Slashdot Mirror
What if Harry Potter 5 Was an E-Book?
hakkikt sent a link to a highly speculative what if story on Harry Potter 5 as an E-Book.
The suggestions are pretty extreme- going so far as to saying that this
one book could change the fates of the publishing industry, book stores,
and could even make E-Books more then a pipe dream. Personally I'd
love to see it available digitally, but I still want a real hardcover
copy, and I can't imagine hundreds of thousands of kids staying up
late at night with laptops under their covers instead of the far more
traditional book & flashlight. Food for thought, but I can't really
take it seriously.
I could never have imagined ebooks being any good. But My friend said it was great, so I read "The Big U" on my m100. It was amazing. Sounds crazy, but it is easy to pick up/put down real fast since it holds your place automagically. Your arms/hands don't crap trying to hold it open in various contorted ways. Reading in the dark is really easy on your eyes (and spouse) with the backlight. I recommend everyone give it a try.
Something that wasn't (I think) clear from the
I think you'd find a vast amount of interest in hacking e-books, putting the documents online (or at least on a local hard drive), and then printing them out for distribution among one's fellow fifth-graders. Not everybody's mommy and daddy can afford to buy an electronic bookreader.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
That's one of the first Slashdot topics in a while that's made me stop and say, 'wow.'
I might even buy one of those gizmos.
I have long hated the concept of e-books. They're expensive, they forgo all of the benefits of a book, a pile of e-book ram cards is nothing like a shelf full of paper books.
But I might buy one if that was the only way to get the next Harry Potter book, and I suspect that a lot of other people would, too. I'd hate having to do it, mind you, but it would be an amazingly cunning, effective way to get the readers into a broad range of people's hands.
God, I hope it doesn't happen, but "wow," nonetheless.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I'm involved with eBook standards development (check out www.openebook.org), and I'm not very optimistic about the future of eBooks as they stand. There is really no standardization in terms of reading devices, and no real consumer market for an eBook. What's going to make eBooks run is added-value, not great content - if the Harry Potter eBook contained video, sound, games, etc., THEN I'd be looking to buy an eBook. My guess is that for eBooks to exist mainly as books, their future is going to be in academia and reference - things that really can be better with a searchable interface, or other technological enhancements. Current fiction, unless given some sort of sensory enhancement, won't cut it in the eBook world.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
Then I guess we could expect a lot more little kids running around in glasses, eh?
E-books are great! You can usually search for a phrase!
Well, you can copy and paste long sections! Well... usually not, when I come to think about it.
Hey, I know, you can print out a couple chapters to read at leisure! Oh wait, you can't do that very often either.
At least you can copy them onto your PDA and read at will... can't you? No? Oh.
For me, Harry Potter 1 was an e-book.
Sure, it was a pirate copy and full of OCR introduced typos, but I sure as hell wasn't going to go spend my money on a kid's book, despite the hype.
I figured, what the hell. Let's see what's so interesting.
Much to my surprise, I was blown away. Harry Potter was a morality play couched in terms of a fantasy novel. There were some rough moments... like at the end where the bad guy gives away the plot.
(Rowling's writing has improved since)
Still, I was fascinated. I downloaded the second and the third, quickly reading through them and finding scathing comments about the classism, the futility of punitive imprisonment, and the state of charity in the world.
When I went to look for the fourth book, it was not available. Instead, I went to Barnes and Noble that evening and paid 21.95 for the big hardbound copy of 'HP and the Goblet of Fire'. Since, I've put down money for all 3 of the others as well.
If Harry Potter 5 is an e-book, neither Rowling nor her publisher should fear piracy. The people who would have bought the book will buy it anyway, and the electronic copies floating around will inspire a few more to buy it as well.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Yeah, so did sailing ships and horses & carts.
BTW, can anyone actually imagine reading Proust as an e-book?
Careful Fauntleroy, you're gonna pull a muscle playing that pretentious twit act so hard.
"In any case, you won't be getting any newly released books published (officially :-) in any format you can actually use."
www.baen.com has a bunch. You can get the titles BEFORE they hit the shelves. They come in several formats including plain HTML, and I own over 40 titles.
I love these people. I am horribly biased. They give me access to great books in many different convenient formats, and they trust me to be reasonable in what I do with them. No draconian anti-piracy crap.
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The media middlemen, such as publishing firms, want to keep themselves firmly entrenched in a world where their middleman position is becoming less useful to the consumer. They're doing a good job of it so far. The technique they are using is to use patent and copyright to control not just the content, but the way in which you are allowed to view it. But they've got to give those of us who give a damn about fair use a reason to ignore our convictions and accept the middleman's control.
The way they seem to be doing it is to force their control over all new forms of technology, thus leaving those who care about fair use with the awful choice of "stay obsolete, or accept our control - your choice". E-books and DVDs are both doing this. Since the new technology is also the restrictive technology, when people start adapting the new technology because it's really cool and neat, they end up giving up their control unwittingly. Eventually the old technology stops being supported. Movies start being available ONLY on DVD and not on tape anymore. Books start being available ONLY on E-book and not on paper anymore. Soon even those who are willing to stick with old technology to avoid the hedgemony don't even have that option anymore. The choice becomes one of "accept the hedgemony, or totally forego every work of culture and entertainment being put out and stay out of the loop."
This sucks. What do I do about the upcoming 4-hour director's cut of Fellowship of the Ring on DVD? I want very much to have it, and I don't mind one bit giving the money in the form or royalyties to those who created it, and to New Line studio for having the guts to put their necks out on the line financing it. But how do I do this without simultaneously supporting their part in the engineered the DeCSS slander, er, I mean "trial"?
And that's just the way they want it. They want to make sure that I cannot seperate the two. And thus, an obsolete system of middlemen who aren't needed anymore in today's economy get job security by forcing me to pick between giving up on fair use, versus giving up on participation in modern culture.
And of course, as a side effect of this, open source software *also* has to give up on participation in modern culture, and I think that's what irks me the most, actually. I don't think the media execs are really interested one way or another in open source. But they are interested in preserving the hedgemony through content control, and as a side effect that ends up meaning there can't be open source methods to access the content they put out.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Searchable. Indexable. Orders of magnitude smaller and lighter. Configurable display settings. Easier to transmit over distance. ALL of which stand to get better and better over time.
There are undeniable advantages to paper books, but to say there are NO advantages to ebooks requires monumental ignorance and probably a large amount of pompous holier-than-thou conceit.