Alexander: We are honored to receive your very first post on the new Genii Forum, panning a book you have never read and which you have no intention of ever reading.

We're not really talking about a book here, though, are we? I mean, this little monicker "ebook" is so much bullshit. What we're really talking about is forty bucks for an email from some kid who made up a few tricks. I don't care how snazzy the layout on your pdf is, it's never going to be a book until you print it on paper so people can pick it up and then read it. That's a book.

Ebooks. Meh.

Be careful about confusing the medium of conveying the information with the quality of the information itself. Unless you've seen the e-book (pdf, e-mail, whatever...) in question, it's probably best to avoid making statements about its quality (e.g., "...some kid who made up a few tricks.").

If you want to get into a discussion of the relative merits of "real" books vs. e-books, we've covered that ground pretty thoroughly in the past. But don't for one second assume that simply because an author chooses to transmit his information via electronic rather than physical means that the information is, therefore, less than desirable. I could give quite a few of counter examples, (e.g., Tom Baxter, Bill Kalush, Tom Stone, Chris Wasshuber).

-Jim

Cugel is someone who's been tossed off the Forum before for causing trouble, so I'm not surprised at his behavior here.

I can give you lots of reasons to hate e-books, and perhaps you will see why, as a publisher, I like them so much.

You can't legally resell, trade, or even give away an e-book; doing so always involves copyright infringement.

However, a paper book can be resold, traded and given away as long as you don't involve a copy machine. The author receives nothing on such transactions and can't even haul you into court.

You can't hold and caress an e-book, dusting it off and arranging it neatly on a shelf. On the other hand, an e-book will never be affected by dust mites, mold, mildew, humidity, fire, floods or natural disasters short of the world coming to an end (I'm speaking of Magic Nook e-Books, of course, which can always be replaced to the original purchaser on record - I can't guarantee that other e-Book publishers will offer that warranty).

There will never be an old e-Book Antique store or seller in a cluttered shop where you can browse for hours, stealing secrets as you pretend to be looking the books over.

You will not be able to legally rent or freely borrow e-Books from public libraries without violating copyright laws.

Yes, there is much to despise about the e-Book. Long may they last!

You will not be able to legally rent or freely borrow e-Books from public libraries without violating copyright laws.

I don't know why you are under the impress you can't sell or give away an e-book. That's ridiculous. You can give away anything you purchase as a gift. You can also resell it to someone else.

What if you drop dead and all your business records are lost? Your customers are screwed, I guess, if they suffer a loss of your file.

Horrible thought, but just as alarmist as your comments. Also, bear this in mind, every single ebook you sell can and will be hacked and cracked and ported by some scriptkiddie and hosted somewhere and shared with many more than would be the case if some person xeroxed a book, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it. Thousands will have instant access. It's a fact. Indeed you can score ANY commercial DVD you want for free if you are an evil immoral type, within days of them being released commercially - just look for a torrent site.

It's easier to pirate and share a digital file than an actual book and to believe otherwise is naive. I think both activities are criminal, but I think it's less of a risk with an actual book and happens less frequently than people consider to be the case.

Look, my point is: knock yourself out with ebooks. I just don't believe they should attract the same sale price as an actual book. Just as a drawing of a set of multiplying billiard balls shouldn't have the same price as an actual set of 2 inch Fakinis.

The price should reflect the product. Of course, my opinion is irrelevant since supply and demand will be the true decider on the day - and there seems to be a lot of super-heated demand from minute to minute on the forums, so I'm confident that ebooks are a lucrative line for some folks.

"If the reel doesn't work you're in trouble. The following is dedicated to those who think. A close friend of mine recently said, 'There are about twenty people thinking for all the rest of magic.' Many of those twenty will contribute to this column."

I just don't believe they should attract the same sale price as an actual book. Just as a drawing of a set of multiplying billiard balls shouldn't have the same price as an actual set of 2 inch Fakinis.

I just don't believe they should attract the same sale price as an actual book.

Despite the Fakini analogy, I believe this is true. The equation is pretty simple: If you buy an actual book, you pay for both the information and the physical production values. If you buy an e-book, you pay only for the information (and sometimes for a decent layout - usually not, though).
Therefore it makes no sense to charge the same amount of money.

Denis

You think that the cost of an e-Book should be commensurately lower than a physical printed book? It is.

You think that the cost of an e-Book should be commensurately lower than a physical printed book? It is.

Do you want to make Magicbob a better offer than he could get from Lulu.com, Richard? I'm sure he would be interested, but I doubt he would be getting $4.50 per effect and $38 per collection of ten effects with any print publication.

Prove I'm wrong and I'll eat a Hat Ring.

