The Big Book Barrier

The e-book isn’t a new thing. In the 1970s, Michael Hart thought to transcribe the US Declaration of Independence into ASCII code, and Project Gutenberg was born. Sometime in the late 90s and early noughties we had people start pushing e-books on the Rocket Reader, PDAs and Palm Pilots. But e-books didn’t quite take off back then, and it took two big and innovative companies — Apple and Amazon— to come out with two distinctly different devices, albeit both capable of reading e-books, to change the game and make the digital publishing industry a viable and vibrant place for readers, authors, and publishers the world over. One of the things that was supposed to happen was that books, freed from the constraints of atoms, pages, and the limitations of shipping costs and availability, would become more accessible to more people for much cheaper. This has generally happened with the aforementioned Project Gutenberg offering free books for download. While the accessibility has gone up along with the rise of online storefronts for e-books, prices remain somewhat inaccessible. Moreover, accessibility and price are still problems for Filipinos in the Philippines. Let’s address the first concern, accessibility. Granted that there are a number of books available to us through various sites, but the three big players in terms of hardware and ebook distribution, Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, offer us three different sets of limitations. Apple’s iBookstore is inaccessible to Filipino users if they register a Philippines account. But despite Apple’s penetration into the desktop, laptop, digital media player, and tablet markets in the country, we are still locked out of their content stores. We shouldn’t feel too bad I guess since there are, as of this writing, only six major iTunes store countries. There is always, of course, a workaround to this and one can, through a little hassle and ingenuity buy books from the iBookstore. But why should we have to go through that when we are already willing to buy books? Barnes & Noble makes it even more difficult, as they check your IP address and if you are outside of the United States, they will block any and all purchases. This is even if you have a US account and are registered there. Again, there’s a workaround which a lot of googling and a little bit of fiddling will reveal. But the point remains, why stop people from buying books? B&N doesn’t seem to have the framework established to cater to international buyers just yet, but one does hope that they can start addressing this larger market. Lastly, Amazon allows us into the Kindle store, but it limits content. While we’ve got to give Amazon points for acknowledging and working with the international market, particularly the Philippines, they still don’t give us access to all books. Sometimes when one is shopping for a book, it will say that that book is restricted and not allowed in our region. This is already a bummer when you can’t buy something. I personally went through something worse. A friend bought a book for me because he thought it was just the kind of thing I would like, and it was around the time of my birthday. But then when I tried to download it, Amazon wouldn’t allow it because the book wasn’t available in the Asia Pacific. Can you imagine buying someone a gift and then the store you bought it from suddenly runs up and tells your friend, “Oops, you can’t have that!"? Sure they gave me a gift check of equivalent value, but that’s still so different from being given the gift the friend selected. I wonder what the limitations will be, especially in terms of other content such as music and film, when the Kindle Fire becomes available. At present, I can’t purchase digital music from Amazon when I am in the Philippines. Will they follow what Apple is doing and snub us too? I am sure that these companies, and others, do not mean to snub the Philippines. It’s not like they have gone out of their way to single out the Philippines and stop us from buying books. It might be that they don’t think the profit margins are worth doing business with us (I’d disagree) or they might just have difficulty setting up the infrastructure and going through the legal loopholes. Which is to say that I am generally forgiving of these limitations. Frustrated, but forgiving. There’s a problem that these limitations create though. And it’s that information wants to be free, not necessarily free as in free lunch, but free as in having the capacity to be transmitted. As a result, even if the big three e-book storefronts are stopping us from getting those books that aren’t supposed to be available in our region, these books are still accessible to us. It’s a pretty simple equation here: make it hard to buy original, legal content, and people will find ways to obtain that content. Sometimes it’s even easier to obtain the content through other, ahem, means than it is to get it through paying. Inadvertently then, by not addressing the Philippines as a viable book market, they wind up encouraging people to get their books however they can. Make it easy to buy e-books and people will buy them. Make it hard, and people will find easier ways to get the books. I understand all of the legal hoops that have to be jumped through before things happen. But though I might understand that, most digital natives don’t, and the internet doesn’t either. It’s a borderless world where information travels as fast as your net connection will let it. As a result, it doesn’t make sense that content can be available online in one part of the world, and not in another. It’s all on the net at the same time. That means that the constraints placed on the movement of this data are artificial, and thus can be subverted. Adding onto that, though, one can’t help but wonder about the “international fees" that Amazon charges are for. Hooray for Amazon that they let us buy a good majority of their e-books without having to resort to VPNs and the like. But then they make us pay an extra $2. Sure that amount isn’t that big, but what is it for? How different and how much more does it cost them when someone in America or Europe downloads their book against someone in Asia? Rather than charging us an extra $2, the nicer thing would be to actually consider we are a third world country and give us a break on the costs. Consider then that we are paying for digital books, which should ideally be much cheaper than their print counterparts. This should be reflected in the costing of digital books. Record and movie companies did this, albeit slowly, reluctantly, and in the face of near-industry death due to the dirt cheap costs of pirated DVDs. Whereas DVDs and CDs used to sell at prices comparable to those in the West, now we can get our DVDs for P100 or so. This is to address the local market and adapt to the buying power we wield. We weren’t willing to pay P800 for a DVD, but at the time we were willing to pay 50-70, even if they were pirated. So the prices were dropped and that helped a little in addressing the piracy problem. Let’s be honest, it’s so often the piracy problem that content providers point to when they are asked to justify limited availability in the Philippines. But then it becomes a chicken and egg question: we don’t make things available because they will pirate them vis-a-vis we pirate these things because they aren’t available. I think this is the big barrier to e-books really taking off in the country:we’re locked out, and if they let us in we have to pay more. This goes too for royalties. Whereas an author or a digital publisher can stand to earn as much as 70% of digital sales in major countries, if a book is bought in the Philippines the author or digital publisher only get 30% of the sale. What accounts for this discrepancy? I don’t know but it’s there and it’s pretty big. I believe that ebooks will definitely define the future of the book and publishing industry. And at present people are still exploring the new world, learning the rules of this new game. It’s because of this that I understand and tolerate the uneven treatment that the Philippines is getting at the moment. I write this because I am hopeful that soon enough these playing fields will be as level and flat as the world is becoming. I hope that soon enough we can buy the books we want without having to check for its availability in our region or without us having to get VPNs or register as anything other than Filipinos in the Philippines. Let the e-books do what they do best, spread knowledge, information, thoughts, ideas. Give us Filipinos full access to all that the new technology has to offer. — TJD, GMA News Carljoe Javier has been called a geek maven, and is at the forefront of digital publishing in the Philippines. His short story collection, was the first book to have simultaneous digital and print releases. His latest book, The Pop Criticultural Infindibulator, a collection of essays on pop culture is available online as a free digital book.