Office of Fair Trading launches eBook price investigation

I’ve written quite a few pieces on this blog over the last several months about the pricing of eBooks, and in particular the price war that has failed to emerge following the launch of the Kindle in the UK.

In fact, prices have gone up, due in no small part to the publishers attempting to introduce a digital equivalent of the old Net Book agreement, in the form of Agency Pricing. This, essentially, allows them to force sites like WH Smith or Amazon to sell the electronic editions of books at a specific price, with no discounting allowed.

Discounting is still allowed on the printed editions, and the net result – aside from some dramatic increase in the prices of some eBooks – is that it’s quite common to find that the electronic edition of a book will cost more than the paper edition.

Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks that the cost of an electronic book should be more or less nothing, because as a writer I actually enjoy being paid for what I do, and the cost of producing a book involves a lot more than just printing it – design, typesetting, proof reading, and editing, for example. Those are all important if, like me, you prefer that when you read a book, characters’ names are spelt consistently, line breaks don’t appear half way across a line in the middle of a word, and chapter or paragraph breaks actually make it into the book – all problems that crop up in various eBooks, and make people even more annoyed when they’re forced to pay a higher price for a poor quality product.

You can’t take all the costs out of producing an eBook, if you want it to be of good quality. But you could probably reduce some of them, and I can’t honestly see a reason why shops should be allowed to discount print editions, but not electronic ones. Or indeed why you can’t get an electronic, searchable edition, when you buy the hardback.

So, I welcome the announcement today by the Office of Fair Trading that it’s going to investigate the pricing of books. Though, given colour of the current government, I doubt they’ll actually decide to do anything that’s in the interest of consumers, rather than shareholders.

For more on this topic, you might want to look at The Register’s take on the news, and the piece I did for them about eBook pricing a couple of months ago.

My roundup of eBook price changes from August to November 2010 is also worth reading, and if you want an insight into the collective lunacy of the publishing industry when it comes to eBook lending, then read this article.

There’s also an article about this at eBook Magazine, which is well worth a browse.

Freeview, trailer booking, VOD and Richard Desmond

The other day I was watching a recording from Channel Five and spotted an advert for ‘OK TV’ which is, apparently, coming soon. Not that I expect readers of a quality blog like this to be interested in such things as celebrity chit-chat, but it did set off a chain of thought about minority programme content.

At the moment, channel space on Freeview costs an awful lot, largely because there’s limited capacity, and it’s been much more successful than many people imagined back in 2002.

If you want to buy space to broadcast, there’s something of a quandary – the only time it’s really cheap is when there aren’t many people watching, so how are you going to make a decent amount of money? One solution is the sort of late night programming we’re all familiar with when we forget to switch over from some of the tackier channels – the ‘slappers on a sofa’ type of chat, or the competitions that were popular a few years back. You don’t need to encourage too many people to call expensive phone lines to make money, if you’re broadcasting when the airwaves are cheap.

There is another way of doing things, however, one that TopUpTV seized upon a few years back. They have several hours of broadcast time in the middle of the night, and operate what’s known in the business as a ‘Push VOD’ subscription service. VOD stands for Video On Demand, and it’s more normally associated with requesting content when you want it, like BBC iPlayer for example. In Push VOD you send the content anyway, and it’s recorded on the user’s hard drive, ready for when they want to watch it. Usually, there will be a special recorder – like the ones that TopUpTV uses – which decides which of the programmes to record.

So, for example, with a TopUp box you can select which channels you want from them, and the box automatically records the content from those channels; you then access it through the library on your box.

A third way

So, what’s all this got to do with an advert for ‘OK TV’ ? The answer lies in a relatively new feature on Freeview, mostly seen so far in Freeview HD PVRs, called Trailer Booking. It’s also available on Sky, too. Essentially, during a trailer for an upcoming programme on some channels – BBC and Channel 4 at the moment you may see a green dot on screen with the message ‘Book me.’

Press the green button on the remote control and you’ll be invited to set a timer for the programme, usually after seeing a bit more info about it. It can work across channels, so the BBC can show a trailer on BBC2 for a show that’s coming up on BBC1 and you’ll be able to set a recording very easily.

And, it struck me, couldn’t this be a way for some minority content to achieve delivery to people via a sort of Push-VOD system? Instead of just that advert for ‘OK TV’ you could have an advert that says “Want even more chav-tastic celebrity gossip from CheapoChat magazine? Press the green button for our exclusive celeb videos, delivered to your TV every Thursday morning!”

CheapoChat magazine could broadcast in the middle of the night, every Wednesday, and people who’ve responded to the advert by pressing the green button would have the programme sitting on their recorder Thursday morning, ready to watch whenever they want.

And – unlike TopUpTV – there’s no need for special recorders; it would work with any box that supports trailer booking.

Practical issues

Of course, right now, there aren’t that many boxes out there that support trailer booking, though that will change in future. But that’s not the only awkward problem to solve.

The other one is the signalling; the code to trigger the ‘Book me’ pop-up has to be broadcast alongside the promo for the programme, and that may be a little fiddlier to arrange. It’s easy enough to book an advert for one channel on another – look at the ads for Sky on other channels, for example – but getting the appropriate signalling alongside it might prove difficult.

And that’s where Richard Desmond comes in. The former pornographer and owner of unregulated tabloid newspapers – as well as OK! magazine – also owns Channel Five. With Channel Five also comes some other broadcasting space on Freeview. So if there’s anyone who would be in a position to make use of technology like this, it’s probably Desmond’s Northern & Shell group.

Will they do it? I honestly have no idea – and I don’t think the installed base of recorders with trailer booking is big enough yet. But it would certainly work, and it would be an interesting way of delivering short programmes, or ‘video magazines’ to people.