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.'"

Comments

Already happened

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:Already happened

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, Avax seems to be quite popular, even though for some reason they moved their domain from Russia to West Samoa, of all places. Hmm, I wonder what the reason might have been? ;-)

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.

Re:More on the "iPod for books"

[PaintyThePirate]

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.

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?

Textbooks

[mcelrath]

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.

One fundamental point ...

[charlie]

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.

Not As Widespread

[ffejie]

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.