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The Future of Digital Books
Tabercil writes "The New York Times has an article about the mass scanning of books, which argues that actions such as Google's Book Search project are an inevitable outgrowth of the internet." From the article: "Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there?"
Will all these books and articles require we login to view them first? I think having every book, article, movie, song, etc available for use anytime is a great idea and important for society but I don't want to have to login and leave a paper trail of everything I'm looking at. Searching should be powerful, access private, and making payments for work still under copyright easy and affordable.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
What I always found interesting about the Star Trek universe was the concept of a 'replicator'. You press a button and speak your order (e.g. Tea, Earl Grey, Hot) and get your order instantiated out of seemingly nothing. What would the consequences of such a device be if we could replicate anything at no cost? Not just information, but physical objects like cars and houses too.
Would we do away with all human suffering? Hunger wiped off the map? Who would endeavor to explore space or do research into new materials and computation? Would money be useless?
We have today costless information. As time rolls on, we'll have more of it. Those who currently own that information are slowly but surely losing their grip on it as it is becoming easier to replicate it with no cost.
The course of action thus far has been to build more protections into the information itself that prevents it from being copied easily. Will the same thing happen with actual replicators when they are invented?
Scanning books is ideal for rapid human progress. While we're at it, the concept of the library is also the epicenter of p2p. Yet, money -- better yet, grant money, restricts the natural development of humanity. Therefore if power is a weed, the ultimate power must be anarchy (or should I say LIBERTY).
True story and a kind of interesting local example of what I'm talking about:
I live on a very long dead-end road. They fixed the mouth of the road I live on a while back -- it used to be a fork but now it's a 3-way stop. There was once a very dangerous fork at the mouth of the street and some neighbours complained about drainage problems when it rained (then sent the flooding bill to the town hall). The town met on the subject, and figured they would simply kill two birds with one stone, so they rebuilt the fork to make it less dangerous when they reconstructed the drainage for the whole area.
Because my street is LONG, the bulk of the people in the area live on the road that feeds up the NEW stop sign. When it was a fork, there was a YEILD sign so you could quickly look down the TINY side street and quickly go.
You would understand if you could see the way they reconstructed this area -- it makes no sense whatsoever to have a stop sign there. It should be a thoroughfare.
Guess how many people stop at the new stop sign now that the street has been "repaired"? About one in fifty.
If a law is stupid, you are obligated to break it because that is the essence of what liberty is!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
FROM THE ARTICLE:
Second, many countries will ban certain types of hardware (without macrovision, drm, etc) and other countries will get some of our business (at least mine) when we opt to purchase superior hardware that isn't limited. From the article again:
Bottom line is some of us will always buy the DRM protected stuff and only a few of us will purchase overseas if necessary to ensure we can get a device that will truly record to or from anything. The scanning of millions of books, magazines and other articles will only push change in laws, but it will take some time. Whoever wins, I'm still going to be purchasing devices that aren't locked down, even if I have to learn a bit of Japanese, Chinese or Korean to do so.
Funnypics
This is part of the move by the publishing industry to kill the resale market.
OK, that is a bit cynical. However, for high-end items like college textbooks, constant revisioning, cd/book bundles, and book/exclusive-web-site bundles are already killing the resale market. In 5 years schools will simply purchase 1-semester licenses to online materials and tack it on to the tuition as a "class materials fee."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've scanned about ten of my favorite books a few years ago and have put them into my Kazaa shared folder for anyone to download.
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books. Maybe my tastes are completely different from the people who use Kazaa, or, maybe it hasn't occurred to the KaZaaistanis to actually look for books on what is primarily a music downloading library.
I've offered Gore Vidal, P.J. O'Rourke, Trevanian, Harry Turtledove, and others, but again, no one has the slightest interest.
So whenever you hear a book publisher claim that putting books online for download for free would devastate the industry, just remember that the people who read books are definitely not the people who download files from P2P resource libraries. The claim that online downloading of so-called e-books for low price or even free would hurt the book publishing industry seems on its face to be reasonable and prudent, but in reality it is totally without merit. The people who buy books and read them don't download files from Kazaa and the P2P filesharers don't read anything without having some teacher require it as part of their final grade. They'll download comic books, yes, maybe, but actual books of coherent text and prose, not a chance.
Such it is as it is. And I don't believe that this situation will change in the coming years as more people outside of the geek community discover the P2P global library resources that are available.
I would love an "ISBN Scan and Search" Service where I could run my book's ISBN #s through a scanner, and search those in Google's (whomever's) database.
I recently had to give a talk and the information I wanted to convey was scattered throughout about 50 books. I wasn't able to do a good job, and I desperately wanted to do a keyword search on each of them.
This would be a great service for a library which would allow a patron to do a full text search on all books in the library.
