Barnes & Noble’s nook device – proposals for better lending
Barnes & Noble’s highly anticipated ebook reader, the nook, boasts a variety of features that B&N says makes it superior to the Kindle device made by Amazon.
I received one as a gift for Christmas, and while I am still awaiting its arrival, I’ve done a good bit of reading about the device. Overall, it sounds like a great device but like any 1st/2nd generation product, the nook should be expected to have its share of imperfections and unfinished features.
One of these unfinished features is the nook’s ability to lend out books, but only temporarily, to other Nook users. According to the clarification from B&N as stated on the nook blog nookTalk (on Twitter as @nookTalk, “the books you buy for your nook can only be loaned out ONCE for fourteen days.” This “one-lend-only-and-just-for-14-days” feature, in my mind, makes this feature more hype than substance. How often do you borrow a book from a friend and return it 14 days later? And how often have you lent out a book multiple times to various friends you have who you think should read the book, or read enough of it to be interested in purchasing it themselves? How frustrating would it be to only have the ability to lend the book out one time, and never again?
Admittedly, the nook’s ability to lend books at all is better than the Amazon Kindle’s lack of a lending feature. And I imagine there’s plenty of business, partner/copyright, and technology issues at play here that prevented a more relaxed lending feature at this time, but here is my question: why not allow the process of lending an e-book to occur in essentially the same way as the lending of physical books works?
Here are my specific suggestions on how to loosen up the technology to better emulate real-life book lending, while also (somewhat) protecting content creators’ copyrights, their royalties, and the publisher’s/distributors’ revenues. These suggestions could be implemented by any of the e-book / e-reader companies:
- Extend the time limit of lending. This is an obvious problem; I would propose they extend the time limit at least to 60 or 90 days, but preferably to something closer to 6 months. This only makes sense, as a physical book lent out can sometimes stay gone for a while.
- Do not allow the owner of the e-book to read it while it is “lent out”. This may be disappointing to e-book users, but it does accurately match what happens with physical books and thereby provides some protection to content providers’ copyright and distribution concerns.
- Implement automatic reversion of the reading rights. As a way of preventing the scenario we have all experienced where you lend a book to someone, but it turns out to be a gift to them (because they never return it!), the devices would ideally revoke reading rights to the book on the lender’s device/account after the lending time limit is up, and return those reading rights to the e-book owner. Update: I heard from @nookTalk shortly after publishing this post that this feature “should work” currently. Thanks for the info!
- Allow for upgrades / “full license” purchase of ebooks to remove or relax restrictions – Apple has already done a similar thing with their music, often offering a non-protected version of songs on iTunes for $1.29 instead of the standard $0.99 per song price, for example. So, an e-book that normally sells for $9.99 could sell for, say, $14.99 in an unprotected format that might have relaxed lending restrictions (even longer lending, lending to more than 2 or 3 people and simultaneous access to the book yourself, etc.) This would calm the critics and ensure that people could have more flexibility if they paid more for the e-book– probably something closer to the cost of what the physical book would cost in the store.
- Implement a “lending friends” list – Thankfully, my understanding is that the nook does allow multiple accounts (I’m not sure of how many, but I am sure it’s comparable to the Kindle’s 6 account limit) to have access to the same books. This should assuage any concerns about members of the same household being able to access each other’s books. But my LENDING friends list that I suggest essentially works the same way, except that the list of accounts can be larger and is used for the lending feature only, not for unlimited normal access to your library. This again would somewhat of a limiting feature to users, but would be a mitigating protection for B&N and publishers. If you, for example, can only lend any of your books to someone on a list of 10 different for example, this will limit the odds that lending will be so easy as for some to avoid purchasing books altogether.
I am hopeful — and confident — that as the e-book technology improves and technology creators, authors, and publishers come to grips with the radical changes that will be coming to their industry with the rise of e-books, there will also be an eventual improvement and standardization of features such as e-book lending across all devices. Hopefully these suggestions here will help to kick-start the discussion.
A look at CD to digital music conversion services
I recently looked up several different companies which allow you to mail your physical compact discs to them, and then in turn deliver the music back to you in digital form. After my wife’s hard drive crashed yet again a few months ago, erasing her digital audio collection which she manually converted on her computer, CD by CD. And so I knew we had to come up with a quicker way to convert all that music, this time, instead of manually ripping each CD ourselves. Sure, various utilities out there make the copying faster, but you still have to deal with swapping hundreds of CDs (in our case) in and out of your computer as they are copied. Additionally, we had never converted all of my CD’s, instead opting to convert a CD here or there as I wanted.
I looked at three services in detail. Each of these services consistently showed up at the top of search results for me when I searched Google using a number of phrases such as “cd to mp3 conversion” and “cd to digital audio conversion”.
