Ebooks: what Amazon, Google, and Apple can learn from O'Reilly

I have used Amazon for about 13 years. I have always been satisfied with its service and fairness.

That was until Amazon started offering electronic books.

As an early adopter of e-book readers, I was obviously interested to this kind of offering, although I could not take full advantage of the Kindle store because I don't live in the USA. A few years ago I bought an iPad, and since then my consumption of e-books has risen dramatically. I find ebooks especially convenient for technical titles, which are usually bulky and heavy on my back when I travel.

Recently, I bought a Kindle touch, which is 3 times lighter than my iPad, and my reading habits have shifted towards the Kindle considerably. There are a few titles that are best experienced on a larger screen, and thus my iPad is still actively used as a reader.

Also in the last months, Apple and Google have entered the e-book market. From my standpoint (as a non-US resident) the experience is a disaster. Compared to Amazon, both Google and Apple look like a bad joke. More on this later on.

Convenience

When it comes to convenience and ease of use, nothing beats Amazon. Browse the store or search for something, find what you want, read the excerpt, and if you like it, buy it. It will end up in the device you have chosen within seconds.

Also for contents that I bought elsewhere or for reading documents, the Kindle is fantastic. I can send contents to a Kindle in seconds either from my browser or from my laptop. I also use it in combination with Instapaper and a few services offered by third parties.

Durability

While Amazon wins hands down in terms of ease of use for your purchases, it has the limitation that the books bought on Amazon can only be consumed on devices or software created by Amazon. DRM protected books from Amazon can't be read in devices created by its competition, nor can they be converted to formats that are easier to search and analyze (things that often I need to do with technical books). The same limitation applies to Apple e-books, which are only available on Apple devices. Some can only be bought from Apple devices. Google does not even tell you which format your books are. They are only in Google cloud. Take it or leave it.

The winners in this category are the smaller publishers, O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmer. They both provide books in the most popular formats. They also send books directly to the cloud (either directly to my Kindle or to my Dropbox account). It is not as immediate as buying from Amazon, but the combination of multiple DRM-free formats and cloud storage makes these publishers the winners in matter of durability.

Fairness

Electronic books have not been popular for long. Until a few years ago, many technical titles were only available as hardcover of paperback editions. When e-books sales started being as profitable as the good old paper books, many titles that had been in the Amazon offering for years were also offered as ebooks. And here comes the trick. These books are listed by the year when the ebook was made available on Amazon, not by the uyear the book was first published. Thus I see SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide listed as published in 2011.

The same book, in O'reilly catalog is correctly listed as published in 2005.

If I didn't know better, I would be tempted to buy the Amazon book as a recent update of the book that has been in my shelves for 11 years (I bought the 1st edition in 2001). Fortunately, whenever I see an O'Reilly book on Amazon, I rush to the O'Reilly site to get the multiple format, DRM-free edition, and sometimes get a discount.

The list of unfair offering is not limited to these date tricks. The fact that makes me angry is the price of e-books that is often much higher than the hardcover edition. Amazon defends itself by saying that the price is imposed by the publisher and they are as much the victims of these overpriced goods as us poor customers. I call BS! Amazon has a dominant position as a bookseller and they can't tell the tale of the publishing houses bullying them into keeping high prices.

The winners of this category are again the small publishers. Books on paper are reasonably priced. e-books are, with few exceptions, much cheaper than the physical goods.

Annoyances

Probably the most annoying matter, where Apple and Google are the biggest offenders, is the store localization. A better name for this issue is store ghettoization. In the case of Apple, you can access a store only if you have a credit card for the country where the store is located. If you happen to have a bank account and a corresponding address in a different country, then you can enjoy some freedom. But, and it is a big BUT, it does not matter which language you speak: you will get the language of the store where you have a bank account. You live in Italy, with an Italian bank account, but want to speak English and buy items in English? Tough luck. No chance in hell. You just get the Italian site written in machine-translated Italian (I hope it's that. It would be too depressing to know that there are humans who have butchered the Italian language that in the Italian Apple store), and there will be an unpredictable mix of text in English and Italian, depending on which items are allowed to be sold in your disgraced country.

If it were only the language, I could cope. I could learn to bear it, like a bad smell. But the fact is that some items, for some unfathomable reasons, are not available to the non-US public. The free Movies app, for example, can't be used by Italians. And the same fate applies to the majority of books in English, which are not even listed in the store available to Italians.

Amazon is also guilty of some similar ghetto practices. There are titles that cost more if you live elsewhere.

Heard of the Kindle daily deal? A low-priced kindle book priced every day. Sounds like a dream:

Until you press "continue"

Google annoyances in this respect are even worse. There is a Google books store available in Italy, with about 100 official titles in English. The other countless books in English are not visible to me. Anyway, I have a Google account, and from time to time I check boos in Google, to see if there is some interesting offering. No way. The prices are always the same, cent by cent, of the other monopolistic booksellers in Italy.

Having an account should tell Google who I am, and what I like, right? It should tell it that I want my listings in English. It doesn't happen. It should tell it that I live in a country where Google sells books. Unfortunately, when I travel abroad, I see the Google books page in whichever language my IP tells Google I am located in, and I get a message informing me that Google Books is not available in my country. Which is not my country, damn you!

You know what, Amazon, Apple, Google? If readers want to buy a book and none of you makes it available for non-US residents, the only choice you leave them is to get a bootleg copy. Would they feel guilty if they have to get a pirated copy of a book that they can't get legally? My guess is "not even a tiny bit."

Summing up

I hope O'Reilly and similar publishers get a better foothold in the market, and erode the monopolistic advantage and ambition of Amazon, Apple, and Google.