How Digital Copies Could Make Their Way Into Publishing
With Apple's announcement of the iPad and the new section of the iTunes Store called the iBookstore for iBooks, a new leaf has been turned over for the publishing industry. Several publishers have already teamed up with Apple to offer a number of titles in digital format for the upcoming iBookstore. This got me thinking of the many ways media industries have been revolutionized by the iTunes Store, and how these revolutions compare and contrast with the new direction of the publishing industry.
Both music and movies have been largely split between physical and digital media in the years since the iTunes Store's inception. What started out as a purely physical distribution channel through CDs and DVDs has now been divided into CDs and/or digital downloads as well as DVDs and/or digital downloads. It's clear with the growing popularity of ebook readers in the market that a similar split has already begun between books and ebooks. But the interesting thing is that even before people downloaded all of their media content straight from the iTunes Store, they were ripping songs in MP3 format from the physical CDs that they already owned, effectively digitizing their music collections. The same thing started happening with DVDs, as people began using other software to store copies of their existing movie libraries.
While some people continue to buy physical media like CDs and DVDs, many choose only to download their content directly from the iTunes Store, thereby skipping the multi-step process of buying the disc, then getting it onto the hard drive in a digital format. Now, with the advent of the ebook (or ibook), people seem to have to choose either the physical or the digital form. There's no simple way to take a physical book, pop it into your computer and rip a digital copy to the hard drive. But my question is, could there be?
It would seem only fair that publishers would offer a digital copy code along with sales of physical books. This would work in much the same way as the Digital Copies that come with a lot of new movies. I haven't bought a DVD since I got a Blu-Ray player, so I don't know if digital copies also come with some DVD editions, but many Blu-Ray new releases come with a digital copy code that may be redeemed directly through the iTunes store to download a copy of the movie into your iTunes Library. That way there's no potential DRM-breaking software involved in creating a legal copy of the discs you buy for your own personal use.
Regardless, I would love to see book publishers offer digital copy codes along with their physical books in the near future. While many won't care to continue purchasing physical book at all, there will still be those who like to build up a collection on a bookshelf in just the same way that people still collect CDs and DVDs. But that isn't to say that the person who buys the physical book wouldn't like to have a digital copy on the hard drive so that they can bring the whole collection with them on the business trip or vacation on their shiny new iPad.
