TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for January, 2003

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Want a good illustration of the age gap when it comes to e-books? Check out an example from the Indianpolis Star. Eventually e-books will be as easy to read as ordinary books and even offer flippable pages with the words in e-ink. But that day isn’t here yet. Still, old foggies in the library establishment would do well to remember that younger readers are already eager for the new technology, even in its primitive form.p when it comes to e-books? Check out an example from the Indianpolis Star. Eventually e-books will be as easy to read as ordinary books and even offer flippable pages with the words in e-ink. But that day isn’t here yet. Still, old foggies in the library establishment would do well to remember that younger readers are already eager for the new technology, even in its primitive form.

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Well, my Win XP is falling apart. The news from Dell tech support was grim–somehow my Optiplex GX150 had corrupted a crucial file, ntoskrnl.exe. If I really wanted to be safe, the technician said, I might want to reformat my hard drive, because otherwise I might lose everything. Rightly or wrongly, he said that copying over the file with a fresh one was no sure-fire guarantee, at least not if my keyboard lockups continued. Cheery words, huh? Actually they were and are. Hey, great excuse to banish Microsoft from my main box. What’s the point of XP anyway? A little over a year after the change, my system is deteriorating the same as my earlier machines did under Win 98. No more pseudo linux, I’m thinking. Give me The Real Thing. I tried TRT a few years ago but was put off by the lack of apps. This time I can look forward to goodies such as Ximian Evolution, which even comes with Red Hat 8.0.

So what does this have to do with e-books? Plenty. Luckily I’m more into plain-text e-books in the Gutenberg vein rather than commercial protected versions, but my data problem was a good example of the hassles of, say, Microsoft Reader–which of course associates your purchases with specific machines. My experience also gave me a new appreciation of the value of cracking tools to allow easy sharing of protected books on your own machines (er, fair use, that antiquated concept so loathed by the copyright establishment). Let’s hope that libararians as a group can successfully lean on e-book-related companies to be more responsive to consumers and maybe even, gasp, develop business with new publishers if the standard New York conglomerates will not wake up. The ultimate solution, of course, would be a well-stocked national digital library system like TeleRead, which, at least to an extent, would reduce the financial incentives for both piracy and consumer-hostile protection schemes.

The horrors of the weekend also reminded me of the risk of Microsoft depending on e-books to bind me and other users to Windows. I myself like the Reader’s feel–it’s much more pleasant than the competition from Adobe, and if someday Microsoft can develop a decent operating system for consumers, I’ll be back. But what’s the point of XP if it imperils my ability to get my work done? Furthermore, since I’m a much heavier user of my machine than most people are of theirs, I suspect there’ll be many more users giving up on XP in disgust as they “catch up” with me. Meanwhile I’m not sure how much blogging I can do in the next day or so, given this little distraction, courtesy Microsoft.

Confession: Yes, I’ll still have Windows on my auxiliary desktop. But I doubt I’ll be buying much right now in Microsoft Reader format–and not just because it’s incompatible .

Update, Jan. 31: Actually this item and a few others appeared a little earlier–I’ve just revived them following some Blogger-related complications.

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Project Gutenberg is in the cross hairs of J. Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley professor and Wired Magazine contributor, who accuses PG of failing to “achieve any form of critical mass.” I’ll get to Gutenberg in time. But first a few words on the DeLong column and then plenty more on his former employer, the Clinton Administration, which in so many ways tried to privatize knowledge–the antithesis of the spirit of Gutenberg and TeleRead.

In the February issue of Wired, DeLong isn’t calling for the end of Project Gutenberg, but he might as well be. He thinks that its scalability is pathetic compared to linux or for that matter a closed-source project known as Microsoft. The headline nicely conveys his ‘tude. "Any Text. Anytime. Anywhere. (Any Volunteers?)." He also says Gutenberg isn’t “a high priority for governments," and, because the work is “boring” and without a strong “positive feedback loop,” it can’t attract enough volunteers. Meanwhile, sob, DeLong’s own e-book needs go unmet from the library system. He begins the column with his mind-numbing search at a university library for a copy of Appendix D of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

“So,” he asks by the fourth paragraph, "why can’t I just call up the text on my computer screen? Where is my universal online library?"

