"A striking 67% of Internet users who download music say they do not care about whether the music they have downloaded is copyrighted," says a Pew-financed study of adult Americans' Net usage.

The same study also says young cash-strapped males of Afro-American or Hispanic heritage are more likely to download than the population at large. So are full-time students, most of whom are in effect giving the RIAA the finger.

Perhaps they and other Web surfers would hold copyright in higher esteem if CD prices were more reasonable and people didn't regard the big-time recording studios as a bunch of thieving greedsters. The biggest answer isn't "education"; it's lower CD prices and more modern business models.

So how many Americans are downloading? Well, Pew researchers say the number grew from 30 million U.S. adults in April 2001 to 35 million in April 2003.

And who's sinning?

Male Internet users are more likely to be downloaders than women by a modest margin (32% vs 26%). African-Americans and Hispanics are also more devoted downloaders than their white counterparts, with 37% of online African-Americans, and 35% of online Hispanics downloading music files, compared to 28% of online whites.

Thirty-eight percent of those earning less than $30,000 annually download music files, as opposed to 26% of Internet users earning more than $75,000 a year. Educational attainment shows a similar pattern, with 23% of online college grads downloading music files compared to 34% of Internet users with lower levels of education.

Consistent with our 2001 findings, young adults continue to dominate downloading—more than half of all Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 have ever downloaded music and almost 10% of those in that age group are online downloading music on any given day. At the same time, Americans between ages 30 and 49 are also downloading regularly, with more than a quarter (27%) of Internet users in that age cohort reporting that they have downloaded music to their computers. Americans over the age of 50 are far less likely to download music, with 12% of those over age 50 reporting the activity.

In a related finding, students are also more likely to be music downloaders than non-students. Fifty-six percent of full-time students and 40% of part-time students report downloading music files to their computer. Only a quarter of non-students report downloading files.

A glory of e-books is that they require less investment by publishers and readers. What's more, they can be called up instantly. Too, they are more open to "viral marketing"--fans can talk them up and spread the good news. With file sharing technology, publishers can let readers pass along sample chapters or even complete books. Various forms of protection, including the best one of all, fair prices, can help assure the right compensation for creators.

Luddites smug about the p-book world might consider a paragraph in a BusinessWeek review of recent novels about the industry:

Has book publishing fallen into a state of material and moral rot? Consider a few symptoms: Publishers' seasonal catalogs loaded with already-ripe-for-the-pulper schlock. Fat advances that are thinly disguised payoffs to prominent pols. "Authors" (athletes, porn stars, celebrity girlfriends) barely capable of penning a shopping list. Media conglomerates dependent on big-name writers, whose books get piled in giant stacks meant to stampede superstore customers. The list goes on.

"Like light from a distant star," he reflects, a publisher's catalog describes books "signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist."

From Circulating eBooks to PDAs in France Landowski Library Lends Life to eBooks--an item in InfoSynch:

Since May 2003, Landowski library in Boulogne-Billancourt has been running an experiment in lending eBooks for PDAs, Smartphones and Tablet PCs. The publishing company Mobipocket is the partner for this 12-month-long test which enables any registered reader of the library equipped with a compatible device to load various selected eBooks from an infra-red station located in the library. The works delete with time and include reference books like dictionaries and tourist guides. Readers will be able to access the works directly from home thanks to a web site specially adapted for the library.

Gemstar's e-book division is now more or less kaput, but what if outsiders bought it and you could buy similar hardware, new? Or at least benefit from a better bookstore arrangement--maybe even with fairer prices?

Perhaps there's hope. On the RCAebooks list, I've just spotted the following from an Alabamian named Mark Bodenhausen:

I am currently working on a proposal for a group of investors interested in Gemstar's eBook division. The proposal includes a revised business and marketing plan and I wanted to hear input from you all about what you specifically liked or disliked about your eBook.

How much would you be willing to pay for server space? Proposed fees are $20 a year for storage up to 10MB with an auto-upload feature for Outlook and Outlook Express email users that would provide digest versions of local email as well as documents.

The new chairman and CEO at the Recording Industries Assocation of America is Mitch Bainwol, who once was chief of staff for Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader. He'll replace Hilary Rosen.

Washington remains a well-bought place via campaign contributions and overpaid celebrity lobbyists, but a little hope comes from a recent column in the Post, one whose message Baiwol and the rest might want to consider: When Money Talks Too Loudly.

Actually I'm thinking in the long run. More and more members of the MP3 generation are reaching voting age, and many will want to swap movies, not just recordings. The broadband or compression technology will eventually be there to accommodate them. So what happens when Hollywood want to turn them into criminals? Future pols just might not be as helpful. Even today, pols are not absolutely predictable. As Post columnist Ann Applebaum writes in a different context about lobbyists:

A fine idea, hiring prominent people, but it's possible to overdo it. Congressional backbenchers rarely have the chance to portray themselves as crusading heroes, impoverished Davids fighting wealthy Goliaths. Attacking lobbyists--or their fancy, formerly important political friends--allows them to do it. So beware, influence buyers, of the unpredictable impact of money in Washington--where it really is possible to spend too much.