In all of my comments on e-Books, I am referring to Magic Nook e-Books, and the key word is "legally". None of our e-Books are sold on CDs, but are digitally delivered. Therefore, in order to transfer it to anyone else for sale or otherwise you have to make a COPY of it, which immediately infringes the RIGHT of the copyright holder. Public Libraries know this and deal only with a different type of e-Book. They would not stock or deal with ours.

An e-Book on a CD can be sold or traded without infringing this right, as long as it is the original CD being sold, and not a copy. I hope this clarifies several testy comments to my post from others that follow yours.

Color is nice, sure. But I've never seen a card related book that really needed it. Many classic card magic books (most?)have no color at all and do not suffer from that.

The assertion that a hardcover is needed to hold 230 pages is ridiculous. Have you been to a bookstore lately? Ever read a large trade paperback?

But, this is a free market economy. If you can actually sell an email for $40, written by someone named "MagicBob" and marketed by someone who allegedly legally changed his name to "Phineas Spellbinder" -- I say knock yourself out.

As Mr. Pokhis is known to say, "America: what a country!"

I think it's an admirable objective: to maximise the creator's return on their energies and investment. But actually there are two sides to the coin and the other side is the expectations of the customer. It's one thing to say you want to pour dollars into the coffers of the author, but the customer would also like to get VALUE for their money. An actual book is the undisputed, established industry benchmark for delivering intellectual property to a magic customer base. When you charge the exact same price for a digital file (and usually one of around 30 to 40 pages!), you are effectively short-changing the customer in terms of the product you are delivering.

I know you have stars in your eyes over this low-overheard, profit-maximization delivery method, but if you can't see that plenty of magicians feel they are not getting their money's worth, then you are in denial.

Does sir want cracked pepper with his hat ring?

Ah, now I remember "Spellbinder" and his literary endeavors.
Seen here pimping a book allegedly written by his 8 year old prodigal grandson "Eleazar Goodenough".

You only get me to eat a hat ring by disproving my calculations in hard cash, not by arguing your philosophy as to how things ought to work because they have always worked that way in the past. Hold onto the cracked pepper, however, since Richard has not weighed in yet.

You are comparing apples to oranges using a surious argument. Because you have never seen a card magic book that needed color, you assume that color is not needed. You obviously haven't seen one of Magicbob's effects, but most require that you use a color template from the e-Book,

A 230 page paperback (even a 655 page paperback) is fine for reading, but not for working with.

You've made they argument several times, though, that it's worth $40 regardless. Are you saying, then that it's the same value as a physical, ownable copy of any of the books the Chief Genii would sell you for that price?

(LIST OF BOOKS AND PRICES ELIMINATED AS IRRELEVANT]

And since the value of an ebook is wrapped up in the information it contains, not in the format, it's fair (it seems to me) to compare it to the used book market. These books sold or were offered lately on the forum for $40. Are you saying your product is a better value than: (LONG LIST OF BOOKS AND PRICES ELIMINATED AS IRRELEVANT]

The quality of the content is actually irrelevant to this discussion. The discussion is about how someone has the gall to charge $40 for a fancy electronic file containing 10 tricks with no production costs other than time.

Let's see a real review from someone like Swiss or Regal.

Who wrote this eBook?

N.

Ebooks, just like single-trick DVDs, are inevitably held to a high standard because their prices are higher than printed books or normal DVDs which consistently have a larger amount of material for similar prices.

Erase all doubt from your mind. I can confirm that this "fuss is about the price of an e-Book versus the price of a print book".

An interesting comment in light of this Review: http://www.geniimagazine.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=38759#Post38759

Yes.

Why is Magicbob's e-Book a better value than any of the books in the long lists you felt compelled to provide (really, one or two examples would have been sufficient)?

Reason 1. Because none of those books is available in a large print edition for those of us with aging eyes. Any e-Book can be instantly resized to fit the reader, and photos can be magnified without reaching for a magnifying glass.

Reason 2. (Already mentioned above) Because Magicbob's e-books do require color photos, and they do allow you to print out your gaffed cards so they look like the real thing and not some black and white imitation.

Reason 3. If you feel the need to make a hardcopy to have on your table as you work, you can print out just the pages needed instead of the entire book, and lay them perfectly flat so they don't get in your way.

Reason 4. If you lose the files on your computer due to flood, fire, acts of god or otherwise, you just e-mail Magicbob (or me, if he's on vacation like he is right now), identify yourself as a purchaser, and we send you another copy.

Reason 5. If you are reading through the e-Book and you don't understand something, it's poorly written or otherwise unclear, you e-mail one of us and we either walk you through the problem step by step, or we rewrite the entire sentence or passage as needed.

Reason 6. If you point out an error that requires us to rewrite a section of the e-Book, every former purchaser is also sent an up-dated copy with the correction or addendum.

