You sell e-books. How do you feel about the Patriot Act, part of which I'll reproduce below? Reply to survey@teleread.org. Copy the text below and insert X in the right places. Or say "Yes" or "No" to the questions by number.

1. [ ] We've purged records to protect the names of readers now that the act exists. [Specifics and other comments welcome here and elsewhere.]

2. [ ] We'll be pleased to turn over the names if investigators come calling.

3. [ ] We're just plain neutral and aren't doing a thing.

4. [ ] Act or no act, we already have privacy protections in place.

We'd like to hear from publishers, sellers and distributors about their practices and policies. Already many public libraries and at least some sellers of paper books are taking steps to assure greater confidentiality of records. But how about the e-book industry, including the parts of it that offer services to public libraries?

So, by September 9, by let us know what you're doing or not doing, and whatever your opinions, tell us how you feel about the act as it applies to e-books. Indicate whether it's okay to quote you by name. In our summary of replies, we'll present the information in a neutral way.

If you're an e-book reader but not in the business, why not forward this survey to your favorite publisher? You can also share your own opinion--as an individual--in public or in private.

Meanwhile, below, I'll reproduce some relevant language from the Act:

`SEC. 501. ACCESS TO CERTAIN BUSINESS RECORDS FOR FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM INVESTIGATIONS.

`(a)(1) The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.

`(2) An investigation conducted under this section shall--

`(A) be conducted under guidelines approved by the Attorney General under Executive Order 12333 (or a successor order); and

`(B) not be conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

`(b) Each application under this section--

`(1) shall be made to--

`(A) a judge of the court established by section 103(a); or

`(B) a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court; and

`(2) shall specify that the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2) to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.

`(c)(1) Upon an application made pursuant to this section, the judge shall enter an ex parte order as requested, or as modified, approving the release of records if the judge finds that the application meets the requirements of this section.

`(2) An order under this subsection shall not disclose that it is issued for purposes of an investigation described in subsection (a).

`(d) No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section.

`(e) A person who, in good faith, produces tangible things under an order pursuant to this section shall not be liable to any other person for such production. Such production shall not be deemed to constitute a waiver of any privilege in any other proceeding or context...

From the start--back in the early '90s--TeleRead has suggested that taxes in one form or another be used to help fund a well-stocked national digital library system. Were we the first to do mention the T word? Not sure. But whatever the case, it was sheer joy to read The Copyright Cage, by assistant Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, in the July-August Legal Affairs. Yes, the T word comes up. Zittrain, co-counsel for the plaintiffs in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, writes:

Overhauling copyright will have costs to some. In the absence of tough copyright controls, investors may decide not to underwrite a $200 million blockbuster film because copying of the final product may unduly reduce their expected profit. But the cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed because the Internet offers such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas—a veritable Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology.

I pay my taxes. I have no idea how to calculate them, but I do what Turbotax tells me to. I'll pay a copyright tax, too, and willingly support artists whose work I appreciate, because it's the right thing to do and because it guarantees that more work will be made available to me. I'm not alone. So: Let's imagine a world in which Teddy Ruxpin can say whatever he wants, where kids can play with computers that are not digitally locked down, where bars and restaurants can stop measuring their TVs and their parking lots, and where amateur webcasters can create thousands of radio stations featuring songs we like, perhaps ones that sound familiar but that have new elements to them. We'll still buy concert tickets, books, and CDs and their digital descendants. They'll be competing with a lot more, though—created for fun, even if it happens to turn a profit.

Don't expect K-12 people to be e-book gurus. Simplify, simplify, simplify--whether you're a vendor or just an enthusiast trying to win a convert.

TeleRead has been saying that for years and advocating a standard consumer-level format to make life easier for technophobes. Schools are a crucial market since they can help ingrain the e-book habit at an early age. But so far the industry has flunked Marketing 101 by insisting on a tangle of different formats and onerous copyright-related controls.

Now, from WhatIsNew.com, comes a striking example of the need for simplicity. Read what happened when a WIN writer ran across a dedicated but tech-bewildered teacher in a used bookstore in Modesto, California, and tried to convert her to e-books.

