Just received from Loughborough University in the U.K. Please fill out Gemma Towle's useful online questionnaire for her Ph.D. in electronic books.
posted by David Rothman at 6:11 PM | permanent link

(Welcome Slashdotters! See update.)

“Winston Smith,” an unemployed American high school dropout self-named after 1984’s hero, is one of the three authors of the Convert Lit program that cracks Microsoft Reader format.

A new British law will force the present host of the Convert Site, Dan Jackson Software, to shut off the downloading later this month. But Winston hopes the crack can be available elsewhere on a high-profile site in a country with the right legal environment. Any offers? Send ’em to Dan.

His goal, and Winston’s, isn’t the encouragement of piracy. In fact, in correspondence with me, Winston describes himself as a big buyer of paper books. And I suspect that within the bounds of his limited budget he probably would be reading and paying for the electronic kind, too, in a major way, if he owned the right handheld.

So why Convert Lit? Easy. Winston, as a matter of principle, wants you to be able to back up Microsoft Reader books and not worry about “protection”-related hassles. Horror of horrors, you can even take the illicit ASCII and enjoy the books with software not blessed by Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates. That’s what is possible technically. Legally it’s virtually impossible in the United States, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says the average American can’t circumvent copy protection--even to make backups or share a book with a close friend. Psst! You’re not even supposed to discuss the details of circumvention, the First Amendment be damned!

In line with the aptly Orwellian pseudonym, Winston identifies Microsoft and its ilk with Big Bro. As he views it, corrupt copyright law is dumbing us down and reducing our interest in reading. “These days, who reads--except for some old coots? And perhaps a couple of tech-crazed geeks.” At the same time, his thoughts nicely jibe with my theory that disgruntled consumers make the best revolutionaries. I’m not talking machine-guns and Molotov cocktails, just an uppity assertion of Americans’ rights to own books, not merely rent them or otherwise be at the mercy of control-fixated publishers and software companies. Winston’s motives are a mix of the noble and juvenile--he admits to a crush on Sabrina Lloyd, the movie-and-TV star, and a desire to talk her up and win her attention--but at the core of his Convert Lit crusade is his desire to let Netfolks enjoy books as desired within fair use, not just Microsoft’s way.

A fan of both Pocket PC eBooks Watch and TeleRead, Winston dropped me several e-mails after reading of my own series of personal horrors with Reader. He wrote from a Russian e-mail address protected with perhaps a dozen proxies between me and the Web interface. Honest, Mr. Chief Software Architect, I haven’t the slightest idea who or where he is. A related letter, however, passing on Winston’s pointer to a DMCA-related article, came from Dan Jackson. While I lack absolute proof, never having seen Winston at work at the keyboard, turning out Convert Lit, I’ve every reason to believe that he’s the real McCoy.

If Bill Gates and friends are clueful in this case, they won’t sic Legal on Winston and Convert Lit colleagues. Instead the Chief Software Architect should turn the matter over to Marketing and Public Relations. Winston in effect provides some great insights into why “Microsoft” is a hated name among millions and why e-books sales for the whole bloody industry are a pathetic $10-million or so a year--a fraction of Tom Clancy’s annual income.

Of course, like Winston, I wonder if Microsoft doesn’t care a lot more about DRM ideology and related profits than about e-books to enlighten the masses. Within e-bookdom, Bill Gates is an anti-Carnegie. If he wants to refute this, perhaps he will stop imposing his expensive proprietary ways on publishers and readers and go for the open-standards approach that Microsoft executive Dick Brass promised in a press release announcing the establishment of the Open eBook Forum. We badly need a universal consumer format for e-books in the spirit of the laudable vision championed by Brass some five years ago at the news conference where I stood within a few feet of him. The format could even work with DRM Lite, as I’ll call it, a nonintrusive, nonproprietary form of the technology. DRM Lite would not be crackproof, but at least be a way to make legalized file-sharing easier through tracking of royalties, with suitable precautions in place to safeguard privacy.

But so far, I believe that Microsoft and the like would not be the least interested in such a compromise.

This is America in the era of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--one of the most prescient buys that Hollywood and other copyright interests made during the Bill Clinton era through millions in well-targeted campaign contributions. The irony is that the DMCA is actually a threat to our country’s long-term economic prosperity and national security. Foreign hackers hate us. The DMCA will be a good recruiter for cyber-terrorists--including perhaps those in Iraq, for which the Bush Administration has hired Hilary Rosen, mouthpiece for the recording industry, to help rewrite copyright law. And that’s not the DMCA’s only con. With the DMCA as a crutch, U.S. companies are relying on fifth-rate technology rather than paying programmers to do the job right. What’s more, if the corporations were smarter, they could serve their shareholders better and turn to nonproprietary protection techniques that receive more scrutiny than proprietary technology and related gimmicks do.

