TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Yes, Ms. New York Times, you CAN read e-books in the bathtub. Time to care more about the destiny of E?

By David Rothman

As vexing as the Kindle’s eBabel and Digital Rights Management can be, Amazon did the e-book community a service in putting the E word on the map.

Eleanor Randolph, a member of the powerful New York Times editorial board, is the latest media luminary to write up her personal experiences with the K-machine. I congratulate Ms. Randolph on her purchase and will point her to 100 tips that might come in handy once she understands a little more about her Kindle. She’s no dummy, and I hope she’ll go on to appreciate some important nuances.

Gasp! Real books, actually 

Contrary to her worries, e-books won’t "kill off the publishing industry." Aren’t e-books real books, Ms. Randolph? They have words, sentences, chapters, even. As soon as my novel comes out in E, not just P, anyone in the world with a Net connection will be able to download it. The talking Afghan Hound at the Cosmos Club, the IRS building collapse, the CIA skullduggery, the rest—nothing will be missing from my publisher’s e-book edition. And contrary to the impression you indirectly give, Ms. Randolph, The Solomon Scandals or any other e-book will be safely readable at the beach or in the shower or bathtub if you take a few easy precautions.

Needed: More knowledge of E before rendering judgments

All this bathtub talk would not be so fit to print if it didn’t reveal the need for Ms. Randolph and others to get to know the medium better before rendering judgments. Right now she may regard E as just a pleasant little departure from paper books. But this could change as she and others accustom themselves to the new medium and want to own their e-books for real. And then some pesky questions will arise.

Do we really want Amazon to control the e-book business, considering that it refuses to make the Kindle able to natively read the ePub standard—not to mention its obnoxious business practices? E-book formats sound like an arcane, geeky matter, but they’re much more than that. If Ms. Randolph keeps buying e-books in Kindle format, what happens if she ditches her Kindle machine for a gizmo with a better screen but an inability to read Amazon’s proprietary format?  Even if the Kindle eventually could read ePub natively, Amazon could still thwart consumer choice by insisting on the use of its proprietary DRM.  Alas, DRM is less effective at "protecting" books from piracy than in preventing consumers from reading e-books on gadgets of their choice. Just ask the pirates who typed out e-editions of Harry Potter. The best DRM is none. The next best approach would be social DRM, which isn’t DRM in the traditional sense and can allow the same files to be used on many machines. Why penalize legal owners with these restrictions? That’s just helping the pirates and reducing sales to law-abiding readers.

Recommended reading

I’d heartily recommend that Ms. Randolph catch up with an article in The Bookseller for a good overview of the eBabel and DRM situations. The best solution, as I see it, is a standard format that would let today’s e-books be readable decades or even centuries from now, with the right library strategy in place.

Developed properly, by the way, the same format could work seamlessly with newspapers, too—allowing the Times and others to distribute updatable files of its editions that readers could download in one swoop. Such files could be readable on many machines, not just the Kindle, in a very attractive and easy-to-use format. Readers would easily be able to go back and forth between newspapers and books. Clicking on a link in a Times article on Iraq and the White House press office, for example, you could instantly call up all or part of Scott McClellan’s new book (or one taking the opposite view) and read the book with the same software. Fewer programs to clutter up your machine! In the other direction, books could point to Times articles.

Simply put, the New York Times could do well, not just good, by taking more interest in e-book formats once it gets beyond the read-in-bathtub phase.

Related: Amazon’s Road to Profitability: Toll Booths on Your Road to Readers, by Andrew Savikas (found via Peter Brantley).