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Will Books Be Napsterized?
langelgjm writes "An article from yesterday's New York Times asks the question: will books be Napsterized? So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books. The article points to the growing adoption of e-book readers as the publishing industry's newest nemesis. With ever-cheaper ways to conveniently use pirated books, authors and publishers may be facing serious changes ahead. This is something I wrote about three months ago in my journal, where I called the Kindle DX an 'iPod for books.'"
I travel most of the year and don't like to lug too many books around. But I always have my laptop (yes, the screen is not ideal, but still...). A surprisingly large amount of what I want to read -- even obscure academic monographs -- are already available as scanned or OCRed PDFs on websites based in the former Soviet Union. It is in fact quite rare for me not to find what I'm looking for, and just as with music from file-sharing services, I've already downloaded more books than I'll ever be able to get through.
Now to other thoughts. I can sum these up simply: the DX is an iPod for books.
Think carefully about what that means. What are most people's iPods filled with? We'll not kid ourselves: pirated music. Of course pirated books and texts have been on the Internet for years, long before the MP3 reached its zenith. But just as the iPod made listening to those MP3s simple and enjoyable, to really enjoy a pirated book, you'll need an e-book reader, unless you want to read on the computer or print it out. Now, even e-book readers have been around a while; however, there are a variety of formats, and conversion between them is not always simple. PDF, on the other hand, is an extremely common and widely used format. This means that one could load up their DX with hundreds of pirated PDF books, all in one portable, simple to use package.
I won't be bold enough to call this a prediction, but rather a possibility: with the increasing adoption of e-book readers, particularly those capable of reading PDFs, we might witness digital book piracy on a much wider scale than before. I doubt it will ever reach the levels of music piracy, since books require a much larger investment of time to digest, but I do think it will increase markedly. The interesting thing about this is that while music piracy seems to cluster around recent and highly popular works, I don't think this will be as much the case with book piracy. Don't get me wrong; you can find all of J. K. Rowling's or Stephanie Meyer's works on The Pirate Bay, but you can also find the works of Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand. Slightly older books such as the latter, despite not being classics of all time, still elicit continued interest. So, when book piracy increases, sure, we'll see this year's bestsellers being shared, but we'll also see a lot more books published between 1923 and 1980 being shared than we see music from that time. This also means that we'll see a lot of books that, while still under copyright, were written by authors who are now dead. And if the copyright debate turns toward digital book piracy with even partially the same furor it has over music piracy, it's going to be a lot harder to convince people to feel bad about violating the copyrights of dead authors.
If there are any Star Trek fans reading this, you'll recall the PADD - an e-book like device ubiquitous enough to be carried in stacks, lent to friends, and forgotten carelessly. The DX is the first step in that direction. Like all consumer electronics, the price will drop eventually (remember how expensive the first VCRs and DVD players were?). And the idea of having free, wireless access anywhere in the U.S. to a sizable library of public domain works at Project Gutenberg is pretty inspiring. Imagine expanding that idea so that anyone with an e-book reader had access to a universal library of books. It'll be possible... let's hope that copyright doesn't stand in the way.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
When MP3's got big, they could be burned and listened to on any cd player or computer. Later MP3 playes got cheap. E-books can be viewed on any computer and most phones, but it sucks. There are no dirt-cheap readers out yet.
I've tried them onmy iphone, my netbook, my desktop and a palm. Each and every one suck equally when reading. Changing the contrast, brightness, it doesn't matter.
Gone!
Recent reports of pilot programs with the kindle show the fundamental difference between the way people experience movies and music and how they experience books.
There is no tangible difference between a downloaded song/vid and one which is on dvd, tv, or radio.
This is VERY different from how books are experienced.
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
Despite being a heavy tech head I will still print out any extended text to dead tree media because it's simply more comfortable and convenient to access in that manner.
While I'm about a generation removed at this point, the pilot programs with current university students show the same attachment.
I personally would love to see neurological and psychology experts convene a joint study on this to determine exactly why this is the case.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Most smartphones with a touch screen would work suitably as a compact, portable e-text reader. The issue with such devices is that you would need to be myopic to read the tiny display without eyestrain for any period of time.
However, they are ubiquitously commonplace, the software to read e-texts is already available for them, (in many cases it comes stock with the phone's default software loadout. HTC smartphones ship with Adobe acrobat reader preinstalled) and current devices already have more than sufficient storage.
Where things like Kindle were SUPPOSED to shine, was in the areas of dynamic annotations, and ease of operation. (both of which a recent article suggested it failed at in a university trial.)
The real issue here, I think, is in the lack of excitement of reading a good book. Most modern consumers prefer the "I am done in an hour" movie version, instead of the "Read it in a few days" woodpulp version.
Making the woodpulp version digital does nothing to alleviate this bias, so ubiquity of new reader devices would not change that.
There are a huge amount of books out there that have been scanned and OCR'd. People have been scanning them for years before e-books or e-book readers existed. IRC seems to have a large amount, but I'm sure there quite a few on torrents and whatnot as well.
Back in the 1980s, My college bookstore sold "books" that were copied from the original and binder-clipped together. When I asked about it, they said it was legal because the book was out of print and the professor insisted they sell it. Photostats have been around for a hundred years now, and the book publishers never imposed any kind of technology limits on copiers.
Music is expected to be portable. You can listen to music while you drive, walk, work, etc. You generally can't read a book while doing any of those things; and for at least the first you are an idiot for even attempting such a feat.
Sure, electronic books could be pirated, but it seems unlikely that it would be as widespread, as there isn't really the same market for electronic books as there is for electronic music formats.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Apparently you aren't in an academic environment. You should see the USB sticks full of pdf and djvu textbooks that are being passed around. Convenient reading, maybe not. But search functionality? Hell yeah. Have you seen the indices of most technical (Ph.D. level) textbooks? They're usually shorter than the table of contents. I don't know about you, but I need to be able to search my textbooks. Most of these seem to be coming from library scanning operations in countries more relaxed about copyright, and can be found on some torrent sites if you know what to look for. If publishers were smart, they'd start distributing a CD/USB key with the pdf/djvu of the text as well. There's also a growing movement of free and open textbooks, and "print on demand" services. Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash. So it makes a lot of sense to do free publishing.
