cowfish

Well, time has done it’s normal thing and flown, leaving me with a day before I help present a session on the Future of the Book with Annie Mole and Chris Meade tomorrow at Amplified 08. I’m the eBook person, it seems, and I’ve been formulating my various ideas about the wonder of future as well as examined a bunch of my preconceptions and previous ideas. So before I have my poor brain further assailed tomorrow I thought I’d roll out a couple of trains of thought for both my own purposes of brain dumping, but also to ask you lot for any thoughts you may have – the point of Amplified is to get people talking, and the posse in the room is only part of that.

The first thing that always seems to come up when talking about ebooks is their pricing. Generally they’re the same amount as a papery book and that bangs against the normal human issue with paying for pure information at the same rate as a physical object. I’ve always intellectually justified this to myself by claiming that the vast majority of the price of a book goes towards profit and the process leading up to printing and distribution, and that it makes sense for ebooks to cost the same as their dead-tree counterparts. However, repeatedly saying this doesn’t necessarily make it true – hopefully I will be assured or corrected by secret industry contacts (hello secret industry contacts!) before I stand up and make potentially inaccurate statements before a most probably well informed crowd.

The next thing, and one that came up in a drunken conversation (well, drunken on my side) with a visiting school chum at the weekend was the wonder of digital rights and copy protection. One of the main benefits of the physical book is that you can do pretty much what you want with it after purchase. Burn it, sell it, eat it, lend it to a friend, tear out the pages and make origami camels, whatever. You can do a lot with ebooks, but the kicker is the lack of a right to resale and lending, with the added potential difficulty of locked formats having potential obselescence issues down the line, stopping you from reading the book that you have paid for. This looms dangerously close to Cory Doctorow’s standard rhetoric of “The MAN is stopping YOU from doing what YOU want with things YOU have PAID for!!1!”, which has a definite point at the same time as occasionally invoking an annoyance within me similar to that which The Dawkins does. My point of view on this seems to be much more on what I understand (probably incorrectly) as that of the free-market capitalist – if people don’t want the product then they won’t pay for it. If the product, as a combination of content, price and restrictions, is not acccepted by the public then it will fail. If similar products with different pricing, content and restriction models do better then sensible companies will move towards those ideas in order to gain their share of the market. Yes, it’s a slightly simplistic and optimistic view of the wonderful world of capitalism, but voting with your wallet is what most companies understand. There is also the wonder of industries banding together and offering very similar unpopular products as the only choice (DRM’d ebooks in this case), but there are always outliers, especially in publishing as printing becomes cheaper and boutique coompanies, like bookkake, can spring up, and it’s these guys that draw the cash and hopefully show the big monoliths the way to go.

I do feel slightly dirty when it comes to ebooks. With music I have very much nailed my colours to the metaphorical mast – I will not buy music that has any form of DRM. I support emusic and other companies that do not encumber the media and will continue to encourage others to do so, as well as put most of my music buying money through them (slipping back to archaism with occasional physical CDs, which are all immediately ripped and then hidden away in a pile at home). However, with ebooks I do buy restricted texts and have two reasons why:

1. My standard usage methods are such that I do not care so much about DRM on books. I do a bit, hence the dirt that I won’t wash off, but I generally read books once and then leave them on a shelf. They occasionally get lent to friends, but in general they sit around gathering dust begging me to sell them or at least take them to Oxfam. There’s a hint of a love of books as property, which I need to write about at some time and will probably discuss tomorrow, but mainly there’s laziness. The DRM’d electronic books just stop me from lending my copies to friends, although generally I am able to authorise a number of other “readers” and thus can do my normal lending, although with just a few extra hoops.
2. In order for me to be able to read the vast majority of books that I bought the reader to read, i.e new releases, I have no choice but to buy the DRM’d books. Yes, I am a hypocrite at some level, but I even with the understanding of what DRM is restricting in both a physical and moral sense I am hiding my head in the sand and passing my hard earned cash to the people who are not supporting the distribution methods that I am trying to champion. I temper a bit that with pushing as many of the people and companies who are “on my side” and putting as much of my book money through them as I can, but in the end I know that there is an element of moral bankruptcy (or at least moral “teetering on the edge of my overdraft limit”-cy) to my purchasing habits. But then again people buy petrol from Shell and Nestle’s Milky Bars, and still sleep at night so I have some hope. And Milky Bars.

The thing that I think the DRM issue is currently lacking is the main thing that I think Cory-style shouting is good for – education. The infamous man on the street has no real understanding of DRM and a ranting author and groups like the ORG are gaining more traction with the general populace, letting them know the various issues and what the implications of various restrictions on new distribution media mean to the use of the “normal” person. It’s a slowly growing core of knowledge, but one that is definitely become better known as the media pick up on the ideas and push them out to the masses. Hopefully this will help in the pushing of the distributers to examine new ideas of media distribution, whether it be music, movies or even books.

Technology continues to roll on. I picked up my Sony PRS-500 a couple of months back and already the PRS-700 is out in the US, with a touch screen and annotatable text all clocking in at only a bit more than what I paid for mine. We are still the early adopters and will get stuck with the standard early adopter problems (price, format incompatibilities, planned obsolescence, etc) but it willl move the medium into the mainstream slowly but surely, just as with televisions, digital radios, CDs, mp3 players, VCRs, DVDs and even with the recent high def discs (the format wars of which are still much in recent news). There are new things out there, as the shiny video from Simon Wardley below shows (as well as a bunch of other articles out there that I am now randomly finding, including one from the guy behind bookkake), and we will see these things roll out as they become affordable and marketable. Such is the way of the future. 

With books there is a definite barrier to entry, as we have maybe as much as ten thousand years worth of shared memory with very little change to their basic form, and the human resistance to change is a fearsome thing. Adding to that the switch from the owning of physical objects to that of licensed data, with all the mental blocks, ethical and commercial concerns that it inspires, we have a big barrier to jump. It will take time and balancing between people’s ideas of the use of books and I think that in the end the paper book is not in any real danger as an existing medium, not to the extent that digital cameras have replaced film for example. There will always be a place for a physical object in addition to pure data, at least for the forseeable future. We aren’t going to do away with ten millenia of culture in a mere handful of years, but we can certainly start the process of accepting a new way.

Other posts

• Amplified08 (or Amplified 08 depending on what google says…)
• Never judge a reader by the cover of their book
• Why I have been so quiet today…