Tag Archives: E-book

Great Quote about eBook Piracy

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Saw this on Librarian.net:

From a transcript of a talk between Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross, from WorldCon

“As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.” [thanks karl]

Thanks Librarian.net! What a great point! 🙂

Preservation of Constant Inconvenience

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Yesterday I was musing to myself over an idea that I’ve been mulling over ever since I bought my Apple iPad. My thoughts centered around the concepts of content, specifically content itself, the price, cost, and format of the content and what ethical or moral obligations are present on content. There is so much content to speak about, but yesterday it was centered on books, but it could also arguably also be about any sort of content, music, photography, sculpture, anything created by people for other people to consume and/or enjoy.

It came to the question of books. In our world we have books and they cost money to write, print, publish, distribute, catalog, and manage. We also have public libraries, where these books are purchased and then shared amongst the people for ‘free’. Technically it’s tax money that pays for the books, but the libraries lend those books to people for no money charge and since there are so many people the burden of the cost of the libraries isn’t readily visible. I imagined what a regular person who doesn’t pay taxes (say a young person or someone who is unemployed) who also happens to be a voracious reader could do, value-wise. They could chew through the libraries collection of books and without having to spend one single dime of their own money consume the content without actually paying for it. This person effectively is cheating all the previous people out of money by the fact that we have libraries that lend for ‘free’. So instead of this person paying their fair share for the book, giving the bookseller, the distributor, the printer, the author and all the others money for the consumption/enjoyment of the content, they essentially steal it right from under the nose of all these people. In our society using a library is not a moral or ethical problem for anyone, we all accept that it’s perfectly fine for anyone at all to do when the library is running and open and lending. What is the limit of a library? Contention for content, libraries don’t have an endless supply of books either in-author or even in-title, so while someone has Widget Book A, another person can’t have Widget Book A.

When I started thinking about all of this, I wanted to concentrate on the ethical and moral ramifications of downloading books from the Internet. Specifically books that I could obtain from the library (KPL or Waldo or LoC) or books that were already present in my house. To me, it really wasn’t a matter of money, because the content creators were paid by (the platonic form of) “The Library” or they were paid by my household, in that the physical paper book was in my actual house and I can grab it and show it to people that I own it. What I wanted to explore was what was really at the core of things, what did people really care about. I discovered that my actual question was, what do people covet? I also distilled this argument down to the core question of content format. If I have a physical book, or I can freely acquire a physical book, is it ethically or morally wrong for me to download the book from the Internet and upload it to my eBook reading device because reading it in that format is more convenient and pleasurable than any other format? After discussing it at length with Scott, I have learned that content creators hold a kind of format tyranny over their content. They sell a book, they sell a paper book that weighs five pounds and THAT and ONLY THAT is how they have licensed you to enjoy their content…

It isn’t about money, it isn’t about ethics or morality, it is all about the preservation of a certain constant of inconvenience. Library supply contention is an inconvenience, format tyranny is an inconvenience, and even while arguing the idea that I could buy my own scanner and disassemble a book in the privacy of my own home to make my own e-book files, this is in itself also an inconvenience. So what in the end is the moral and ethical implications of downloading an e-book from the Internet when you either own a physical representation of the book in your home or can arguably acquire it for ‘free’ at any (platonic form of) “The Library”? It is apparently ethically and/or morally reprehensible to break the law of the preservation of constant inconvenience. That inconvenience must be paid, must be respected, that everyone in the supply chain must be satisfied that you are somehow inconveniently thwarted. You pay for books by suffering inconvenience.

As I wrote above, this is expandable to other kinds of content, such as Music. Oddly enough the realm of Music apparently has abandoned the fighting arena that books enjoy, that being format tyranny. But the existence of Library also plays out here; I could walk down to the KPL and borrow a CD and rip it onto my device? If I own a CD, Music isn’t really concerned anymore that I rip it to my iPod, so if I borrow a CD from the library and rip that, it is wrong because there is a late-binding violation of the law of preservation of inconvenience? I sense some erosion.

What about Comic Books? Now this is an interesting field. If I own longboxes of comic books and I happen to have their digital representations as well, this is wrong, because I have broken the format tyranny and violated the law of the preservation of inconvenience.

What is the future for this law of inconvenience? Since Music has given up their domain of format tyranny, does that mean that one failure in content can eventually expand to other kinds of content? Does Music’s failure to remain vigilant mean that books and comics will eventually face the same erosion of ethics when it comes to the contention of format tyranny? I think that time will tell, that people when faced with technology will change their definitions and concepts of what is ethical and/or moral. Just as the ethical violation of the existence of Libraries has dwindled to nothing, may format freedom eventually attain this same dwindling? Again, time will have to pass and when everyone no longer really cares, then I think the definition of ethical and/or moral upset will fade away.

Apple iPad

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Apple has unveiled their latest technological offering, the Apple iPad. It fills a niche between their iPhone and their Macintosh line of computers (MacBooks cause everyones hot for mobility). I was on pins and needles for the entire event, which I enjoyed in fits and starts from the Engadget Liveblog page. Watching Apple demonstrate the device, chat up some of it’s features, and then at the end pull the pin and lob a hand-grenade of aggressive pricing at everyone, I was stunned!

