Note: I read this post aloud for the Modern Evil Podcast, today. Episode 86.

Related somewhat to my recent post about some of my perceived problems with eBooks, tonight I noticed a similar problem with music.  As I tweeted a little while ago, “Listening to previews of the songs on Moby’s new album in iTunes. Makes me want to go out and buy it on CD. I don’t trust dl-only anything.”  I then went on a bit on Twitter, saying that if I could easily and always access what I’d paid for “from the cloud” on any device, for life, that’s one thing. Currently: it’s simply too easy to lose digital media.  I know corporations want me to keep re-buying my content, over and over, with each new format. I say f_ck that. Sell me a license to the IP, don’t sell me the container & expect me to re-buy the IP if the container breaks.  Yes, I’m supposed to back up my digital purchases… but buying the CD is buying the music PLUS a high-quality backup I can play in my car!  If I buy the music from iTunes, I have to make my own backup, on less-reliable (and uglier) media.  Why would I want that?

Yes, as with eBooks, there is convenience. It would be nice when, as in this example, I wake up at midnight, find an email about Moby’s new album, listen to the previews and think it’s great, I could instantly buy a copy of the music without having to worry about when stores are open and where this particular CD might be available.  (ie: Super WalMart is open right now, but they don’t stock all the music, just some of the music, and supporting them is economically dubious.  I prefer to buy from Zia, a locally owned chain of record shops, but they don’t open until 10AM, by which time the allure of “now” will likely have faded into “someday”.)  With a digital purchase (or the sort of “I’m buying a license to this IP” idea I suggested above), I could have instant access to the music or the eBook (or the movie, or software, or whatever), and instant is good.

But then there’s also the bad of digital.  The inconveniences.  Yes, iTunes is now (sortof) DRM-free, so the “I can only play this song on 5 devices” rule isn’t as problematic, though I do have a chunk of music with that problem.  Some eBooks have DRM, some don’t.  But here’s a problem: by buying a digital-only copy of the music/book, if I lose that copy I have to buy it again.  Yes, this is true of all buying-the-container systems: If I lose the CD, I have to buy it again.  If I lose the paperback, I have to buy it again.  But it’s much, much easier to lose digital goods than it is to lose physical goods.  Hard drives crash.  Files become corrupt. Or lost. I buy a new computer every couple/few years.  I buy a new iPhone every couple of years. I bought new iPods every couple of years before that.

Earlier I said “I don’t trust dl-only anything.” — I have reason to say this.  I have bought, and lost, I-don’t-know-how-much-money’s-worth-of-music &c. over the years.  Yes, I made backups.  In some cases, the backups were lost.  In some cases the backups failed.  At one point I was backing up to tape and then the drive broke and I discovered the company was out of business and replacements had become very, very expensive on the resale market.  In one case, I actually used iTunes’ built in “backup your digital purchases” function to do a complete backup before format/upgrade of OS, and found that -randomly- huge swaths of my music had not been backed up.  Many albums only had one or two songs left after restore, many paid-for singles were simply missing.  I followed all the directions to the letter, and they had failed.  Luckily, most of my music comes from CDs, so over the last few years as I’ve discovered missing tracks I’ve been able to grab the CDs and re-rip them.  Not so of digital purchases.  I am missing Long Tall Weekend completely and -as far as I know- can never get it back.  (Or maybe I can get it back if I pay for it again.)

We live in the future. DRM is a watchword on everyone’s lips, but they’re using it wrong.  I love the idea of Digital Rights Management -what those words acutally say- because I dream of a future where, when I’m shopping at iTunes or the Kindle store or Smashwords or whatever, what I’m actually paying for with a purchase is the right to listen/read/use the IP I’m paying for, rather than the container.  I dream of a future where my rights to listen to a particular song or album will be managed digitally and I’ll be able to access it regardless of device failure/upgrade.  I dream of a future where I can buy the book ‘Let the Right One In’ and access it instantly as an eBook on my choice of devices or -because my digital rights are protected- have a copy printed up on a local EBM or by an online service for only the actual printing cost (ie: without having to pay for the IP again).  I dream of a future where DRM is a good thing for consumers, instead of the weapon it currently is, wielded by corporations against the very people whose purchases support them.

Physical media -CDs, paper books, DVDs, et cetera- should not be what I’m buying any more than the container that is a digital download (ie: this particular .mp3 file contains a copy of this song) should be.  Smashwords gets this concept right – you pay once for a Smashwords title and you can dl it as many times as you’d like, in as many formats as they can produce, for as long as Smashwords exists.  (Which will hopefully be at least until my dream DRM system is implemented.)  Kindle … sortof gets it, in that you can re-dl your titles with WhisperSync, but doesn’t really get it, since you can’t re-dl a title that’s been removed.  (ie: if a Publisher decides they don’t want to sell that book on Kindle anymore, they remove it and you’d better hope you had a backup.  Or, apparently, if they put out a revised edition of the book, they may remove the old one -and then you have to re-buy it if you ever lose the file or want it on a different device! WTF‽)  Do you get it?

I try to do it right, but since I’m one guy, not a mega-corp, the easiest way for me to manage it is to simply make free, DRM-free copies of the eBook and audiobook available alongside pay versions of each.  If you pay for one, you don’t need to pay for the others (though you can).  Unfortunately this leaves the “paper is best” standard in full effect – I have no easy way to give away a free copy of the paperback with purchase of the eBook.  Someday.

