Preditors & Editors ™
A guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers
More on the Future of Publishing
An opinion by Dave Kuzminski
Right now, there are fears by the publishing industry that books sold over the Internet will be shared by their customers with untold millions, thus depriving them of vast profits. After all, it's already a known fact in the publishing industry that normal books are already read by perhaps ten people each by virtue of being resold, stolen, tossed away and found, or by being given away. Truthfully, this shouldn't be a fear nor a reason for failing to sell over the Internet. If anything, the Internet offers the first chance in the history of publishing to make sure that only the customer and the customer's immediate family partake of the contents of a single book.
How so? Really, it's quite easy.
First off, most sales over the Internet will be by credit card. This is an important ingredient in solving the problem. What publishers should then do is transmit the purchase in an encrypted format with the purchaser's credit card number as the key for decrypting the text file so it can be read. To do that, the key will have to be within the text file. This results in several advantages for both the customer and retailer.
- The customer won't have to remember the password since it will already be on his credit card.
- The retailer won't have to transmit a password by separate means since the customer will already know the password.
- The customer will be reluctant to part with any copies of the purchased file. In doing so, he'd have to share his credit card number with someone who might later pass it on to someone less scrupulous. Very few customers will be willing to do that.
- Should the customer's copy be corrupted or lost, replacement won't result in additional payment since the previous sale can be verified simply by checking the credit history.
- Very few customers are likely to sit down and print out an entire book for someone else. Should this or piracy become a serious problem, embedding a second copy of the credit card number or a special code with a master password for tracking purposes somewhere in the text of each file can quickly dissuade most folks from doing so if immediate prosecution follows upon the discovery of illegal resale of printed or transmitted copies.
Admittedly, this will require some additional computer programs for the purpose of handling the sale and automatically encrypting the purchase with the credit card number as the encryption key before transmitting it to the customer. Of course, the program should also check with the credit card company to assure that the card isn't stolen. These are not difficult programs to create. It's simply a matter of changing people's habits, a process that the Internet has already set in motion.
However, there is one caveat that the publishers will have to observe. Either they'll have to accept more work from writers, perhaps creating special imprints for works that aren't up to their standards, or accept the fact that people will routinely check around for free novels on the Internet by authors the publishers are unwilling to publish. Basically what I'm stating here is that the publishers better make their best effort to publish everyone who writes well if they don't want to lose sales.
