TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for August, 2002

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So what will Wi-Fi and the TabletPC mean to newspapers? Steve Outing takes a perspicacious look in his August 28 column for Editor and Publishing.

The TeleRead take: Back in the early 1990s TeleRead was advocating small tablet machines that could be used not just for books but for a variety of purposes–full-fledged computers that could work with a well-stocked national digital library system. Such a system isn’t online yet. And tablet technology at a TeleRead level isn’t as cheap as it could be. But the TabletPC, which also vindicates Roger Fidler, who was in this area as far back as 1981, certainly is coming close in terms of performance. Wi-Fi will just add more oomph. You’ll be able to download books almost instantly, as needed, if you’re in Wi-Fi hotspots such as Starbucks or airports. Or in your own home with a Wi-Fi network.

Along with this speed and convenience, however, will come some important intellectual property issues–since book-swapping will be easier than ever. TeleRead would help address these questions by providing ways to track the popularity of individual titles, so that publishers could be paid either by readers or from a national digital library fund, depending on the title. If Wi-Fi became ubiquitous and affordable enough, even low-income schoolchildren could use the technology to share copies of their favorite e-books. They would not need to worry about home telephone connections, DSL or cable modems.

What’s more, to return to the topic of newspapers, imagine the possibilities of using the same infrastructure for papers to collect payments for reading of individual articles. Thousands of newspapers could participate in this common payment system. It would not carry the same baggage as a system from one company such as Microsoft. Of course, let’s hope that advertising will keep pay-per-read to a minimum. But if we must have it, then let’s reduce the amount of money going to middlemen.

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OverDrive has launched a free locator–for the public and librarians, not just publishers–to search through listings for thousands of commercial e-books from 400 publishers. URLwire has the details about the eBook Locator.

The TeleRead take: Good move! The new service is definitely a step in the right direction, as long as it is not confined to the offerings of paying customers. No problem with ads on the home page. It’s only reasonable that OverDrive look for a sustainable business model for the service. Of course, the locator is no substitute for a powerful TeleRead-style catalogue that could search e-books not just by title and author and keyword but also by many other criteria. What’s more, don’t forget the Online Books Page and other existing locators for free e-books.

An aside: The big thing we’ve noticed is what’s not in the eBook Locator–for example, the actual novel of The Great Gatsby, as opposed to study guides. We didn’t see any writings by F. Scott Fitzgerald, for that matter. Of course, in Australia, a country without such an influential copyright lobby, Gatsby is online via the local Gutenberg project. Perhaps it’s time for librarians to compile a master e-book catalogue with both commercial and public domain works.

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“Imagine living in a country where anti-capitalist books are banned from libraries, the only reading materials available are fluffy novels, and librarians are anarchist outcasts. If the privatisation of libraries continues, writes Jane Mackenzie, that is where we are heading.” – Library Juice, Aug. 12-16, 2002.

The TeleRead take: See our earlier item from summer 2000, The Rise of the Unlibraries.

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“…Wade Randlett, of consumer rights group DigitalConsumer.org, said the entertainment industry’s efforts have criminalized behavior that used to be legal, including letting teenagers excerpt portions of copyrighted works for book reports. He told the story of a friend whose daughter wanted to compose a multimedia report for school. Because she could not legally obtain an excerpt from a DVD, she ended up using material whose copy control mechanisms had been cracked with a program that courts have ruled illegal. The student, he said, ‘put it on a disk, took it to school, and committed a felony.’ Such examples, he said, are evidence that ‘there is a war on against consumers.’” – DMCA defenders in enemy territory, ZDNet News, Aug. 1, 2002.

The TeleRead take: Hollywood is the world’s biggest threat to the concept of copyright. The entertainment industry is educating a whole generation of young consumers–some of them voters now, some of them voters in the future–to hate the C word. Someday we may well see the anger reach the point where it even balances out the entertainment industry’s massive contributions to politicians. The best solution remains a well-stocked national digital library system with provisions for fair use, so that we can stop making felons of schoolchildren.

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How can universities securely preserve the research of their faculty members and others–without giving away the goodies to greedy commercial publications, which then turn around and overcharge schools’ libraries?

Or at least without being quite as dependent on the gougers?

Earlier we listed MIT as among the institutions interested in do-it-yourself archiving. Now, via a Wired News article, come details of DSpace, a joint project with Hewlett Packard. Encouragingly, this could lead to a model for other universities to use–hopefully with easy simultaneous access to the archives of all the schools.

