They say every stage of the evolution contains leftovers of the previous one. Sometimes really redundant and not only useless but also hampering. It works the same way with wings on the backs of animals who do not fly anymore, technologies which development is blocked by backward compatibility demand, but the most inert are social constructs.
We can wait for generations lifespans to ged rid of heavy burden or make a revolution and cut it off.
“You may say I’m a dreamer…”
I travel a lot and the books I read during my journeys usually make me think about people I know or meet: “He/She would enjoy reading it too.” Some books I read changed my life and I when I meet people who have the same problems I had, I wish I could share with them the wisdom I had found in e.g. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. Traditional paper book could be lended to a friend or we can buy a copy and give it to them as a present. This is a functionality that was “lost in translation” from paper books to eBooks. All I can do is to send purchase link to a friend, always risking that they wouldn’t enjoy the thing they spent money for because of my recommendation. The huge technological progress – of inventing the book which doesn’t demand the trees to be cut and having been bought can be delivered within seconds – had the cost of easy sharing. But it is not a demand of technology but a knot inside human heads. This knot is based on fear for income and is called DRM. I already know that DRM is not necessary in distribution of digital things. Have you heard about second biggest independent platform for games and movies? This DRM-free and named Gog.com? I made it once.
In old times the bards played the ballads by the fires and listeners rewarded them afterwards. The more beautiful and moving the story was, the more they gratified an artist. Money or gifts were not just a charge for commodity but an expression of admiration – directly, from hand to hand, without institutions in the middle which controlled them and took most of author’s income to cover the costs of their functioning, of their greed and arrogance. The human bonds between storyteller and their audience was lost in what we call civilisation progress.
And thinking all those things over I came up with the idea of OpenBooks.
“… but I’m not the only one.” (John Lennon)
The most important part of the book is the message carried in it’s content. As the most powerful marketing tool for books is a friend recommendation, a book considered good by readers, once freed to be shared with others without restrictions, will go viral and reach huge amounts of people without any marketing effort. It means, the popularity of a book in OpenBooks model will depend only on it’s value, and not on the size of marketing budgets.
“But how the hell in the world you want the authors to be rewarded?” The idea is as simple as the construction of a flail. Like Wiesenthal revolutionized sewing just by simply moving eye of the needle from its back end to its tip end and created sewing machine, we copied payment link from bookstore site into the ebook file. Into a several places inside of it. Well, a human memory is not reliable, so it is just to remind. It means that everyone who has the copy of the eBook, not only after downloading it directly from our website, but also having received it from friends, can use the link. With OpenBooks, author receives not 10-15% of the net revenue like with traditional publishers, but 70%. The 30% fee is left for the service functioning and we hope we can make it even smaller in the future so the authors will get as much as possible for the time, struggling with a resistant matter of words, and sleepless nights. We want to re-create the love connection between authors and readers which have been lost and turned into dehumanized industry.
“And what if readers will not pay???” I heard so many times. I believe that people are good in general and only those who are capable of stealing themselves suspect others for wanting to do so. If one imagines others to enjoy the book and cynically not use “support the author” link, they are the one who would do it themselves. We treat our users fair and we hope that in return they will also be fair to us and to the authors. We even do not require to register at OpenBooks. The books can really be downloaded with one-click.
“If there’s a possibility to pay or not to pay, the choice is simple”, some said. But look, people freely pay more for fair trade coffee or the products certified to be pain-free for animals. They just want to be sure no one suffers because of their choices. People voluntarily use charity surcharges in online shops, seen and gratified by no one, just to make someone’s life better.
After a few months of having service running, over 150 authors were brave enough to join our (r)evolution with 313 of their books. So I’m not the only one who believes that yes, we can. And change we need.
“Only the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world…”
