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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?"
What I would like to see is academic books in an electronic format (on a disc distributed with the hard-copy perhaps) so that I could search the text for a phrase or quote that I did not get the page number for. This would make referencing much easier. Of course having a lot of newspapers and books online from other countries also aids academic researching.
I wank in the shower.
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.
-MIT's Open Courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
-Textbook revolution at http://textbookrevolution.org/
-Physiscs texts at: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#langua ges
-The assayer at http://www.theassayer.org/
-Open content at http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technolo gy/OpenContent/opencontent.htm
I also know a number of econometric and statistics texts that are also available as free Ebooks, but they are of interest only to specialists.
The other problem is that no content provider, and few customers, actually benefits from this system. They use it at the carnival because they don't trust their minimum-wage employees with money and some other ancillary benefits of microcurrencies (makes you spend more than you intended, what have you). But for an online business, "what our customers buy" is not just useful, its their *lifeblood*. Take a look at the value Amazon gets out of cross-referencing buying habits, both in aggregate ("People Who Like Harry Potter like ...") and specific to you (recommenations, which are basically taking the aggregate data and splicing that with what they know about you from past purchases). Heck, their database is probably as important to them as their tech or brand name.
Nor do most customers care. There was never a golden age of privacy in commercial transactions, since you always have to arrange delivery of the goods and payments and that always leaves records (even if they're only memories). Even if there had been a golden age, hello, credit cards, supermarket value cards, and data mining software. Its dead and most people couldn't care less. Sure, you can scare people a little with "Dubya and the NSA can subpoena your library records" but that ceases to scare (mostly because the dangers of it are vastly oversold and the usual suspects warn about this every two weeks whether they need to or not -- see the +5 mods which are probably already above and below this comment).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
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.
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
Compared to a direct-light display such as an LED or CRT screen, perhaps, but I'd argue that the contrast is more than adequate. I personally find direct-light displays less comfortable to look at for long periods than reflected-light displays such as paper, but I suppose you can get used to either one; and I'll grant that the lack of a built-in light source can be a problem in dark areas, if you happen to read in such places frequently.
doesn't scroll, is unsearchable, is uncopypasteable,
Why would you need to do any of these? Maybe this is the generation gap, but at 28 and having read hundreds of paper novels, I've never once felt the need for any of those while reading. There have been a few occasions when I've wanted to go back and find a particular quote in a novel I read years ago, but that's a different usage pattern from ordinary reading--and incidentally, I've found that when I do need to search, my brain does a remarkably good job of finding the right place as I flip through the pages.
takes up physical space,
I guess if you've succumbed to the "gotta-get-em-all" Pokemon mindset, this could be an issue. I'm living in a 45m^2 apartment in Japan with two medium-size bookshelves, and already have plenty of books (around 150 at rough count) to occupy what free time I have--when I want more, I just sell some of the ones I already own.
and is a fire risk.
As is that CPU you're overclocking. No, seriously--the chance of a fire actually starting from or due to a book is probably about the same as, if not less than, the chance of a fire starting from your PC or other electronic equipment. If your apartment or house is stacked from floor to ceiling with paper books, maybe you'd have something to worry about if a kitchen fire or the like spread, but in ordinary circumstances it's really not something that merits particular concern.
I'd also add that aside from having resolution that exceeds that of electronic displays, paper books don't need electricty to read, don't suffer from bugs or require updates, and survive ordinary wear and tear much better than electronic readers (I've got a book on Japan dating from 1907--a few photograph pages are no longer glued in they way they should be, but on the whole it's in fine shape).