Will a Mac tablet be on the way, as MacRumors.com speculated earlier this year? That would make sense, given Apple's strong interest in publishing applications, portable devices and education. Either Steve Jobs is lying, the project has somehow been delayed, or else he is a slave to his earlier dogmas but will change his mind sooner or later.

If a Mac tablet became a reality, it would be fascinating to see if Apple entered the e-book business as it did the music distribution business--hopefully with gentler DRM than the norm. Meanwhile here's the denial from Jobs, via a mix of paraphrases and quotes that Denise Howell picked up from him:

There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.

My bet is that in the future we'll all be moving to tablet PCs and virtual keyboards. Why? Less moving parts = less costs to the manufacturers. Want a "real" keyboard? Go buy one and plug it into the USB port. Tablets are the future - it's just obvious. I've said it before, I'll say it again, Microsoft got it right on this one.

Personally, I really love the idea of a tablet PC and have for years. I do a lot of reading on the web and it'd be great to be able to sit comfortably where ever I want to do it. Laptops just don't work that way, despite their name. I'm really hesitant to buy a M$ Tablet, though. If there was an option to buy a Tablet Mac, I'd get it tomorrow. Browse the web from my easy-chair, come back to the desk and throw it into a dock when I want to do some real work. Why doesn't Jobs see this?

It doesn't make sense. Let's hope he's throwing us a curve...

Part of a letter from Michael Hart--Project Gutenberg's founder:

As Project Gutenberg moves from 9,000 to 10,000 eBooks in the next 4 months, we only have 2 months' budget on hand. . .so right now it looks as if we will run out of money in October. . . .

This month my assistant and I are working with no salary. We might get paid later, if things start looking up.

We are going to need people to interface with the MAJOR granting agencies to get a good run [toward] a million eBooks!!!

We should approach the Fortune 500, Computer 100, and the 500 wealthiest people, too.

DRM for the most part still has miles to go in terms of user friendliness, but as E-Commerce Times notes, the music industry has made progress--as shown by the example of Apple's iTunes service. Now if Microsoft and the like in the e-book area can catch on.

Interestingly, PalmDigital, which has been one of the most stubborn companies in resisting a nonproprietary consumer e-book format that includes DRM Lite, as I'll call it, has a more enlightened DRM policy than many rivals. A PalmDigital exec noted to me recently on the eBook Community List:

Our DRM is not locked to a specific hardware device or set of devices--books are locked to the purchaser's name and credit card number, so you can install and unlock a book on any supported device. Upgrading all your hardware doesn't necessitate contacting anyone to ask for another activation. You can read the same book on as many devices as you own.

From LISNews.com:

Here's A Neat Chart from BookMagazine that shows how well the "classics" are selling these days. It's a look at the best selling classics in 2002, according to BookScan.

The top 5 are The Hobbit, Catcher in the Rye, Red Tent, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies.

What would have been really interesting was a column on this chart showing when each title is currently scheduled to become available in the public domain. That would be an eye-opener. Anybody have the time to do the research and the math?

E-books can be a sanity-saver during power failures--a point I made earlier this year.

Why, backlit reading devices can even double as flashlights. Besides, when the lights go out, what better chance to follow the example of TeleRead CTO James Linden and read Poe stories in the dark--which he's done even with the juice flowing?

But a blackout is as good an excuse as any, and I was happy to see e-books mentioned in Blackout survival: How did you do?, a column by Tom Gromak of the Detroit News. He writes:

Additionally, I learned that laptops and iPods and eBooks are a lot like cars: It's best to keep their 'tanks' topped off in case you need them. I had let two of the three devices - the laptop and the iPod MP3 music player - run down to the point where they were useless as entertainment distractions during the outage. The one bright spot was my almost fully charged RCA eBook, a nifty device the company no longer sells with a crisp, clear backlit screen for reading digital texts. It kept me busy for hours on Thursday night.

If you write technical books and want to author the electronic variety, check out Adam Engst's new article in TidBITS. It offers the perspective of a best-selling writer in the tech genre. Some specifics:

All that said, the economics of ebook publishing still don't, for the most part, compare to traditional book publishing. An average computer book might sell 8,000 to 12,000 copies and generate between $5,000 and $15,000 for the author. In contrast, my experience is that ebooks are more likely to sell in the 200 to 2,000 range and generate more like $1,000 to $4,000 for the author. The big difference is in the time and effort necessary to create an ebook--it may be a matter of days or weeks from start to finish instead of months for a traditional book.

The smarter booksellers already know. Oppressive Digtal Rights Management can wreak havoc on sales. Consider the inconvenience that DRM inflicts on customers who want to read the same book on different machines, or share it in reasonable ways with friends. Not to mention another dark side, the nightmares for libraries. As ALA copyright maven Carrie Russell points out in Library Journal, DRM can be a major threat to fair use.