I think in 10 years time, the printed textbook will be an anachronism, and getting paid by a publisher to write your textbook will be too.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
One fundamental point that tends to get overlooked is that unlike CDs or cassette tapes before them, books traditionally came with built-in DRM, insofar as copying them (via scan/OCR/proofread) was a really tedious process. Whereas it's relatively easy to crack the DRM on, for example, MobiPocket or Microsoft Reader books (and probably ePub by now). So the DRM'd formats are easier to pirate than the previous "analog"-analog format. What this portends for the future remains to be seen, but wearing my full-time novelist hat, I'm a bit worried. The music industry has efficiently trained people to grab files without throwing money at the artists, by bringing the role of publishers into disrepute. Now we're all set to repeat the experience, and unlike a rock band, most authors don't perform well on stage.
"Yes, yes they will" (I should probably go tell The New York Times rather than Slashdot, mind you.)
Wants to copy the article to rapidshare, hotfile, and megaupload.
I see audio books pirated at a high rate (just check mininova). However, we as a nation, are not much into reading. So no, I do not expect printed works to be in high enough demand to trigger the same kind of massive piracy that audio does.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The pocket I'm reading to and from work? No way, ever. It gets beaten up, thrashed around, ends up squished way in the bottom of my backpack etc. and no e-book reader would take that kind of abuse. The big old textbooks I used to read in school, you know sitting down at a desk and reading yes possibly. Reference type books are already much better online, you can search for specific things, jump with hyperlinking and whatever.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wants to upload the linked articles to rapidshare, hotfile, and megaupload.
I was into reading ebooks on my PDA before it got popular.
Reading from smaller backlit screens is certainly not be for everyone, although I liked the form factor and the fact that I didn't need to rely on external light. For almost everyone else though, the new e-ink readers should fix most of the problems such as small screen size limited resolution by making the screen look just like paper.* If the devices aren't quite there yet, I think they will be soon enough, it's just a matter of making small improvements to the existing technology. Then there would be little preventing people from just grabbing some books off emule, unless the devices are completely locked down with unbreakable DRM to disallow anything not digitally signed.
I actually also wrote a short-ish essay on this topic for one of my classes years ago. It wasn't too detailed as it wasn't a business or economics analysis, but it clearly showed that getting a cheapo Palm device and then just warezing the books made sense financially if the reader could either tolerate the reading method or actually preferred it. As I recall, I also made some comparisons between book vs album prices and mp3 player vs PDAs, assuming a desktop PC with internet connection was a fixed cost. The conclusion, I think, was that pirating books is going to be viable on a larger scale in the near future assuming even more suitable devices appear at a reasonable price.
The only problem for now is that these e-ink devices are pretty expensive. While various PDAs were also not too cheap, they were very versatile, so for instance I used mine mainly to keep track of all tasks, assignments, meetings, and other organizational stuff, then play some Worms or Quake on it, then check my mail or browse the web. As far as I know, the Kindle just has a broken web browser and an mp3 player. I don't think this is going to be a long term problem though, the technology is still pretty young and therefore expensive.
*- Preemptively acknowledging the few nuts who would just love to rant here about how anything that doesn't feel like dead trees or involve physically turning the pages is unusable
How much physical space they occupy is irrelevant, there's just no replacement to the flexibility real books offer.
I don't think this will be nearly as widespread as music pirating. The reason is because with music, the medium changed, but the experience didn't change for enjoying it. Years ago, before iPods were really popular, and MP3s were still being pirated widely, people would routinely burn CDs and listen to them on their CD players, portable or otherwise. Once the iPod revolution came about, people actually started taking their CDs and moving them to MP3s, to listen to them on their MP3 device. Put another way, there was an easy translation ability from the new way to the old way.
Books, on the other hand, for the next 10 years (at least) will still predominantly be read on actual paper and not on e-books. Further, people can't take an e-book illegally downloaded and turn it into a real paper book, like you could with CDs. Until ebooks can recreate the experience of flipping pages, and bookmarking a physical part of the book, they probably will never get people to completely switch. The physical part of a book is an important experience. The physical part of music (swapping disks, repairing scratches, rewinding tapes) is nothing more than a hassle.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Much like small bands/indie movies can be hard to find, books rarely have the mass desire necessary. Books have been traded for decades on IRC/usenet(I downloaded books before my first mp3), but books generally aren't popular enough to be mass downloaded, except as "every *** book" collections on D*oid.
When the last Harry Potter book got scanned early, my mother actually complained that she couldn't find it on P2P, even though she had pre-ordered and would be getting it at midnight release anyway.
I've never heard that for any other book, although I've been noticing a lot more of the "books for people who don't generally read" floating around on non-book trackers, as well as movie tie-in books. I wouldn't be suprised if teen-angst fiction really drags books into the "everybody pirates" realm.
No, I believe the widespread piracy of literature has been avoided due to sheer respect. That and the fact of this anecdote: I've only bought one book in electronic form, and it was a very short guide of sorts. Even though the read was extremely short, having the inconvenience of being tied to a computer and no benefits beyond paper, I found it very displeasurable. I'm willing to pay the premium to have the words on paper. The only thing I can think that might be better would be to distribute the text in .RTF format or a similar simple, easily managable text editor, where I can quote and copy the text in my own notes file -- yeah right!
Even if only in analogue form (photocopies, usually of academic materials; at least in one of the former soviet-block countries...I think I can see a pattern here)
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's not as prevalent or widespread, no, but it sure as hell is already a reality. Especially for comic books, a 5 minute search can typically yield complete collections of comics pertaining to whatever character you feel like reading for a while, and then with a handy program called CDisplayEx, you can read them page by page with great ease, even turning the image 90 degrees to get a larger image on your screen.
The tools are there, the materials are there, it's just that the community isn't yet, and neither is the awareness of the piracy.
General rule. If it could be pirated, it can and will be pirated. No exceptions.
What is 'book'?
Pirates can't read! Sailing the seas and plundering treasure doesn't require reading skills. So no, books won't be pirated.
I have purchased every textbook Ive used since I started school, but even so I usually try to find an ebook (pdf or chtml) because it is so much more convenient to use my netbook in class than 30lbs of texts. Ever since textbooktorrents.com went down a few months ago, its gotten almost impossible to find anything useful.
I'm a fiction novelist. Recently, I've noticed one of my books that's ended up in PDF on the web. Since then, my sales have gone UP since (I believe) more people are discovering my work.
One kid went so far as to bring in a printed copy of my book on 8.5x11in paper (probably printed on his personal inkjet) from the downloaded PDF. I signed it and asked him if he'll actually BUY a copy of my next novel coming out in a few months. He told me he liked this one so much, he will.
