TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Richard Stallman takes a stand against e-books and e-book devices

By Robert Nagle

In his presentation on copyright on July 5, 2007, Richard Stallman took a stand against e-book devices.

TeleRead is reproducing parts of the speech (taken from Slashdot and verified from watching the ogg-theora video). If an official transcript becomes available, we’ll let you know.

Most of the talk is familiar to those who have followed Stallman’s work, but he singled out e-books and e-book devices specifically as a target of scorn. He concludes, “So we’d better spread the word now: … we better build up the opposition to this repeat attempt to make us accept e-books. We’ve got to value our freedom.”

Unofficial Transcript follows below. Please note: The entire unofficial transcript was posted by a reader on Slashdot. See Part 1 and Part 2. The entire speech is worth watching and reading. However, this passage in particular will interest those who follow e-books. The passage on e-books starts at about the 50 minute mark. See also this important note about why TeleRead decided to reprint portions of the unofficial transcript here.

And what about … what about books? Book publishers are trying to do the same kind of thing. You might remember a few years ago, there was a lot of hype for e-Books. Supposedly we were all gonna start reading e-Books. And guess what? Those e-Books came with DRM. Readers of books traditionally enjoy a range of freedoms under copyright law, which did not give publishers total power over all use of a published work. For instance, there is the freedom to borrow a book from the Public Library, and the freedom to sell a book to a used book store, and the freedom to lend a book to a friend, and the freedom to buy a book anonymously by paying cash, and there’s even the freedom to keep the book for years and read it as many times as you’d like, and pass it on, perhaps to your children, who might read it as many times as they like.

[51:23]

All these freedoms, the publishers want to take away from us. But they don’t think they can take away these freedoms from book readers because even though democracy is pretty sick, there are millions of people that read books and would get angry. So they came up with a two-stage plan to reach an equivalent result: stage one was take away these freedoms for e-Books, which they have done in many countries through laws like the DMCA, and nobody objected ’cause there were no e-Books. [laughter] The DMCA was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives as an uncontroversial measure: nobody even insisted that they have a vote about it. And the second stage is: convince people to switch from paper books to e-Books. Well, that’s what they were doing in the early years of this decade, and it didn’t succeed. I had an interesting brush with this: there was a publisher that thought it would be neat to give their line of e-Books … uh, to start off their line of e-Books with a bang by publishing my biography as an e-Book. [laughter] So, they found a writer and sent him to me to ask for my cooperation. This is something that happens to me over and over again, where in my own life, the issues that I’m talking about come up, and I then have to insist on doing the things I do in a way that fits my principles.

[53:15]

So, I said, “I’ll cooperate, provided this e-Book is published on the Net without encryption.” So he went back to the publisher, and the publisher didn’t like that idea. So I said to him, “Why not try that publisher? They would do it.” So he went there, and they agreed, and the biography was published. In any case, e-Books mostly did not succeed. But I don’t think this is because most readers were so attached to their freedoms that they refused … rejected the DRM. I think it was for some practical reason like uh … it’s easier to read paper than a screen or something like that. Which means that if they try again in a different way, they might … they might win this time, and we might lose.

[54:20]

Several years ago, I got some evidence that there was an organized P.R. campaign specifically in favor of using e-Books. I was on a domestic flight in Brazil, and I pulled out essentially by … without thinking, the in-flight magazine, and I saw, in the place where you’d … where it would look like an Editorial, an article speculating on just how many years it would take before we were all reading e-Books. Now, those magazines never publish anything unless they have a specific business reason to do so. And since this was not the kind of article that was going to put it into the readers’ mind to want to fly to take a vacation, there had to be some other business reason. They had to be getting paid to publish this.

[55:16]

Maybe I can guess what their next attempt is going to be. There’s something that they call “electronic paper,” I think. Is it “electronic paper,” or “electronic ink?”

[Someone in audience answers:] E-Ink

What? Yeah. It’s something basically that looks like a book made out of paper except that each sheet is actually a display … essentially a display screen, and you can download images into it. And what is this? It’s really just another kind of “reader” for e-Books. And you can be sure that if they actually implement this, that there will be no way to get the book out of it and provide it to someone else. So, suppose people started reading books this way, what would it mean? You’d never be able to lend a book to anybody. I mean, you’d have to lend your whole library, which was in your reader. And, of course, you wouldn’t do that, ’cause then what could you read? So they would kill off this part of our social lives.

[56:28]

So we’d better spread the word now: we’d better get … we better build up the opposition to this repeat attempt to make us accept e-Books. We’ve got to value our freedom.

1. This doesn’t seem consistent with Richard Stallman’s philosophy about free software and copyright (as stated in the speech itself). We think Stallman doesn’t intend for the video version of speech to have this license. (On the other hand, it’s possible that Stallman wanted to prevent derivative works to allow time to make the original essay better and publish a full essay elsewhere. If that is the case, then we will certainly remove this transcript and link to the canonical version of his essay…reprinting it if the license allows it.)
2. We believe his take on the issue to be newsworthy and frankly of vital importance to what TeleRead is all about. Our core missions are promoting new reading technology while at the same time promoting copyright reform, open libraries and open standards.

In the interest of fairness, we will remove the content if the Computer Science Club or Mr. Stallman demands that we do so. (here’s our contact information). On a different note, we would ultimately be interested in reprinting the essay/transcript in its entirety here. For the moment though, because of its importance of Richard Stallman’s arguments to the debate, we will keep substantial excerpts here while referring people to the Computer Science Club’s video.