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.'"

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More on the "iPod for books"

[langelgjm]

The relevant part of my journal entry follows:

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.

short answer: no

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:short answer: no

[Logic and Reason]

When dealing with physical books it's almost inconceivable that you mishandle the book and accidentally "turn the page".

Really? You've never dropped a book and lost your place? Or been reading a new textbook with a stiff spine and had the pages turn on their own? Or been reading a book outside on a windy day?

When using an e-book reader it's very easy to accidentally push a button and lose your place.

I don't know if existing e-book readers do this, but it should be very easy to implement a place-saving feature. On the iPhone, for example, most apps will save their state when you press the Home button, so you can re-launch the app and pick up exactly where you left off.

E-book readers are $300 or $400 device you have to get to to read electronic books, why do that, when they can buy real physical ones at the bookstore for relatively little expense?

But they won't always be so expensive. What happens when the reader is cheaper than a single new book? (See the Nintendo DS.)

For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?

Maybe not simultaneously, but I am currently in the middle of three or four books that I'm reading for entertainment or learning. It would be nice to be able to take those with me on trips without having to devote the space for multiple books.

To boot, the DRM-laden electronic books are almost just as expensive as the physical ones, and you can't lend them to friends. To boot, you can't place them on a photocopier and make copies of particularly interesting sections to use in a paper, personal momento, etc. You can do less with the e-books than you can physical ones.

Hence the book piracy.

I think there's a stronger feeling of ownership and control over a printed book. as if the text belongs to you, and reading is a very tactile experience, where you are involved.

It's certainly true that you have a greater sense of ownership with a physical book. But then, you never really owned the text in the first place due to copyright.

You can rip a page if you don't like it, you can doggy ear, or bookmark pages with significance to you.

I've never felt the desire to rip a page out of a book. And don't most e-book readers provide bookmarking functionality superior to doggy-eared pages?

The book is on your shelf, it's more secure that way, you can always get to it whenever you want. Your dead tree book can't fail you, the batteries cannot die. No one really wants to steal it, and it's easily replaced, you can take it in public without fear.

But it can get flooded or burned or torn or peed on or lost... An e-book reader is also susceptible to many of these things, but you can just keep a copy of your books on your PC (which you also back up, right?). And the theft and replacement issues will all but disappear as readers get cheaper.

It's easy to lend to friends.. just hand them the book.

It's even easier to email or IM them a small .rar file or a link (depending on how often you see them in person, I guess).

You get two pages of text side-by-side. Typical e-book readers just provide you one continuous page, so the experience is completely different.

It's different, but is it significantly better? How advantageous is it that you can see two pages at once in a paper book?