For an example of “protection” at its most obnoxious, consider the Digital Rights Management and related technologies associated with Microsoft Reader. Microsoft has squirreled away tens of billions in spare cash, and yet an unemployed high school dropout, who tries to make his living fixing computers and doing manual labor, has played a key role in bypassing this substandard “protection.” Winston, though obviously damn bright as a self-taught programmer, would be the first to admit he’s hardly the ultimate at his craft. And yet he and his friends could still crack Convert Lit. You’d be surprised how absent-minded and cheap a megaconglomerate can be about the little details. That’s my main theory here. Another theory is that proprietary DRM is inherently inferior, so maybe cash wouldn’t have entirely mattered anyway, given the approach used. Questions also exist about the basic concept of DRM and whether it can ever truly be crackproof. Whatever the circumstances, however, my belief is that lawyers for DRM zealots at various corporations are pocketing the money the programmers should have gotten—if not at Microsoft, then elsewhere. The lawyers intend to rely on the DMCA, a law blithely passed by fellow lawyers who make up so much of our well-bought Congress.

You needn’t be a geek to be upset about this. If you’re truly an American patriot, you’ll hate the DMCA for its restrictions on free speech. And if you live in the U.K. or other countries saddled now with DMCAish restrictions, then you’ll be a British patriot, a French patriot, a German patriot, a whatever-your-nationality patriot. So far in the past few days, however, perhaps fearing Microsoft, the media seem to have wimped out. I’ve yet to see a single article about the effect of an EU-inspired law on Dan Jackson, who must now stop hosting his Convert Lit site in the U.K. Even bloggers, letting the mainstream media set their agendas, have essentially ignored Jackson’s plight. Anti-DMCA articles are still appearing, but Dan Jackson, at the cutting edge, has vanished from headlines.

Still, the pesky DMCA controversy lives on. Here in the States, a bright young Princetonian now finds himself the target of a $10-million DMCA-related suit from a greedster company trafficking in Digital Rights Management technology. His crime? Pointing out how use of a shift key could bypass SunnComm’s lame CD copy protection. Oh well, given the pathetic sales of the e-book industry, one wonders how much Microsoft and publishers could sue Winston and buddies for. In the case of e-book publishers, Winston might even argue that consumer-hostile DRM is actually costing the industry and that maybe AOL Time Warner and the rest owe him some hefty consulting fees. Yes, I’ll issue a satire alert for that last sentence. The rest of this TeleBlog posting, however, is as real as the signatures on the checks to DMCA-supporting pols in search of campaign gifts.

Below I’ll present Winston’s thoughts. I’ve organized them by topic and lightly edited them for style but have not censored the good stuff except for some details that might help reveal his identity. Please note that the term “Convert Lit” is an exercise of editorial judgment, and that I’ll let Winston use an earthier name below. Needless to say, I don’t agree with every syllable Winston writes, but he deserves a full say, if we consider the significance of Convert Lit, whatever the name.

Meanwhile, given Microsoft’s presumable wish that all mentions of Convert Lit vanish, I would encourage Netfolks to copy this posting immediately and circulate it as freely as they would like while crediting teleread.org, so that readers know where to go for updates. And now here’s Winston on Winston.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

I am an American citizen by birth. I am over 21. I am a high school dropout, and failed to arrive on any college campus, even with the incentive of weeklong drug-filled orgies. Everything I know about computers and programming I have taught myself. I am currently unemployed. What little money I make comes from fixing computers or doing the odd manual labor job. Lack of a college degree is a true impediment to getting hired.

WINSTON’S REAL NAME FOR THE PROGRAM

I have a twisted sense of humor. Clit is clit, not Convert Lit. The original idea was that Microsoft would feel compelled to denounce the program by its precise name.

We never got the chance to laugh, though. To date, Microsoft has not once mentioned Clit, nor have they acknowledged that such a program exists, to the public, or, I am sure, to the publishers. That the C could be conveniently made to stand for "Convert" was an intended amusement.

I am solely responsible for the quickly-thrown-together Graphical User Interface in asm. It’s entitled "Cuntlit" and named with the same idea in mind as Clit. The acronym is "Convert Until Now Transformed: Lit Into Text." The use of Charisma Carpenters' backside for elements of the user interface was an obscure joke that no one caught.

HIS MAIN MOTIVES

I am a rabid fan of free speech, regardless of how much I might disagree with what is being said. My other motivations follow those of "Coauthor in the Shadows."

In his words: "My motivations are to break DRM systems for my own education and to force providers of these systems to make their systems more complicated and bug-ridden until they cannot be effectively maintained. Keeping Clit as a useable program is to assuage my guilt at making the end users suffer through this process." Coauthor in the Shadows, naturally, is in possession of more maturity than I claim to have.

Beyond twitting Microsoft, and causing it to cripple LIT more and more, until the program is so unfriendly and complicated that the whole format collapses under its weight proves impractical in other ways; beyond letting normal, law-abiding citizens actually use what they have legally purchased; beyond the fulfillment of doing what I consider an ethically required endeavor, Clit for me is just my way of getting Sabrina Lloyd’s attention.

Aren't all the best things in life done for a woman? I am a diehard fan and harbor the dream of someday meeting her. As an incidental benefit, Clit will give me the voice to bring attention to her goodness. It's not the best ulterior motive, but it's not the worst.

That--and, hey, the coding experience I'm gettin--is also valuable.

