But
what is intriguing about this development is the idea that booksellers will try
to sell content that is in the public domain and widely available for free
in a format that will work on
the same device. Penguin Classics has been selling works that are in the public
domain for years. The model has been to distinguish their offerings in print in
much the same way they will online, by bundling in some extras to help give the
book some historical context and meaning. And this model has been successful in
the offline world. Whether this will work online remains to be seen (ahem,
music industry)?
What
distinguishes this from the problems the music industry faced is that the music
industry at least had the threat of legal action under copyright law, whereas
Penguin Classics is competing with identical content that is freely available
and in the public domain. The free content (in this case Pride and Prejudice
through Project Guttenberg) can be uploaded to the Kindle just as the paid
content from Penguin Classics and through Amazon.
Presumably the paid content
is more likely to be formatted properly and will ostensibly be of a higher
quality (or perhaps a better or different translation for foreign language
texts), but at the end of the day will people pay for these improvements and if
so how much?