I gave him a printed copy of the book for free.
See, piracy WORKS!
It has been more than a year that I read any paper book. I read only on screen. In the beginning it was not too comfortable, but nowadays I am completely used to it. I pirate about 2-3 books a week, I have about 10GB of them. They are always around on my laptop, even when I have no net connection. For me books are already napsterized.
I hope he's kidding. Reading devices are not the issue. The trouble of converting is, and that is becoming less of a issue by the day.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Should be free, and will be free.
If you don't offer 'added value' to the information you produce, then you are doomed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How much good quality video can you fit in to, say, 1gb? 0.5-3 hours, depending on quality?
Music? 10-20 hours?
And what about books? Well, you can fit hundreds of them in to a gigabyte. That's enough reading for a decade, at least.
I know bandwidth isn't that big of a problem these days, as it was before, but take what happened for me, for example:
I heard about this interesting science fiction book one day. It didn't sound interesting enough for me to rush to amazon.co.uk to order it, though, so out of a whim I decided to do a search on the pirate bay, just for fun. What I found was this torrent that was filled with science fiction books, a couple of gigabytes in size. It contained basically every single notable book by every single notable science fiction author.
The fact that downloading a whole genre of books is so trivial that it can be done in a half-an-hour these days makes me glad I'm not a science fiction author
While you need a decent studio to create a decent music quality, writers can create good-looking PDFs on their computer.
If there is going to be an iTunes book store, publishers and bookstores will take the hit. An author could charge a bit more, and the audience would pay way less. It would be more convenient to buy the book (one can read the first chapter before buying, not something you do in a bookstore. Nor do you have to go there).
Bert
Copyright wont stand in the way, but the attorneys will.
But in the end, they will lose, unless we lose ALL control of our digital device and basic freedoms first. ( which is always possible ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The argument everyone uses about digital content is it can be easily copied so it can and should be endlessly copied, one of many arguments I should say. Let's say my books have only been dead tree published, this argument shouldn't have any validity. How is scanning and posting my work not stealing? Yes I know the guy that scans it isn't making a dime. Well neither am I and I just spent three to six months writing it. Doesn't affect sales? Tell that to the music industry. Hey live performance? Since when has anyone here paid to listen to an author read a book? Write for the love of it? My creditors object to that one, as does my family. I realize everyone thinks we are entering into some golden age where content is free but as a content provider I hate to break it to everyone but the content providers aren't willing or able to work for free. It's a hard business as it is to make a living at and more so than filmmaking and music it won't take much to drive 90% of the authors out of the business. Most are barely making a living as it is. So far people aren't embracing readers but there will come a time when they are more attractive. Buying a reader doesn't entitle you to endless free content. The device makers don't fund content providers. So far there hasn't been much impact on writers from the piracy but I can see it soon affecting us. I should have another twenty or thirty years in me and twice that many books to come but I'm already considering options when I have to give it up. Piracy isn't striking a blow for freedom it's a loss for humanity because work will go unpublished or never created in the first place. I realize this isn't a popular stance on Slashdot but it's painful to watch a career I love facing extinction. The quality of writing in film and television is miserable so the last place for writers to make a stand is where we started with dead tree publishing. I've avoided electronic distribution in large part because of the digital excuse but if a kid with a scanner can take my work and in so doing reduce my sales below a survival level then I have to throw in the towel. I have no choice and a lot of my fellow writers are in the same boat. There's been a nervous vibe for many years running through the community but so far only a handful of writers have been affected and those are mostly at the top. The mid level writers are going to struggle and the low end will have to surrender. I'm on the cusp so I may or may not survive but the frustration will likely be enough to drive me out eventually. When some one downloads a book rather than buy one, yes I know they are expensive, what you don't see is the writer staring at a stack of bills wondering why he even bothers. That's the ugly side of piracy. I recently considered starting a small publishing house but the sole reason I didn't do it was the looming specter of piracy. It takes three to five years to make a publishing house profitable. Even then margins are low. The odds are good that novel piracy will be growing strong by then so odds are I'd loose money by starting a publishing house. Instead of moving up I may have to face being forced out of writing altogether. What people forget is for centuries writing was for the wealthy. No one else had the time to write or the resources to get their work published. After hundreds of years of fighting to establish a industry open to anyone we may see the clock move backward and only the elite will be able to publish their work. What if the only books available were written by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet? Silly? That was largely the case 500 years ago. Yes people are free to post their work on the internet for everyone to read. Well how much of this free content is worth your time? Virtually anyone can make a movie given the cheap cameras and editing equipment. Where are the thousands of modern classics made by people in their garages? Most of it is unwatchable. The system is flawed but it does tend to filter out the worst of what is out there. Sure people will still write but trust me most of it won'
What's needed for Napsterization to happen, is a file format that's universal (or close enough). I don't think PDF is that format. With its fixed page and font sizes it's not suited for the varying screen sizes found in ebook readers. Piracy in the form of scanned or OCR'ed PDFs won't take off on a huge scale for the same reason.
HTML would be a better choice, but converting a scanned book to HTML (especially if the book layout uses multiple columns) is nontrivial.
If the books are available for download substantially cheaper than a hardcopy version (to account for the vastly cheaper distribution costs), without restrictive DRMs, in a form that will work on specialised book readers, mobile phones/pdas and laptops, and with the ability for repeat downloads of something you've paid for once, then there won't be a huge demand for pirate copies. If not, then mp3 history will repeat itself...
Early signs (think kindle) do not look encouraging...
Cuz Kids are inhairantly dumn so there is no way this is gonna hapin in my live tioe.
Honestly every article some jerk writes about this to make himself look intelligent hurts the book lovers who need free searchable digital books!
I have spent a LOT of money on books in my life. I repurchase the same book many times over my life if I like it, the main reasons being to support the author and because I can't carry my books with me.
I think the story is slanted. "Napsterization" sounds like pirating, but you know the Napster brand was also used for the music download service of a famous phone manufacturer too. People will find more authors than can be stocked in a bookstore and consume more books than ever. Yes there are ways to download books but if there was an easy way to buy digital books at a cheap price ($1-3) I would do it.
I have had to deal with ascii only versions until now to read on a palm or phone, but I am looking forward to an OSS e-reader that will provide low power consumption, e-ink style high quality display, and no chance ever of books being deleted like Amazon did. I want to keep a library of gigabytes of books, and I want to support the authors of books I read.
