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Why Nobody Likes E-Books
CybrGuyRSB writes: "In today's Chicago Tribune, there is an interesting article about the total unpopularity of e-books. It seems to partly tie their failure into their copyright protection and briefly discusses the Skylarov case."
"You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did."
It's already happened. Use your fav file sharing tool (or course, you only use it for legal reasons, ha ha ha ha) and search for e-books or ebook. Not enough? Try some ebook websites/ftps. Try alt.binaries.ebook. Lots of stuff there. I COULD (*cough* could I said) get:
everything Douglas Adams has written
almost every O'Reilly book
All the works of Poe and Shakespeare
Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas
Steal this Book (by Abbie Hoffman) (heh)
Army Manuals
Tons of Lovecraft
Everything by Stephen King and Clive Barker
and about 200 compressed MB of other fun stuff.
Is it legal or right?
Meh.
People have been trading ebooks for a long time. Longer than MP3 trading has been around. Who DID'NT get a copy of The Cucoo's Egg from a BBS?What has the impact been?
Maybe none?
- I can't flip through it.
- I can't dog-ear it, or use my bookmark collection.
- Books smell good and feel good (okay, this is nostalgia).
- Screens hurt my eyes, paper works fine.
- eBooks run out of power, books don't.
- eBooks might have access control, books don't.
- I own a book, not a license to it.
- Books are cheap - I can forget one at the beach and not lose too much cash on it.
- I'm unlikely to be mugged for a book, even on the NYC subway.
- Reading in bed doesn't get in the way of hot sex.
- And finally, with a book, no one can take away my right to read.
What did I miss?(Hold on honey, let me unplug my eBoo - bzzzzzzzzt aaaaaagh!)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Last summer, out in the woods with the new popup camper, it was very enjoyable to reread Huckleberry Finn (which I do every few years) whenever I could grab a few minutes. I carry it anyway (work, spreadsheets, phone #s, etc.) so I might as well load up a book or three for those spare moments.
I purchased and read all the installments of Stephen King's The Plant (first time I've ever read anything by him). I'm looking forward to the conclusion of the work (if he ever decides that the 6-figure _profit_ he made from the early portions justifies writing some more).
Specialized readers? NO! Useful and/or entertaining documents? SURE!
I carry around the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, FIFA Soccer Rules, Unleashing the Ideavirus!, and others ...
Having the exact quote at your fingertips is sometimes quite handy ...
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
For some things perhaps. Not all. An ebook library would take up much less space. Which is a problem I currently face in my one bedroom condo.
It allows someone to move through the book faster (mainly reference books, like Java in a Nutshell), ...
I suspect that someone using the find or search command would more quickly locate info then someone using the index or table of contents on a paper book, with the discrepency increasing with the size of the book. Exceptions might be searching for illustrations.
That said I much prefer paper books to todays ebooks. The are numerous problems with the technology (poor screens, clunkly units), the software (limited catalog, lack of standards), the legal environment (DMCA), and the lack of respect the companies have for the consumers (copy protection, greed, thinking everyone is a pirate).
But the problems all seem correctable. And I look forward to the day when book readers are as cheap as gameboys, my entire library is available to me where ever I go, and I can back up my books (ever drop one in a pool, leave one on a plane?).
Steve M
The article missed the boat by not looking at O'Reilly. They talked about horrible Amazon sales rankings. A more clueful reporter might have noticed that the unprotected Perl CD bookshelf has a sales ranking of under 1500.
The cake is a pie
"A Russian graduate student named Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested"
I was happy to see they used the term "graduate student" and not the ever to popular term "hacker" in their article.
I consider myself someone who reads lots of books, and I completely disagree with this statement. I think the people who say they like the feel of a book in there hand have never tried any type of e-reader. They weight of enough books to last me for a two week trip is not pleasant. I would much rather put a few books on my Palmpilot, which I have with anyways, than carry around an extra few pounds of paper.
I have been reading books on my Palmpilot for several years now, and I am completely addicted to it. I even have a Palm III with the old low contrast screen, so I would probably like it more if I moved to a V or 500 with a proper display.
I think people who don't like reading e-books have never tried it. (This is making the assumption that the books these people want to read are available in an usable format. I can completely understand people not wanting to read e-books because they have no interest in 100+ year old stuff from the Gutenberg project or whatever annoying thing the publishers have decided to make available.)
The exact same article ran in the August 6 LA Times.
I've referenced it a couple times here already.