Good question, Professor. The Clinton Administration, where you worked as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, got off to a wonderful start when Al Glore was talking about digitizing the library of Congress, so that a little girl in Carthage, Tennessee, could dial up book after book even if Daddy worked at a backwoods gas station. Alas, however, succumbing to a massive inflow of campaign cash, the Clinton people sold out to Hollywood and the rest of the copyright establishment. A copyright lobbyist named Bruce Lehman continued to ply his trade as the White House’s czar of "intellectual property" matters in cyberspace. Lehman at one point was even foreseeing a time when the average American might be able to read e-books only at the local library on computers made safe for the copyright interests. Just the opposite of TeleRead’s slogan: "Bring the E-Books Home."

Lehman’s infamous White Paper helped pave the way for such treats as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I suppose that a well-to-do Berkeley economist would happily pay for copyrighted materials, including Appendix D, or at least his institution would. But tell that to the schoolchild whose image Gore conjured up, albeit without the reference to the gas pumper, my own little touch.

She might fare better under TeleRead. It was and is a business model to allow many thousands of books and other copyrighted items to go online with proper compensation for copyright holders while giving the entire country–not just the elite–access to them.

The most powerful Clintonians, in character, turned out in the end to be aggressively indifferent to the plan despite the polite noises I heard at the beginning. I remember the condescending comments from a Clinton appointee when I was about to testify at a copyright hearing. "This is like Hollywood," the man said. "Not everyone can be a star. We can’t use everyone’s idea.” William F. Buckley, Jr., however, my political opposite in many ways, could. He showed his courage with two friendly columns on TeleRead. On the positive side in the Clinton era, the Department of Education commissioned me to write a paper later called Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era?, payment for which I donated to my local library. But TeleRead never happened. Perhaps George Bush can rise beyond the stereotypes on this issue just as Bill Buckley did.

Meanwhile, if TeleRead isn’t reality yet, what can we do right now for the little girl in Tennessee? That is the glory of Project Gutenberg. While many Washington politicians and bureaucrats were evincing less concern for the commonweal on the the e-book issue than for big wheels–like Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner, both major campaign contributors–Michael Hart was keeping his promise to work toward a universal library. He is the son of a two academics who served as codebreaks during War II, and reviewing an old Wired article, I see that his father specialized in Shakespeare. Back in the 1970s, however, when Hart first started creating e-texts on a mainframe at the University of Illinois, he sensibly began with something very different but profound in its own way. The U.S. Declaration of Independence was a prescient choice, given the Stamp Tax mentality of the copyright establishment as exemplified later by Lehman.

Imagine how wacky the Gutenberg project must have seemed even to Hart’s friends at the time. His donated storage space, as reported in Wired, was all of 10K. That was how advanced computers were. Even by 1988 Hart’s network connection was still poking along at just 1,200 baud, but he did managed to put online 10 entire novels, starting with Alice in Wonderland. Hart at first supported himself as stereo sales rep and then becoming an adjunct professor of electronic text at a Benedictine University, a Roman Catholic school in Lisle, Illinois. The Wired article nicely noted the parallels here. Like the old monks, Hart wanted to preserve books, and the people of the seminary obviously were pleased to oblige even if they could pay him just $12,000 a year and living expenses. Along the way Hart hewed to his beliefs in free knowledge.