I recommend the construction of libraries that stock all books in digital format and provide them for free, one at a time per copy purchased by the library, and allow people to keep the copies. If you want people to learn about authors the library can provide blogs or rss feeds about books that are good to read.
If anything this will be excellent for authors. You might also consider that new books are not on the net but you can discover an author through the net and read old ones. Some authors understand this, see the Baen Free Library.
Most of the songs in my iPods are ripped from CDs I bought, it took significant time to rip my whole collection of CDs, but it is doable, the same can't be said for scanning my books collection already purchased, some I could easily find a torrent, but many aren't available on any store. With right now, there's just not that many source for e-books, legal and otherwise.
You don't want the book to ship with any more carp there is too much as there is now you want the $200 text book to cost $250 with that USB key / cd.
I write too. Are you paid by a publisher? If so, you're polishing the handrails on the titanic - just like those old school rock stars and wannabe rock stars.
What most creative types don't seem to get is there's no reason for them to exist. There's so muc recorded music already if there were no more new artists we'd still have mroe music available than any of us can listen to in a lifetime. Same thing with books.
Artists communicate. Your job is to communicate. The enemy of an artist is not piracy, it's obscurity. Publishers are your enemy, not your enabler. People do not buy shit from publishers because they want to they do it because they formerly HAD to - publishers created an artificial scarcity by keeping most artists in obscurity. Once you have someone who CHOOSES to listen to you - and that's how virtually all art works - they will "support" you to the best of their ability. Fans want to be connected to their artists - this is where publishers seek to interject themselves in order to extract value.
If you're a creative type still thinking in terms of a publisher, you're screwed. Give the people who appreciate you what they want, and they'll support you - it's that simple.
My house burned down about a year ago. I lost everything. I now have a stack of old BYTE magazines and a copy of the Scelbi/BYTE primer sitting on my shelf. It's not because there's "information" in them - the "information" was obsolete two decades ago. It's because there's creative content in them I can't find elsewhere and I love having this "souvenir" of my youth. Among the things I miss most are my EPs of "Holland Tunnel Dive" and the Detroit band "Shock Therapy." Why? I can download the content, but they don't have the value to me of the records. It has nothign to do with content and everything to do with being something tangible. However, if I had never heard either of these bands those now destroyed records would mean nothing to me - get it?
software and hardware for scanning books it a bit primitive still. especially hardware, though. even if OCR is faulty, accompanying the original scans isn't a big deal. but scanning an entire book without ripping out all the pages and without a page feeder is a problem. i wonder if there is something for fixing and normalizing photographs of books?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
What do you mean will?. It's happend, done, etc
. Books just aren't as polualr as TV or Movies which is why they're pirated less.
Bet for more. More pirated than music, I'd say.
I bought a small cheap reader, a Cybook. The thing is far from perfect. The screen is worse than others that I've seen, there are no tree structure in the library, and it hangs about once in ten boots. But it's still a wonder. It's thin, light and you can have a thousand books there. I'm now addicted to the thing. Read mostly novels there, no PDF stuff.
Then my brother lent me an SF book from Poul Anderson. Heavy stuff, and I don't mean the plot. The book was heavy, more than seven hundred pages of thick paper. The thing bent my hands down when reading in bed. So I reasoned that the text might be online. Went to the net, found it, downloaded it and presto! it was in the eBook reader. The pleasure of reading was back.
Books are much more pirateable than music, because they are much lighter. You can put ten books in a song. A couple of Gigabytes of books is enough for a lifetime, and you can transfer them in few hours. I have read these ideas of books being an object of love and desire in themselves, and I even thought I was in that camp, till I found out how fast I ditched them paper books. No regrets, no looking back. If I ever miss the sweet smell of paper I can crush a torn page under my nose while reading the odorless ebooks. I just need a better reader and paper books are history for me. And I'd say that also goes for the most of the rest of the world, at least the part that reads anyway. I have to pry my reader from the hands of everybody whom I lent it, for reading something only available online, for example.
Put a good-enough reader out (and no, the Kindle is not yet it), and you can start re-defining best-sellers the platinum disc way. Books will be leaked before they are printed, and almost nobody will make a living writing. Well, that last part is mostly true nowadays too, so perhaps nothing will change that much. But the pirating of books, by being ten times easier to pirate than music, and a thousand times easier than films; and providing a best overall experience IMHO, will be incredible. And now, with the Kindle and others, you'll begin to get better quality from the pirated ebooks. Now is mostly OCR, but soon will be mostly well-corrected for-purchase ebooks, unprotected after buying, and released to the wild masses.
Books napsterized? They'll make Napster look like a joke.
I'd say sell publishing companies' stock and shelve those plans of richness and fame by becoming a best-seller author. Ah! and welcome to the Data Century.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Is there book piracy yes. Ebooks will make this more prevalent and digital copies just make it more widespread. One can find EASILY almost every science fiction work out there. Its gotta be pretty obscure for it not to be found. For a while LIT (MS format) was the popular format, but PDF has since overtaken it. But as an owner of a Sony Reader (PRS505) I can tell you a US Letter sized PDF doesn't display well on my reader, reasoning is that the texts gets far too small to read. On a Kindle DX this could be alleviated. But for a good format EPUB is one O'Reilly is banking on. PDF is made for the ability to print it consistently across platforms, not really display while staying readable on all platforms (oh you can read it sometimes but smaller displays make it difficult) EPUB is a format that is meant more for display, rather than print.
It still takes time to a) scan a book b) ocr the text c) format it for distribution if your a pirate, but this can be done in stages by many different groups of people. One guy scans a bunch of books (or photographs them or what have you) and the resulting files is released, another group will take those files and OCR the text and while it will be full of errors, sometimes it can be spell checked and somewhat proofread. Then that file can be 'updated' as its corrected by people reading the material. Its a problem easily solved by distributed parties, and this is how a lot of them are handled right now.
The ability of a Ebook Reader to hold a lot of straight text material is far too much to fathom. The average book converted to text is about 500k (less with Epub as it uses internal compression) even if it was 1MB however 1GB of reading material is at least 1000 books. My reader can hold with the external media inserted 12GB, which the rough math is 12,000 books. If I could read a novel every day (and I do get through a good chunk of a novel every day I do admit) it would take me 32+ years to read 12,000 books. Now if everything was compressed as like EPUB and other Reading formats do, we could fit two or three books into that 1mb. 64-96 years of reading then. I dunno about you, but that gets a little much, heck 32 years is too much. if I was to fit that amount of books on a shelf, I would have to have a big house to hold them all. Enough to slip into my small modest sling pack along with my 160 gig ipod (filled to the brim with pirated music).
