andrewducker | You can rent them by the yard

Speaking of Spotify, I think I could actually save money by buying the albums I mostly listen to and transferring them over to my phone. But knowing I have access, and that I'm actually paying for music makes me happier than not doing so.

I think I'd feel the same way about books. I wouldn't have to worry about finding books in the right format, for the right price, without DRM. Instead I'd be paying for access, and not have to worry that I wasn't doing my part for the publishing industry.

Edited 2011-09-07 10:17 (UTC)

I'd really like a Lovefilm for (physical) books. The library should achieve that, but in practice they don't have a lot of the books I want[*]; I'm imagining something very comprehensive, like Lovefilm seems to be.

[*] although county-wide inter-library loans have improved it from about 2% of the books I want to about 50%.

I'd really like a Lovefilm for (physical) books.

YES!

Yes! The other advantage that would have over libraries is the 'no late fees' thing. I can't make libraries cost effective due to my shocking memory!

Lx

Edinburgh Library has some sort of ebook service now library2go they are calling it. And it's free.

That's fantastic! I had no idea. I'll have a play when I'm at home again.

hitting this now.

given that I find Edinburgh Library unusable now that they've clogged it with those *fuckerating AWFUL* self service booths.

I went there a couple of days ago, picked up a book, wandered over to the booths, gave up and took the book back. I probably won't be back for a while.

it doesn't work with linux.

another great fail for mankind

Aside from the delivery aspect, surely this is just a library.

I can see the stock being badly damaged after a while though. Books do take a heck of a pounding, especially paperbacks. Imagine paying to borrow a dog eared copy of the most recent bestseller that's been through the post 30 times in a month.

I had no idea that Edinburgh library did ebooks.

And I'm happy to pay for books, in order to make authors happier.

Damage? How do ebooks get damaged?

Doh, I really didn't read your post at all :D

Isn't it called a library?

I had no idea that Edinburgh library did ebooks.

And even so, there's a queue, because they can have all copies on loan, which means i'd have to wait behind other people.

Spotify doesn't work like that. I have whatever I want, instantly.

So a Spotify for ebooks? Maybe. I don't do ebooks at the moment. Still quite attached to dead tree format.

I need to get over my urge to own books. I think when I read something I love, that emotion gets tangled into the book (I imagine this is how hoarders get started). However, I rarely re-read books, so really, a Spotify book deal would probably suit my needs a lot better.

When it comes to non-fiction or reference books, that would be INCREDIBLY useful. However I like keeping those sorts of books when I need to look something up. I have a good memory for the location of information, and a less good memory for the information itself.

You could always buy books you love as well.

But for trying out books (like the one you just hated), you could do so more easily, and then stop, because you didn't pay money specifically for it :->

When it comes to non-fiction or reference books, that would be INCREDIBLY useful. However I like keeping those sorts of books when I need to look something up. I have a good memory for the location of information, and a less good memory for the information itself.

same! I store the "where to find it" info in my brain, rather than the actual info. And, interestingly, why paper books are hard for me to shake: because of the trick of remembering where in a book something was...

I'd be more likely to do it for a tenner a month, but might go up to 15 depending on the catalogue. I know Spotify doesn't pay the artists terribly well, but I wonder how the royalties from a book-Spotify would compare to library payments? I'd still buy books as well, but only ones I thought I might like to keep.

I'd hope it paid better than libraries. Largely because payment per listen is for a short period, but payment per read covers a much larger one. It shouldn't cost much to listen to a track once, after all, but over a good song's lifetime I'll probably listen to it many times.

I see I'm the only person to tick more than £20 quid. I don't think it will ever happen (not least because it would destroy the economics of publishing) but universal access to everything published is easily worth that.

I spend a lot less than £20/month on books, so it's not worth that to me. If it was that much then I'd continue to buy individual books.

I probably do spend £20+ a month on books (these days that is only two and a half full price paperbacks).

However, what I actually spend now is only part of the picture. In your hypothetical, I'd be able to browse every published cookery book for recipes. And that's just one example: I could check any reference I wanted, look up any quote, it would be priceless.

Yes - the cookery book example is genius.

I put £20 but I spend WAY more than that. Especially on tech books! Of course there is Safari bookshelf etc, but lack of decent book reader has put me off that so far - maybe this year there will be an acceptable tablet!

I re-read a LOT which actually keeps my spend down.

and I'm an insanely fast reader - average fiction paperback in 2-3 hours.

I can see big problems with getting revenue to publishers for such a service -- like how do you split revenue fairly. For example, with my kindle, I look in the dictionary moderately regularly because there's a simple cursor based word look up so if I'm not quite sure of a meaning I now look it up (e.g. destrier previously was filed as "some kind of horse" and I now know "big chunky war horse"). So I "read" the dictionary every week. Other books I might dip into to refresh my memory if I'm reading something else in the series. But by "page time" I am actually spending most of my time with various fiction books. If not carefully handled the revenue stream could be pretty unfair.

