The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Random House starting to figure out ebooks?

Publisher's Weekly has an interesting article about Fictionwise and their partnership with Random House for a few books. What makes Fictionwise interesting is that they sell their books without any digital rights management. They're unencrypted, and presumably there's nothing - other than ethics - to prevent warez kidz from buying one copy and distributing it to a thousand of their best friends. But people don't. And Fictionwise makes money.

Interesting, isn't it? It certainly flies in the face of the rabid DRM folk who are so zealous that they're busy crippling music CDs for all of us (and they wonder why music CD sales are down? Hmmmm)...

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about this topic:

"Evangelist entrepreneurs Fictionwise have been flogging for years the idea that unencrypted ebooks are more user-friendly and saleable than the encrypted kind. Now the startup has a notable, if highly temporary, partner in Random House, which is taking three ebooks from Del Rey and releasing them as unencrypted titles via Fictionwise.

The promotion for the three books, Tainted Garden by Jeff Stanley, Stone Maiden by Anne Aquirre and Thagoth by Michael McClung is, according to the publisher, just a one-time deal. The books are the result of a writing contest and are not being released in print form.

Random is the first large publisher to announce a promotion involving unencrypted ebooks, but the publisher emphasized that it did not expect to pursue this idea and would continue releasing ebooks in various encrypted formats. Fictionwise, though, sees in this something different - the beginning of an industry realization that easy and unprotected is (contrary to many large-publisher and public-health messages) the way to go.

"Unencrypted outsells encrypted, even though you could argue the encrypted gets 100 times the publicity," says Fictionwise co-founder Scott Pendergast. "We'd like to see a lot of publishers sell authors in [unencrypted] formats. But these are baby steps." He says the company has experienced very little piracy with unprotected titles.

Indeed, theirs is not an Open Source ethos - give it all away, hope a few will get bought - but rather is motivated by notions of customer-friendliness. Says Pendergast: "There's a very large percentage of buyers who will not buy encrypted titles, mostly because of ease-of-use or they're worried they are buying a title that will not be supported in a few years."

Hopefully these three books will do well enough that the bean counters at Macmillan will ask a few probing questions about what they're doing, what their assumptions are about ebooks, and what the market really wants.