Add in my netbook to get online and grab music/books/movies, my digital camera which allows me to add more to it and wow... I am loaded to bear with digital technology for most things.
Before cds were invented there was a consumer magnetic recording technology called compact cassette, the piracy carried out using this technology was so widespread and pervasive that it almost killed music altogether! Those were crazy times, big labels were brought to their knees, the executives had to cut their own pay to $1000 a month and sell their mansions, limos and helicopters. I forget how it turned out.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
When dealing with physical books it's almost inconceivable that you mishandle the book and accidentally "turn the page".
My experience with physical books has been that if you take your hands off the book or drop it, it turns its own pages.
the ability to scribble free-form notes (typing is too cumbersome/inconvenient for such notes)
I would much rather type than scribble, if for no other reason than that I would like to be able later to read what I wrote.
...so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?
How about to take on an extended trip on which you would have time to read four or five or more books. Also, I'm inevitably reading more than one book at a time for entertainment purposes, so to me it's almost inconceivable to have only one book going at a time.
You can rip a page if you don't like it
Seriously? I - I - I - don't quite know what to say. How would you remember the precise details of what you didn't like? How would you stir up the embers of your indignation? How would you lend it to a friend after it's been modified that way?
I agree with the rest of your post, especially the part about the dead tree book being unable to fail you. Of particular importance to me is the concept that no one can modify it without your knowing about the modification.
Books are not going to be napsterised on the same level as music and movies because they are already abundantly available for cheap or for free. You can borrow from libraries, swap with friends, lend them to friends, or give them away. Books are also dirt cheap second hand, and most households have a reasonable collection of books.
It's a good thing. It means that the publishing industry can enjoy very little threat from piracy compared to other media industries.
Books are as heavily 'pirated' already (if you consider lending or second hand sales piracy, as the publisher doesn't see a penny), as pirated as possible without counting illegal copying.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
When Amazon has remote access to what I read....
Heres the irony; Amazon remotely erases ur copy of 1984 and "Animal Farm" which in all of George Orwells writings speaks of communism and "Big Brother". Who would trust an entity like this?
I want an Apple E-Book.
There are these places called "libraries". They have books there, and you can read them for free. You can even take them home with you!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Frankly, I rarely pay for a book anymore. Until I see pricing on DIGITAL books around 1.99 I'll never buy. I think it's idiocy to charge 9.99 for a product that costs almost 0 in reproduction. "with special editions??wtf is that" costing 14.99
Who in their right mind buys into this shit?
I've read some real shitty OCR copies though..
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
Perhaps unlike most here, I was listening to music in the cassette days. I remember the music industry pitching a fit about it, and I remember copying tapes from and for friends. But if you didn't know someone who had a tape you had to buy it. There was no mechanism to make it easy to copy a song off a stranger.
I'm not saying the RIAA or the music industry in general are really hard done by now, but when people today say "widespread" I don't think what happened in the days of tapes would even be a blip on the radar.
The writings at the Baen Free Library explains why piracy is not an issue for paper books.
Long live the smell of *real* books!
That is all.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
If you think about it, MANY people are already essentially subscribing to a monthly service so they can download whatever they like from a large, constantly changing selection of commercial software packages. It's called "Easynews" or "Giganews" or whichever "premium" Usenet service a person prefers.
The only problem with this business model is that the original software developers don't get a cut of the profits.... but that says more about their unwillingness to "evolve" and consider new business models than anything else.
Right now, one of the closet things I can think of for computer software digital distribution that's doing well is "Steam". You often seen discount software bundles up there, as well as special deals on new releases - and thanks to the convenience plus lower prices, a lot of people buy their PC games that way.
And the music and movie industries are starting to "get it", offering their works for electronic download from places like iTunes or Amazon. But book publishers are way behind the curve here - generally assuming their industry was "immune" to needing any changes. (The idea there is, the fact they sell you the work in a printed book form adds enough "value" in and of itself that people wouldn't waste their time on a digital copy they had to print out and staple/bind together, or be stuck only reading on a computer screen.) But e-Book readers tilt things in a new direction - meaning they too need to get on-board with digital distribution, and quickly.
I've been thinking about this problem for a dog's age, from the perspective of a fiction writer. "Seed" For Sale Get your wallets out! Christmas is coming!
"So far, popularity of books online has not reached the degree of music or movies, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy online books."
There, fixed it for ya.
"So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books. "
You left out the other half of that equation. Which is easier? Ripping a CD/DVD and distributing it, or "ripping" a physical book and distributing it? Also I'd say that the publishing industry in aggregate has had a lead time to outproduce the capacity of pirates to keep up. How many pirates would it take to copy all the commercial music? Now how many to do the same with print media?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That said I currently do not have any [...] pirated software (the last software I pirated - many years ago - for some time has had an open source alternative that meets my needs).
Until the publisher of the last software you pirated sues the developers of the open source alternatives, claiming patent infringement or look-and-feel copyright infringement. For example, imagine The Tetris Company suing the GNOME Foundation over Gnometris.
The real question to me is if books should be napsterized; while most ebook prices themselves are reasonable, the restrictions placed on them are not. Some books are still far too expensive, especially when you already have a dead tree version. Will be interesting to see.
Of course books are and will be heavily pirated in whatever format they are placed in. As we move toward handheld computers as powerful as today's laptops, there will be no issue about how readable this or that format is. Users will find a good way to read them, then the books will be placed in that format and people will trade them like they do already today, just in greater numbers.
This is the transition that is happening with all media formats and its ridiculous on Slashdot to even ask the question "Will this happen?"
I am only worrying about whether the writers and editors will be able to get paid for their work. If the book industry tries to do like the music industry and continues to charge as much for their product as they did when they had to physically distribute it, then they will lose out on billions of dollars they could have made by correcting their prices and getting their money through selling more products. And they have to make this price correction early on. If they wait until everyone becomes insulted by their greed like the music industry did then people will not feel bad about cutting them out of their profits. Digital media has come to the point where the consumer now has the power in the relationship and if the industries don't recognize that then it will be at their own peril. I think many of those who pirate would have been happy to pay something small instead for a legal version.