THE DUMBING DOWN OF (HUMAN) READERS

The problem for e-books is utter apathy. People simply do not care. In fact, for the most part, people simply do not read. For a fascinating eye-opener check out John Taylor Gatto's site, which contains The Underground History Of American Education. Did I get this link from TeleRead? If not, it should have been there!

A quick synopsis, even if it doesn’t give “Underground” full justice, is that we've been dumbing down people for centuries. These days, who reads except for some old codgers and perhaps a couple of tech-crazed geeks? Sure, there are best-sellers. There are some great authors, as well, some who've been around for decades, and some with their first book. Literature isn't dead, just free thought.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but, I think most people are missing the issue. With DRM, for example, Microsoft isn't trying to restrict content so much as your ability and desire to have the content. When it becomes too frustrating to actually get books, and too nerve-racking to read them--well, look at average computer users now. Their systems crashes a few times, or a virus trashes them, and they shrug their shoulders and go look to see what’s on TV.

Evil conspiracy? You bet. Fewer people reading, more people tuned in to the 'truths' on Fox news. More made on advertising. And on it goes.

When Microsoft owns every avenue of content distribution, what alternative will you have--especially when companies start refusing to produce dead-tree copy, because "It’s more cost-effective to release electronically"? Who cares if you’ve got to have the perfect and 'compatible' setup needed to read it? Paranoid as this sounds, I'm afraid it will quickly become the grim reality. And, just like musicians, the authors and consumers (moo!) are the ones who will be screwed.

A PRO-WRITER, ANTI-PIRACY STATEMENT

I actually buy a lot of dead-tree books. I'm wishy washy about online reading. I have no problem, obviously, about being at my computer for hours reading, but I enjoy the feel of a book, and, it's rather hard to take my computer outside. Of course, if I had actual e-book hardware, that probably would change. How's that for an irony, considering how many .lits are read on Pocket PCs--even though the PC end of it is also important?

Now here's something for you--I downloaded Stephen King's On Writing from the ebooks newsgroup. I enjoyed it so much that I bought the dead-tree version for me, as well as another copy as a birthday present for a friend. Greg Ilse was another one I checked out online, and now have a good deal of his books in hardcopy.

When I was a youngster, I used to check tons of books out of the library weekly. In fact, I used to have the bookmobile bring me books from the big city. Now I own most of the books I enjoyed then. I don't want to steal from the authors, and I think many authors understand the ‘new’' medium (check out Orson Scott Card's excellent article regarding CD piracy).

I think authors in general are going to benefit when there is an open system, simply because there are so many people like me. If something entertains you, or stimulates, or whatevers you to such an extent that you feel compelled to tell people about it, you're going to feel guilty if you don't support the author by purchasing it.

Sure, we all enjoy getting stuff free, but most of us also understand that without paying for it, there won't be any more produced. It's that simple. The only reason pirates exist is because people don't feel that what they're buying is worth the cost it's demanded they pay for it!

I point to non-crippled shareware as an example, though that's a tenuous one since people seem to feel differently about software. Still, the model works. Books that are easily accessible, for a trivial cost--less than a haircut’s!--are going to sell big in plain text. Add ClearType-ish tech on top of that, and you've got a real winner. Make it a huge hassle? Who wants to mess with it?

Further, if you're allowed to do what you wish with what you've bought, companies will spring up to take these electronic books, and bind them for you or perform other services. You could purchase all of Dan Simmon's Hyperion series and have a company bind all of it into a great tome you could keep handy. Or maybe all of Asimov's Foundation series. There's a lot of possibilities for the consumer, and the author doesn't care, because he's already gotten paid

Now, if someone tries to sell a volume like mentioned above, or to put the files online, they should get nailed and ostracized! I point again to Orson Scott Card’s article.

The biggest social deterrent is that of society's attitudes. Thing is, right now all the media companies are treating their users like thieves: How should one expect users to act if they’re treated that way?

Oh, and here's something else to think about. Why wouldn't you just snag a plain text online? Because you want to be sure that, if you're a fan of the author, what you're reading is what he or she actually write! With an open format, you'd be worried about modifications, you'd want to get it from the 'source,' simply because you can trust its authenticity then. This won't matter to some, but it'll matter to most. Electronic books could be extremely profitable to authors, but, again, not to those entrenched between them and their fans, trying to keep things the 'old way'.

WINSTON’S QUESTIONS FOR PUBLISHERS

Are you aware that books sold in the .lit format are able to be easily pirated? Are you aware that DRM does not work? Are you aware of the despair and frustration releasing these books in .lit is causing your customers? Microsoft can try to Trojan its way into anything it wants, but if no one will touch Microsoft DRM, Gates will get nowhere.

E-BOOK DRM AS A TROJAN HORSE FOR “TRUSTED COMPUTING”

What you may not have seen is the specter of Trusted Computing, which, for all intents and purposes, is already here. The only way to defeat that--and this I have on very good authority from bright minds--is if the users rebel.