She spent more time shuffling through her lists than she did looking at the books on the shelves. She had been there a while and had chosen only one book.

I couldn't stay quiet -- she looked miserable. I had to talk to this woman. The conversation went like this:

I asked, "Do you have a computer? Have you tried to find them in eBook format? "

"Uh…yeah," she said not looking at me.

"Just go download eBooks. You can get Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and lots of others that way." I choose these as examples because they were titles on her lists and I happened to have downloaded them for my niece a few weeks ago.

This caught her attention, "But then what do I do with them?"

"You're a teacher, right? Do the kids have computers in the classroom?

"Yeah. I've been buying used books all summer long, mostly at yard sales. But I still need a lot."

"Well, the students can use eBooks too." I went on to tell her where she can download eBook readers and eBooks. I made sure to mention that certain libraries offer them for free. I thought the price might peak her interest, especially since she was using her own money to buy books for her classroom.

She looked blank. Absolutely no comprehension of what I was saying. I'm not sure that she even connected eBooks with the paper book she was holding in her hand.

As kindly as I could and trying to avoid sounding patronizing I asked, "Do you understand what I’m saying?"

"Well, I want them to read the book," she replied flatly.

OK, so she believes eBooks are some sort of anthology or truncated book...

Most cash-strapped families, especially on the Great Plains, wouldn't have paid for medical information via the Net. Just why not trust the doctor? Why gamble the money on such a long shot?

Luckily for a sick child, some Great Plains folks did just that. Today's Washington Post quotes a Stanford University librarian on what followed.

Soon they were back at the doctor's office with a report of a new therapy. "They plunked it down and said, 'Hey, can we try this?' And guess what? It worked."

...The vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers--the largest of them based overseas--that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. The child's parents...paid for several papers before finding the one that led them to the cure.

Why is it, a growing number of people ask, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?

So why aren't 100 million people downloading e-books and reading them on their sharp-screened PDAs or dedicated devices? For more than a decade we've harped on the need for public libraries to popularize the technology--a Good Thing for the commercial side, too. Then e-books will reach the masses. In order to appreciate the technology, you need to use it, a frustrating but very real Catch-22. But imagine a mix of good content and the ability of Americans to borrow decent e-book readers from their local libraries. The right infrastructure online in the TeleRead vein, such as a good universal catalogue and more sophisticated linking and archival capabilities, would also help.

Doubt the above? Well, below, we'll offer some quotes from Edison, His Life and Inventions--a 1910 biography by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin. And then, in the technical standards area, we'll provide a less flattering parallel. But first the positive:

Nothing is more difficult in the world than to get a good many hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do something they have never done before. A very real difficulty in the introduction of his lamp and lighting system by Edison lay in the absolute ignorance of the public at large, not only as to its merits, but as to the very appearance of the light. Some few thousand people had gone out to Menlo Park, and had there seen the lamps in operation at the laboratory or on the hillsides, but they were an insignificant proportion of the inhabitants of the United States. A newspaper description of or a magazine article may be admirably complete in itself with illustration, but until some personal experience is had of the thing described it does not convey a perfect mental picture, nor can it always make the desire active and insistent. Generally, people wait to have the new thing brought to them, and hence, as in the case of the Edison light, an educational campaign of a practical nature is a fundamental condition of success.

Another serious difficulty confronting Edison and his associates was that nowhere in the world were there to be purchased any of the appliances necessary for the use of the lighting system. Edison had resolved from the very first that the initial central station embodying his various ideas should be installed in New York City, where he could superintend the installation personally, and then watch the operation. Plans to that end were now rapidly maturing, but there would be needed among other things--every one of them new and novel--dynamos, switchboards, regulators, pressure and current indicators, fixtures in great variety, incandescent lamps, meters, sockets, small switches...

A Eurocrat directive now in draft could menace technological competition, file swapping, free software, and even street music in EU countries. Fair use fans, beware!

So says The Draft IP Enforcement Directive - A Threat To Competition And Liberty, an article from Music Industry News Network. It's clear this proposal would harm not just the growth of the Internet but also competitors of Microsoft, Disney and the like, and even those of offline companies.