"If he made some concessions," Denise Hamilton wrote in 1997 in Wired, "it’s possible that Gutenberg might have 100,000 books online today–a respectable library–instead of 1,000. Indeed, Hart says, various academic institutions and even some Texas oil interests have offered to bankroll Gutenberg over the yeas, in exchange for control. One university offered him a six-figure salary, he says,to bring the project to their campus. He turned them all down flat. ‘Almost everybody out there wants to charge for books, and they want real control over which books we do and which edition comes out,’ Hart grouses. ‘They want a bit in my mouth. I don’t trust them.’" But the money could have been there. If you want to speak about Michael Hart’s value in free-market terms, Professor DeLong, it looks as if The Invisible Hand could have treated him very well if he’d been as pliable as the Clintonians.

At the time of the interview, Hart had uploaded 1,000 books to the Internet, as noted, and was aiming for 10,000 by Dec. 31, 2001. The number seemed high enough for Hamilton to ask in print: "Is Hart a deluded crackpot, a high tech saint, or just another Net eccentric?" Isn’t he the crazy guy who puts sugar on his pizza? Well, it turns out that as Don Quixote, not that infrequent a comparison for Hart, he actually has come close to knocking down a few windmills. Just 12 months or so after his deadline, Hart has almost 7,000 books on the Internet for Gore’s mythical little girl in Tennessee. Close enough.

So what’s the the problem for Gutenberg’s critics. Well, considering the tens of thousands of books published annually, 7,000 isn’t that big a deal even if PG has played up the classics. At least going by the information in Wired, the Internet Bookmobile Project, another worthy endeavor, offers 20,000 books and plans a million by 2005. Just how many of the 20,000 came from Gutenberg, though? Keep in mind that the questions arise about Wired-supplied stats, not the laudable Bookmobile Project, whose main page just alludes to "almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online" without mentioning the original sources. Meanwhile The Million Book Project would like to live up to its name, with the same year, 2005, as the deadline for the million books. Present number of titles? 1,091, according to the graphic accompanying the DeLong column. The International Children’s Library offers 200 books and envisions 10,000 by 2007. Simply put, right now, all the collections are tiny in the grand scheme of things.

Who’s to blame? Not Hart, who has dedicated his life to his cause and deserves better than a kick in the teeth from DeLong. The real villains are Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Congress and the other politicians who never followed through on the former’s promise to digitize the Library of Congress.

Significantly James Billington, Librarian of Congress, has said that he worries more about the digital preservation of "rare pamphlets" than real books. But why not both? As quoted in a story in Tech Law Journal, dated April 15, 2000, Billington believes that "there is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down. There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence." Interesting. Should a paper edition of Mein Kampf enjoy more presumption than e-book editions of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare? Adding to the insult, Billington has said, "You don’t want to be one of those lonely mindless futurists who sit in front of a lonely screen." A remark delivered with Hart in mind?

What’s really incredible is that Billington has said that e-books are "isolating" but libraries are "a community thing"; he is totally oblivious to possibilities of e-books as vehicles for shared knowledge, especially among schoolchildren passing books on to their peers. That is what can happen now, to a limited extent, under Gutenberg and could happen in other ways under the TeleRead plan. TeleRead provides for legal file-sharing of copyrighted materials, tracking, and a national digital library fund–along with the infrastructure for private philanthropists to participate.

Well, there you have it, Professor. Now imagine if the Clinton White House, Congress and Billington, a Reagan appointee, had offered government money, without strings, for Michael Hart or a TeleRead-style national digital library? We might be much farther along.

That said, I’ll also note Project Gutenberg’s flaws. I totally agree with critics of Gutenberg’s publishing system, which needs drastic updating. You can’t search across the site for the same text in many books, for example, and, of course, the books are in ASCII alone. Even some of Gutenberg’s most ardent boosters are aware of these weaknesses, and with or without the Project’s actual support, they are working on potential improvements such as RaptorBook, which is the baby of James Linden, a gifted programmer in his 20s who shares Hart’s penchant for the classics. For years Hart avoided graphic user interfaces. But as shown by a response to James–who happens to be a business associate of mine, as well as TeleRead’s chief technical advisor–Hart is more flexible these days. My hunch is that the Gutenberg site in the near future will indeed undergo a massive makeover.