The technology has reached a point where defeating it becomes a matter of obtaining hardware that is hard to get, even for knowledgeable people who can afford it. Right now, the wedge to open the door for the Trojan is simply uncomfortable. It's software, it can be defeated. Trusted Computing is hardware-implemented: The wedge grows by a foot, gets six inches wider and isn't lubed. Have you read lately about the little black boxes that have been in certain cars since the 1970s, and only just now people are hearing about? It's not even funny about how easily the mass consumers are going to swallow it, and not even know it. First, make sure everyone has the hardware, then start using it.

Microsoft is great with the long term planning--and the best in the biz with PR. "Trusted Computing will stop viruses from running on your computer.”

A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

Were I in the Soviet Union, I could publish Clit under my real name, with no fear of being thrown in prison for it; at least, as long as I never visited the United States. Russia is becoming more like America was, and our lawmakers are doing their best to combine all the worst policies in the history of Russia and Germany to forge our future. Dan Jackson at great risk agreed to host for us--great risk because the UK law was unclear, even of the hosting seemed to be legal. That loophole was closed last Friday. No one has yet come forward with an alternative, and, were there to be a jurisdiction that allowed websites with content that large corporations found offensive to be published, I'm sure our government would find reason to call them terrorists and bomb them into oblivion.

As to the apathy, perhaps it's best summed up: "They came for the e-book crackers, but I didn't crack e-books, so I didn't speak..." A program demonstrating faults with a proprietary format being pushed by Microsoft isn't nearly as juicy news as a 13-year-old getting sued by the RIAA. People simply dismiss it as the usual cat mouse of companies and crackers. I think it a sign of just how much the general public's ability to think ahead, or think at all, has been lost.

The only bright spot, when I’m caught, is that maybe the EFF will be there, and that we can make the mainstream aware of just what the DMCA actually does. Will piracy replace terrorism as the rallying call of lawmakers, as terrorism replaced pedophilia, and pedophilia replaced communism as a catch all for laws that restrict freedom in the name of protecting people? (And think of the children, for the love of God!)

ON THE MEDIA’S LACK OF MAJOR INTEREST THESE DAYS IN THE HORRORS OF MICROSOFT READER

Your recent experience with Microsoft Reader is the norm. It’s not covered on mainstream sites (or did I miss the ‘Microsoft Forces Users To Bend Over Again’ article on Wired?) or discussed outside the few forums where e-book users gather. Really, people are ignorant to the fact that soon, when they buy a DVD it will only be viewable a specified number of times until it's "past limit."

If they don't care about their packaged eye-candy, what’s going to awaken them from their slumber to care about media that'll actually stimulate their minds?

ON TELEREAD

Something like TeleRead would be highly profitable for the authors, and for those managing the system if it were private, without overcharging the consumer.

TeleRead looks like a step in the right direction, and that's probably why it will never be a reality. If authors can be paid directly for their work, and consumers can happily access what they want, when they want, and how they want, where in that chain does the distributor get their cut? Or the monopolistic entity wishing to control the content, and sanitize it, and lock it so you can't even borrow it?

Of course, I still hope that someday I’m anonymously publishing ways to get around TeleRead’s “Parential Protection” controls instead of sickly RSA implementations.

MORE ON SABRINA LLOYD

Unfortunately, Sabrina's married. It’s her personality and intelligence I like most about her. No one’s heard of her because she's not the mainstream beauty ideal, but, wow, what a sparkle! Sabrina Lloyd certainly deserves the attention: She's been doing these little independent films which never get distribution, even if Dopamine was well received at Sundance. They simply aren't the blow-stuff-up flicks so popular today. Plus, she actually reads for the sake of reading, not for the show of reading the “right” book, the game that so many celebrities play. Okay, okay, I've just got the usual geek obsession thing going on, but I'm proud of it--let the world tremble with absolute confusion at the mere mention of her name!
posted by David Rothman at 11:59 AM | permanent link

I wish the Terminator good luck in governing California.

That said, let's remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger to a great extent muscled his way to victory--through his Hollywood glamour and campaign donations from the Beverly Hills crowd.

Power People across the Potomac from me will take notice, and one wonders what the results will be in Washington. Yet more influence for Hollywood in government and the media? We already have talk of Bill Clinton being the next Jack Valenti, and meanwhile Hiliary Rosen is a regular on CNBC as a guest commentator, while K Street on HBO hypes up lobbyists.

Now with the Schwarzenegger win, the country's two ego capitals would seem to blur even more. Maybe the day will come when you can't even vote if you're behind on your cable bill.
posted by David Rothman at 3:05 AM | permanent link

Red Beard, as I’ll call him, a refugee from an oft-chilly region of Europe, has written in from Brazil to share a few observations on local e-book software, Convert Lit and Bill Gates. Slightly edited, they appear below. Just so the pirate-sounding pseudonym doesn't mislead anyone, Red Beard is not a software bootlegger--merely a guy interested in fair use.