The Vonnegut comment at the end is great!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
Add to that this: the "book" as we know it has been around for over 500 years.
There's a reason for that. In fact, there's many reasons for that. Me, I've got 2000 books in my house. Sure, I've got a 40 gig hard drive, too -- in fact three 40 gig hard drives -- and could easily fit my books on one (probably less than 1) of those hard drives.
But why? Why would I want to sit and stare at a computer screen or Palm or PocketPC or iPaq or Rocket eBook reader or whatever is the gadget du jour?
I actually enjoy the physical book -- the paper, the way it smells, the way I can use it, abuse it, tote it, and carry it around. I also like the fact that I won't be arrested if, say, I decide to backwards engineer it -- if I take a peep at the binding, wonder if the leaves are glued, and even spot a couple pages that haven't been cut.
I can't do that with an eBook. I can't do that because Adobe and Microsoft will make sure I end up in jail. They'll claim that my "crime" is nearly as bad as murder -- more so, in fact, because I'm infringing on their "intellectual property" which, as we all know, is more important than anything else these days.
Yeah, eBooks rock, all right. Go ebooks. Wonderful.
And all these "screen reading" software that Microsoft is pioneering? Yeah, it's wonderful. Sit me down in front of a bigass monitor with Microsoft's Reader software. Software, by the way, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Software which is slow, buggy as hell, and won't even let me "register" more than twice.
Oh yeah, ebooks rock all right. Let's see. Don't get me started. How about the one time I decided to purchase an ebook? I filled out all the forms -- nearly had to give my driver's license number -- and then submitted all my credit card information only to -- get this! -- get a 500 Server Error when it came time to issue me the "digital verification" that I then had to "click" on then RESUBMIT just to prove that I'm who I said I was and that my reader was registered.
Love it! Let's see, now how does that compare with this:
Live in Ann Arbor (or any good college town with lots of bookstores). Go to Dawn Treader Books (or any good used bookstore piled high with thousands of books). Buy book. Buy another book. Bring book up to counter. Chat with clerk who says, "Hey, if you're into Thomas Pynchon, have you tried Gaddis?" "No," say I. "You recommend him?" "Oh yeah," says clerk who, within seconds, drops a copy of _The Recognitions_ and _JR_ on top of the nicely dog eared copies of _V_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ that I'd already decided to purchase.
So exit I do, ambling down Liberty Street (or whatever street in your college town of choice that is lined with your used bookstores of choice) with my newly purchased used books. I can read these books anywhere. I can underline them. I can lend them to my friends. And -- imagine this! -- no matter what I do to these books -- read them, underline them, xerox a few pages from them for a presentation -- the FBI DOES NOT GET INVOLVED!
Now, compare that with digital books. Compare that with encryption, validation, verification. You tell me which is the better deal for readers?
Now, don't get me wrong. Maybe ebooks have their uses. You're Pre-Med, say, and can get a semester's worth of ebooks on a CDROM. Maybe that's a good deal. Or you're a law student and can get what you need a couple CDROMS and don't have to scout out estate sales of dead lawyers just so you can build a library of outdated law books. All right, fair enough.
But for book lovers -- and actual readers -- readers who like to discover an old Modern Library edition of Thackeray that was used by someone in 1941 who dated the book and even stuck a few interesting notes on the margin -- there's nothing to compare with actual, phsyical text.
My own opinion -- after years of haunting used bookstores and 'Friends of the Library' sales -- is this: that people who claim that ebooks are the best thing to come around since, er, the invention of the book are not readers. They simply don't read. They like to have the books. Or they like to have the electronic versions of books that they've read (I mean, really, how many copies of Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War' or Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy' do you really need? If you check out the ebook groups on usenet, these are really the only books traded, posted, and pirated -- Haldeman, Asimov, some Sterling, Gibson (of course), and Heinlein. And the same pirated texts are posted day after day after day after day after day. But that's not the point, is it?)
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
Companies have been building their software in recent years to make copying more difficult. They understand that copying is inevitable, but by using sophisticated install programs and liberal use of the Windows registry, they have made it tricky to simply copy a program. The software industry has been dealing with digital copying the longest, it makes sense that they would've gravitated toward some level of protection by now.
I'd like to expand on some points I made in the previous post. The first thing to consider about electronic books is how small they are. A single mp3 weighs in around 5 megs, which is quite a bit larger than a compressed version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place.
