One of the glories of well-stocked national digital library systems would be an expansion of the number of e-books online.

Even after decades of digitization efforts, especially of the classics, e-book readers can enjoy just a few of the millions of already-published paper books.

I'd guess that the total number of electronic pick-ups from dead-tree books is well under 50,000-100,000.

A newcomer to the eBook Community List asked for an explanation of the paucity of e-books, and Lee Fyock, a veteran e-booker, shared some useful thoughts with the list. He and I have differed over many things such as Digital Rights Managment and proprietary formats, but I'd essentially agree with his explanations below.

I think it was Heinlein that wrote "when the question is 'why don't they?', the answer is 'money'".

It goes like this: publishers that are putting out a new book have softcopy text with which to produce an ebook. They also have an up-to-date contract with the author that allows them to do this.

For old books, the publisher either doesn't have the rights to make an eBook version of the title, or they would need to send out an old paper copy for scanning, OCRing and proofing. (This costs money.)

Getting the rights to old titles can be tough. Some authors are reactionary and don't want anything to do with eBooks.

Note you'll not find any legal Tolkien, Clancy, Grisham, Rowling or Jordan anywhere--I don't think this is because the publisher doesn't want to make money; I think it's because eBooks aren't worth the time of the authors or their agents, in their minds.

Some agents want large advances for titles that were written twenty years ago and aren't currently earning money. Some authors have passed away and the rights to their works is in limbo; tracking down who has the rights and licensing these can be a lot of legal work and time. (This costs money.)

Basically, turning books into eBooks takes time and money. Most publishers are going after the easy ones: new titles for which they have softcopy and the rights. Backlist titles are on the backburner for most publishers for now.

You also have to keep in mind that the eBook market is relatively small as yet, and therefore doesn't have the large payoff that some paper books do.

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." - Henry David Thoreau's wisdom as quoted in Book Digest--itself now in suspension.

Funny. So many publishers and writers love the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which stretched out copyrights by 20 years past previous terms. But what if the main threat weren't piracy on the Net but people not caring about reading and literature in the first place? This morning's New York Times carries an item headlined Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, Survey Finds. Better schools would be the main way to help; but so would the repeal or mitigation of Bono, as well as the creation of a TeleRead-style national digital library system. Bono in time will cost the public billions and discourage the reading of good, free literature, especially on the Net. Without price tags, potential readers can be so much more adventurous. Doesn't anyone in Washington care? In case the copyright zealots doubt the existence of a problem, here is an excerpt from the Times:

The survey, called "Reading at Risk," is based on data from "The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts," conducted by the Census Bureau in 2002. Among its findings are that fewer than half of Americans over 18 now read novels, short stories, plays or poetry; that the consumer pool for books of all kinds has diminished; and that the pace at which the nation is losing readers, especially young readers, is quickening. In addition it finds that the downward trend holds in virtually all demographic areas.

"What this study does is give us accurate numbers that support our worst fears about American reading," said Dana Gioia, the chairman of the endowment, who will preside over a discussion of the survey results at the New York Public Library this morning. "It quantifies what people have been observing anecdotally, but the news is that it has been happening more rapidly and more pervasively than anyone thought possible. Reading is in decline among all groups, in every region, at every educational level and within every ethnic group," he said, calling the survey results "deeply alarming."

The study, with its stark depiction of how Americans now entertain, inform and educate themselves, does seem likely to fuel debate over issues like the teaching and encouragement of reading in schools, the financing of literacy programs and the prevalence in American life of television and the other electronic media that have been increasingly stealing time from readers for a couple of generations at least. It also raises questions about the role of literature in the contemporary world.

The survey also makes a striking correlation between readers of literature and those who are socially engaged, noting that readers are far more likely than nonreaders to do volunteer and charity work and go to art museums, performing arts events and ballgames. "Whatever good things the new electronic media bring, they also seem to be creating a decline in cultural and civic participation," Mr. Gioia said. "Of literary readers, 43 percent perform charity work; only 17 percent of nonreaders do. That's not a subtle difference."