But what about Gutenberg’s scalability? Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive and also the Bookmobile project, ran an item on a mailing list about "robotic page turner" the size of four refrigerators. It can turn almost 2,000 pages an hour and undoubtedly will be still faster, smaller and more affordable in the future, or some else will invent a better version. Resources like that aren’t cheap. In sheer numbers alone, then, other projects may well beat Gutenberg–well, at least until the sophisticated page-turners are as inexpensive as scanners.

Still, keep in mind why Gutenberg is special. Readers can share their personal passions–say, a favorite neglected books in the public domain–with the world at large. What a contrast to Bill Gates, who bought several copies of The Great Gatsby for the private library of his $50 million mansion but refuses to pay for it to be on the Net. That is why visionary grassroots projects such as Gutenberg deserve support from public and private sources alike, including a TeleRead system if one becomes a reality.

I myself would like the system to be run by professional librarians, who, as a group, are far more clueful about the Net than when I wrote on TeleRead in Computerworld in the early 1992s. But I would hate for other choices to vanish. Until I posted The Brass Check on the Net–well, the first chapters, with more to come–no one else apparently had. Gutenberg will spread around the file I’ve prepared with other volunteers. PG doesn’t and shouldn’t replace librarians, but it addresses needs that even the best pros may not always be able to fulfill in their usual professional roles (yes, librarians are welcome participants).

If nothing else, Gutenberg is a powerful defender of the concept of public domain, which, if not used, will deteriorate. Governments can roll back copyright terms and threaten to end grants or other funding. But the more Gutenberg thrives, the harder it is for Bruce Lehman and friends to steal away the rights to the classics already online, and that resistance will benefit librarians and nonlibrarians alike.

No, Professor, I won’t blame you for the copyright-related sins of the Clinton administration and the gutless retreat from Gore’s hopes for the Library of Congress, but, along with the failure of Gates to be Carnegie II in a major way through e-books, they are a stark illustration of the need for Gutenberg. Perhaps you need to reconsider what you wrote. I notice toward the end of the column you even brought up the possibility of “limiting copyright.” That would be a big help, thank you, but hardly a substitute for Gutenberg and TeleRead.

Update, Feb. 1: Brad DeLong is now saying that his point was that with some goverment help, Project Gutenberg could have digitized many more books by now. That is certainly contrary to the impression he left countless readers, including me. At any rate it would be great if, when he revisited the topic, he wrote about the reasons for the lack of government help.

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IP Justice: New white hats
Going by the Verizon case, U.S. courts care more about Draconian copyright protection for Hollywood than privacy for the average American. What an appropriate time for the debut of a new group called IP Justice. Cnet interviewed Executive Director Robin Gross.

“Are there any countries that have views about intellectual properties that you like, and alternatively, which countries have the ‘worst’ IP laws in your view?” Cnet asked her.

“I’ll start with who has the worst IP laws,” she said, “because that’s actually the easiest. It’s the United States. When it comes to the traditional balance we’ve had between copyright and freedom of expression, it’s been completely done away with in the last couple of years. It’s been replaced by a regime where the content industry has total control over what people can do with their e-books, CDs, DVDs and that sort of thing. With the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and subsequent enforcement, the United States has some of the most restrictive views on what people can do with their works.”

True, true, true. With bought politicians in the U.S. so eager to cite other countries’ laws in justifying sellouts to copyright holders, IP Justice should have a positive effect in the States, too. America may be the most Enronesque of nations in the IP field, but like-minded copyright greedsters are everywhere.
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…why not suggest the use of public-domain classics from, say, Project Gutenberg? Libraries won’t suffer the same lending restrictions that they would on books from commercial sources. In fact, readers can forever keep material downloaded from Gutenberg-type sites. Libraries, moreover, are free to print out public-domain books from the Net, and as noted here earlier, the materials can cost maybe $2 a copy. Great way to fill in gaps in collections.