It seems like the ideal endgame of all of these digital media transitions is for there to be direct payment to the artists who actually create the content. If I could go to my favorite bands' or favorite authors' websites and pay something small directly to get their content like 20 cents a song or 2 dollars a book then I would buy a lot more of these things for sure. I think that is the prize we should be keeping our eyes on - freeing the artists from these archaic business models and the huge piles of middlemen that want to continue to get paid from the artists' work. The current debate about piracy really frames this whole transition in the wrong way. It continues to assume that these media companies will have a place in the future of media distribution. For hugely collaborative works like movies, tv and video games, I think there will be a need for media companies to create the products. But media that can be created by small groups or single artists like music and books, there is no need anymore for this huge infrastructure to bring it to the public. That's the bottom line for them, they are soon obsolete and few will miss them. But I for one will always want to compensate artists I appreciate and I think that is a common feeling, so we really need to explore ways of doing that much more directly. If we can transition to this more direct relationship between audience and artist then I think the problem is solved and our culture as a whole will be better for it.
So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books.
Why would someone pirate a book when for MOST cases they can go down to the public library and borrow it? In Canada we still have (For now, although government is trying to get rid of it) inter-library loans which essentially make it possible to get your hands on any book in Canada if a library has it.
I just left the US for 6 months and I'd always wanted an e-ink reader. My trip was the perfect excuse to buy one and I purchased the Hanlin V3 through astak.com. I've loaded it up with a lot of content from Project Gutenberg as well as a few pirated titles. I've only been out of the country for 6 weeks and already I've read five books...WAY more than I would have back home. Granted, some of this is due to the extra time on my hands, but I find my reader easy on the eyes for long format reading (unlike my iPhone for example) and enjoyable to use. Even if the reader crashes, it remembers where I left off. I can bookmark pages easily. The battery lasts for a month on a single charge. I can carry hundreds of books on a 1 GB SD card. So, yes pirating of books is going to be rampant, I can assure you. This will only become more widespread as tools like Inept become more widely know. If you're not sure what I'm referring to just google the term adeptkey.der.
"War makes me sad." - Me
Already has been:
[root@filesrv ~]# du -sh /storage1/media/Books/ /storage1/media/Books/
214G
As long as the legal bounds defined by copyright law are more constraining than what people feel is morally acceptable, it is inevitable that rampant copyright infringement will be the call of the day once the preferred format for books phases into the digital domain. This so-called "piracy" will take on a myriad number of forms some of which will be:
Other people might also find it acceptable to:
Other people, of course, will just download and not think twice. It should be obvious to everyone that it is even less likely to be able to prevent this than with much larger works like music or movies. In addition, there will be an enormous amount of public domain and freely licensed content which will be easily found via the wonders of the net, search engines, and the inevitable rise of sites which try to survive based on replacing the edit/review/recommend function of current publishers for this wealth of free content.
To sum up, the current business model of book publishers isn't going to survive. My guess is that its new form will include a lot of mutations of the Street Performer Protocol.
Most quality bookstores have got seats next to the shelves, so you can read the book in comfort.
Same as most record shops had seats with headphones were you could listen to a record before buying.
Everything old is new again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
we wont stop,no you can't stop us. The new age of freedom is coming,be prepared for it or it will crush you.
I think it's a bit sad that this entire topic is viewed from the pirating side of the table. Just the way we approach the idea of books becoming freely available is off-centre. Ebook readers are about to do what the iDevices did for music. We should be rejoicing the coming panacea of freely, easielly accessible books. The shear number of classics that are legally out of copyright, that are still popular with the masses and are housed in libraries around the world will ensure a large collection of free, high quality content, that will compete with anyone who wants to try and lock in the eco-system around sub par choices at super expensive prices.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
...why should the Kindle? Public libraries "napsterized" books a couple of hundred years ago, and it's done nothing but good.
It's very noticeable that authors, who you'd think would be the ones most affected by public libraries, are universally in favor of them. Carlyle wrote: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books." Franklin, who founded the first public library in America, wrote "This library... repair'd in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me." Asimov wrote "My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. Stephen King has spoke eloquently in support of public libraries, despite the fact that a hundred people can read one of his books and he only gets paid once.
Writers understand that the value of public libraries to writers far exceeds the value of any "lost" royalties.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Since Napster is now a paid service, I don't think the word usage applies.
Love,
Grammar Nerd Kinsey
-Kinsey
For books like "Using Samba", you can have the electronic form of the whole book for free. Nevertheless, people still send money to O'Reilly for the dead-tree format.
Back when we did the first edition, we found that even hard-core electronic-everything folks wanted the physical edition. You could read it in the bath or the subway, make notes in the margins, and read a page with two fingers stuck in at two other pages you were referring to. And the printed form was small enough to hold easily in one had, something that wasn't true if you printed it yourself on 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
Conversely, the electronic form was easier to search, which helps if the word you want isn't in the index. You can stick a copy on your latop, for whenever you're away from your bookshelf. And you can print out excepts to leave with customers so they can figure out what the heck you just did.
So both forms are valuable, but for different things.
E-books are horribly primitive as of the moment, and not exactly waterproof, so I'm seriously doubtful that they will compete with paper books for long time, if ever. Instead they will complement them, just like the copy of Using Samba on my laptop complements the copy on my bookshelf.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
If my reading habits are any indication of what's to come. Most people aren't spending lengthy periods away from home, therefore the ability to store 1000's of books and carry them with you is not of interest. Novels tend to be read from cover to cover, digital formats offer no advantage for this pattern of reading and require power. Some other disadvantages of digital readers will be overcome in time, but books are durable. If I have a book in a bag, I can drop that bag on the floor without concern, digital readers not so. I don't want to spend my time guarding another device from breakage.
I'm hardly a technophobe but I don't even have a digital book reader. Maybe I will some time, but for me digital books have one main advantage - searchable text. Hardly relevant to novels, more to reference books and technical manuals. I have downloaded books I would probably not otherwise have bought, so price is an advantage, but these are all public domain (mostly on gutenberg.org) or released online by the author and are books I read for information. For enjoyment, forget it, I want to be on the couch reading, and that's where digital offers no advantage. If the types of books I want in electronic format are sold that way by the author I'll happily pay, although DRM is a deal killer. If it's reading for enjoyment rather than information, you won't get a sale from me without a physical book, I won't even bother to read it if you offer it for free in electronic format only.
If a significant portion of your fans want digital format, make sure any contracts you have with publishers reflect the amount of help you need doing that.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Of course, despite having pretensions of being "a quality newspaper" with "real journalistic integrity" they're too scared to ask the real questions:
Like, for example, "Will the book and print media industry learn from the mistakes of the Music and Film Industries as new digital technologies (in this case, pervasive and cheap eBook readers) are embraced by the public".