I'm all in favor of "academic freedom"--part of which is the right to come across as an imbecilic Luddite pandering to the like-minded. But should the American Association of University Professors have published an article as sloppy and dishonest as the one by S. David Mash, a "Ph.D. student in higher education administration at the University of South Carolina"?

The title of Mash's article is Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom: Can Academic Freedom Survive the Death of the Book? A better question, however, is whether the AAUP’s full credibility of the moment can survive Mash. If this example is representative work from him--let's hope not--then he strikes me as a Jayson Blair of academics.

In his ramblings for the May-June issue of Academe, Marsh apparently refuses to classify electronic books as real books. Here I carry around Dickens and Trollope, Wharton and Cather, in a PDA smaller than a typical paperback; and yet poor Mash in effect is telling me I am not reading real literature. Since when are e-books less rich in eloquence, facts and insights than the equivalent p-books? Does ink confer wisdom? Does paper assure that the ideas will be more fleshed out than on television? Does a cardboard spine with golden letters guarantee accuracy and integrity? Does a paper Mein Kampf end up as more uplifting than an electronic Bible? No, books are words, not cardboard, ink and paper, and it is downright Orwellian to say or even imply otherwise, or suggest that e-books are less valuable. An online dictionary, based in part on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, would appear to back me up with a definition alluding to "A printed or written literary work." Books can be written in bits and bytes, not just ink. "Write" can mean to "compose and set down," and the U.S. Copyright Office qualifies electronic books as a fixed form of expression eligible for copyright. End of story. Luddites and friends, however stubborn they often are on definitions, should just give up on this one.

To move on to the implications of the article's title, just what's this malarkey about e-books being at odds with academic freedom and presumably other forms of free expression? If anything, by lowering the costs of publication, the medium will add to, not lessen, freedom. Last week at little or no extra cost for Web hosting, TeleRead put online the full text of The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair's expose of corporate journalism. I'd never seen The Brass Check at my local public library, and many decades earlier, in fact, when Sinclair had self-published his work, sellers of paper had withheld some of the supplies he needed for reprints.

Now, however, thanks to TeleRead and some helpful volunteers in Indiana and Maine, every English-language reader on planet Earth can read Sinclair’s message if a Net connection is at hand. And that is even before the Project Gutenberg spreads our edition of The Brass Check to hundreds of servers throughout the world. I am delighted that the University of Illinois recently came out with its own version of The Brass Check, but it is the free electronic editions that will provide the ultimate rebuke to the would-be censors. Yes, oppressive Digital Rights Management and the shrinking of the public domain might somewhat crimp access to e-books in the long run, but even with the most nightmarish of scenario, I doubt that The Brass Check and other uppity works will vanish from Gutenberg's global network of servers.

A few of Mash's other gems appear below:

Mash: E-books are to be discussed in the same paragraphs as the old hype for educational TV. He cites The Problem with Pulcifer, a book about a future in which librarians steer children from books to television. In fact, Mash tells of a real-life institution of higher learning--Eastern Michigan University--that replaced some bookshelves with computers, TV and the rest.

TeleRead: Yes, if it is electronic it must be evil (sarcasm alert). Actually, months ago, in a rant against the displacement of p-books by media centers, TeleRead was already on the case. We oppose bookless libraries—unless students can read the same material by way of e-books. That's what TeleRead is all about: making it happen, not immediately but slowly over time, without instantly killing off every paper book. But some academic hacks are more interested in formulaically defending p-books than in looking ahead to a TeleReaderish era when people in the most remote areas of the world could read everything from Kant to Clancy. Even then p-books would survive. The charm is and will be there. May p-books live on like horse-and-buggy rides in Central Park. Just don’t cheat the world--especially the world beyond the privileged inhabitants of academia--of e-books.

Over the years, in books, in p-articles and on this Web site, I’ve told how children could grow up reading a rich collection of the classics and other books in electronic form. This vision won’t be reality to the fullest if we kill off or crimp public libraries and those in schools; we must not limit books--paper and electronic--to the elite. But if the worst happens, the villains will be the humans, not the machines.

Mash: E-books must be a failure because they haven’t caught on by now. “In early 2002,” Mash writes, “less than three years after it founded the ambitious Frankfurt eBook Awards, Microsoft withdrew financing and discontinued the related annual event.”

TeleRead: Wow. Imagine this man’s historical perspective. Was television doomed just because the masses didn’t buy sets from Day One? Point is, some people have cared enough about e-books to read them even without optimal technology. Not everyone feels this way, of course; we have not yet reached the era of electronic ink, where e-books will be similar to p-books, complete with flappable pages. But we are getting there. Meanwhile I find myself actually preferring to read books on my Dell Axim, which has a sharp screen and type that I can blow up to any size I want, using the Tiny eBook Reader program.