On Brazilian e-book software and the open standards question

Only related technology that's attracted my attention to-date is the DocPro e-reader. This local brew, now in version 5.5, uses a proprietary browser plug-in Citrix ICA client. DocPro search capability seems formidable across all video, audio, old manuscripts, musical scores, microfilm, blueprints and drawings, text or whatever digital formats. For example, Rio's National Library Web site uses DocPro. You can choose an English version of the library although naturally most texts are in Brazilian Portugese. Try typing Napoleao+Bonaparte in the library's Search window and DocPro technology will toss out a host of documents available from 1811 to the present in under a second, if you have the free plug-in installed. Other private and public organizations with humongous archival resources and needs, e.g. Petrobras, the oil giant and current world leader in deep-sea drilling technology, also use DocPro.

More generally, my gut feel is Brazil's 170-million population is a prime candidate for the open e-standards you preach in TeleRead and lags badly when compared to India, the PRC and others who have been scanning docs into digital format for some time now. There's still too much of a not-invented-here syndrome and arrogance in Brazil, probably a remnant of the old Informatics Reserve Law that once deprived ordinary well-educated Joes and Janes of any practical access to IT other than that via mainframes as in their banking.

Convert Lit

David, your comments on software and free speech match my own suspicions as a ConvertLit 1.4 user. I take my inalienable rights seriously too.

Bill Gates

Forgive the license, but tact was never my forte.

You're a smart guy with a great message millions would endorse, but it rings senseless to me to beat up on the CSA (Chief Software Architect for whom, heaven forbid, I hold great admiration in the main) as so many are wont to do when his ex-partner Paul Allen is so willing to put real money into philanthropic projects that resonate worldwide. Have you tried approaching Allen? You've got a heck of a proposal.

If he gives you the time of day, tell him there's a red-bearded foreigner down in Brazil (green card holder too) who'd chuck everything to work in a worldwide project of the scope you envision for TeleRead. Just nod.
posted by David Rothman at 4:45 AM | permanent link

If the world were fair, Daniel Akst, not Bill Gates, would control a $41-billion personal fortune. Then an electronic Carnegie might exist for real--and maybe put thousands of e-books online for free and for eternity.

Akst, however, albeit a pauper by Gates’ standards, just might have a few other things going for him. His first novel, St. Burl’s Obituary, ended up a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner award, and his second, The Webster Chronicle, is still better. As a creator Akst has a direct interest in copyright. What’s more, as a former trustee of the one-room library in Tivoli, NY, he can appreciate the need to spread the books around. Too, as a contributor to the Carnegie Reporter, Akst has a connection with the philanthropic legacy of Andrew Carnegie. In the fall 2003 issue of this magazine from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, he shares a number of thoughts that ideally will intrigue Carnegie II in between his duties as Chief Software Architect.

Below I’ll filter a few of Daniel Akst’s ideas through my TeleRead prism; just please remember that Akst himself does not obnoxiously lecture Gates as I’m doing here. If the Chief Software Architect wants, by the way, he can suffer the limitations of the Adobe format and read the PDF directly.

Lesson One: Get Serious about Libraries as Poor People’s Universities

Maybe it helped that Andrew Carnegie’s business was steel, not selling software and other intellectual property, but it turns out that the Carnegie wasn’t exactly a pay-per-read zealot. He devoted more than a speck of his fortune to free public libraries. In Akst’s words, “Andrew Carnegie understood how well libraries could function as the launching pads of social mobility, which is why, in 1881, he started using his wealth to fund them. In those days there were few free public libraries, and working people had relatively limited access to reading materials. Carnegie helped to change that. His money subsequently built 2,509 public libraries all over the English-speaking world.”

To Bill Gates’ great credit, the Chief Software Architect has donated massively toward public health and medical research, but his library contributions still remain an embarrassingly tiny fraction of the $41 billion in his personal fortune, or of his $25 billion endowment, belying the massive buildup of Gates as Carnegie reincarnated. Perhaps I’m overlooking something. But going by the Web site of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his library spending would appear to be just $226 million as of January 1, 2003, or mere crumbs in Gatesian terms. Yes, Gates-financed library computers are everywhere, but that’s more a result of the low-cost of technology than it is of true generosity toward library users.

The Chief Software Architect would do well to read a Library Journal article to which his foundation’s Web site links. “About half of adult library computer users,” the magazine says, "have household incomes below $25,000, compared with 30 percent of the population of those states, according to the U.S. census.” The article goes on to say that the poor are “more likely to live farther from their libraries and more likely to be discouraged from using library computers because of long waiting times, strict use periods, and high printing costs. More often than wealthier patrons, economically disadvantaged patrons think their libraries should be open more hours. African Americans and Native Americans are the most likely to be confronted by these difficulties.”

Gates’ donations of library computers have been laudable, but as I see it, the real solution is the same as TeleRead's motto. “Bring the e-books home!”--at all hours--by encouraging the production of low-cost computers that libraries could lend out, and that eventually would be affordable enough for even the poor themselves to buy even without help. We already know about the relationship between the number of books at home and the success children enjoy in school. The e-books themselves won’t mean much without family-oriented programs for teachers and librarians to encourage reading, but they’ll be a start. Even middle class children could benefit if books were as close to them as tablet computers screens.

But how to finance e-books and other content that the poor and the rest of us ought to be able to enjoy for free at home just like paper library books? So far Bill Gates has been Scrooge. As reported in the Washington Post, the Chief Software Architect bought several rare editions of The Great Gatsby, supposedly among his favorite books, for the library of his lakeside mansion. And yet he has refused to buy up rights to Gatsby for the Internet, much less put a vast collections of books online.