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
The modern "content distribution industries" (MPAA, RIAA, screw-everybody-AA) are destroying their industries, and claiming that rampant copyright violations are hurting 'the poor starving musicians".
... well there's "special clubs" for that ;-)
I *used to* spend a fair chunk of $ on "content", now I spend relatively little - but I'm not 'pirating' either. I Just Don't Buy Their Crap Anymore.
If I *really* wanted to be repeatedly beaten with a baseball bat with large nails stuck in it, and pay for the privilege
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I got a Kindle a while back, and I have to confess that I've been pretty disappointed that there isn't an equivalent of Napster or The Pirate Bay for ebooks yet, as far as I can tell. But it isn't merely an issue of consolidation, it's an issue that a lot of books simply don't seem to have .pdf versions which are readily available yet. Yes, the books that you'll find in Borders often do, and a lot of popular textbooks do as well, but beyond that... I think this is a serious limitation to the appeal of e-book readers. I was able to accept that the Kindle was missing a lot of obvious features because readers are a new technology, but I find the lack of .pdf versions of the texts I want to be more problematic.
Granted, a lot of the books I can't find in .pdf versions are available from Amazon's store. But iTunes it ain't... I'm not going to seriously invest in Amazon's walled garden until the prices fall to something closer than what you'd expect of a digital copy. Ebooks need their Napster if only to pressure the publishing industry to reform.
Somebody, *please* think of the carp!
But you are forgetting the radio! As a teenager I couldn't afford LPs, and most of my friends couldn't either, so I'd keep a tape parked in the cassette/radio and hit the record button when I liked a song. Of course, all of these songs had the first 3 seconds missing, but it did me fine.
True. Which supports my point - you need both an easy duplication system and an easy distribution method before you get widespread "piracy." The ease of listening/reading to the result is less important than those two. Which is actually perfectly illustrated by radio taping - easy duplication (just press record), easy distribution (broadcast into your home) yet a much lower quality playback experience (crappy recorded radio with a few seconds missing from the beginning and/or end and frequently a bit of DJ in there too).
To get the new ipods filled completely it would cost you a couple million dollars. If you really paid for all your music you must have a small collection and you basically waste 90% of the thing with empty space.
Dyslexics are teople poo
With the economy sagging, all of us will need sharper skill to compete in the global marketplace.
Having a large number of books on hand will help provide a competitive advantage in the workplace.
Sure, lots of people read for fun, but many of the jobs of the future will require reading and critical thinking.
Also, the e-textbook revolution is about to take off. My students in college pay $300.00 for the textbooks for class and the tuition only costs about $200.00.
It is only a matter of time before my college starts charging a small fee to all the students to pay for the writing of open textbooks for the students to use online and free of charge.
The newspapers going out of business was just the start...
The publishers are next...
Nabsterize? To distribute copyrighted materials without payment of royalties? Like Amazon does with free kindle books? No mention of the thousands of free books already online, no mention of Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, etc. nor authors like Cory Doctrow? That's quality reporting for ya...slanted towards feeding the hungry money machines. But bad reporting aside, I've been doing all my reading online now for years, as anything made of paper is impossible to deal with on the road and in the Himalayas, unless you can read dogeared greasy ancient paperbacks and mags left over from generations of English-reading tourists. For books, I use Kindle for iPhone and Stanza, and they are both pretty good apps. Plenty of free/cheap stuff to keep you entertained (especially if you like old sci-fi or the classics). If you learn to live with less, you'll be happier:)
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
MSI Wind netbook + Mac OS X + Read Right app:
http://imgur.com/rmIQP.jpg
http://twilightedge.com/mac/readright/
Where'd you get yours? Mine didn't come with fish.
Just adding that in most countries, downloading isn't illegal (yet). Only uploading is, which is the act of illegal distribution a.k.a. copyright infringement. (Sure, P2P needs uploading too).
You indirectly hit upon another problem with copyright, the fact that it is a complex legal question which varies quite widely between various jurisdictions. IIRC, you are wrong about non-commercial, personal downloading not being illegal in most common-law-based and Crown-law-based countries, but you might be correct in some European countries (like Spain). And in Canada, downloading music is OK but downloading other media is illegal.
What a mess.
The few times I read something in the bath, the pages wrinkled up just from the humidity. Add to that accidental splashes, having moist fingers, etc, and a printed page fares much worse than y Sony reader in a ziplock bag.
I agree with you that both have their own benefits. For me, its the options. When commuting by subway, I found that pretty often, I'd get bored of reading whatever book I had with me, and wanted to quickly turn to something completely different. So often I'd have a newspaper along. That got kind of heavy. On my PRS-505, I can load up a few different online "newspapers", which are just rss feeds, but range from traditional newspaper sites, to ars technica, to whichever rss feed you want to download and compile into a book.
So a reader gives you that option of variety without any added weight.
Are you referring to:
the original form of napsterization, where piracy is used as the excuse for a hidebound industry's failure to adapt to a changing market . . . ?
or are you referring to:
the subsequent form of napsterization, where a lame-ass re-branding of the original piracy-based model is reduced to irrelevancy due to a failed business model which doesn't addresses legitimate desires and needs of a changing market . . . ?
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Two good examples jump right out at me, albeit with different approaches to the problem.
O'Reilly handles this with Safari - you get access to electronic formats of their books (which you want), they get ongoing subscription revenue from you. Want more books? Pay a little more each month. Want to download chapters or the whole book? They have a system for that which will let you download a limited number of books per year as part of the subscription, and you can do so faster by paying what amounts to a per-chapter charge. Sure a lot of people pirate the books, but many of those pirated copies are in the hands of people who never would have purchased a paper copy and (I could be wrong here) many of those who have pirated books will make it a point to actually purchase other books from O'Reilly.
Baen has a different approach: they give away a fair amount of content in the Baen Free Library - generally older books from their authors, frequently the early books in a series that's still ongoing. They also give away similar content on the CDs included with some of their books; those CDs can be distributed freely and are available as ISOs from multiple sources. You can get electronic copies of everything they're publishing within a given month for $15, generally 4 new books and a couple of "backlist" titles - frequently things that are now coming out in paperback after an original hardcover release. You get a variety of formats with no copy protection - HTML, Palm/Mobipocket/Kindle, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader (.LIT). If you subscribe before the month in question, you get access to the book 25% at a time starting months before the release date. And of course you can purchase an electronic copy of any of the books for prices around $5 (a few are less, some are a dollar or two more).
