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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!!
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.