Imagine writing a paper on the literary impact of "The Beatles" or "Star Wars" scattered throughout diverse materials like romance novels or physics textbooks in a large library.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
YOu should first try to get the law (etc) changed, then if necessary try to get the law challenged through acts of civil disobidience. True civil disobidience means that you are willing to pay the price of breaking the law as long as your actions will bring further attention to the mistake{s} of the law/practice in question.
Digital information has certain properties that distinguish it from atomic information:
1) It is infinitely easier to distribute.
2) It is significantly easier to index.
3) It is significantly more malleable.
In most cases the digital-information-haves cast these properties as inherently benevolent in nature. Unfortunately this is not the case. These properties are instead morally neutral. While a universally accessible, fully indexed, fully accessible digital archive of all the books on earth sounds like an idea which on the whole will benefit humanity we can not ignore the darker side to digital information.
1) Information that is infinitely easier to distribute can lead to infinite information being available. The more information there is available the more we depend on gatekeepers to provide us what is relevant.
2) The index of information is a form of information in it's own right (meta information) which itself contributes to the glut of information previously mentioned.
3) The more malleable information becomes the more it is subject to alteration. Each version of an altered document adds to the information glut leading us back to a greater dependency on information gatekeepers.
As the technology for digital books develops and less people find books as convenient as their counterpart in the digital world people will inevitably begin replacing their books or simply stop buying printed books. I don't think this is as much a science fiction dream as it may sound. How many of you still read a printed newspaper?
We may need no convincing to burn our books. They may never need to be outlawed. They will instead be subtly subverted by the insidious desire for "convenience". The kings of convenience will then be free to rule using the most powerful political tool in the information age: FUD.
I think the point is that the marginal cost of doing most of these things is pretty much nil. Scanning the books is definitely not free, but when you've got hundreds of GB of space, and the bandwidth to download hundreds of MB of porn a day, the cost of downloading a few hundred KB of text with your already paid-for broadband is small enough to be imperceptible, and thus to be, in the mind of the consumer, free. Which was the original point.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Examples of cold books are the books that you use at work. You have no attachment to these books. They are there to provide information.
Digital books will wipe out the market for cold books. Digital book have one crucial advantage over cold books. You can use a search engine to search the content of a digital book.
In the bad old days, an investment analyst may have remembered reading an insightful analysis about hedging. She wants to re-read the analysis but, unfortunately, cannot remember which bloody book contained the analysis.
In the present day, that same analyst can just use a search engine to find the precise book by quickly scanning the list of books that she has read.
The opposite of cold books is cozy books. These are books that you read while you are curled up in a comfy sofa or bed. As you sip hot chocolate spiked with whipped cream, you devour every word of the book. You lovingly flip the pages as you quickly follow the heroine of your chick-lit novel.
No computer or search-engine will ever replace the cozy books. There will always be a market for cozy books. The phrase, "curling up with your high-performance notebook computer popping up page after page of the novel", just does not have that same cozy feel.
Note that the notions of "cozy books" and "cold books" are relative. A female engineer may consider a book about advanced quantum physics to be a "cozy book" for leisure reading, but a middle-aged housewife may consider a romance novel to be a "cozy book". The point is that digital books will never eliminate all paper-based books simply because cozy books will continue to survive in the digital age.
using a shovel will never be replaced as the way to dig a small hole
I don't know. On our street the crew was fixing a broken water line. They used a vac and water jet truck to make mud and suck it up. It made a nice small hole about 8 inches in diamater and about 2 feet deep.
I found they use it because it can't cut into nearby underground phone/electric/gas/cable service. A shovel is too dangerous for many curbside utility repairs. They were not permitted to use a shovel.
The truth shall set you free!
With DVDs and CDs (ie: video and music) you need a hardware system to access the content. With a book, the hardware is in the pages and the binding. So when we're talking about e-books, we're talking about changing the playback hardware, not just the distribution channel for the content.
This is important because for music and video the internet (file sharing) has only really altered the distribution channel for content, not the playback hardware.
I think e-books have not taken off because the market likes the existing playback hardware: paper pages and binding. I don't think that is likely to change as long as prices for books remain affordable. Unless the point of production of the playback hardware shifts to the end-user (ie: a home book-binding color laser printer or something like that), this is likely to remain so. And even if such devices were possible, people would probably still buy 'the real thing'. After all, there have been home cappucino machines for a long time, yet Starbucks is booming. These are probably the main reasons why books and bookstores have been a booming business since the inception of the internet, and not the other way around.
The situation may be different in places where books (and Starbucks) are not affordable, like in - say - Bangladesh. And this electronic resource will be wonderful for serving those communities. But giving such markets access to books electronically doesn't constitute any loss of sales since they aren't buyers in any case.
For all of these reasons, I suspect this resource is going to be a fantastic research tool, but I doubt it is going to be a paradigm change so much as a subtle shift for the distribution of the written word.
A-Bomb
Here's a quote from a guy who considered himself qualified to discuss politics with authority. He seems to think that if we had automated means of producing objects of desire and need that we would essentially be in a position to do away with class in society.