TeleRead, of course, would help by allowing thousands of commercial books to be online for free to libraries and users, with payments to content-providers from a national digital library fund. But that day hasn’t come. And meanwhile, if your library system wants commercial e-books, it might investigate a new offering from OverDrive and Fictionwise.

“Under terms of the agreement,” says a statement from the former company, “OverDrive will provide premium content and digital rights management services to Fictionwise for use in their Libwise product (www.libwise.com). Patrons of libraries using Libwise will be able to download eBooks to either a PC or any popular handheld devices such as Palm, PocketPC, WinCE, Psion, and even some Nokia cell phones. The agreement also includes a co-marketing alliance between the two companies to reach the library market.” According to the companies, the main markets of the new product will be “small and independent libraries.”

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The most famous lobbyist of the music industry is leaving by year’s end to devote more time to her children. Touching. Maybe Hilary Rosen can even think about the children of average families and about the taxes she helped bring about on schools and libraries and consumers–in the form of harsher copyright laws. Meanwhile, if nothing else, we know of one household where the use of .MP3s will be very carefully supervised.

The TeleRead take: Lobbyists and PR people are disposable. Family responsibilities may even be the main reason for Ms. Rosen’s resignation from the Recording Industry Association of America, but as a recent Wired article shows, Ms. Rosen turned herself into a tempting punching bag for outraged Net activists, librarians, you name it. It’s time for the music biz to move on to a less hated figure. Be interesting to see how long until Ms. Rosen resurfaces in another industry. Perhaps the asbestos business? Of course, the fantasy here is that she ends up like one of those former cancer-stick-pushers who did anti-smoking commercials. “And now, speaking for America’s libraries and the need for fair use….” Hey, if Rosen doesn’t want the job, maybe ex-child advocate Pat Schroeder of the publishers association can repent and oblige.

But back to Hilary. She earlier was known for helping to start “Rock the Vote” to engage young people in the political process. My hunch is that at RIAA her effect on the RTV cause was mixed in certain ways. On one hand, the naked purchase of Congress by the copyright interests, via campaign donations, has helped energized some of the young to vote. And on the other hand? Many more millions may eventually be thinking, if they haven’t already: “Why bother?”

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Earlier TomPaine.com caught it from us for merrily publishing Bill Gates Sr.’s arguments for the estate tax–without a reminder that neither father nor son appeared to be opposing copyright extensions, the surest path to a copyright gentry. The commonweal wins some and loses some, eh?

Now, however, to its credit, the Paine site has published a piece on the blatant ripoffs that writers are suffering from the Boston Globe, an offshoot of the New York Times’ congomerate. Alas, the Massachusetts Superior Courts recently ruled in the Globe’s favor. But the freelancers are appealing, and with good reason. Here is what Debra Cash, cofounder of the Boston Freelancers Association, wrote in TomPaine.com:

“The terms of the contract are complex (and we argue, deceptive), but a short summary is that, as a condition for freelancing for the Globe today, writers, photographers and illustrators have to give the newspaper rights to their entire archive of past Globe work. Then the paper can do virtually anything it wants with that past work–resell it to third parties, anthologize it, put the images on T-shirts or posters, you name it. Under the contract, the paper can also do the same thing with every new Globe contribution. The Globe’s right to do these things doesn’t run out until 70 years after the creator dies. And the Globe doesn’t have to pay an extra penny, ever.”

What the useful article doesn’t say is that copyright law is inherently the friend of the rich in ways far beyond the above. Copyright lawyers here in the Washington, DC, area cost in the region of $200 an hour, with the more expensive ones charging as much as $800-$900. Yes, some working-stiff writers will hit it big. But not many. So much for the protection the Founding Father’s intended. A client of a writer can engage in the worst rip-offs, and the author still may have problems collecting his or her due because litigitation is so expensive. It’s happened to me. It’s happened to others. What modern copyright law does do, however, especially with longer copyright terms in effect, is reduce the number of free classics available for future writers to read online. And literary classics will take longer to be available for adaptations by writers without Hollywood-bloated budgets.