What’s more, I am laughing at Mash’s silly belief that e-books are a failure because Microsoft is not pushing them as ardently as in the past. Far from throwing in the towel, Microsoft simply decided that the quick money was not there. It’s not as if Microsoft has given up on the medium. If anything, as the Open eBook Forum and the Association of American Publishes have documented, use of e-books is growing far, far more rapidly than that of p-books--the sales of which in recent years have been rather disappointing on the whole.

Mash: "…in September 2002 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the results of an e-book study conducted with students at Ball State University. The study, supported by a $20 million grant from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, found that college students are not yet willing to replace textbooks with e-books. In fact, 'several students said that they thought e-books adversely affected the amount of information that they absorbed.'"

TeleRead: Look, this TeleBlog is just the Web log of a small Net-based group, not the august and presumably peer-reviewed Academe. Just the same, thanks to the nefarious electronic medium known as the Web, I have actually been able to read certain source material from Ball State—the 2002 study, The Usability of eBook Technology: Practical Issues of an Application of Electronic Textbooks In a Learning Environment. The researchers were Richard F. Bellaver, Associate Director Center for Information & Communication Studies, and Dr. Jay Gillette, Director Human Factors Institute, Ball State University. And even though most of the students were uncomfortable with e-books, I saw conclusions in the Bellaver-Gillette document that raise pesky questions about Mash’s summary.

The two researchers, while acknowledging the unpopularity of the technology actually used by the students, even wrapped up their paper with the following paragraph: "It appears that the current dumb eBook output device could be viable as a full screen storage medium for students. As an easy to carry, relatively inexpensive and completely reusable storage device, the eBook could fit into the hardware/software spectrum between the full personal computer and the PDA." Why didn’t Mash at least acknowledge this sentence? And how come he left out the fact that the researchers were working with already-obsolete technology? Jayson Blair territory. Bear in mind, too, that the students were reading textbooks, and that linear reading, such as novels, would not require cross-references as often. At any rate, devices with larger and sharper screens at affordable prices should help immeasurably. Such tablet-style computers will be on the way.

Alas, in summing up the Ball State study, even the Chronicle hardly distinguished itself. The headline said: "Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds." But far down in the story, the Chronicle at least had the decency to report that "whatever the complaints about the performance of the devices, there seemed to be little difference between the performance of e-book users and textbook users. Several quizzes were administered during the study, each with a maximum score of 50. The textbook users earned an average of 29 points per quiz, while the black-and-white and color e-book users earned average scores of 28.9 and 28.5, respectively."

On top of that, studies from two Midwestern schools and the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University suggest that students can be rather enthusiastic about e-books. Only 20 students took part in the later study, but 100 percent said they would recommended e-books to a friend for use in college courses. An amazing 84 percent answered “Yes” to the question: “If you knew that every one of 4 courses that you were taking next semester had the option of an e-book, would you be willing to spend $200, in addition to any textbook costs, to purchase one?"

Mash: The Web is inadequate as a research medium, and students rely heavily on traditional libraries.

TeleRead: Of course, the Web could be better, much better. Mightn't part of the reason be that people like S. David Mash are too busy repeating the old Luddite platitudes (sucking up to a dissertation advisor, perhaps?) to come up with solutions to the problem? Such as well-stocked national digital library systems in the States and elsewhere? Meanwhile, like it or not, research commissioned by the Pew Foundation shows that young people are relying on the Net in a massive way. Let's start addressing their needs by improving the quality and range of online information, especially from academia--and by improving linking and archiving and otherwise adding to stability. Or would universities rather take pride in withholding the goodies and not caring about a good online enviroment for serious research?

I could move on to Mash's other lapses of fact, logic and honesty, but I think it’s already clear how Blairish the AAUP-published essay is. I am tempted to send the editors of Academe the Web address of this TeleBlog posting—which is not a formal response, just my immediate thoughts—and demand that the magazine let me publish a full-length rebuttal of the Blair article if the organization really does care about "freedom" and open-mindedness. If nothing else, the AAUP should correct Blair’s, er, Mash’s, egregious misrepresentation of the researchers' conclusions at Ball State.

Despite my unhappiness with the essay as a whole, I’ll acknowledge that Mash did serve up some quotes with which I’d agree:

With uncanny prescience, Henry David Thoreau opined in Walden that “men have become the tools of their tools.” But we do have a choice and we must exercise it. As Eric Ormsby, professor of Islamic intellectual history, wrote in the October 2001 issue of The New Criterion: "If the past twenty-five years have proved anything, it is that, for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen."

Librarians don't just cheer when a best-seller sends eager readers their way. They also groan. How many copies to buy to accommodate the crowd? E-books, needless to say, could help get the best-sellers to library users in a hurry. And a TeleRead-style approach could offer a variety of lending models for to suit the needs of libraries and publishers.

Meanwhile the latest example of the challenge--let's call it that, rather than a problem--appears in yesterday's New Zealand Herald:

There are 504 requests for the latest J.K. Rowling bestseller at Auckland City's libraries, which have 106 copies checked out

...the borrowing list for the title began at the city's 17 libraries six months ago.

Those at the end of the waiting list are unlikely to get the book for six months.