Musicshifter.com boasted “as low as 69 cents per cd”, but after visiting their site one learns that the 69 cents price only applies to archive, “lossless” quality cd backups. As helpful as that service is, most people will want their cd’s converted into formats that result in file sizes small enough to load onto portable music devices, such as the Apple/iTunes proprietary AAC format, or the popular MP3 format. To get that type of STANDARD conversion done, their pricing starts at 99 cents per CD and goes up from there, depending on how quickly you want the digital files back in your hands.
RipDigital.com, another top site in Google search results, also prices their standard service at 99 cents per CD. A big negative, however, is that their 99 cent service only provides you with 192 bit audio quality, and in order to get your converted digital audio files created at a higher bit rate, you will have to pay a total of $1.19 per CD. Sadly, their “lossless” quality backup service is very pricey at $1.39 a CD. This makes it fairly expensive to order a standard digital version AND a lossless, archive version of each CD for those that might wish to do that.
PickledProductions.com was the third site that I closely evaluated. Their product offering is excellent. Although all of the services make it easy to ship your CDs to them with containers they send you, and although all of them offer insurance for the CDs you ship to them, Pickled Productions actually does all of this at the lowest price of all of them — only a 89 cents per CD conversion price, and for that price you can get the songs recorded digitally at a quality level as high as bit rate of 320! Additionally, you can have them also create a second digital copy of each CD with a second format for only 15 to 25 cents, depending on the format. This is perfect for those wanting to also secure a digital “lossless format” copy of each CD without spending twice the conversion cost as the other sites would appear to require.
So, we are moving forward with using the PickledProductions.com service as its service appears as good as the others, and its pricing clearly the lowest! (10 to 20 cents per CD savings adds up when you have several hundred CDs).
I will let you know how it turns out!
NOTE: I have found a great online converter app that shows you how many CD’s you can convert, given a certain amount of hard drive space. Click here for the link.
UPDATE, 1/5/2010: Today I placed an order on the PickledProductions.com website after briefly speaking with a sales rep on the phone. I also found out they are offering 10% off orders right now with the promo code NEW YEAR.
UPDATE, 3/4/2010: After receiving the Pickled Productions “welcome packet” about a week after my phone order, I put off organizing my cd collection for a few weeks, then finally decided to get things in order and place them on the spindles that Pickled Productions sent to me. Before sending them back, I called them and asked if I could add a second format (for only 15 cents more per cd) on my collection conversion, and they said “of course!”. After mailing them in, it took about 3-4 weeks before receiving a confirmation e-mail that the conversion was done; within a week of receiving that email the whole package– my cd’s along with the data dvd’s filled with the music, returned. I was happy to find the data dvd’s excellently organized, labeled with the artist name range on the label of each dvd, and on the dvd itself I found separate folders for each artist, and within them subfolders for each album. The song files themselves were named by the name of the song, with the artist in parentheses at the end of the song name. A very clean, organized, format to be sure. To top it all off, I received a printed, bound, printed music catalog detailing my collection, complete with color-printed cd covers along with track lists beside each one. Because I sent in my collection in alphabetical order, I am not sure whether the music data dvd’s and the printed music catalog also came alphabetical because of how I had organized them, or if Pickled Productions would have re-sorted them alphabetically anyhow. All in all, I was VERY pleased with the service and the price!
Target & iTunes
According to an article in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, Minneapolis-based Target is partnering with iTunes to promote music on iTunes.
I think this is a fairly interesting development, as Target begins to leverage its brand outside of the brick-and-mortar space. Sure, target.com has been a favorite destination for women (and men!) for years now — and yet, it’s not yet often that you see a traditional retailer join forces online with another online company to encourage purchases that otherwise COULD have come through them (via physical cd’s through their website or in their stores).
This clearly demonstrates Target’s commitment to change with the times, and acknowledges the fact that cd sales are quickly dropping away. It is widely known, in fact, that Apple surpassed Wal-Mart in 2008 as the largest music retailer in the United States.
It is astounding to me, however, that Target is to my knowledge the first major retailer to take the obvious step to partner with the leader in online music sales. A trip to the music section of Best Buy’s website promotes the revamped Napster heavily– and who can blame them, when they paid $121 million to buy Napster last year? Of course, they do sell iTunes gift cards online, although this is virtually pointless except when buying them for a gift — who wants to pull out our credit card, buy an iTunes gift card at BestBuy.com, wait for it to come in the mail, then go to the iTunes store and wip out the gift card and enter the card number?
Barnes & Noble has recently gotten wise on the rise of e-books and jumped on the bandwagon by launching their own e-book store at the same time they launched a Blackberry and iPhone reader app — as well as indicating they will be selling a reader device very soon. This, of course, in response to Amazon’s Kindle device and in realization of the virtual disappearance of physical books, for the most part, coming upon us in the very near future.
Target is wise to take a similar strategy with music — they are getting a piece of the online music action before it can take a bigger piece out of their sales.
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