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The old-fashioned library book sale has gone electronic at librarybooksales.org.

From the home page: “LibraryBookSales.org matches you with rare, collectible and quality books that have been donated to public libraries. The money you spend goes directly to the library that sells you the book. You benefit because you can find quality books at great prices. Everyone Wins!”

More details: “librarybooksales.org (and .com) has become one of the hottest spots on the web. New libraries are joining every day, and books are being uploaded as we speak. The project is open to any library. Public, private, institutional, special collections, educational, foreign or domestic. The goal is for libraries to generate much needed funds to continue serving the ‘better good.’ The project is not open to commercial book sellers. These libraries can now sell their better books on the web. These may be books that have been donated to the library, duplicate copies, monographs or surplus materials. We try to discourage the sale of ex-libris books, since most serious book buyers don’t want to own books that look like they were permanently borrowed from their local library…” Needless to say, you can not only buy books but also donate them to particpating libraries.

The project, sponsored partly by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, is from the California State Library Foundation.

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Try to search “ebooks” in a search engine…

Do you think that it will include the singular “ebook” in the results?

Nope. “ebooks” is a different noun from “ebook,” and the search engine may still treat “ebook” like a name, not a regular noun. So an “ebooks” search will be treated totaly differently from an “ebook” search. So ebook is not the singular form of ebooks.

Additional thought from David Rothman: To add to the fun, you want to try “ebook” and “ebooks” both with and without the hyphen.

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“The nearly one million citizens of Westchester County will be able to search the library system catalog, the Internet, and more than 30 subscription-based resources with a single query using” Muse software. – EContent, Jan. 21, via Library News Daily.

The TeleRead take: Excellent. And here are a few more ideas.

How about assuring prominent display of Web links to special local resources–for example, the county’s Healthy Heart Program–when search results pop up? Work on this with Muse if the feature isn’t already there.

Or why not blend in Googlert or the equivalent (”Fill in your email address if you want to receive regular alerts on this topic”)?

Interestingly, Westchester County’s system is run by Maurice (Mitch) Freedman, president of the American Library Association. Nice going on the uber-search wrinkle, Mitch. Perhaps ALA itself will think strategically in another way and come out explicitly for a TeleRead-style approach someday–complete with an ample national digital library fund and user-to-user file sharing of library items (with provisions for fair payments to copyright holders).

E-book get-togethers at ALA gatherings, like this year’s Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, are a good start. But in the end they should be just tools toward major goals in the TeleRead vein.

Right now, of course, too many librarians seem worried about their turfs, as opposed to fighting for a truly integrated national plan that would greatly expand the resources available to neighborhood libraries and their users. Yes, as Steve Cohen is laudably documenting, public officials are up to some Stupid Budget Cutting Tricks. But local, state and national politicians might be a little more receptive to the pleas of the library community if its leaders showed more guts and imagination. A TeleRead-style system would be a very cost-effective way to help spread books around and reduce the famous savage inequalities. It would strengthen, not replace, existing libraries–especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Outrage in favor of extended copyright terms. The smaller the public domain, the more need, alas, for TeleRead.

How about it, Mitch? So far you’ve been deaf to uppity nonlibrarians. Hey, take a stand on TeleRead. John Iliff did, and other librarians might speak out if you yourself showed some courage here. As indicated by the your adoption of Muse’s one-search approach, it isn’t as if you’re a Luddite. Now act. What a great way for future generations of librarians to remember you. Time to speak out in Philadelphia?

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TeleRead would greatly expand the range of library books available in small towns and in urban ghettos and lower the cost of distribution. But it is no substitute for resistance to anti-library budget cuts in the here and now. For an overview, see an ALA news release on the Campaign to Save America’s Libraries. Then check Steve Cohen’s new Web log, Save Our Libraries.