I also understand that there are books currently being released in unsecured formats and there isn't a problem with copying. My response is that the distribution channels aren't really there yet for wide spread piracy. When someone thinks of music they think (or used to) Napster; when someone thinks of books, no Internet solution pops in their heads, yet. As more books become available in electronic format, more people will look into copying them because the selection will be there.
As I stated before, it's my opinion that a proprietary format is needed to "keep the honest people honest". I'm not saying Adobe is the best solution for that, I personally would prefer a more open design, but it makes a lot of sense to me to keep heading in this direction. Just my two cents.
I think the reason that eBooks are unpopular is that they are not books. Books are portable, easy to use, easy to store, last for a long time, and have a fantastic "Refresh rate". I can't stand reading large amounts of text on a computer monitor, or LCD screen. Teh screens are ether too bright, and glare and reflections, or are just plain too flickery. With a book you can read it in bright light, low light, and by flashlight. The batteries never go dead ether. It's just so nice having an actual physical book there to look at, and reference whenever you need it.
quote: Most publiers are releasing only older titles on e-books. I have yet to see a new hardcover edition be simultaneous released on e-books.
I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books, which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
I went to the Baen books site and checked out the link to the Baen Free Library.
Jim Baen and Eric Flint get it when it comes to ebooks and intellectual property.
Check out the site, it's worth the read.
Steve M
When discussing E-Books, we should look at O'Reilly, and how they do E-Books. While true, it's just on a CD-ROM, it still very much applies. Yet O'Reilly doesnt encrypt it in any way. They make it very easy and portable to read the content, and they are successful. Then you look at why. They dont have to force stuff down our throat, or force us into submission, or tell us how we can read the book that we pay for. They just have good informative content, and give it at an acceptable price, and people respect them and buy the product. Now if all E-Books decided to work in this way, they would be much more successful.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
Uh, they did. The problem is that twice zero is still zero. So, it didn't help much.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
People who read lots of book, those that would see the greatest benefits of a portable reader, actually love books themselves! They like personal libraries, the weight of a good book in their hand, and honestly have some kind of tactile fixation with page turning. Most everyone but the geeky fifteen year-olds (god bless their hearts) mentioned in an article below are actually trying to get away from the monitor at the end of the day.
feints within feints, wheels within wheels
...unfortunately I have to "steal" them. Even though I can buy the paperback for $6, the companies wants me to pay hard cover prices for electronic copies. Forget that. I'll buy the paper back, then download a copy of the book from a newsgroup and iSilo it onto my Visor (which I feel that I have a right to use with my ownership of the paperback). It is great reading a part of a book anytime you have a free moment. With my Visor always with me, I always have 4+ books at my disposal. When I finish a book, I delete it and give the paper back to the library. Wouldn't it be much simpler to sell me the electronic copy for $6?
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Not quite so.
The Rocket ebook I have is slightly larger then a paperback. Not much so. You can also use a Palm, which is much smaller then a paperback.
Memory is cheap. I have a (nowadays) scant 16 meg in my Rocketbook. That can accomodate 20+ books. So, if I run to the bathroom, I can actually choose what book I want to read out of many. This is great on trips. You can go on vacation, and in the space of one book, bring 30.
As for my Visor, I have 72 meg of memory in that. I can store more books then I could read in there. Keep in mind that readers (at least the ones that I have seen) store books compressed. Text is very easy to compress, so, you can fit quite alot in there. If the reader comes with a memory card slot, forget it. You could practically store a whole library with the larger cards nowadays (ok, not quite, but you know what I mean.)
As for uploading stuff to your book, with space like that, chances are you dont have to do it often. Its been a couple of months since Ive uploaded stuff to my Rocket. I have The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings series, the whole Wheel of Time series, and some other stuff I havent gotten to on there. Thats about a good 10,000 pages of text, easily.
There are plenty of converters for different formats, so, whether you have a book in pdf, lit, rb, html, doc, pdb, or text, its not a problem to swtich from one to another.
Its not as much of a problem as you would think.
I was wary of all this when I first decided to spend 250 bucks on an electronic book, but Im quite happy I did now.
To quote zpengo:
"The biggest problem with [eBooks] is the same one that affects [online comics] and other online reading -- Monitors on which reading and viewing are actually comfortable have not yet filtered down to the masses. Joe Sixpack won't read lengthy [eBooks] because it makes his head hurt after a while.
Paper is still a beautiful medium."
