Winifred Wilson's Exciting Adventures in Space

Amazon’s eBook business is growing in leaps and bounds, faster than the company’s own expectations, even overtaking print sales just 4 years after the introduction of the Kindle. For every 100 books that Amazon sells in either paperback or hardcover, it delivers 105 (paid) kindle eBooks, not including free titles. This growth is phenomenal and is in large part due to the market leading nature of the Kindle coupled with the enormous library of digital books offered (over 950,000 books with 109 of the 111 New York Times best sellers available).

But this new distribution method has brought with it that old bugbear, geo-locked sales. Remember region codes on DVDs? Weren’t they a pain in the arse? You legally purchased a movie (possibly a hard-to-find or unavailable movie at home) in a country under a different region code to you and brought it home to play it to find that, hey it won’t work here! I certainly remember this pain, being a Region 4 country floating amongst a sea of Region 3 meant I couldn’t bring DVDs home from holidays. Over time, this system became increasingly irrelevant as region-free players became cheap and the internet made it easier to pirate a film. With Blu-ray, we now have a simplified region system however reports indicate that as much as 45% of these discs don’t even specify a region code. In the age of high-speed internet, making it hard for the consumer to use your product encourages your customer to pirate it. (Side note: I am really glad to see so many DVD/Blu-ray discs shipping with iPod & computer files now, about time the industry respected the customer [even if there are still some bugs in the execution]).

Apparently this memo never made its way to the publishers because they have embraced this geo-locked sales method with fervour normally reserved for the bedroom. Take, for example, Party Monster. Happen to live outside the US like me? No digital book for you! I live in Australia, so this book is unavailable in my region, even as an alternative(ly priced) digital version. But what if I ordered the print version? No problem! Amazon will ship that right to my door in just a few days. So why has the publisher chosen to geo-lock the eBook version and not the print version? Good question! I couldn’t find an answer to that either. In this case, all the publisher has driven me to do in this case is find a way around their ridiculous geo-locked system. For Amazon, this is a simple case of changing my residing country (even if this does flout the rules), however this could very easily have seen me turn to the internet to obtain the same content for free for the convenience.

If the current upheaval in traditional media industries (music, movies, publishing) has taught us anything, it’s that we, as customers, want the most convenient method available to consume our media. If this means pirating it because the legitimate copy is crippled at purchase, then off the reader goes to a BitTorrent search engine. However, if you make your legitimate version easy to use, easy to buy and transportable, we all win and will happily pay! (Obviously there will always be a group of people who will refuse to pay any price for anything they can obtain for free, but I am confident you will find that the average consumer is more interested in convenience).

In the digital age, alienating your customer is the last thing you should be considering. Wherever possible, you should make it as easy as possible for people to obtain your content at fair (internationally fair – none of this ripping locals off stuff [I'm looking at you, iTunes Store]) prices. As long as you refuse to, you will foster the very grey-market ecosystem you so eagerly wish to destroy. If Amazon was to block users from this simple method, consumers will likely turn to the internet for that content.

Side comment: Text-to-Speech features

On the topic of publishers “just not getting it,” why on earth would you disable text-to-speech functionality in your books? The Kindle does all the heavy lifting here and allows your book to be read by those who are visually impaired or who need assistance when reading, so it isn’t like the publisher is avoiding costs here. To me, this is the publisher actively saying: we don’t need that segment of the market, so we will make our content inaccessible to them.” Please explain to me why this is a good idea. Claiming that computer voices are not “nice” to listen to or you lose control of pacing are ridiculous reasons – you are just preventing those who need these technologies from accessing your content and I think it’s a sad state of affairs.