What gets me is a bit of geek lore, at least at first. iPad, I’m sure Apple’s inspiration was a ‘notepad’ since the device is arguably most like a conveniently-beefy sized notepad. The word iPad though does have deep connections for many Sci-Fi Geeks who also happen to be gadgetophiles. In Star Trek TNG a common device that was handed from crewmember to crewmember was a PADD. A roughly 10 inch rectangular piece of metal and plastic that was touch sensitive and displayed information. Oh eat your heart out! iPad – PADD. For geeks like me, this is a blossoming of authentic science-fiction that has been turned into a real thing and offered to us. The act of handing our iPad to someone else to look at something makes that whole experience valuable – we saw that in Star Trek, we’re doing it in real life. It’s one thing out of a multitude, but it’s very much like heroin for geeks. If not for every geek, at least this one.

The iPad is not only chock full of sci-fi technoromanticism (portmanteau bitches!) but it has the capacity to change the world. The iPad, like the iPhone and the iPod is a device that does something and from the track record of Apple, it will do the tasks very well. Whether you get it chock full of storage or not, wireless up the wazoo or not, the device itself means something. A full color illuminated display for books with authentic graphical representations of the behavior of real books will enhance literacy and impact the printed page. It won’t demolish the print industry, but it will liberate books from the tyranny of limited printings. If you want a book and it’s in a digital format, the idea that “We’re all out, we are waiting for a second printing” simply goes away. This will ensure that books can be spread, retained, and even published without the usual prohibitive costs related to acquiring an editor, a publishing house, signing book deals. The iPad (et al) will do for books what the iPod did for music – ie release creativity. People who couldn’t necessarily get their music out into the world via a record contract could suddenly record and put their music on MySpace or thru a Podcast and then the record companies didn’t matter so much, the consumers could approach the artists directly. Same goes for books. Before if you wanted to write the great American novel you’d have to pound it out, submit it to publishers and they controlled whether it spread or not. The iPad (et al) can release literature from control, bypass the gatekeepers. Everyone can publish.

When I say (et al) what do I mean? iPad isn’t the only device out there that can render literature, so can the Nook and the Kindle. The iPad presents an overwhelming challenge to it’s competitor devices, not so much for the principal context of literature, but because the iPad can do much much more than the Kindle or Nook could possibly muster. Playing Music, Movies, Extensibility through the App Store, these are things that the Nook and Kindle just can’t accomplish (save music, which I know the Nook can…) and it’s this extensibility, full color, and full touch sensitivity across the entire device. The iPad is a killer device for many forms of literature, but the form I’m personally most driven by is that of comic books. These books  are bright, graphical, textual, and often times have callouts where hypertextual links would offer incredible convenience. One thing people have to understand, and this is true of the iPad as well as the Nook, is that you do not have to wait for some DRM’ed eBook to be published to read literature, whether it be a classic like The Iliad or Green Lantern Volume 2. You can do the legwork yourself, these two devices have open extensibility, in the Nook it’s the ability to dispaly PDF files and open eBook formats – while for the iPad it’s the foundation of the iPhone OS and the sure extensibility of the App Store.

Waiting for eBook publishing to catch up is not as compelling a reason to hesitate as may be feared. Routes to getting what you want will always exist as long as there is an analog hole. For print matter, the analog hole is the print itself. You buy a book, disassemble it, feed it to a sheetfed color scanner and in an afternoon you’ve converted a physical book to it’s digital counterpart. You can then spread that digital representation to whomever you wish, it is definitely not legal, but it is something you can do, thanks to the analog hole. This is most paramount to content providers, publishers and the like. Your lesson is this: Change your business model when the technology changes and you will succeed – Fail and you will be buried. If XYZ Publisher refuses to heed this warning and refuses to publish their product in a digital format then the customers will be forced to cope and create the knockoff digital content on their own, they know what they want and if it’s possible for them to obtain it, they will. XYZ Publisher will find their sales drying up because nobody wants dead trees anymore, they want digitial content, and if that has leaked into the network, all those potential sales are gone and XYZ might as well board up and close shop. It is better for XYZ, and their customers if they immediately produce digital content, leave DRM by the wayside, treat their customers with respect and they’ll make profits like gangbusters. A perfect example of this is Marvel and DC Comics. For years people have been disassembling these comic books and scanning them and making the entire archive available on the network free of charge. By not leaping on the bandwagon immediately, they’ve missed a golden opportunity to extend their product into a entirely new economic ecosystem. The drop-dead-date has not passed yet, but it is coming, around March when the iPad starts to sell. For example, if DC wanted to jump on top of this immediately they’d need to get a DC Comic Book App set up in the App Store, set up a channel for paying for content (which you can now do through an App) and then deliver digital editions of their entire line available through their iPad App. Charge the cover price, skip out on the cost of printing, happy customers. Win win and win.

What then for the Kindle and Nook? They will always have a place at the table. I don’t see iPad annihilating them, however I do see Nook leading Kindle to the MC Escher Staircase and pushing it. Kindle’s living nightmare, an Apple competitor, is now here. Nook will push Kindle and iPad will shoot it once it lands at the bottom of the MC Escher Staircase. It won’t be pretty.

And just so everyone is aware, I am saving money so I can buy myself an iPad. I couldn’t imagine not having a PADD. 🙂