Right on.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I can buy the book for $14.95... or the reader and the material for $200... pure economics... all geek factor aside... I cant photo copy out of an reader electronic reader either
I've been reading eBooks since I owned a Newton 100 (The Hacker Crackdown was my first). It's extremely handy, for several reasons:
1) I can carry around many books in the space of a PDA (currently a Palm);
2) You can read the book with one hand (get your mind out of the gutter) - I can hold the palm in one hand and turn the pages with my thumb on the scroll button. Sure, it's not much, but that's just that little bit of convenience that paperbacks don't have;
3) Low light conditions - I can just turn on the backlight, and I have an instant built-in reading light;
4) It goes where I do - since I keep the Palm with me, it's always right there if I happen to have a few minutes or more free and I didn't think (or feel like) bringing my book.
However, I have no need of a specialized eBook reader nor Adobe's format. I buy my books and magazines from Palm Digital Media (used to be Peanut Press) at http://www.peanutpress.com/ They have a decent if not overwhelmingly complete selection, they don't overcharge, and everything's quick and easy. I'm not going to give up on paper books any time soon, if ever, but I have easily integrated eBooks into my life.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
And the reader is very nice for travelling, since it holds a number of books, and ends up taking up far less room and weight than the equivalent paper copies.
I can't see paper vanishing any time soon, and I think the download to PC style of ebook is a pain, but the dedicated reader devices are really good, and have their place in the market. And if nobody likes ebooks, why does a Google search turn up more than ten pages of ebook sites?
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Mr. Vonnegut is an ironic choice for a publisher to convert the works of to e-format. Many of his works deal with dehumanization through technology. The most prominent of these is Player Piano.
It describes a world in which everything has been mechanized and computerized. Because of this, there are few required jobs left, and most of the population has to work for government programs, or join the army. Eventually, the former director of the largest automated mass production facility becomes the de facto leader of the rebellion against the machines. Published in 1952, this puts it comfortably in the "way ahead of its time" league.
Interspersed in the novel are examples (a mechanized tavern goes flat broke when a "germ trap of a Victorian bar" opens up next door, and the soon-to-be-rebellious director falls in love with an old farmhouse with well-water and no electricity) that the most advanced way of doing things is not always the best, or the most appealing. It's a good read... on paper, of course.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
I've been using Gutenpalm, a GPL'd book reader that stores text files in zipped form on the palm.
You get the text (from project gutenberg typically) and use a desktop java program to compress it and put it into a palm db file, then just install it on your palm.
Since I spend a lot of time on the road, I can take a dozen or more books with me if I'm going on a trip without the weight. The palm's battery life means I have days of reading at a time without charging up (one reason I turned down a color palm from my employer).
I'v used fancier doc readers, but Gutenpalm is good enough and it compresses the content so I can carry a pretty good sized library around on my Palm. With a 16MB memory module, I could have literally dozens of books handy.
With respect to the issue of paper vs. e-book, I see absolutely no reason to prefer a paperback over a Gutenpalm book, except if you find looking at the palm's screen tiring, which I don't. The autoscroll feature is kind of useless, so if you like that sort of thing, I'd recommend the free readre "ReadThemAll", which does not scroll the text but "wipes down" the new page over the old one. However you'll have to use doc format books instead of zipped Gutenpalm format books.
So -- I'm basically a fan of e-books.
That said, I'll never read a non public domain e-book.
The reason is I don't want publishers to start treating books as "software" and to put the kind of onerous "licensing" agreements. That would be the beginning of the end of intellectual freedom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There should be no proprietary text formatting options.
They just limit ease of use and make the world a crappier place.
hrrm.
Most publiers are releasing only older titles on e-books. I have yet to see a new hardcover edition be simultaneous released on e-books.
You're looking in the wrong places, apparently. www.peanutpress.com has released at least several simultaneous with the hardback.
According to some inside info :-) King's Black House will be released as ebook the day it's available in hardback.
Here is what an e-book reader needs to be to be successful:
1. Physical dimensions of a closed paperback.
2. >=200 dpi high contrast display.
3. Internet/wireless enabled. Should be able to plug in a phone line or ethernet cable, or use 802.11b at the book store to download new content.
4. E-Books should never 'expire'. I want to be able to re-read a book ten years from now. I can do it with printed books, why not an e-book.
5. Huge storage capacity - at least 1000 books.
6. Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
7. Should function on it's own. I don't want to HAVE to use a PC to load books onto the damned thing, see #3 above.
8. Not neccessarily fully voice enabled, but it should be able to listen for something like 'bookmark', 'next page', etc...
