Ebooks launch in SA. Meh.
I’m having very mixed feelings over the new Kalahari ebook store, launched two days ago. Though mixed implies good and bad, and I have only one definitively positive thought about this:
YAY! Finally, an ebook store with local purchase rights! The future is here! Glee!
Ahem. After the initial sense of astonishment and joy, my enthusiasm was tempered by the actual substance of the new ebook store. It provides slim pickings indeed. By some estimates, the store lists 60,000 books, and a paltry 2,000 of those are fiction. It’s not like they have to store the books on-site (their partner aggregator, Gardners, does that). And good luck trying to find any local material on there – not a single Alan Paton, Dalene Matthee or John van der Ruit to be seen.
Regardless of this lack of interesting material, there’s something far, far worse in evidence here – the prices! They’re astronomical! Maybe I’ve been conditioned by the media to expect my ebooks to cost less than $9,99. Maybe this is an unreasonable price point. Ebooks aren’t free to produce, after all: you have to pay for all the design, editing and marketing that goes into normal books, and server space and bandwidth are costly too. But come on – I’m not going to pay R295 (was R330) for the latest Faye Kellerman. The whole point of ebooks is that you can circumvent ultra-inflated first edition prices, not that you can sell a digital version for the same as the physical. Digital products are NOT exclusive, limited, unique, finite. It doesn’t cost more to publish a ‘first edition’ ebook. The very idea is preposterous.
The other prices are not much better. Aside from some super cheap, R20 romance novels and a handful of decent if obscure titles in the R60-R100 range (an entirely reasonable price point), fiction ebooks cost exactly the same as physical fiction book. Or more. Yes, more than a physical book that had to be printed, bound, shipped and stored in a warehouse. It’s not a very enticing prospect for a customer: buy an untested new technology, struggle to figure it out and read it on the PC screen, or just stick with the nice-and-safe comfort of a reliable format? it’s a no-brainer.
At least Kalahari made the effort to co-launch an ebook reader with the ebook store. Unfortunately, it’s the rather lackluster COOL-ER ereader. There’s nothing specifically wrong with it, but it doesn’t inspire much excitement either – no touch screen, no wi-fi, clunky controls and UI (by most accounts). Also, it’s a cool R2,600. The best thing about it is that it’s not locked into any particular format, online store or DRM, so you can import your current PDFs, ePubs and the like onto it. However, the small 6″ screen is unlikely to display PDFs very well, so I’d stick with reflowable ePubs wherever possible.
The presence of (and necessary download/registration with) Adobe Digital Editions hints at some pretty serious DRM, but there’s no mention of it anywhere to be found. This is another big failing on Kalahari’s part – ebook buyers are likely going to find out they can’t do what they like with their purchases only after the fact, once their money is safely in Kalahari’s bank account. And, of course, there’s no such thing as a return policy for digital goods.
Sure, I know that this is only early days and things may very well improve, but the initial launch is less than stellar and, in many ways, supremely disappointing. It’s not useful to say Kalahari are just testing the product, because they’re doing it completely wrong – a test store should be cheaper, cooler and more exciting than the final one, to entice potential customers to give it a shot. And they should actually tell people about it. The fact that the launch was so quiet and under the radar suggests either that they don’t really know what they’re doing or that they don’t trust the shoppers to get behind them. In that case, why even bother?