How do they make money? The same way publishers always have, with new content. How do they keep people from ripping them off? They use the honor system. They have loyal customers who are happy to spend a relatively small amount of money on their books. Do people bootleg the books? Sure, and I'm sure a lot of them then go on to become loyal customers. As an outsider, I'd say that Baen is less concerned about their readers stealing from them than they are about expanding their number of readers. If someday they become the Sole Publisher On The Planet then every bootlegged book is lost revenue, but right now they're trying to grow their readership paid and unpaid while making sure that a large percentage of it is paying customers.
And of course, I'm sure you can't buy most Baen books for the Kindle through Amazon's store - that's why Baen has instructions on their site for how to load the books onto your Kindle or other ebook reader. After all, why pay Amazon $9-10 when you can buy from the publisher for half that and know that more of the money's going to them and the authors?
fencepost
just a little off
required, just cruise down to your local bookstore, support an author, buy a book, go sit under a tree and read. It is quite a pleasurable experience, even on a rainy day and more so on a rainy day with a nice cup of Earl Grey.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Its already a big thing.
Its rare I cant find a book I want.
I would prefer to buy the books I want - but they arent usually available - except on the kindle (which i dont own - and I wouldnt buy anyway because of the DRM and the ability to remove books etc)
Ive emailed the publishers and they are not interested. so its their loss.
However there is already a huge ecosystem in drm free ebooks out there.... just the publishers are luddites who are ignoring it.
Once the sales of ebook readers go mainstream they the horse will have bolted - and they will be reacting after the fact. Still I and Im sure many others have tried to deal with them now...
It's not as if this has not been obvious ever since we first heard of something called "e-paper" being in the works.
Normally, I wouldn't bother to point this out, but your bragging made you deserve it ;)
It is nice to have the reference books as pdf file. Makes search for a particular topic easy enough.
My first question is: have you ever tried to read a file in PDF format as an e-book? You have an awful lot of opinion on something which I guess you have not tried.
Your assumption is wrong. I wrote that journal entry three months ago, at a time when I had read about 2 PDF books. Since then, I've read several more books in PDF format; all in all, I've probably read about 2500 pages or so in PDF format.
PDF as a format for an e-book reader is a very bad format.
You're right, it's not ideal. For certain documents it's appropriate, where preserving the original layout is paramount, but for many types of books that's not the case. I wouldn't have been able to do that reading on a smaller screen size, which is why the wider availability of large-format readers is important.
The reason I talk about PDF in my journal entry is not because it's the ideal e-book format, but because it is probably the most common format for pirated material.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
DRM for library ebooks works well and I think it's a brilliant solution. My mom visited me from Sweden and forgot to take any books with her but she had her library card with her.
She went to her local library homepage, typed in the ID for my Cybook and downloaded a couple of books that had a 30 day time limit on them.
Since it's quite new the list of books are not great but with time I'm sure it will improve:
example: http://www.elib.se/library/default.asp?lib=107
I really dislike reading "BOOKS" on my computer. Forums and programming manuals are as far into reading on my comp as I get.
much like a public library but over the web.
#1 Check out a book, get a 90 day period to read it.
#2 After 90 days return it, or renew it for another 90 days.
#3 After the check out time expires the PDF DRM locks you out of the book, but you can click renew and renew it if another copy is available, if not wait until a copy is available.
Google Books is a good start, it could easily be turned into an ebook library. Scribd.com has many free eBooks plus eBooks people can publish and other people can buy. It used to be flooded with pirated eBooks, but they cleaned it up I think. It could become an eBook library as well.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
My G1. It's always with me, and reading books don't tax the power on it like using the internet, or playing a game.
How much of the books page do you need to see at one time?
Be seeing you...
We already have a name for putting things in digital format. We also have words to describe file sharing. Is there some reason we need to be making up words by adding the -ize syllable to the end? Here's one: bastardize. Stop doing it to the English language.
it's all free and pretty easy, you do have to have a server to put the pdb files on so that you can grab them via ereader. that and book torrentz are like 500k. noice.
William Shakespeare has been dead for almost 400 years. We do not hurt him, his family, his relatives, his close companions, his business associates, his manager or his dog by copying his works.
Robert Howard has been dead for over 70 years. His works are in public domain in most countries, but not the U.S.
Frank Herbert has been dead for 20 years. His works are all copyrighted and locked up (In addition to his kids destroying a great series).
Where is the cutoff? When will it be legal to download the works of someone who died over 70 years ago?
It's a sticky issue. Project Gutenburg Australia, Lib.ru, all places to find great books online, easily, and without restrictions.
Nearly 10 years ago wired exposed the bookwarez scene.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001030192249/http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,38945,00.html
It confused a website with the usenet channel but caught onto the fact people were sharing books. They have been flourishing for years because they are so small and easy to transmit even over dialup. Few books are over a mb. And you get a near perfect copy, formating aside.
Every few years people dredge it up and say OH NO look whats going on. However the lack of a decent affordable reader means only the most desperate penniless have actually read them. Perhaps this will change if there is ever a decent reader but then mass electronic readers may well mean cheap easily available well formated and edited editions. Sure ebooks are absurdly overpriced now but so were dvds, now they are a dollar in the bargain bin.
Comics now, those I'm prepared to believe are eating into the market right now. If your comic only has 20 minutes of reading in it then you will have a hard time coping with a quickly rapidshared cbr file on a big monitor.
I have had 8 diferent models of eReaders... the kindle was just the ugliest of all, and below average for the eyes
I ended keeping my hanlin v5 (but wife its in love of the sony prs-600)
i don't get it. with everything becoming digital and the supply, nearly limitless, shouldn't the value of said objects be drastically declining? false scarcity is rubbish and harmful in the long run.
wtf are they gonna do when almost anything can be duped with the push of a button? we need to figure this out now before its too late, or we'll have to pay everytime we read/watch/listen.
i think copyrights are way too long to begin with. with the speed of technology, they should be as short as the original terms or shorter. i'd also like to see a standardized, mandated licensing program.
if you want your work protected, then anyone can pay a fee and use it. copyright, is, after all, a sort of 'social contract' between the creators and society. if they can keep changing the terms, why can't i?
...
File Apartment (http://www.fileapartment.com) is a good alternative to some of these models which may break industry.