TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for July, 2004

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“Hollywood’s Internet Avenger?” is what a Washington Post headline called Dan Glickman, the newly appointed president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.

But you never know. Is there at least a small chance that Glickman can avoid being Jack Valenti II? Can he help Hollywood befriend the Internet, not just the politicians it buys off with massive campaign donations? Here is some germane history. Puppetmasters from the biotech industry pulled Glickman’s strings during his term as secretary of agriculture under Bill Clinton. But he was sensible enough to show sanity in the end and acknowledge his role as a dogma-spreader.

Now perhaps the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government can see biotech-style parallels in the copyright debate that Hollywood money has directly or indirectly stymied on the Hill and even in the Presidential election.

“You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised,” Glickman recalled about the biotech questions that emerged during his Agriculture days. “So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches.” I applaud Glickman’s honesty. Now perhaps Glickman can smarten up and look ahead before Hollywood cons him into repeating Valenti I’s massive mistakes.

In fearsome ways Valenti I was more of a lawyer-celebrity pandering to the fears of his clients than an astute businessman attuned to Hollywood’s true needs. This is the prophet, after all, who believed that the VCR would be the death of the industry. By so often thwarting consumer-friendly tech, mightn’t Valenti and his handlers have done Hollywood a disservice? So now I would ask Glickman to remember the true role of a lobbyist, not to repeat the party line, but to maximize profits for his industry without serving time in Allenwood. Isn’t it just possible that Valenti and friends have made some major policy mistakes that, if left unfixed, will cost Hollywood many billions?

So here’s my advice for The Avenger and the studio heads who will tell him what to do and say:

1. Stop fixating on the several billion dollars that accountants say that Hollywood is losing to piracy–and look ahead to the most promising endeavor: growing revenue online. Most adult Internet users in the U.S., a third of all Americans of legal age, already have access to high-speed Net connections at home or work, and in some countries, broadband use is even greater. But Hollywood still is out of touch, with limited selections online from legal sources. What’s more, the sites can be overpriced or else just plain stupid in other ways. With Time Warner’s Netscape browser, you can’t even use Movielink, just Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Perhaps Hollywood should moralize less about theft and more about the need for and adherence to good technical standards.

2. Realize that Hollywood’s current dominance in Washington is not necessarily eternal. The revenues of the telecommunications industry dwarf those of Hollywood, and, via the Baby Bells, those folks have more than their share of state and local connections. Now consider, also, the tens of millions of people who are swapping music online and would love to do the same with films, not the worst news for the telecom companies. The next-generation Internet will make this astoundingly easy. And “next generation,” by the way, does not just apply to the technology, but also to voters accustomed to file swapping.

So I would urge you to stop trusting the usual crew of self-interested legal experts and take a good look at Prof. Lessig’s Free Culture, as well as the authoritative legal writings on the Net such as in the Yale LawMeme. Look at the job that Ernest Miller and others have on the proposed INDUCE Act, as well as analyses of existing horrors such as the DMCA. Now, combine all these legal brains with the determination of many in Silicon Valley to de-Valenti-ize our copyright law. Can Hollywood really build sustainable business models around laws that high-tech executives and tens of millions of other Americans either hate now or will learn to?

Beware! The economic climate and industry du jour will eventually change. Once farming was holy. Now none other than Barry Myer, CEO of Warner Brothers, has alluded to the “tax parasites of the agriculture industry.” While U.S. films predominate overseas, just what happens if consumer tastes undergo a mass shift, especially given the growing tendency of people in the States and abroad to favor niche products? With new technology driving down production costs, movies will be cheaper and cheaper to produce, especially those with special effects. Is it really impossible that someday Bollywood and equivalents elsewhere could even eclipse Hollywood, given the growing prosperity of the Third World? Much of Hollywood’s predominance hasn’t a thing to do with talent or Manifest Destiny, just the fact that Americans are perceived as richer and more glamorous, and hence more fit as fodder for motion pictures.

3. Work toward more realistic intellectual property models. As early as 1991 I was proposing a television tax to pay for a well-stocked national digital library system. Times have changed. I would argue instead for payment from either general tax revenue or, if that isn’t possible, from a minor tax on sales of recordable CDs and perhaps computer equipment, just as some others have already suggested. Don’t wait for the hard copy, download a Free Culture now and have your flunkies print it out, and read why the present intellectual property models are not working. You’re just postponing the inevitable–just like the Kremlin trogs who warred against Xerox machines–if you think you can permanently thwart technology with laws to protect the present business models.

