One of my pastimes is buying old books from charity book shops that are destined to go to landfill, cutting off the binding and scanning them into a PDF that I share freely on the internet. Essentially a historical preservation service creating a DMB Publishing Digital Library of old books that are likely to have been lost forever.
Over the last 20 years there have
been a number of initiatives predominantly lead from America focussed upon
achieving these same objectives.
The digitization of
books is a significant undertaking, primarily led by a few major players:
1. Google Books: Google Books is one of the largest and most well-known
initiatives in book digitization. Google has scanned millions of books from
libraries and publishers worldwide, making them searchable and, in many cases,
available for reading online.
2. Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library
offering free access to millions of books, movies, software, music, and more.
Their Open Library project aims to create a web page for every book ever
published.
3.Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and
archive cultural works, primarily older literary works for which copyright has
expired. They offer over 60,000 free eBooks.
4.HathiTrust: HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research
institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from
libraries around the world. They focus on ensuring that the digitized works are
preserved for future generations.
5.Europeana: Europeana is a digital platform for cultural heritage collections
across Europe. It provides access to millions of digitized items from European
museums, galleries, libraries, archives, and audiovisual collections.
6.Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): DPLA aggregates metadata and
thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, and other items
from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
These organizations and initiatives are at the forefront of digitizing books,
making them accessible to a broader audience and preserving them for future
generations.
My initial
interests derived from Project Gutenburg founded by Michael S. Hart in 1971 it
aimed to make literature available to everybody by digitising books and making
them freely available. The majority of the books are in the public domain
meaning their copyrights have expired and they can be freely distributed. These
primarily works published prior to 1923. Although different jurisdictions may
have different laws relating to copyright. Also some copyrights may have been
donated to the project.
Being honest the book
digitisation project I am doing does sometimes run into Copyright issues
although I do my best to seek Author or Publisher approval if they can be
located. I always publish under the Commons Licence rules and if challenged
immediately remove the book. But many authors do not embrace the giving away of
their books even though they are headed to landfill, not available anywhere and in
no way worth printing or publishing but the author still wants to retain
copyright. In truth often making a digital copy freely available sometimes
generates a second hand market value or may stimulate a demand to republish.
Back in 2000 when I first became involved
with eBooks and their creation I did a lot of research on the subject. Even
writing a book on eBooks that I never published.
Back then in 2004 I came across an
article by Cory Doctorow who was a real interesting science fiction writer but
with an interest in self-publishing and particularly digital books. His style
of writing always appealed to me being very chatty and full of anecdotes. So I have
included his article below since it covers every aspect of digitisation and the
comparisons of digital books with printed paper books even delving into the
work of Monks with my authorship of a Domesday Book making me enthusiast for their contributions.
As a enthusiast for O'Reilly Publishing, although they turned down my Digital Workflow Book, this contributed to an O'Reilly Conference aligned with a slide show. I always think articles created in parallel with a slide show have their own unique style of summarisation which makes the content more concise and thus more readily understood. Every author should create a slideshow and then write the article or book in line with it.
It’s a bit messy in terms of formatting
but its well worth a read. I have deliberately left it rough and ready since it
best conveys the spirit of creativity so common amongst “techies” as they
looked to move the boundaries of digitisation.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
This ebook is for the use of anyone
anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or
online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in
the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are
located before using this eBook.
Title: Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
Author: Cory Doctorow
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook
#11077]
Most recently updated: December 23, 2020
Language: English
***
START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EBOOKS: NEITHER E, NOR BOOKS ***
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
February 12, 2004
San Diego, CA
Cory Doctorow
—
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference [http://conferences.oreillynet.
This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
Commons public domain dedication:
> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law) >
> The person or persons who have associated their work with this >
document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright >
in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the >
public domain. > > Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the
public at > large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of >
relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights > under
copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. > Dedicator
understands that such relinquishment of all rights > includes the
relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit > or otherwise) those
copyrights in the Work. > > Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the
public domain, the > Work may be freely reproduced, distributed,
transmitted, used, > modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone
for any > purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story
collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a
list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk,
"eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that
is, I don't think it's true.
