Not only do I think it’s BS that a $9.99 eBook isn’t profitable I think it’s outrageous that Steve Haber sucks for thinking consumers are a bunch of idiots that don’t understand profit margins.

Perhaps $9.99 isn’t profitable for Sony (Why is sony profiting at all on eBook sales?) because Sony is a huge bloated company with (I’d guess) more middle management than it needs. Profit margins have to be high for bloated inefficient companies to survive. That’s not the consumers fault, or the competition.

It’s an ebook, very little work goes into it’s creation, distribution, etc beyond the initial writing/editing process. Unless publishers are so backwards they’re still mailing manuscripts around in big envelopes, the work is already digital. Translate to ePub, and that’s it.

WTF, you can’t make money on $9.99 when you’re doing nothing more than taking the finished digital work, and converting to ePub? Really?  eBook sales should be icing. You’re already marketing the book (or should be), already pitching it to brick and mortors, etc. the eBook is the “Oh yeah it’s also available on your eReader”

As a side note, i found this quote hilarious.

On Sony’s embrace of ePub, the open format for reading digital books across multiple devices (which Amazon has not adopted):

“My analogy is if you walk into a mall and you’re with a bunch of your friends to go shopping and you can only go in one store and they can go into many stores. It probably makes more sense to shop many stores. That’s our thinking … It frankly makes it more fun for us because we can work with so many different companies. We’re not here trying to put a wall up to block our customers. We don’t get emails complaining about ‘Why did you lock me in?’

My translation is this.

“We tried being pricks and forcing people to use our own proprietary format, much like we did with digital music, (ATRAC) and memory cards for digital cameras, that didn’t work with any other devices or services on the planet. It didn’t work, so we’re doing what we should have done in the first place, but spinning it like we’re cool, and hip, and all about consumer rights.”

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the Pro-IP Act, essentially makes being a consumer a crime, yippy!

Techcrunch has a good write up on.

I’m completely opposed to the idea. I think IP should be protected, but I think making everyone feel like a criminal for using their purchased goods how they want, is not the way to go about it.

Not only will laws like this Pro-IP act make pirates more active, but it’ll further hurt innovation, and make purchasing that much more difficult. People will not want to create for fear of whatever DRM is in place making their offering less interesting.

TC has a good point, and I agree. Either candidate in our current election, would really shine in the tech sector if they can ignore the reationary, “If it ain’t broke…” industry lobbyists and guide American IP and copywright law into the current, let alone the next century.

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My first point of contention is that according to wired, no one knows where the 750,000 number actually came from. Several groups cite other groups as the source, even circling back on themselves. Gotta love that.

My second point of contention is this; the drug czar doesn’t seem to have done much for us, unless we won the war on drugs and no one told me. Now we’d have an equally useless position pushing draconian laws to augment the already incredibly terrible copyright/patent process we have today.

We don’t need czars, they didn’t work in Russia, they don’t seem to work for us either. We need reform. We need the copyright office to not suck. We need the patent office to do it’s job, and not rubberstamp “Device for viewing internet materials” type patents with no actual device to back up the patent. Copyright needs to make sense.

I agree those who get copyrights, should be protected, but copyright as it stands now is whack. It’d be nice to see copyright replaced with Creative Commons, it sure seems to make more sense to me. If content creators were more interested in their work, than suing everyone who quotes it, we’d all be in better shape.

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