4. Be open to mitigation of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Under the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act, Hollywood would be able to discover many forgotten films and promote them into blockbusters without paying a cent to anyone associated with the original films. Not the worst deal. Too, Hollywood’s cost of adapting novels and recycling old films would drop. And best of all, you could be doing a favor to young writers and film makers. The longer are copyright terms, the more out of touch the creators will be with the great works of the past. I don’t how the math works here. But it is just possible that in ways the accountants cannot calculate, Bono is a negative? I think so! If nothing else, do you really think that people many decades from now will care about all the junky action flicks that Hollywood seems to specialize in? Just because Bono hurts education and consumers doesn’t mean it always helps Hollywood in the long term. If nothing else, as Bono’s true costs become known, especially as digital libraries grow in importance, sentiment against the law will build. Better to compromise now.

5. Besides the Public Domain Enhancement Act, consider another idea–discussed in this blog: The Walt Disney Text Access Act. It would create shorter copyright terms for text than for movies, another way studios could save money. After all, the total investment to put out a novel is far less than for a movie; and the law should reflect that. Consider, too, that the Walt Disney Text Access Act would make it easier for young creators to develop as writers. Forget all the bunk about copyright terms and creative incentives. Do you really think that Bono caused F. Scott Fitzgerald to leap out of his grave to finish up the Last Tycoon.

6. Worry less about dead people’s estates and more about living authors and other creators, the true Golden Geese of Hollywood. A TeleRead style national digital library system could pay fair compensation to living, breathing writers and provide them with true incentives to create books that Hollywood could adapt. In TeleRead, my own focus has been and will be on text. But not everyone feels that way. Such a library system might even help finance small productions–of the kind that the big studios now shun–and providing another incubator for talent. As an Atlantic article observed, Hollywood has fixated on the world market to the extent that American movies are less American than ever. A TeleRead-style system would be one more source of income to help struggling young creators by way of the Net and would fit in well with the Digital Promise proposal from former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow and others. But Jack Valenti has been too busy being a destroyer–of the Internet–to take an interest in alternatives like Minow’s.

Simply put, technology and the Net should have a symbiotic relationship, not a hostile one. Over at the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle is developing storage systems with many times the capacity of those commonly in use today; imagine the benefits for Hollywood. But Draconian copyright laws could well get in his way. If you really care about the prosperity of Hollywood, including that of your son, the young film-maker, you will applaud the efforts of people like Kahle rather than saddling them and the rest of us with such malarkey as the threat of near-eternal copyright (isn’t that one Valenti-ism you can speak up against, now?).

Rather than being just a mouthpiece, a label that even the Hollywood Reporter has applied to you (”Glickman Relishes Role as Hollywood Mouthpiece”), perhaps you can actually encourage the industry to reconsider the soundness of its strategies. Is a master lobbying operation the be-all and end-all? Is it really helping Hollywood investors realize their highest returns? A motivational speaker once wrote: “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” Mightn’t that be a maxim for you to follow in your new job–not just morally but even in terms of Hollywood’s own self interest?

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Dan Glickman, an ex-congressman from Kansas and ex-secretary of Agriculture, is replacing Jack Valenti as head of the Motition Picture Association of America. I’ve got a few constructive suggestions for the new guy. Coming in the next day or two.

Related: Hollywood’s Internet Avenger?, from Cynthia Webb in the Washington Post.

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The best fix for the Sony Librie, the crippled technowonder that can’t even display public domain books in HTML because Sony is so DRM-fixated, would be an OpenReader approach. That’s what Jon Noring and I have been pushing.

But what if Sony at least allowed nonDRMed HTML to be imported into the Librie format as a temporary measure–or, better, used a popular reading system like Mobipocket that already permits HTML imports?

Just putting that idea out there. Sooner or later the market will tell Sony that a truly standards-based approach is better. But the importation strategy could work out in the interim.

The monopoly factor: One difference between Japan and the U.S.

Meanwhile it is important to distinguish between the Japanese and American markets. We already know that Sony DRM has POed well-informed consumers in both countries and plenty other places without Sony even marketing the unit outside Japan. Here’s the real difference between Japan and America. In the States, I suspect, the publishing monopolies are somewhat less powerful than in Japan. I just wish Sony would show some guts. There are lots of small but excellent publishers, in the States at least, that could help Sony reinvent the e-book industry so it grows from the pathetic $20-$30 million in global sales. A little courage, please, Sony. Otherwise maybe you’d better sell off your e-book operations and venture into paper mills.