As many librarians would argue, the economic slowdown has increased the need for library services as people upgrade their skills to compete in an increasingly mean economy. But politicians are cutting back. As noted in the SOL log, America’s Libraries has reported:

“In order to close what he estimates as a $34.6-billion budget shortfall, California Gov. Gray Davis has proposed cutting statewide support of local libraries from the current $52 million to about $24 million. The measures, part of a budget proposal released January 10, are among $20.7 billion in total cuts over the next two years, including $4.5 billion taken from education programs.”

Meanwhile, down in south Florida, the SunSentinel.com site says one middle school in Florida doesn’t even carry Harry Potter. Nice way to get the children to read, huh?

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TeleRead is a plan to aid society, via a well-stocked national digital library system, and would offer new business options for pubishers of all sizes–as opposed to regulating their present activites. What’s more, if given a chance, new technologies could help open up the way for all kinds of diversity in media. That said, if today’s media biggies have their way, innovation could be killed off before it has a chance. Things have reached the point where even conservative Bill Safire worries about Media Giantism. In today’s New York Times he writes:

“Take a listen to what’s happened to local radio in one short wave of deregulation: the great cacophony of different sounds and voices is being amalgamated and homogenized. (The following figures were published by Gannett’s USA Today, which kind of blunts my point about big-media squeamishness, but its account of the F.C.C.’s ruination of independent radio is damning.)

“Back in 1996, the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations; today, those two own more than 1,400. A handful of leading owners used to generate only a fifth of industry revenue; now these top five rake in 55 percent of all money spent on local radio. The number of station owners has plummeted by a third. Yesterday’s programming diversity on the public’s airwaves has degenerated to the Top 40, as today’s consolidating commodores borrowing public property say ‘the public interest be damned.’”

More and more, books are becoming like radio. Yes, zillions of small publishers are out there. But the big boys claim the bulk of the sales, abetted by the giant chains.

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Memo to Bill Gates: The best way to reduce piracy of Microsoft Reader files is to make the format friendlier to users. Here are comments by George Czajkowski on Usenet–via Pocket PC eBooks Watch:

“Why use something so user unfriendly and unsuitable for mobile reading (Pocket PC, Palm, etc.) as Adobe e-book, when there is so much better, user friendly and secure system available in the form of Palm Reader?

“Did you notice that nobody is bothering with cracking Palm Reader DRM system? Could it be because it is so much more user friendly (unlimited activations on unlimited number of devices, no need to beg anyone for additional activations, etc.) and therefore ensures that all those e-books we spent our money on will be still accessible years from now, even if we upgrade/replace our devices dozens of times?

“…My advice – stay away from draconian device specific DRM systems like MS Reader or Adobe and you are guaranteed to enjoy your e-books for years to come.”

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“For Godoff’s allies, the question of ‘What Now’ comes closely followed by ‘Why’. Olson was remarkably up front about his reasons–finances, which many read as pressure from the Bertelsmann highers, who have their eyes on an IPO. As for why revenues weren’t higher, many pointed to a decision made too recently to create a Little Random paperback division; it is Vintage, after all, that many feel makes Knopf untouchable.” – Publishers Weekly, Jan. 16..

The TeleRead take: An IPO? Jeeze. Yes, publishers can turn nice profits, and it wouldn’t hurt to trim back some of the outlandish advances for the biggest megastars or be cautious about creating new divisions. But does Bertelsmann really think that Wall Street and European equivalents will be happy with normal rates of return for prestige-pubishing, when even genre books can be unpredictable? Is book publishing going the way of commercial radio–where cash has unabashedly won out over quality? Remember, anyone in theory can start or buy a radio station, but the Clear Channel people dominate. Time to consider new business models for book publishing, music and the rest? Reports continue to come out about the book industry’s woes–check out today’s piece in the New York York Times on the continued disappointments of even best-selling authors.