The TeleRead take: While these archives are for research institutions rather than society at large, they are a step in the right direction–especially if the public can enjoy access to the information. Furthermore, some of the archival technology ultimately could be of use to a TeleRead-style library system.

An aside: Commercial journals have their benefits. TeleRead is not against them–rather, against the gouges that are so common. Certainly, material could end up in both the free databases and the commercial publication. At any rate, the DSpace project and similar ones could lead to more rapid and thorough peer reviews–a benefit for everyone.

(Found via Library Stuff. Thanks, Steve.)

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“I have never met a kid, or teenager, who didn’t want to know more about something. I also know many, many such young people who watch their lust for knowledge slowly die off, like a battery, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until one day, there is no more power left.” – James Linden’s Gnosium Blog, Aug. 1.

The TeleRead take: James sees e-books and other portable electronic resources as a way to keep youthful curiosity alive. What’s more, he notes that they could help libraries to fit in with the lives of active teenagers–with trips to the beach or Starbucks. He himself is in his early 20s and has plenty more to say in the above entry of his new blog. TeleRead welcomes him as an adviser on technical matters as well as youth-related ones. James even has been developing his own e-text format, ETDF–to be more exact, “an XML specification for electronic text representation.”

Far more than a techie alone, James runs the Gnosium e-text site with classics from Edgar Alan Poe and other greats and has been reading e-books for years (the site is now undergoing heavy renovation, but you can bookmark it for future reference). He has also helped out Project Gutenberg.

He’s James Billington’s ultimate nightmare–a human being who can’t imagine life without e-books. The older James had better prepare him for many more Lindens. They’re more interested in words than in the exact medium used to display them.

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Not all oldies are goodies, as a recent Toledo Blade article shows. Seems that some public school libraries failed to cull obsolete books from their collections, making it harder for students to find up-to-date ones. Imagine having to wade through history books that went back before the Vietnam war or the lunar landing.

The TeleRead take: With e-books and the right cataloguing system, of course, it would be a snap for students to use date-based filters to focus on the truly contemporary in searches where this mattered.

(Found via Library Stuff.)

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Check out Jenny Levine’s thoughts on copyright, the new media and libraries–and a related item elsewhere on the threat that the so-called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would create for consumers and libraries. Sen. Hollings’s bill would lead to a technological nightmare and interfere with fair use. South Carolina, his state, doesn’t exactly have the highest family incomes. In fact, South Carolina is the very kind of place where electronic books could eventually do the most good as a resource-stretcher. Shame on Hollings for placing Hollywood’s interests over those of his constituents. Too bad South Carolina librarians can’t afford to outbid the Rosens and Valentis for Hollings’s attention.

Meanwhile, in the Carolinas and elsewhere, librarians should do what they can–within the present laws–to prepare for e-books.

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Rep. Howard Berman and the RIAA/Hollywood crowd would do well to read a BusinessWeek article quoting the Business Software Alliance–hardly to be confused with the Free Software Foundation.

As BusinessWeek sees it, “Legislators shouldn’t be willing to consider something as outlandish as Berman’s bill until entertainment companies have proven first that they have exhausted the other legal avenues already available. Instead, the entertainment industry and Congress should take a look at the BSA’s most recent piracy report, which explains why the the BSA has been successful in the past, and why it now faces new problems.”

BusinessWeek goes on to say that “The chief reason for the lowering of piracy rates over time is simple, according to the BSA report. ‘As PC technology and the demand for software spread from the U.S. to other countries during the 1990s, there was, at times, a lag between the demand for software and the effective distribution of legal software…. The software industry has worked hard to have a legitimate sales presence in every country, making legal software sales and support easier to obtain.’

“As to the reason for a recent uptick in piracy, instead of pointing the finger at the Internet, the BSA explains that the increase is due to the economic downturn, with people in harder-hit countries turning back to pirating software.”

The TeleRead take: Needless to say, the same idea could apply to electronic books. TeleRead would allow libraries and commercial publishers to use a powerful distribution system and drive down product costs to a level that greatly reduced illegal copying. In fact, many thousands of books could be free in the Carnegnie vein and paid for via a national digital library fund. TeleRead-style library systems could exist in many countries, including the developing ones–an excellent way to grow the international book market and encourage local writers and publishers in the most unlikely places.