Detail: Mobipocket imports HTML and TXT via the included Mobipocket Web Companion. No secrets here. After you click on “Publish,” the Web Companion says: “Welcome to Mobipocket Web Companion. It will help you to convert any HTML, TXT or Image file into a Mobipocket PRC file.” If the Web Companion botches the job, you can always clean up the HTML file so it does display properly.

The big question: Just why can Mobipocket deal with big publishers while preserving those HTML and TXT importation capabilities but Sony can’t, at least in Japan? Public explanations welcomed! Is Sony going to let Japanese publishers dictate the kinds of machines and software sold to English-reading Americans in the future? Whether Sony is DRM fixated on its own because of its Hollywood ventures or because of pressure from Japanese publishing giants, the real losers will be the electronics conglomerate’s shareholders. The longer Sony lets Hollywood copyright zealots or Japanese publishing trogs set the tone, the more chance that other technologies will drain off buyers from its E Ink-based Librie.

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When will Sony listen? Yuri Kageyama, an Associated Press writer Tokyo, is the latest journalist to complain about the Librie’s Mission Impossible approach to DRM–books that self-destruct after 60 days. Like most everyone else, he loves the screen and the machine overall: it’s the DRM that makes him uneasy. His thoughts:

…you can’t copy and paste passages to another computer or device. And copy protection built into the software garbles your books into useless data after two months. There’s no way to digitally archive texts for later reference. That’s a lot of restrictions, though the books available for this first Librie do cost only $3 per download….

I’m not wild about buying books that self-destruct after 60 days. But the idea behind Librie makes impeccable sense.

It’s not that far-fetched to imagine receiving our morning newspaper of choice – call it the Daily Download – into an upgraded version of such a gadget. We’ll save a lot of trees.

Exactly! But only if people will purchase the Librie in the first place. Sample books included with the Librie don’t count; people want to buy and keep their own books. Get it, Sony? $3 a pop for self-zapping books is a gouge. Except for a comatose and perhaps overpaid guy writing for the New York Times, most everyone seems to agree that Sony’s technology-enforced business practices for e-books are a real rip-off.

Detail: The cost per download was originally to be somewhere less than $5 ($4.95 in the Real World, based on my past experiences). Anything change, or did things just come in on the low side? Or is the $3 or $5 figure wrong? Even $3, though, is too much for a book that vanishes after 60 days. What’s more, consumers should be able to own books for real. Hey, I’m rooting for Sony to get this right!

Update, 1:49 EDT: Added more details from the AP article and about the download cost.

(Found via eBookAd.)

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What if you couldn’t buy a Chevy or a Honda without a buggy whip? Alas, the buggy whip mentality is alive and well in some e-book vendors’ dealings with libraries, which can lend only one copy of one e-book at a time. Want more library users at once to be able to check out a title? Then, in many cases, you need to buy more copies. Imagine the headaches for librarians, who cannot always predict what the demand will be.

Now, however, Ebook Library, a partnership between EBooks Corporation and Dawson Books, is offering better approach, which will start out in academic libraries and hopefully make it to public libraries. Details from a press release:

Drawing on extensive experience in print and digital publishing and on advice from respected members of the library, publishing and technology communities, eBooks Corporation has developed a pioneering approach to ebook lending. Non-Linear Lending enables libraries to better meet the peaks and troughs of full-text demand.

EBL provides an intuitive interface for flexible purchase and lending of a growing collection of digital book titles that is designed to suit the specific needs of academic and research librarians. The new service allows publishers to provide their content through a choice of flexible lending models, including multiple concurrent use, unlimited access and short-term circulation. Additionally, individual ebook chapters can be set aside for reserve lending or inclusion within course packs.

Kari Paulson, General Manager of EBL, said, “We are confident that EBL will be a valuable resource for academic and research librarians, in large part because we have developed it in collaboration with such a committed and creative group of advising institutions. We are fortunate to have a brilliant technical team in Perth, who have packed EBL with functions that will delight library patrons and librarians.”

The collection comprises content across all subject areas, with an initial focus on recent publications, principally in the areas of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM). Leading global academic publishers have signed on to EBL, including Taylor and Francis, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Kluwer and World Scientific Press.

In addition to providing an elegant platform for acquisition management, EBL has entered into partnerships with leading book distributors, Blackwell’s Book Services and Dawson Books, in North America, the UK and Australia, respectively.

This can only be good news for libraries. It will be interesting to see how EBL’s competitors respond.

(Found via eBookAd.com.)