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TeleRead for years has pushed for a distributed national digital library system managed day to day by many librarians in many locations–as opposed to a Washington or New York elite–even if certain administrative functions could be centralized and national resources could be used and adapted at the local level.

Meanwhile, in certain other media and technological areas, the decentralizational movement is gaining strength. Check out David Weinberg’s recent essay Why Open Spectrum Matters The End of the Broadcast Nation–the topic of a recent post from Dan Gillmor.

In the essay, Weinberg lays out the three big lessons of the Internet, and they could well apply to library systems, too:

“(a) Open standards work. Rather than building a network that connects A to B to C by touching copper to copper, the creators of the Internet built a network by establishing standards for how information is to be moved. It is because the Internet was not built as a thing that it has been able to bring the world many orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any previous network. Our current policy, however, treats spectrum as if it were a physical thing to be carved up. By focusing on open standards rather than on spectrum-as-thing, the medium can become far more efficient and offer far greater capacity.

“(b) Decentralization works. Keep the architecture clean and simple. Put the ’smarts’ in the devices communicating across the network rather than in centralized computers. In fact, central control and regulation would have kept the Internet from becoming the force that it has.

“(c) Lowering the cost of access and connection unleashes innovation beyond any reasonable expectation.”

Thoughts for library and publishing people to ponder? Especially on issues such as grassroots file-sharing? TeleRead would spread the smarts and the goodies around, so that even individual users could even store books permanently on their own machines and share them, whenever they wanted–with privacy-respecting tracking mechanisms in place to provide for payments to content-providers from a national digital library fund or from the users themselves. Thousand and thousands of copyrighted works–those covered by the fund–could be free to users without cheating the writers and publishers or impeding the ability of schoolchildren and others to share the whole books.

Just as the radio establishment is resisting, and will resist, the new technology, many in the library and publishing fields will resist the TeleRead approach despite its financial potential. So be it. But eventually, technology will win out, and the winners will be those who adjust.

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“Apparently, they spent less than half of the money that other schools spent on new computer labs, and got better hardware to boot.” – SlashDot post about a private school in Maine, via Google Technology News.

The TeleRead take: A great reason for schools to try to favor e-book formats that are not tied to specific operating systems! Earth to Microsoft: You were quick enough with that stock dividend despite earlier statements to the contrary. So when are you going to get into linux for e-books and other apps rather than just do the expected? You’d actually have been better off if the feds had forced you to split up your app and OS parts into separate companies.

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Know how to write? Want do a p-book and invest virtually nothing–and avoid the vanity-press scams? A zillion books exist on the subject of self-publishing. Also read an SFgate piece about CafePress:

Early this year, says SFgate, “the company’s media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it’ll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafePress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable…

“Such publications could be available through links on the specific Web sites, while books might even be purchased on mega sites such as Amazon.com and printed to order at CaféPress. The only requirement to sell through bookstore venues is to have an ISBN number, which CaféPress will provide its fledgling and perhaps even established authors.

“‘Vanity publishers tend to load the price up on the top’,” SFgate quotes Maheesh Jain, the company’s cofounder. “If you know how to format, we’ll print it with no fee.”

While the big publishers love to knock self-published books–and yes, they do so rather justifiably in many cases–there is a long, honorable tradition here. Upton Sinclair published The Brass Check and a bunch of other works himself.

Given the dominance of a few publishing conglomerates here in the States, self-pubishing is a “must” as an option for author and society at large. In fact, conglomerates are picking up a few self-published books in popular genres. Just don’t depend on it. Publish because you have something to do, not because you’re sure they’ll be money in it.

The TeleRead take: Print on the demand, as we’ve noted, could also be used for library books. But in many cases it’s a transitional technology. Sooner or later, electronic books will have screens sharp enough to make reading perhaps even less difficult than off paper.

SFgate link via Boing Boing