Although digital libraries such as netLibrary have stepped in to do what Bill Gates should have been, providing actual books in electronic form, they are for-fee services with collections a fraction as large as those that Gates could provide. How about some Gates money to augment tax money for an online collection of e-books--ideally through a massive, endowment? This is David Rothman speaking, not Daniel Akst, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Akst privately felt likewise.

What Akst does make clear is that digitized knowledge could be a godsend for the Third World, not just Americans in urban slums or isolated mountain hamlets. That would be in line with the thoughts of Dick Brass, a Microsoft vice president for technology who, like me, has envisioned e-books in rural India.

Yes, Bill Gates’ AIDS and population control efforts are commendable, but mightn’t they also be balanced by more of an eagerness to realize the Brass’s vision? Medicine alone doesn’t reduce the spread of disease or reduce overpopulation. So does knowledge. Use it for health education and to improve agricultural efficiency and raise living standards in rural areas so couples will not feel as compelled to have ten children for farm labor. Bring the libraries to them.

In real life, the Carnegie Corporation of New York is keen on Third World digital libraries, and perhaps Gates himself needs to do more in this area.

The $65 million which he spent on international library programs, as of January 2003, is less than the value of his waterfront mansion, which, as described by an Agence France-Presse story from the year 2000, boasts 52 miles of fiber optic cable, “touch-sensitive pads controlling lighting, music, and climate, seven bedrooms, 24 bathrooms and a sauna.” I don’t begrudge Bill Gates his toys. But with that much money, shouldn’t he be reaching deeper into his wallet for libraries?

Lesson Two: Care More about the Long-Term Preservation of Digital Material

How seriously can we take e-books if they disappear on us--either because their formats are obsolete and unreadable, or because the media can’t preserve them reliably? This is no small reason why I’m so keen on the library model. It would be the best not just for the public but even for publishers and e-bookstores (yes, I actually can see room for stores and subscription services to help balance out the powers of librarians).

Don’t trust publishers with the task of preservation. Their loyalty in most cases is to their shareholders, not the future, and we need digital libraries to back up material systematically and assure that interbook links will still work decades or even centuries from now. I wonder about Corbis, Gates’ treasure trove of old photos for which media outlets pay handsomely even if the public can access many items for free. Suppose that, as Gates says, Microsoft isn’t necessarily here to stay forever and is overtaken by younger, more nimble rivals. Will he or his successors be able to lavish on Corbis the same care he does now?

The general preservation issue is no trifle as depicted by Akst--both in terms of media durability and the format question. He notes that estimates of CDs’ lives “range from 20 to 300 years, with some cheap ones failing in a year or two. The truth is, digital media are new enough that nobody is exactly sure how long they will last, especially given variations in manufacturing, handling and even labeling.

“And there are still more preservation issues. A lot of material from the past has endured because there were multiple copies all over the place, including musty trunks in people’s attics. The storage of digital data can be distributed, too, as it is on the Internat, in which case preservation depends on lots of individual decisions by people who are not professional archivists.”

Yes! Under a TeleRead-style approach, people could keep many of their library books on their disks forever--in fact, all of them, if the business model permitted. The e-books would not have to vanish on them because of limited borrowing times. Result? More backups available.

At the same time I’ve also been enthusiastic about preservation in a central location despite such risks as hacker attacks or even nuclear or biological ones. We need a mix of the distributed and central approaches. Central archives, in fact, could be in a number of cities and rely on a variety of different operating systems and other protections against viruses, which, with Gates’ Windowscentric approach, are far more of a hazard than they would be otherwise.

Writing about the central-storage concept, Daniel Akst notes that the Congress has agreed to fund the Library of Congress $100 million for preserving digital information--provided $75 million also comes form private donors. Yoo-hoo, Mr. Chief Software Architect? The $75 million is less than the value of your mansion. And the Library of Congress in one form or another is likely to be around longer than Corbis. We need a large organization that can forever afford to monitor the integrity of information and move it to new media.

Beyond the other preservation issues there is one of formats. Just obsolescence by itself is a threat. Now add on proprietary formats and heavy-handed forms of Digital Rights Management and the issue of The Tower of eBabel—the format wars so beloved to Microsoft, Adobe and Palm Digital Media, each of which knows that its products will triumph in the e-book world. Just as for me, the format matters are a gut issue for Akst. He married a second-generation dentist who “went to work with her dad--but we can’t read all her records. They were kept in some special dental software and stored on floppy disks. We no longer have this software, and if we did it might not run on the computer we have today--never mind 60 years from now...”

In his article, Akst tells how an obsolete format tripped up even the BBC on a major historical preservation project--involving old property records dating back to the 11th century--until it was saved through masterful wizardry. “But,” he asks, “will the 1986 Domesday collection remain readable for the next 900 years? Don’t bet on it. The problem is that digital data is unintelligible to the naked eye. This article, written in Microsoft Word, is really just a series of ones and zeros that depend on hardware and software for decoding. As Stewart Brand, noted author and online innovator puts it, ‘Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies and extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files.”

