The Italian Competition and Market Authority is currently investigating behavior in Italy’s textbook industry. I recently filed a brief comment flagging issues that might be worth exploring in the etextbook space.
The Authority’s Preliminary Report (Executive Summary in English - thanks AGCM!) gives an overview of what they have been looking into. The full Preliminary Report spends time documenting limitations that the small number of italian textbook publishers are placing on etextbooks and digital materials associated with regular textbooks (see paragraphs 250-272). This includes locking readers into proprietary reading software that limits functionality (like annotating), severely restricting printing, and making it all but impossible to share portions of textbooks with others. This behavior is familiar from the Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy whitepaper from a few years ago.
The Authority has the ability to make fairly robust interventions in the market, which could make things interesting. In my comment, I focused on three main points:
- Ways in which the transition to digital has allowed publishers to rebalance power between publishers and readers,
- Reminding the Authority that ebooks (and all digital goods) can, in fact, be sold in addition to being licensed, and
- Licensed markets can still be much more flexible than the one that currently exists in Italy
We’ll see what happens next once the Authority completes its review.
Feature image: Design for the letters Y and Z of a primer: Yacht/ Zéphir (Yachts driven by Zephyrs) from the Smithsonian Open Access collection