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation; as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
Aristotle, The Politics 350 BCE
And there's probably thousands more web sites like this containing e-books. I think this illustrates that there's absolutely no need for an entity such as google to create a central repository of such resources. What's needed are open document standards and a better system for indexing and searching for these documents on the internet. I think the prospect of an entity such as google having a monopoly or attempting to gain a monopoly over such resources is really quite frightening.
This article goes to some length discussing the historical basis for copyrights and how those may or not still be valid for creative works in the 21st century as the cost of making and distributing copies has effectively gone to zero. The author comes to the conclusion that no matter what laws are made or desires are had by publishers (or authors) technologically, the "copy" has ceased to be acontrollable thing that revenues can be squeezed from.
An interesting thing will be how authors and artists of the late 21st century will make their livings. Already many performing artists [musicians] are moving towarddistributing their recordings under CreativeCommons licenses that allow them to begenerally free to the public.* They then can increase their following and make a better living selling tickets to performances as well as taking donations and selling easy accessto their music.
The 'donation' aspect of this new model is one that I find particularly interesting. It remains to be seen how it would work out, but I can imagine a day when a music group or author puts up a 'new album/book fundraiser' on their website. Fan donations could build until the cost of the production is met, at which point the group/author makes their work and provides it for download free of additional charges (as it has already been paid for). This "donations/payment upfront" model would strongly encourage increased production by artists (the purpose of copyright), while also providing a mechanism to support smaller/niche artists. I imagine that this model would not produce the huge incomes of current (<2%) superstars, but it should provide reasonable incomes for the vast majority of artists.
As a example of this model in use is the musician "Cargo Cult". I downloaded his albums (for free in 128kbps mp3 format) and listened to them on my MP3 player for several weeks. After a while I found that I really liked his music and went back to Magnatune and gave him $8 for the CD-Quality version of the tracks. Also, I sent him an email asking about his experience giving away his music under CreativeCommons. He replied back with a short message that basically said "Before I didn't make any money with my music, now I do." Where might we (and our culture) be if this was the dominant model.
- Adam
*Some, such as theAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikelicense that I use for mywebsiteallow free use only for non-commercial uses.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Ad (1) Do we need additional etexts?
The list of e-texts on the sites shown might look impressive, but it isn't really. It's a convenient aid to a decent university library but nothing more. In addition it took me quite some time to find these sites, and it took the site builders untold hours to put their sites together. And still it's terribly sketchy.
Why do I say it looks more impressive than it is?
-the topics tend to be covered in a very incomplete way
-the only area that is covered fairly well is undergraduate (first and second year) Mathematics and basic Physics.
-to my feeling there seems to be a positive correlation (but I didn't check this) between open e-texts and subjects that are studied by people who really really _want_ to study them
All full e-texts in these sites were made available by their copyright holders or have had their copyrights expired. What Google is planning to do is to make al books searcheable (including those under copyright) and to display only such small morsels as is consonant with fair-use. That's a very different story.
I for one would pay good money to be able to do an occasional full-text search of textbooks. And I would be happy to then either lend those books from the library or to buy them outright.
Ad (2) Should we be afraid of a Google monopoly on book searches?
I am as suspicious of monopolies as the next person, but this is a service which genuinely doesn't exist at the moment. I firmly believe that we can expect nothing of remotely comparable quality from existing publishers. If Google makes money from building such a valuable resource, why not let them? And should there turn out to be problems, we can always address them later, once actually we have a service such as Google is planning.
As a case in point I would remind you of the situation with scientific journals. There is _no_ single system that allows me to do full-text searches in scientific journals. Most scientific publishers offer (ruinously expensive) searching services for their own journals to libraries, and mostly they let you search for abstracts, keywords, and authors only. The quality of the search engines usually ranges from barely acceptable to really poor and they simply can't hold a candle to the quality of the Google search engine. This is because publishers usually put only bitmaps of their full articles on-line (even to paying subscribers !), which effectively renders them unsearcheable.
Conclusion
The long and the short of it is that it really isn't in the publisher's interest to make their books and articles too easy to search. Publishers generally aren't about making knowledge accessible to society, they are about maximising profits by monetising copyrights (no censure intended). They (probably rightly) feel that allowing their publications to be searcheable won't help them sell more copies. Why would that be? Full-text search as proposed by Google would allow people to look a a page or a passage of their books and decide that (a) the book or article is of no use to them, or (b) that they now know enough and don't need to buy the book or article, or (c) that the book or article is a must-read. Mostly the answer will turn out to be (a) or (b). So they block it (which makes perfect sense from their point of view).
Of course this is counter to the best interest of researchers, but they usually aren't copyright holders. That might surprise some people, but researchers usually have to sign away their copyrights in order to get their work published. And they aren't in a very strong bargaining position because their jobs depend on publishing regularly in well-rated peer-reviewed journals.
I would definitely support a national library doing exactly what Google is planning. Unfo