Hey, Mr. Chief Software Architect, see the ramifications here for digital books! Mightn’t your e-book strategy be a little rickety considering that Microsoft Reader has already gone through several “security” updates that people need to keep up with the latest, greatest books? Wouldn’t e-books be more serious as a medium--yes, commercially, not just in the library sense--if Microsoft lived up to Dick Bass’s original promise to support a common e-book format at the consumer level? And also if a Universal Consumer Format could use nonproprietary encryption techniques? That would help considerably in the future when people wanted to read the oldies.

Lesson Three: Be Open to New Business Models that Are Fair to Both the Public and Content Owners

“Libraries,” Akst warns, “increasingly find themselves renting material rather than owning it. This often requires an ongoing subscription; if the library stops paying, it loses not only new material but everything that has come before as well. Furthermore, this ‘access’ model--versus traditional ownership--means libraries are licensing material under rules se by private contract rather than federal copyright law. And what happens to the database if it owner goes bankrupt?” That’s Akst the ex-library trustee speaking. Akst the author correctly warns of the need for writers, publishers and others to be paid despite the much-discussed ability of the Net to be one giant Xerox machine. Quite understandably publishers are worried--they should be.

He goes on: “Some people even suggest that the current legal and business models for compensating authors and publishers can never be stretched to fit the digital future.” And then Akst mentions TeleRead, describing it as “one of the most intriguing alternatives” to the existing models. He says “it would amount to a single global digital library, except distributed, much like the Internet today.” Please note the second D word. TeleRead would actually be a series of linked national digital libraries, each independently funded, so that, for example, Fidel Castro or Iranians mullahs could not control the acquisitions of the American library system. People from different countries could subscribe to libraries elsewhere, with the gray area of censorship handled except as today in this era of satellite dishes. Let these issues be clarified case by case, though I myself would favor the wide-open approach.

Continuing, Akst tells how TeleRead would be phased in: “It would start with academic books, out-of-print titles and works that are already in the public domain (many of which in various forms are already finding their way on to the Net) and gradually expand to include all books published, anywhere.”

That would be the TeleRead in one form. I’ve suggested variants, of course--mindful of the economic realities and also the need for checks on the power of the librarians. I’d never want to see people banned from selling books directly or through bookstores. In fact, as I’ve noted recently, stores could even pick up books from the TeleRead collection to use to draw traffic to their sites or to include in subscription plans. Authors could receive the same royalties as if, rather than going through the store, the files had come directly from the TeleRead library itself.

Akst then says, “Copyright problems would vanish.” Well, that’s true if most everything is available for free and if standards can be established for pickups of copyrighted works that people use in whole or in part. Yes, the “if” is there. Still, even with the “if,” the copyright situation for included works would be better than today. As Akst notes, “Access would be free via the Internet, after all, so no one would bother making an unauthorized copy." That would be true domestically, and outside the States, subscription fees could be low, with the emphasis on volume rather than high prices. Akst continues: "Users could make printouts--sooner or later portable digital tablets will make reading on screen less onerous anyway--or save electronic copies with thier own highlights and notes.” I’m actually more optimistic than Akst is about screens and about e-ink-style technology. I can read e-books hour after hour on my Dell Axim using ClearType, which, by the way, is among the more useful of the Microsoft-refined technologies for the PDA world. If I wanted, I could even take it into the bathtub.

“So,” Akst sensibly asks, “who would pay the writers? Rothman’s idea is that public funds could be allocated to publishers and authors based on the number of times each book is borrowed or accessed--something society could easily afford, given book spending of something like $25 billion annually in this country.”

Estimates will vary and, at the consumer level rather than industry level, actually could be much higher, but that’s a petty detail if you consider the $25 billion in the context of our $10-trillion economy. We’re talking about a speck of a speck. Besides, as noted, TeleRead could start small, and, even full grown, there would be ways to control costs beyond limiting the number of books covered. One--not my favorite--would be to limit the number of people accessing the same books at once just as netLibrary does. Would I like that? No. But it would be a way to expand the number of included books.

“Then,” Daniel Akst goes on, “what would happen to the publishing industry under TeleRead? While it could forget about printing, manufacturing and returns, in Rothman’s vision, a publisher’s brand would become even more important to assure readers of a work’s quality. Publishers would still have to acquire, edit and promote books, and theyu would get paid for this based on their performance in the marketplace, just as they do now--except nobody would buy anything.” That’s an excellent description of TeleRead if carried out to the fullest, even though, as I said, there could also be commercial alternatives to assure maximum freedom of expression.

Mind you, Akst hasn’t said, “Let’s do TeleRead tomorrow,” but he’s done a great job of showing how Washington, librarians and publishers alike could look beyond the existing business and legal models. Does he speak officially for the Carnegie Corporation? No, but the Reporter is one of the influential voices of the philanthropic establishment; and perhaps some of the right people will catch on to the possibilities here. The twelfth president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which Carnegie founded in 1911, is Vartan Gregorian who earlier served on board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps it’s time for Gates to invite Mr. Gregorian back and encourage him to help seriously address the issues that the Daniel Akst has raised in the Carnegie Reporter. If Gates want to be an electronic Carnegie for real, maybe he needs to be Akst first.

