bit more, Hoffelder found evidence that this bug had been adjusting prices for at least a month:

My earliest confirmed report comes from MobileRead, and it is dated 10 September:

Is anyone else getting different prices on the checkout page? For instance, I want to get “Catching Fire” and it’s listed at $5.99. I click on the “buy now” button and the price jumps to $11.97. I contact Kobo’s customer service and they said that I should be logged in as to get the correct pricing. I log in and the same thing happens. I contacted them again, and they told me that the correct price is $11.97. But it’s still listed at $5.99?? Any ideas??

So Kobo has had this bug on their website for at least a month. As bad as that sounds the actual situation is very likely worse.

Some input from readers suggested the problem has been around for much longer than that. "Unverified reports" date the bug back as far as December 2011, and that Kobo customer service has known about the issue for at least 6 months.

Another report pulled from MobileRead (from February 2012) mentions something that sounds quite a bit like the price bug, but one that the purchaser didn't notice until it was too late.

Oh I had a similar issue. The price of the ebook I bought was much more lower on the website than what I was charged for on my credit card, that took a few weeks to resolve as well. They gave me a credit for the difference, but I did phone them about 4-5 times and emailed them at least once a week.

And then there's this, dating all the way back to December 2011.

When I go to the Kobo store I will see a book for $7.99 but when I log in the price updates to $8.99. Is this because the default price is in $US but when I log in using my Canadian they update to $CDN? I’m just wondering.

This doesn't bode well for Kobo's already-shaky customer service track record. A bug that alters prices not only during log in/log out but also during the actual checkout process isn't the sort of thing that should go unfixed for a month, much less (possibly) the greater part of the year. (Speaking of the checkout process, there's no verification screen during the purchase process. Once your purchase information is entered and the customer clicks "Buy Now," there's no turning back, and no way to verify the price is correct before it's charged to their card.) But Kobo seems very uninterested in providing even adequate customer service.

Based on my own experiences, the 2 readers who claim they contacted Kobo customer service are very likely telling the truth. I have seen in the past at least one occasion where Kobo customer service got a complaint from a customer, responded, but appeared to not have forwarded the complaint to the relevant party inside the company who could have fixed the error.

Speaking of Kobo’s questionable customer service, there was a period of at least 3 months last year where Kobo gave out this blog as the warranty repair site for the Slick ereaders. I kid you not.

I know a number of people will step forward to defend Kobo, but I’m not sure how. A month-long bug which over-charges some readers is indefensible. Customer service dept failing to forward a bug report is indefensible.

If you want customers, especially loyal ones who will increase your market through word-of-mouth, the worst thing you can do is subject them to ineffective customer service and a roulette wheel masquerading as a pricelist. There are still plenty of happy Kobo customers, but I wouldn't expect that number to grow anytime soon. And with this parade of misdeeds and miscues swiftly becoming the public face of Kobo, I fully expect that first group's numbers to start shrinking.