For the month of July, the easiest way to get my eBooks on your eReader or iPhone for free will be via Smashwords.com.  (My eBooks are always available for free on modernevil.com.)  For owners of the iPhone/iPodTouch, just go into Stanza (a top-notch eBook reading app with access to many full catalogs of eBooks), navigate to the Smashwords store, and search for “Teel” (that’s me!) using the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the app.  The coupon code to get the books for free is “JFREE” and it works throughout the month of July.  Be sure to check out the entire promotional catalog (you can’t miss it in either the iPhone app or on the web site) to find thousands of other books that are discounted (or free) during this promotion.

Why free?  For the reasons I’ve already covered, and also because I recently set all my eBooks’ prices to under $2 on Smashwords and in the Kindle store.  Try them, buy them, tell your friends.  You can’t beat free.

I want to read Let the Right One In, preferably on my iPhone.  Mandy and I watched and enjoyed the film together, then she checked the book out of the library, read it & loved it.  I didn’t get around to reading it when she had it out, so I re-requested it (it’s a very popular book & there are only two copies in circulation in the Phoenix library system, so it took a while) and it came in a couple weeks ago and … I still didn’t get around to it.  I’d like to try reading eBooks (I basically never have), on my iPhone, and I’d like to see if having the book always available, in my pocket, makes me any more likely to actually get through it than merely having the huge block of paper lurking around the house, taunting me about not reading it.

Also, Mandy loved it so much that she has stated that she would like to read it again.  So:

1) I could go to a book store and buy the book (the paperback is broadly available, on account of the movie), or just order the paperback from Amazon for … looks like $8.88 used or $10.85 new (or the hardback for $9.90 used / $14.69 new) … then we’d own it & I’d be able to read it and Mandy would be able to read it over and over, and we could even lend it out if we wanted to.

2) I could buy the kindle version from Amazon for $9.99 and read it on my iPhone.  And only my iPhone.  And Mandy can’t read it again without us buying or borrowing it again.

I can’t find the book as an eBook anywhere else (though admittedly I’m not experienced at trying – where do YOU look for eBooks?), so this may be the only e-option for this title.  Amazon’s DRM means that I can either pay twice for the two people in my household to be able to read the one book, or buy the paper book and then a totally unrestricted number of people can read it.  Let me rephrase: I can buy the electronic version for $9.99 and I’ll be the first and only person ever allowed to read that copy OR I can buy a paper copy for $8.88 that’s already been read by an unknown number of people and I can be one of many people who are allowed to read that copy in the future.

There is a reason publishers like DRM and dislike used books, and it has nowt to do with readers.

I believe that publishers should do everything they can to encourage reading as much as they can in every possible way that they can.  I believe that anything publishers do that discourages reading, or that fails to encourage reading, is working against their own best interests.  I believe that the amount of money society spends on reading material relates directly to how much people are reading – so that the best way to increase spending on books is to increase reading. Duh! Please, Macmillan, encourage me.

I’ve just finished a new video, on some of the exciting changes taking place in the publishing world (I recommend you watch it in High Quality & full screen, if possible):

If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.

Speaking of mood swings and mental instability, here’s another post about my books – with a totally different perspective from the last one.  After reading a post about the results another author has had with experimental pricing, and considering the matter, generally and in terms of my recent frustrations, I’ve decided to try a similar pricing scheme.  So, at least for the remainder of the summer, the eBook versions of my books will no longer be priced according to parity of margins.

I’ve reduced the price of the Kinde versions of all my eBooks, and then all the Smashwords versions of my eBooks, to under $2 each.  Forget What You Can’t Remember & Lost and Not Found, for only $1.99 each.  Dragons’ Truth & More Lost Memories for only $1.75 each.  And on the Kindle, each of the first three books of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series for only $1.50 each.

The Kindle versions, of course, can only be read on the Kindle.  Sorry.  The versions at Smashwords can be read on most any device – your PC’s browser or word processor (.txt, .rtf, & .pdf), the Kindle and other Mobipocket-compatible eReaders, Palm devices (.pdb), Sony eReaders (.lrf, etc.), iPhone/iPodTouch (via Stanza)… pretty much anything.  And yes, for reasons I’ve stated clearly before, there are still free versions available for those of you who either 1) can’t afford to pay and/or 2) refuse to pay.

This is an experiment. Tell your friends. Twitter about it. Link to it. Set up an affiliate account at Smashwords & take a cut of every sub-$2 sale.  ($0.15 here, $0.18 there, repeat hundreds or thousands of times & it adds up!)  Copy it.  Compete with it.  Blog about how you think I’m devaluing my content. Blog about how you think I’m building my reader base. Blog about how you think Amazon’s 65% cut is terrible and I’m a fool for even publishing a kindle version.  Or ignore it.  If unit sales increase over the next couple of months, which is what I’m hoping for, great! I’ll keep the prices low.  (Sub-$2 low? Maybe…)  If, by the end of the summer, unit sales haven’t changed (or haven’t changed enough that my significantly lower per-eBook take gets close to my current -relatively low- sales numbers), I’ll put them back up.  Maybe put them up to a $9.99 price point & see if “fitting in” increases sales.  Maybe split the difference.

So give one (or all) of my books a try.  The prices are low enough that it’s worth the risk of not liking my writing – but if you like to think, I think you’ll like my books.

No idea if/when they’ll get this corrected, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Theoretically, this means that if you buy one of my books for your kindle right now, you pay ~$7 and I get ~$0.60. Wheee!