If it were priced below my current level of ebook consumption then I would do it -- but why would publishers?

Actually, I know why publishers would. Humans have an irrational love for a flat-fee model. People will provably pay more for "unlimited" broadband than for broadband charged per hour or per Gb of use. So I guess publishers could use it as a lever to get more money out of people -- at which point I would not use it since I read research literature and am, hence, unusually aware of the weaknesses in human ability to get the best deal for a service.

I like flat fee models for convenience - not having to think "Can I afford this?" or even "Is this worth the money?" is worth paying a small premium for me. As would having everything (or near-everything) being available through the one place.

I agree that the charging/payment structure would be interesting to hammer out.

This is known in psychology/behavioural modelling circles as "bounded rationality". In complex decision making people will often trade (sometimes considerable) sums of money to avoid a more complex decision process. They make an "irrational" (in the economic sense) decision because the "rational" decision is difficult. I am sometimes a victim of it despite myself: a typical example would be:
If I shopped around for an hour and did some working out I could save £5 a month on my mobile bill (guestimate) but I can't be fagged, some part of my brain is saying "it's only a fiver"... although over the two years of the contract I have wasted £120 which is considerable and certainly worth doing an hour or two of work to obtain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

For a one-off decision that will save money over time I tend to be better. When it's a constant series of decisions to make, then I'm happy to drip-feed money to prevent them.

That is the very essence of bounded rationality and at that point it is "rational" in the human if not the economic sense (which in classical economics does not account for the cost of actually making the calculations required to make an economically efficient decision).

Any theory of economics that doesn't take into account that decision-making takes time, and that "time is money" isn't worth the paper it's published on :->

You may have heard the story about the mathematician looking for his car keys under a street light. A passer by asks him if he could point out more precisely where he dropped them. The mathematician points to a place tens of metres away and says "but I can't look over there, it's too dark."

The theories we have may not be worth the paper they are published on but they are quite definitely those theories which are most accessible.

[To be fair there are non-equilibrium theories of decision making accounting for bounded rationality -- they're just MUCH MUCH more difficult.]

Why isn't there an option for "I will never, ever read an e-book because I think books should always be read on paper?"

Should always, like, for everybody ever?

For me. I understand that other people are happy with e-readers and I even bought a Kindle for my girlfriend for Christmas because she wanted one.

But, there is no way in hell I'd ever use one.

This is the way I feel at the moment too. I'm fine that other people love them but for me, holding the thing in my hands and turning the paper pages is all part of the experience of reading for pleasure.

This is a library and state provision is the way to go. I don't read so many books that I can't afford to buy all the etexts I want.

With a public library I have to wait for a book to be in stock. The Edinburgh library system now does ebooks and they deliberately limit the number of each book that can be loaned out at any point.

This is very different from "I want to read X right now" and having access to it immediately.

How curious! Why do the library impose limits like that on something electronic?

I imagine it is imposed on them. With physical books, there is a monetary outlay that places a limit on how many copies they can issue. This would have to be artificially imposed for e-books and the reason someone (the PLR?) would want to impose this is to protect income for authors.

I can confirm that this is the case.

Yes... it is a licencing issue. We have similar things with some bits of software -- the licence allows only (say) 25 simultaneous copies running on the central system. If you pay more you can have more simultaneous copies.

The limits are imposed on the library by the publishers.

Publishers want to set library ebooks to expire after being lent something like 26 times, forcing another purchase of the book. Harper Collins started it: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/03/harpercollins-library-ebook-checkout-limit.html

I’ve been thinking about this myself recently. I really like the idea. I subscribe to Napster and it has really enhanced the depth and breadth of my musical appreciation.

I ticked £20 per month. That’s how much cable costs. It’s about two new paperbacks in paper or half an academic text.

I don’t often re-read books so the ownership is symbollic for me. I’m a big fan of the John Schumman lyric from Where Ya Gonna Run to Now “the books on your shelves are a measure of all that you’ve learned”. How would I demonstrate my status as a man of learning if visitors to my home are not confronted with a wall of books?

The catalogue would be very important in making the decision. What I’m missing from the library is a back catalogue of science fiction and lots of specialist non-fiction.

The author payment is tricky and the way it works for short songs is probably not going to be the way it works for long books. Not a problem that I need to solve tho’. I’d let the authors, rights owners and E-library suppliers sort it out for themselves on whatever terms make sense to them.

A Spotify equivalent for books
(x) We already have it, and it's called a public library.

I would be willing to pay up to...
(x) Nothing. We already have it, and it's called a public library.