Also by Daniel Akst: Where Nobody Knows You're a Music Thief, in the Oct. 5 New York Times.

Serendipity of the Net Department: This is apparently a sneak preview of the Akst article. I found the PDF file by accident while searching on a string for a TeleBlog item on the Anchorage library crisis: “teleread.org school librarians ascd.”

posted by David Rothman at 2:04 PM | permanent link

Jerry Justianto of Pocket PC eBooks Watch - eBook and Beyond, TeleRead's partner site, was nice enough to go to Fictionwise and get me a gift copy of Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf. Neat. I could preserve my record as a nonbuyer of books in Microsoft-"secured" format and still look forward to a great read. But guess what. Surprise of surprise, I had to download a new copy of Microsoft Reader due to a "security update." I obliged Chief Software Architect Bill Gates & crew, suffering the reboot routine and all that.

All done? Hardly! At what should have been a Microsoft activation page, an error message popped up. And those people honestly believe they can make publishers money with cumbersomely DRMed books? Maybe the problem was just a Net connection between me and a Microsoft server, but whatever the cause, it's one more example of the hassles that inherently come with Microsoft-style DRM.

Given all the complaints I've heard--and now a replication of my earlier troubles with Reader!--I'm amazed that people actually buy any Microsoft e-books. Like it or not, Microsoft and Adobe have done a great job of making a $10-million dwarf out of what should have been at least a $50- or $100-million business by now. I'll try the activation again and let you know how things work out. Nothing against Chief Software Architect Gates personally, by the way. But to borrow a phrase from his buddy Jack Welch, my hatred of Microsoft's DRM is Straight from the Gut.

Update, 6:30 p.m.: OK, I've pulled off the Reader activation--whether because the Net connection was better or because I turned off both AdSubtract and Google's pop-up blocker. Alas, however, the basic problem remains. The error page was outstandingly unhelpful--I suspect that many users would have given up. Oh, and how about the investment in time? Is it possible that DRM may even be costing readers more in time than the $10 million or so in annual revenue that all e-books--not just Microsoft's--bring in? Maybe not, but we still might be talking about millions in DRM-related waste. Perhaps I should send Bill a bill.
posted by David Rothman at 3:38 PM | permanent link

From my friend John Iliff up in Anchorage, the author of a fine essay on the need for a well-stocked national digital library system, comes word that the local public library system is laying off 22 employees and not filling eight more jobs.

The excuse is that the Net reduces the need for librarians. Hogwash. I'd don't know what I'd done the other day when I was checking up on an arcane fact about Warner Brothers as it existed in the 1920s. The Net was an absolute dud. Even if a universal TeleRead-style library had been around, there's no assurance that I'd have found the information without the help of a librarian who was an expert in both business and the film industry.

I needed the information for business-related reasons--and now let me zero in on a little irony. Particularly in this sustained recession, communities are interested in wooing new businesses and retaining those they have, and, ideally, in aiding the self-employed, too. Take away reference librarians, and you've destroyed part of the business infrastructure. Not to mention the educational benefits. The more information out there, the more help kids will need both in terms of their immediate queries and knowledge of good research techniques. Face-to-face guidance and mentoring can go a long way with the young.

Two changes I would like to see would be more specialization among reference librarians and better integration of public libraries and schools (perhaps public reference librarians could even be formally assigned to mentor individual students, based on their needs and interests within a certain period). Not to mention more use of IM technology for communications between librarians and the Net-oriented young when trips to the library aren't the fastest route to the information. School librarians are valuable, but, particularly in the evening and particularly when it comes to specialized knowledge, they are hardly a complete solution.

Just the same, those suggested changes are nits in the grand scheme of things. Keep laying off the reference librarians, and the rich and well-connected and their offspring will have even more of an edge than they do now over the rest of us.

As irksome as the ALA can sometimes be, I'd side with the librarians here. I hope they'll heed John's suggestion to consider unionization as a way to protect themselves against politicians' whims of the moment.

Photo and other details: That's John in a previous incarnation as a reference librarian in Pineallas Park near Tampa. He's now a Web librarian for the Consortium Library of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Among old-timers on the Net, John is known as the former co-moderator of the pub-lib list, where I spotted the above item on the layoffs.
posted by David Rothman at 11:15 AM | permanent link

""We've made a lot of inroads over the course of the last few years. I think the interesting thing is that when it comes to issues that Hollywood is concerned about, this president is much more in line with Hollywood than the Democratic candidates are. On copyright protection, First Amendment rights, this president is very supportive, very in line with those interests, and I think a lot of people in Hollywood have come to realize that." - Mark McKinnon, a senior media adviser to George Bush, as quoted by the Boston Globe in an article on campaign fund-raising in Hollywood

The TeleRead take: A little oxymoron here? How can one support free speech and Hollywood-bought laws like the DMCA? Ugh, do you think Bush and McKinnon ever read EFF reports?
posted by David Rothman at 9:59 AM | permanent link