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What Will It Take For eBook Adoption?
zmcnulty writes "Gizmodo has a new weekly feature that appears to be off to a great start: their first 'Feature Creep' writeup (by Sanford May) is an excellent overview of some of the obstacles standing in the way of adoption of eBooks, and more importantly, a handheld device that supports them. We've probably all heard of the Sony Librie's lukewarm reception, but if you're not familiar with the somewhat stunted eBook market, this is an excellent essay to get you on your way."
Cory Doctorow (who reasonably knows a thing or two about electronic publishing) has a pretty good piece disassembling the Gizmodo article here: Ebook column that gets it all wrong
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
And I agree with his interpretation from his article: " Ebook column that gets it all wrong Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then (well, to be fair, there's also a lot of puffery stuck in there to promote an ebook company called Vertical that probably didn't exist in 1997, but that's beside the point). Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed") off. This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact). This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)" http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/29/ebook_column_ that_ge.html
// Empires come and go we live forever
Cory Doctorow has a fantastic commentary on how wrong this article is, concentrating especially on the authors credulous assertion that DRM is an absolute requirement for the ebooks market. Says Cory: "But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it [...]" Well worth a read.
Maybe I'm just a gadget freak but, frankly, I've never understood the problem. I read paper books and a few magazines as well, but don't much care how the words get in front of my eyeballs.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
How about alt.binaries.e-book.*
Stephen King's ebook was later published on paper as part of Everything's Eventual, his latest collection of short stories. That book also included three stories that had previously been published only as books-on-tape.
Why the hell isn't this thread about THAT article?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There are any number of ways to protect against widespread piracy without screwing the user and crippling the interface and the ruining the reading experience.
One variation on this is Amazon's "Search Inside" function for books which allows full-text searching and the viewing of a limited number of pages for free.
This concept could be expanded to allow the purchaser to read everything and to print a limited number of complete hard copies and to cut and paste a reasonable percentage --say 5% of the entire book -- to be e-mailed, saved to a file etc.
Sure, this can be abused and it WILL be abused, but there are no 100% solutions and a compromise between reasonable DRM and the reader's rights and experience would more than please me and many other authors.
In fact, universal formats with flexible DRM rules have been created. In a previous life as CTO and founder of an Internet micropayments company, Pocketpass (I am no longer associated with that company), I invented just such a system called Tibanna
Tibanna integrated the MediaForgerun-time environment with the Pocketpass payment system.
Tibanna was free software that any individual could download and use. It took the content, the "digital wrapper" and the Pocketpass payment system and combined them into a single file that could be copied, shared and set free on the Internet without all the hassles still associated with premium content.
Tibanna even had a built in affiliate system that allowed fans of the content (book, music, any other digital deliverable) to "sign" the file, distribute it to a million of their closest friends then get a small percentage of the sale price -- set by the content creator -- if anybody bought it.
With Tibanna, the file became the store and I designed it to fit my needs as an author and creator with my needs as a reader and digital content consumer.
My intent was also to put control over the process in the hands of the individual musician, writer, digital creator and free it from the clutches of technological complication and corporate greediness that controls the sale and distribution of digital content. Tibanna would work just fine for corporate and mass wrapping of content, but I believe the independent creator deserves something to level the playing field.
Thanks to a group of untrustworthy investors, Pocketpass underwenta questionable reverse merger with a public shell, changed its name and -- as far as I can determine -- mucked everything up in the process.
I still believe in Tibanna and have just started a tribute site to keep the idea alive because it represents the middle ground that allows a creator to make money from their work without screwing the user in the process.
I have also started the Tibanna Blog to talk about the company, the product and how good ideas can go down the tubes when money guys with no vision take control.
I was gonna post up Cory's response as soon as I saw this on Slashdot, but glad somebody beat me to it. I love Gizmodo, but when it comes to knowing about how eBooks will or won't work, I'll take the word of the guy who's been very succesful releasing at least 3 of his books in eBook form, rather than the random technology blogger. I've met Cory, and the man knows what he's about, so when he talks about this stuff, I'm much more willing to give his words greater weight in this debate. It should be required reading for anyone who reads the original article.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
No, its not. I can "own" a CD. I can "own" a book. We can argue that I don't really own it. But for all practical purposes, when I buy a CD, I own it.
You own an original CD, yes. But when you buy online, you only "own" a license to the data. Apple's iTMS is generous enough to let you burn CDs, but that CD is just a copy which you're not legally allowed to resell.
That's the analogy I'm trying to draw here. Paper books are to purchased CDs as e-books are to downloaded music. You do not have the same rights to electronic media as you do to physical media, and since all you "own" is a copy, not a physical object, there's no reason to expect them.
Dear God, I hope not. I think the loss of the book would be a giant leap backwards for civilization. Call me nostalgic, call me romantic, call me old-fashioned, but I think there's something soul-satisfyingly and fundamentally *right* about books.
Years ago, back when Alexandria was a major center of learning for the classical world, and before the destruction of the famous library, there was a city in Anatolia called Pergamon, whose scholars had begun competing with Alexandria as a center of learning.
In order to suppress their competition, the Alexandrians cut off shipments of papyrus to Anatolia; the idea was that without papyrus to make their scrolls, there would be no scholarship.
The Pergamese responded by researching new materials to replace papyrus. What they came up with was "parchment". This marvelous material had the advantage that it retained its flat shape and did not tend to curl, as did papyrus.
This enabled them to produce larger works as stacks of flat parchment sheets, rather than as scrolls--the scroll being the natural form of a large papyrus document. They also developed the notion of binding these parchment leaves along one side, so that they could not be lost or scattered as they could if they were simply kept loose in a box.
For years after this technology was introduced, scholars throughout the classical world lamented the loss of the scroll, saying:
"Dear Gods!, I hope not. I think the loss of the scroll would be a giant leap backwards for civilization. Call me nostalgic, call me romantic, call me old-fashioned, but I think there's something soul-satisfyingly and fundamentally *right* about scrolls."