9. The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
With paper books, I can look smart by filling a whole bookshelf with stuff I haven't read. With one trip to the used bookstore, I can cheaply purchase a whole 6 feet of classics from the past, and look like a well rounded person. Ebooks need to include some sort of packaging that fills bookshelf space, like the computer game boxes.
Technical references are too easy to use in a well-implemented electronic format. Why would I want to search text electronically when I could visually scan for it, page by page? There should be three ways to find something - Table of Contents, Index, and post-it-notes. Oh - and you shouldn't be able to click on the index entry to jump to the page, you lazy bastard. Navigate there yourself.
It's also too easy to correct errors in electronic books. I have fond memories of spending the first day in class fixing the errors introduced in the 11th edition. Errata should be sent on paper, by mail, so you can make the changes by hand. Think what the children are missing!
One thing that should be implemented is textbooks that change every year, in such a way that they can't be upgraded. This encourages students to keep their textbooks, since they can't sell them to next year's students. My shelf has many inches taken up with important sounding books like "Elements of Style", "Thermodynamics, 3rd Edition", "Calculus Made Easy", and "Learning Programming (with C)", that protects my shelf from getting dusty.
The best thing about reading the newspaper is the feeling of getting up, throwing on a bathrobe, getting your slippers wet with dew, and retrieving the daily paper from your neighbor's yard. All ebook media should be delivered by throwing it on your lawn, preferably at 5 AM, so that the dogs can tell you the moment it arrives. Or shipped in two weeks, the way Amazon does it. Again, don't forget the packaging - I want evidence that I've been getting the daily paper in my trash.
Size is also important - how will the folks across from me on the bus know whether I'm reading Dostoyevsky, Hacking Exposed, Playboy, or Harry Potter? The e-book should be huge, so that it requires a backpack, and should include, in a bright red LCD display on the back, what you are reading. The back-pocket is an unreasonale design goal. Weight is also a good thing - you need a counterweight when you are taking a dump.
Also, current ebooks are a bit too waterproof, and a bit to easy to backup. If I spill a little liquid on the display, I should see the waterspot five years from now. If I lend it to a friend, I want the electronic equivalent of a marked cover and bent spine. Books are a precious thing, and should be fragile, easily transferable, and should age with an old-book smell. Or, just put mold in a aeresol can, I don't care which way you go.
Are any design engineers listening?
Take a look at any of the ebook usenet groups one day and you'll see that ebooks aren't dying, rather they are only viable as an underground were people digitize all of the greatest new releases (and older classics, and older not-so-classics) and distribute them in easily read formats. You can get nearly any modern book from these people in plain old text, which you can slap on a Palm or simliar device and read on the bus/train/whereever you want.
Contrast this with "official" ebooks, where you have to buy an expensive and proprietary reader for your expensive books from exceptionally obscure authors. Worse, these readers have all sorts of annoying "copy protection" built in that makes you a thief for even trying to give your book to a friend (like you can do with regular old paperbacks), and the publisers treat you like the enemy when you buy one of these.
I think the truth is in the article. Ebooks are the future, unfortunatly that's a future without publishers, so the publishers of today have every incentive to make ebooks look as bad as possible and makes sure that everybody knows that "everyone else prefers the tactile sensation of books over any of those crappy ebook things that you want to stay away from."
Of course the publishing industry is slow to change, so we probably won't see the publishing industry die anytime soon.
I read the internet for the articles.
Every E-book I have seen will not let me upload guttenberg texts to it.. I have to use "special" texts from "special" sources. This is what is killing it. How about my technical manuals? not availabie, a haynes manual for my Pontiac fiero? not available, how about some decent science fiction? not available.
So I can buy a E-book, and it can sit on the shelf with my ever useful sony data-discman... the Ebook of 1987.
No thanks. Until the solve all the above problems, an Ebook is just a joke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I would like to go into a book store, and ask for any book, which would be printed on demand.
Or, I would like to go into a book store, transfer my ebook token, for which I paid $4 for to the book store. Then for an additional $3, I would receive a cheap pulp/paperback print copy of the same book. Or I could add $11 for a original printed copy from the publisher/printer, which normally would have cost $15 withot the token.
30 years after, the print copy would still be functional, while all the other gadgets and content delivery schemes would long since have been obsolete and thrown away.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.