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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.'"
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!
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.
On the other hand, a well stocked digital library that functions like Netflix or like a physical library with a reasonable monthly fee could nip mainstream e-book piracy in the bud.
This isn't quite like Rhapsody or Zune Pass or similar music subscription schemes where you would end up with an annoying pile of encrypted data when your subscription runs out or the company folds. Well, it is, but most people are content with checking out a book once, reading it, and checking it back in.
Of course, something like this could only be possible with DRM and e-book reader support for that DRM, which despite what you hear on Slashdot, can be useful when implemented properly.
eclecti.cc
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.