It's not. With a public library I have to wait for a book to be in stock. The Edinburgh library system now does ebooks and they deliberately limit the number of each book that can be loaned out at any point.

yeaaaaaahhhhh.
while I get that the library has to agree to licenses, that is a very good example of content owners REALLY BADLY FAILING TO GET THE FUCKING POINT.

again.

ahem

To be fair, if I could get any ebook I wanted instantly for free through my local library, there would be no reason for me to ever pay money for books ever again.

It's not a case of them failing to the the point. It's a case of them having tremendous difficulty trying to work out what the new model should be.

The old one is easy: library buys X books, lends them. If it wants to lend more, it buys more.

New one: library buys an eBook. This eBook file could be 'loaned' an infinite number of times without restriction. But is it fair that a library pays for one eBook copy and then lends that copy to hundreds of borrowers?

We know that restricting eBook loans seems 'wrong' to borrowers. But equally, publishers find it wrong not to be paid for each copy of their eBook - which is fair enough, really.

Until someone comes up with a model that satisfies readers and publishers, library eBook lending isn't likely set the world alight anytime soon.

With no exceptions I can think of, books fall into two categories for me:

Books I would like to read once and then not read again. (There are millions of these.)

Books I would like to have on my bookshelf forever and ever amen. (There are about 180 of these. They aren't always the same 180, as I get older.)

I don't read near as many of the first kind of books as I would like, a bit because I don't want to pay for them, but mostly because I don't want to keep accumulating books I have no intention of reading again and then have to figure out how to get rid of them (this keeps happening anyway, but, you know, I'd like to have it happen less). The kind of service you suggest would be ideal.

I'm amused that you don't have a category of "Books I don't want to read" :) Not even a Spice Girls autobiography, or The Complete Guide to Programming in Fortran 1.5?

I agree, though. I'm happy to read many books once and let them go; I have no particular interest in having such books on my shelves. And there are other books I read and want to have a copy of, perhaps to reread, but primarily to be able to let others like our bibliophibian daughter read :)

You know libraries do ebooks, right? At least, so I gather.

See various discussions elsewhere on this post - they limit the number of copies of each book, and (looking at Edinburgh libraries service) have a very limited selection.

the Edinburgh Library ebook service really isn't what Andy is talking about here.
having looked at it myself, it solves none of the problems such a service should and in its current form is a massively wasted opportunity
[though I shouldn't really expect more from what is essentially a digital form of the usual library service]

From a reliable big company, yes. I'd have to get a decent reader first - some kind of tablet methinks - everything else is too small.

Hell yes, and I would pay over £20 if it meant full access to the books I need when I need them. I use Edinburgh library, and the university libraries here and in Glasgow, and I use jstor a lot. The books I need often have long waits on them, or need to be ordered through ILL, or are reference only. I use Google books to read bits and pieces, but so very often the bits you want are unavailable in them.

And, throw in unlimited fiction reading, and I'm happy. I'd still buy a ton of books, though. I'm still buying paper books as well as reading on a kindle.

Why just books? Why not films and computer games?

If I'd bought all the games I've got on Steam at full price (which I certainly didn't do!) then that averages to £27 a month on computer games.

I'd happily pay around £50 a month to be able to play any games I wanted, when I wanted, for as long as I wanted.

Spotify is stupidly cheap, but while I would be happier paying more, I suspect many might not be.

Films and Computer games would be a different poll.

Was this in reference to this?

Thank you for that, I hadn't encountered it before!

(and that was a no)

I honest to goodness don't know what Spotify is.

I have Internet access but it's slow, and I usually avoid links that seem to require high bandwidth.

Music streaming service/library. You can pay $5/month to listen to anything you like, as much as you like.

It's how I listen to pretty much everything nowadays. I pay £10/month to have their premium subscription, which gives me access on my phone.

Since I got my Kindle I've read more, although I suspect it's more rubbish. With Kindle offers it's easier to download something I might not buy normally, but equally I've found some decent authors that way.

I no-longer want a library. That might not sound weird (who wants a library?!), but as a kid & teen, I always wanted a library!

Key reason I'd pay for a service is new books. Libraries are rubbish for new books in general. That said, a fiver every week or few days for a new download is not a problem - some of my colleagues spend that on Starbucks.

Assuming they had every single book in stock that I could ever want to read...

Nope, still probably not. I'm not reading enough fiction/light nonfiction at the moment to make a monthly fee worthwhile, and the academic stuff is much better in paper form since I only have limited screen space but can have nigh-unlimited physical books spread all over my apartment. And that's not getting into the physical comfort of sprawling with a book versus trying to find a comfortable reading position with my netbook.

If you're not reading much in the way of fiction, and don't have an ebook reader, then it wouldn't be of interest :->

Julie's not really reading much at the moment, because the PhD has her reading enough papers right now that she has no brain space for reading for fun.

You can rent them by the yard

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