Among the examples Ms. Russell gives? A blind library user "borrows an e-book from the library and finds that his text-to-voice software cannot 'read' the product." Right she is! None other than Hillary Clinton's new book, if it's like other Microsoft-format titles with full protection, appears to have come out without the capability for the blind to hear it in the Microsoft version.

Most obnoxiously of all, dark-suited thugs can go to court and jail or bankrupt you under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if you try to bypass DRM. This is not balanced copyright law, but rather part of entertainment moguls' jihad against the pocketbooks and freedom of consumers.

So is there a better approach to DRM, if that's what DC, Hollywood and certain publishers insist on?

One possible tack, for publishers set on the technology, would be DRM Lite, a nonproprietary, more convenient form that could be associated with the Universal Consumer Format that my friend Jon Noring has advocated. Yes, there are risks from the open approach. But the closed one also seems to invite cracking, as Microsoft and Adobe know all too well.

But what does Ms. Russell herself consider to be acceptable DRM? In the Library Journal article of August 15, she writes:

A "good DRM" system, obviously, would allow fair uses. Instead of having a system skewed in support of the content community's interests, good DRM would also provide rights to users as well as copyright holders. This is probably the most difficult problem to address because DRM technologies do not yet distinguish between fair use and piracy. They cannot apply the judgment necessary to determine fair use. They can only quantify and limit copying, access, and other uses.

Libraries should be able to lend digital works. "First sale" allows that once a lawful copy is purchased, the owner should be able to lend or give away that copy. Works in the public domain must be clearly labeled and be free of DRM controls. DRM systems should only collect that information on individuals necessary to complete transactions. Personal data should not be collected and stored.

Good DRM would facilitate archiving and the continued availability of works. DRM should not be dependent on a particular hardware platform or software application, so the library buyer continues to have choice in the marketplace. Finally, the development of DRM standards should be an open process that allows for public participation and is not solely dependent on meeting the needs of the entertainment industry.

1. ALA's efforts within the Open eBook Forum to develop acceptable DRM. I wish the best of luck to Ms. Russell and the ALA. The big issue, as I see it, is whether the large software players, along with certain publishers, will want "good DRM"--given the past prejudice in favor of proprietary solutions, even at the expense of user convenience. Ideally the OeBF in the end could give us DRM Lite and use the right standards to reduce technological complexities for publishers and consumers alike.

2. A Creative Commons-style approach, which, as described by Ms. Russell, would "use metadata to make a user overtly aware of the rights being asserted by a copyright holder. Changes in the copyright law over the last several years have made copyright 'automatic.' Once an original work is created and fixed in a tangible medium, it is protected by copyright. DRM then should allow creators to assert the rights they retain and those they don't want. For example, a creator might allow a nonprofit educational institution use of works without prior permission. If copyrights are known, users will easily discover uses they can exercise without any infringement concern." This approach is hardly a full solution, but at least would help address the fair use issue and make it easier for copyright holders to be less restrictive. None other than the TeleBlog has a link to a Creative Common license in plain English for human use.

3. A proposal from Mairead Martin of the University of Wisconsin, Grace Agnew of Rutgers University and others--topic of a DigiLib article. As Ms. Russell writes, the plan "uses 'middleware' to provide DRM solutions for Internet2 educational and research institutions. Middleware—a software layer that exists between the network and applications like DRM--could authenticate and authorize users and secure content and ensure user privacy.

"It could also allow end users to state their use requirements. For example, a user may request to make a fair use copy of a document. Middleware would guide the user through a set of prompts that would authorize the action while maintaining user privacy. This model, being supported by the National Science Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, Educause, and others, assumes that individuals are acting lawfully--exercising exemptions allowed under the copyright law--without first requesting permission from a copyright holder."

In the worst-case scenario, DRM could control the right to read in and of itself. Readers would have access to text under certain conditions defined by the content holder. They would have to pay to read (raising equity of access issues) and/or identify themselves before being allowed to read (raising privacy issues). The idea of "browsing the stacks" before deciding to commit to reading a specific book is eliminated by some applications of DRM. Julie Cohen, a law professor at Georgetown University, describes this as a threat to "the right to read anonymously." Simply put, if DRM and the legislation that supports it continue to be developed solely, in theory, as an attempt to limit piracy of digital content, it portends myriad negative long-term implications for how our society will be able to access and interact with information.

While certain e-book folks--ideally a minority--are licking their chops over all the money they'll squeeze from customers via DRM, some nasty little statistics have appeared. It's from a Yahoo-related study of how young people spend their time. As described in Internet Advertising Report:

The study found that the Internet has dramatically altered media consumption in this demographic. While the stereotypical teen used to be thought of as a couch potato, that image should now be altered to be a computer geek. According to Harris, youths spend 16.7 hours online in the average week, against 13.6 hours watching TV and 12 hours listening to the radio. The phone occupied 7.7 hours. Unsurprisingly, books and magazines not related to school came in dead last at 6 hours.