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in
Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible
in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors
who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that
shape.
I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you:
1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more
books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving
away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to
coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book —
and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how
much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of
people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for
free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about
marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more
people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages
and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that
writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is
even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel
from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the
beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if
they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build
concordances of characters, places and events.
3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a
"practice" — a collection of social and economic and artistic
activities — and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it
begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of
my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software
— as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an
HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can
turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I
can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array
of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can
convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover,
printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a
paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a
printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense
of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing,
owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open
digital edition of the text.
4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground.
*Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a
couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay…a couple cents a
word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're
*quaint* and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *rounding errors* as
compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at
the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may
dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play
the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to
be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you
that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get
indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or
millions. They can be googled.
Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and
powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon
message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work — for, if a personal
recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal
condemnation is the best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still
with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a
review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon
by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
[QUOTED TEXT]
> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are >
smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But > regardless of what
Entertainment Weekly says, whatever > this newspaper or that magazine says,
you shouldn't > waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's >
(sic) site, read the first page, and look away in > disgust — this book is
for people who think Dan > Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really
pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My
stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:
[PULL-QUOTE]
> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first >
page
You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off
Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly
bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and
uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And
then I can make up my own mind.
You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that
people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your
insecurities — "all these people will have it in their minds not to bother
with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the
flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see
how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they
are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL
right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to the value of
paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of
electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value
propositions — that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy,
transport or transform an ebook — the more it has to be valued on the same axes
as a paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat paper-books for
sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the
smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for
free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book
for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try
clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).]
Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back
far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian
go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a
lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them.
We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up
with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this
out:
[Nietzsche quote]
> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to >
practice reading as an *art* in this way, something > needs to be un-learned
most thoroughly in these days.
In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're
not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this
quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with attribution]
It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published
in *1887.*
Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for
Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for *five years* while the
story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's
installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new
volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages
long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure,
presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long
oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay
attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library
collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope
to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more
than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can
stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that
collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as
fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or
listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse
level of measurement: once you get into really granular observation, there are
as many differences in our "shared" experience as there are
similarities.
More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single
book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things
different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the
pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those
pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to different queries.
None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and
excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle
it is today.
8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books].
To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like
paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that
purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy
— seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my
readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy.
There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the
time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking
it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs
(with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA
and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my
first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold
so far. If it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home
from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another
way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book
bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more
than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy.
We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are
damned good at counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid
on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good
count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make
sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or
spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of
books ordered, but never exactly — if you've ever ordered 500 wedding
invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
that's why.
And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in
the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced
for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned
as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next
morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where
the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold,
returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to
run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good
enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio
airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies
of a book are distributed online or off.
Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has
as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors
for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of.
Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
hardest and most important task any writer faces.
#
I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away
by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age
of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection
and a nonfiction book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in
the works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction,
[CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for
best novelette. [NEBULA]
I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY LADDER]. I have
to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer
to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very
short-lived, it disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for
good. Science fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed
books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a
"book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe,
usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal
lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that,
changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes'
time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of
honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one
or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that
rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to
person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot
of speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of
speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out both categories
of ideas.
This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a
lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal
failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook
"piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly weird
that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure"
was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was
worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
A brief digression here, on the double meaning of
"ebooks." One meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook
ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of
books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a
general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device
like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a
"pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made
by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then
running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to
convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty
buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that
these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers
who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly,
I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing
this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be
worrying about.
Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not
yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook
piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers
were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names,
claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw
up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a
blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-
> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going
to > happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks >
make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and > videocassette
copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's > greed; partly it's
annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the > desire to Share Cool Stuff
(a motivation usually underrated by > the victims of this kind of small-time
hand-level piracy). > Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming
it's morally > tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will
make > it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it >
doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that > "home
taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to > avoid
noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's > credibility on
the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers'
workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I
showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him
to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's
bought three more since — I really like Patrick!).
Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked
silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for
carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should
have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing
files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so
liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted
copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium
Copyright Act or DMCA.
Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of
actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had
access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their
own, what was an unlawful copyright infringement — something more usually left
up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright
scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship.
It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were
reluctant to share it with the rest of the world.
Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the
one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more
books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day.
This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]
2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every
day [GRAPHIC]
These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books
smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry
stain in the margin can be)
* You can't take your ebook into the tub
* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a
screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a
really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for
primetime because their grandmothers won't use them — well, my grandmother
sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show
off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement
condo)?
The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper books, and have
different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has
gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the
book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.
Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who
got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins.
The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that
rose from censers swung by altar boys.
Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in
languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people
who got to read the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is
history.
Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
printing press:
[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE
MONKS]
* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical
expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out
the word of God
* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional
use-case for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of
the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of
all, it needed rarity.
* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading
was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text
he wanted — and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire
Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe
in good stead for centuries.
In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any
cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good,
and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many
Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty.
What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES
KICKED ASS]
* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the
Church
* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God
really meant
* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were
all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by
Luther's ideas about religion.
Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of
a monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a
success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success.
By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK
ASS]
* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from
a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in
reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as
reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the
only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the
single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend
— getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than
having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series!
* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
evangelist in me comes out — minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the
Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks,
like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to popular music. That's
why it's popular. But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill
Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other
stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the
quality perception is." Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not
because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping
on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't
available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the
songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our
hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are
different for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference
between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming.
It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same
token, the malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily
repurposed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your
favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the
text for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other
words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable reason, and
in a predictable format — say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before
deciding whether to buy the book — but the thing that differentiates a boring
e-text experience from an exciting one is the minority use — printing out a
couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the
hardcopy wet and salty.
Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall
with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet.
However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail-bashing, it
has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know,
when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
The affordance of a computer — the thing it's designed to do —
is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to
move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows
from this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing
and dicing text and sending it around.
Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities:
infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically,
copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time
the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because
Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill).
This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's
why:
[CHART: HOW BROKEN
COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely
rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright
that often defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it
doesn't follow that strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.
* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
Calling them crooks is bad for business.
* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for
dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction
magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things
like theme park rides and action figures based on their work — it's also why
literary agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they
represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who
wouldn't want a piece of it?
* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per
infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all
kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your
personal information before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a
judge. This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side
of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably
force their authors to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one
better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any
material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like
song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up
assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an
honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible
price.
* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright
are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old
works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake
means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly
earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long
before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's
ancestral founders — Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules
Verne, HG Wells — are still known, their work still a part of the discourse.
Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky — if
their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just
vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good
copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way,
and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for
new media is its "democratic-ness" — the ease with which it can
reproduced.
(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies
that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued
Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one
hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them
perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build
or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that
matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible —
next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)
Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
off its artifact-ness — the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks
of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople — for ease of
reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they
scaled better — as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes,
hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to
the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own.
Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie
Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are
richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've
got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you
invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items that are best
suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *need* to be plays, the
books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the
music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of
humanity.
Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control:
it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on
every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a
Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that
rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences.
For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a
new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the
Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to
secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government just
ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a
fixed rate.
Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
generated in response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to
treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets
(or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by
definition, current copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this
the end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the printing
press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez.
#
Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to
do before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra] Think
of it as a "lagniappe" — a little something extra to thank you for
your patience.
About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative
Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around
copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at
the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge.
Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the
text of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
"Attribution-ShareAlike-
The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
happens when I get in up to my knees.
The text with the new license will be online before the end of
the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it
away to the world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing
Boing, before the day is through.
#
EOF
That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your
kind attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more detailed
topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them here in plain sight.
Cory Doctorow
Midflight over Texas
February 4, 2004
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.
Dated now having been published by Dennis Publishing Limited in 2012. With many of the eBook formats now superseded by either Kindle (Amazon) or ePUB (Open Systems now the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ).
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