Reason 7. If you are searching for a particular spot in the e-Book and can identify that spot by a unique word, just use the "Find" feature on your computer to get right to the spot. Better than an index.

I don't want to make this list too long, so I'll stop here and allow you to locate one of the books in your long lists of printed books that has comparable features.

Not ashamed. But I prefer precision in my communications. The term ebook is a misnomer - a little white lie used for marketing purposes. Email is the correct term for what you are selling.

A. If you are making the argument that ebooks are easier on the eyes (even the eyes of people who don't see well) than physical books, you are using readers with which I am not familiar.

B. I notice that you didn't address the first (and in my mind, the greatest) disadvantage of your ebooks over printed books -- they are merely licensed instead of owned.

1. They are useful for only as long as the hardware on which they reside is alive. In an era of advancing hardware, the failures of small businesses, etc., I would bet that the majority of ebooks released before 2010 will be nonexistent by 2025 and nonreadable soon after (and if you disagree with my dates, but agree with the inherent problem, then you've essentially agreed with the argument).

2. I take you at your word with your promises to maintain a database of customers and commitment to re-issue the files, if need be -- but where will you be in 10 years? 20 years? I've subscribed to journals and magazines which failed, and whose publishers won't respond to emails -- but at least I've still got the hardcopies.

3. I thought about buying a copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Magic" and felt pretty sure that even if the content wasn't to my liking, I'd be able to recover much of my investment on the secondary market. The ability to resell a book means that my physical magic library will always have some tangible value. Not so with emailed ebooks.

1. That is a post on a bulletin board, not a review in the magazine Richard edits. What is the gotcha?

Here we go again. I feel like I'm teaching kindergarten.

So because I buy my print books and receive them by mail, the correct term for them, by analogy and reverse logic, is simply mail. Perhaps P-mail. Your convoluted logic assumes that the delivery system provides the correct name for the item received. I prefer to think that an e-Book, although delivered by e-Mail, more closely resembles a print book in that it has many pages, usually numbered, and is a separate file that is detached from the e-Mail by which it is delivered and it is stored as a separate file on the hard drive of your computer.

Class dismissed. Go outside and play.

Of course, the possible unforeseen consequence of this marketing trend is to encourage those who produce actual books to increase the sale price.

A. Open any pdf file you may have on your computer using Adobe Reader version 8 (freely available). The little + button in the toolbar at the top will magnify the page; the little - button will reduce it. If you prefer to use the text toolbar, go to View and use the Zoom function to do the same thing. That will be 25 cents for the lesson, please. Give it to a charity for the seeing impaired.

B. 1. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, asteroid or comet collision with the planet, or excessive volcanic activity resulting in the extinction of civilization as we have come to know it, e-Books would disappear first, and print books would be next in line, being highly flamable. If we manage to survive, we need not fear the loss of digital information as we move from one system to the next. All of the files which I had saved on those old style floppy discs from the 80s were easily transferred from computer to computer and I continue to use them today. My current computer has no slot for any kind of disc except a CD/DVD. Next, I assume, it will only work with an HDDVD... but the digitizing has been done. That will always be 1's and 0's into the foreseeable future, so nothing need be lost, only enhanced.

B. 2. If you are worried about my health, feel free to make back-up copies of the files onto CD (always your right, under the copyright act) or hard copies for your own use, but not for sale or any kind of distribution.

Im still waiting for someone to show me the section of the law that pertains to an ebook which forbids me from giving it away or selling it after I've paid for it.

Hard Copies vs. Digital Copies

Another possible complication stems from the inherent difference between transferring an e-book and transferring a hard-copy book. The transfer of a hard-copy book is just that; the physical transfer of one copy. The transfer of an e-book, however, requires the digital recreation or copying of that e-book. Because the first sale doctrine allows transfers of only your particular copy, and not reproductions or recreations, a digital transfer of an e-book is probably impermissible. Thus, users of Kindle and the Sony Reader can only legally transmit works by selling the physical media on which they are stored—be that the e-book readers themselves or the users' hard drives.

If you download a copy onto your hard drive, and then you move that file (MOVE, not copy) onto a disc, which does not leave a copy on the original hard drive to which it was downloaded, then why can't you sell it?

There is no "gotcha," nor was one intended. I merely thought it was interesting to find that thread and wondered why there were no negative comments about the price of e-Books versus the price of printed books connected with that. I thought that possibly a double standard was being, that's all. I was assured that no double standard was intended and that's the end of that.

Pity it's an ebook rather than an actual book. Priced like an actual book, however.

It is my personal opinion that Marty Grams is the ideal person to review his work, since Marty is "king of gaffed cards" in a manner of speaking.