Here in the States, big companies are already using sleazy, DMCA-type laws against smaller competitors. Just look at the Lexmark case. Think big companies can't gouge even as it is? If printer ink "were gasoline, it would cost you $175,000 to fill your gas tank," says a story in the Chicago Times (via The Shifted Librarian). Eurocrats claim to be concerned about such outrages. But the draft would make them easier to pull off.

Alas, even Eurolaw has implications for us Yanks. The friendlier the global atmosphere is for copyright and patent zealots, the tougher time we consumers and Netfolks will have in the States. Don't see a threat here? Just read some excerpts from the article:

The EU's draft Enforcement Directive sets out to make it dramatically easier to enforce copyrights, patents, trademarks in the EU, and also to penalise people who tamper with technical mechanisms that are designed to prevent copying or counterfeiting. The directive has been welcomed by the music and film industries. But it divides the computer industry - Microsoft is for, while Sun is against - and the telecomms industry is strongly opposed. Supermarkets also stand to lose. Resistance is building, for example in the European press. Online liberties are also at risk, as well as commercial interests.

The law on 'intellectual property' - copyrights, patents and trademarks - has always been a difficult balance between protecting incumbent companies and fostering competition. The Directive seeks to shift the balance strongly in favour of the incumbents and against competitors. This will create winners and losers. The winners will mostly be large companies, such as Microsoft and Disney; the losers will include some large companies (such as phone companies) but also a lot of small firms and civil society interests...

The likely outcome is that IP owners will be able to bully their competitors much more effectively than before. For example, even before a substantive hearing takes place, a games accessory maker being pursued by Sony for making compatible memory cartridges could be liable to have their stock seized as evidence (article 8) and be forced to hand over all their correspondence with their suppliers (article 9)...

The proposed Directive will also undermine basic liberties in ways that will offend many influential groups in society, from academics and librarians through disabled people to musicians. At present, a busker who plays 'Mr Tambourine Man' in a subway station should in theory send CBS Records a cheque for a few cents for the performance royalties. At present, CBS sensibly do not bother to pursue buskers for tiny royalties; but in future, this activity must be criminalised. Draconian enforcement will have a chilling effect on large numbers of musicians, ranging from amateur bands who play pubs for small fees through to 'appropriation artists' whose art consists of sampling and reworking existing tunes.

Universities, libraries and the disabled: these groups will be hit by the restriction of 'fair use' and 'fair dealing' rights under copyright law. In future, publishers of electronic books will be able to use technical mechanisms to suppress the right to make copies for private study, or to use devices such as book readers that render published matter into formats accessible to the blind. Also, European universities will be immediately subject to the intense legal harrassment which the record industry has inflicted on some US universities over students swapping songs. If universities are held liable for the content that passes over their networks, then they will have to start policing this content - which will be profoundly contrary to academic values.

For years TeleRead has been preaching on the need for enough titles online if electronic books are to succeed in the library world. Still, even with limited collections, it's great to see libraries experimenting, period, especially in Europe where e-books in libraries are much rarer than here in the United States.

The Landowski library in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt is even letting users download e-books to their PDAs, Smartphones and Tablet PCs. Answering our request for statistics, the library's Alain Patez has kindly emailed us:

A thorough investigation is envisioned in September 2003.

Briefly thus, users are surprised that a library offers such a service. It is a way for them of discovering the multiple applications of their PDA. What they like about it is the mobility, the remote access, the fact of not having to [leave their homes to go to the library]. They regret the restricted number of titles (370 for the moment) and the duration of the loan, too short (8 days), the absence of French editors (Gallimard, Flammarion...)

Launching of the service: At the end of May 2003

Numbers titles: 350

Number of registered users: 36

Men: 29

Women: 7

Ages:

20-24 years: 1

25-54 years: 30

55 years and +: 4

Loan statistics:

67% of the loans relate to the literature of leisure (such as science-fiction)

33% of the loans relate to nonfiction works (such as tourist guides)