TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for September, 2002

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Lately your comic strip has chronicled Zonker’s fight against “Liberal Hypocrite” David Geffen. This Hollywood biggy had the nerve to close off his Malibu beach property to surfer types. A legitimate controvery? Yes, given all the overcrowding at public beaches in California and elsewhere. But how about a discussion of another important issue–intellectual property rights?

Thanks to Hollywood’s influence on Washington, the number of free books and other items is the public domain is shrinking. Geffen himself is a major campaign contributor. Political Money Line notes that Geffen “has just about maxed-out to 2002 candidates. In the 1999-00 election cycle he gave $240,000 to the Democratic national committees.”

Care to take on the copyright issue, Garry? It’s no abstraction to your readers, against whom Hollywood is warring with increasingly restrictive copyright legislation that will jack up the costs of education and recreation–and certainly add to the expenses of a well-stocked national digital library system.

What are you doing just writing about Geffen’s beach when Lawrence Lessig is going before the Supreme Court on October 9 to argue against Washington’s recent extension of copyright?

Copyright is a valuable concept; let’s not endanger it by skewing copyright law against the public. Sooner or later, just as with the Wall Street scandals, the corporate world will pay big. Voter anger will force politicians to tilt in the other direction at the expense of Hollywood.

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Volunteers for the Internet Archive “have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site,” reports Alternet, “and now they’re driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read. And yes, it’s all free. The Internet Archive bookmobile will make its first visit to an East Palo Alto school Sept. 30 and will stop at numerous other schools, libraries, and nursing homes during its cross-country trek.”

On October 8, the bookmobile will be in Washington, D.C., home of our well-bought Congress, the major threat to the public domain. That’s about when the Supreme Court will be hearing the arguments in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case over copyright extension. Educators, librarians, Net activists and others are asking the justices to undo a law that extended copyright to an author’s life plus 70 years–in other words, 20 years longer than before the law. The result? Fewer public domain works available for the bookmobile to promote, or students and other Net users to read.

Thanks to the U.S. copyright lobby, American students can’t read such modern classics as The Great Gatsby (1925) for free even though the works are availailable in, say, Australia.

Copyright extensions–yes, plural, since Washington has inflicted a whole series on the country over the years–do not promote creativity. No one will sit down to write a classic simply because the copyright term has been pushed back. Instead extension laws actually harm creativity by reducing the exposure that future authors will have to the classics, or opportunities for young film-makers and others for dramatize such works. May the Archive bus help drive that point home to the Supreme Court.

(Found on InfoArchy.org via help from Luke Francl. Thanks, Luke!)

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Two hardware items of interest…

Item One: What if China ends up far ahead of the U.S. in the use of e-books? Could happen. Remember, TabletPCs may be especially good for Chinese-language users. And once the hardware is out there, it’s natural for books.

Item Two: The next generation of the Hiptop, a budget-priced PC-phone combination, would be a natural for e-books to be included–complete with easy downloading capabilities and maybe Gutenberg classics built in. Some people, in fact, would consider the present screens to be good enough. The Hiptop already offers Web-browsing, instant messages and email.

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What to buy? A foreign-language book or the biography of John Adams? That’s what more and more librarians will have to decide, amid fast-growing use of libraries by immigrants. Today’s Washington Post writes up the challenges of DC-area libraries.

The TeleRead take: Needless to say, a TeleRead-style approach could go a long way toward lowering the costs of a library system serving many needs. One of the best ways for U.S. libraries to aid the assimilation process is to reach out to newcomers. And not just through collections but also through onsite services. This is an issue transcending the “English first” debate. Outside the U.S., in truly multilingual countries such as Canada, TeleRead’s cost-savings would be still greater.

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Congratulations to Prof. Jamie Boyle and colleagues at Duke Law School on receiving a $1M anonymous gift to fight copyright extension, the DCMA and similar anti-consumer measures from Hollywood-bought politicians. More details via CNet (at least linking isn’t illegal yet).

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Ball State students, in an experiment, found e-books harder to use than paper. But their grades didn’t suffer meaningfully. So says an article in the August 26 Chronicle of Higher Education, paraphrasing a report on the BSU study.

The TeleRead take: A useful study. Still, keep in mind that the students used Gemstar hardware, which is not the be-all and end-all. Future screens will be sharper, and highlighting and other features will be easier to use. What’s more, as noted, even with these limitations, academic performance didn’t suffer on a test comparing e-book users with those of paper textbooks. “The textbook users earned an average of 29 points per quiz,” the Chronicle reported, “while the black-and-white and color e-book users earned average scores of 28.9 and 28.5, respectively.” The difference would be too small to be significant.

(Via eBook Web.)

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E-books continue to make their way into America’s libraries, even without a coordinated approach such as TeleRead. In fact, you can even check them out now from the little library in West Hurley, New York.

You can borrow RCA-branded readers to enjoy text. But they are not as popular as LeapPads. As if to confirm Allen Renear’s multimedia-related observations, an article in the Daily Freeman of Sept. 2 says that use of the audio-enhanced LeapPads is “growing by, well, leaps and bounds…

“The LeapPad books talk, spelling or sounding out a word the child touches with a pointer. Touch a part of the human skeleton and the book will tell you the name of the bone. Interactive games teach geography, and the list goes on.”

LeapPads use flip pages of paper. Still, in the future, everything could be electronic.

Meanwhile the West Hurley system undoubtedly would welcome other improvements. Library Director Kara Lustiber says her staffers spend plenty of time “loading up the books, making sure they work properly and showing patrons how to use it. We prefer to be in the business of loaning content, not services.”

Exactly! TeleRead would drive down the cost of the hardware and put many thousands of books online, so that local librarians could spend more time as mentors and on customized links–and less time doing scutwork.

If nothing else, imagine the greater reading choices for parents and children at home. And, yes, this can matter. In a column in the Indianapolis Star of August 30, Jane Lichtenberg notes the strong connection between success in life and being read to as a child. And yet sales of children’s books actually fell eight percent in the States last year. Perhaps it’s time for publishers to show more open-mindedness toward the library model, which, in a TeleRead incarnation, could compensate them fairly for use of the material

(Indianapolis article via LIS News.)

By David Rothman

CNN surveyed the scene and not surprisingly found that younger college students, especially those with high-speed connections, felt more comfortable with e-books than did older students. Elderly policymakers, please note. It’s the material that counts, not how it’s delivered.

Allen Renear, one of the Open eBook standard-setters, told CNN that electronic textbooks would gain appeal when they come with improved audio and vidoe capabilities. True, true, true.

And their capabilities for displaying plain text will get better, too.

Time for library systems to plan ahead?

(Found via LIS News.)