The survey sample--17,135 people--makes it one of the largest studies ever conducted on the subject of arts participation, and the data were compared with similar studies from 1982 and 1992. In the literature segment respondents were asked whether they had, during the previous 12 months, without the impetus of a school or work assignment, read any novels, short stories, poems or plays in their leisure time.

Their answers show that just over half--56.6 percent--read a book of any kind in the previous year, down from 60.9 percent a decade earlier. Readers of literature fell even more precipitously, to 46.7 percent of the adult population, down from 54 percent in 1992 and 56.9 percent in 1982, which means that in the last decade the erosion accelerated significantly. The literary reading public lost 5 percent of its girth between 1982 and 1992; another 14 percent dropped away in the following decade. And though the number of readers of literature is about the same now as it was in 1982--about 96 million people--the American population as a whole has increased by almost 40 million.

The survey found that men (37.6 percent) were doing less literary reading than women (55.1 percent); that Hispanics (26.5 percent) were doing less than African-Americans (37.1 percent) and whites (51.4 percent); but that all categories were declining. The steepest declines of any demographic group are among the youngest adults. In 1982, 59.8 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds read literature; by 2002 that figure had dropped to 42.8 percent. In the 25-to-34 age group, the percentage of literary readers dropped to 47.7 from 62.1 over the same period.

What she says about her favorite writer, Henry James, probably explains the Edwardses' consistently long-view attitude toward an awfully short campaign season: "You've got to have patience, but if you're a reader and you love baseball, you love James; it's a little play here and there, not constant scoring. The truth of most anything is not in some big statement but in small things, and that's what James recognized. That and the fact that we're constantly making moral choices.''

Bill Janssen, a researcher interested in e-books, as well as one of the stalwarts of the eBook Community List, came up with an interesting look at the Librie in action:

I've finally got my hands on a Librie, which is sitting here on my desk here. It's slim, perhaps a half-inch thick, and light, about the weight of a paperback edition of The Name of the Rose. The device itself is larger than a paperback book (by about 2 inches vertically and 1 inch horizontally). There's a gray leatherette cover, which flips open--it's attached on the right side of the reader--and has a magnetic (!) catch to hold it to the reader when closed. When you open it, it has a *lot* of buttons, including a full keyboard. There's also a cute little rollerwheel in the bottom button row, in the middle, which you can use to scroll up and down in content lists. The screen is almost as big as a paperback page, perhaps half-an-inch less both horizontally and vertically.

Generally, I agree with the review at http://www.dottocomu.com/b/archives/002571.html.

The screen is sharp black on light silver. Apparently the silver (very light gray) background is deliberate, since white (really, brighter silver) appears now and then in some patterns. The text edges are very sharp, particularly with Kanji characters. I'd estimate the resolution to be at least 250-300 dpi.

The screen seems to have some latency. When you turn a page, you see a black flash, followed by a combination of the previous page (in white-on-black) and the new page, which then quickly settles into the new page. All of this takes about a second or two, I'd say.

The text I'm reading, a Japanese text on Office English, has audio content as well, to teach the reader how to pronounce the English words. The audio is quiet but clear. There's a headphone jack at the bottom to listen in private.

Listening in private is apparently important. A great deal of the population commutes by train to and from work every day. I'm told (ethnographers down the hall from my office happen to be studying Japanese life) that on the subway, one is supposed to turn off one's cellphone, and refrain from using it in "audio" mode--text messaging is the order of the day on the subway. The Librie makes a great reading accessory for those commutes.

In addition, it comes with a Japanese-English dictionary on it. Electronic dictionaries are extremely common in Japan for those who speak other languages, and run about $100 to $300. This ameliorates the $400 price of the Librie a bit. Content is apparently only available in Japanese (and requires a Japanese credit card to purchase?).

It runs Linux internally, and the source code is downloadable from http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/EBR-1000EP.html.

In the May 2003 issue of the Washingtonian Magazine, writer Charles Hurt profiles John Edwards and tells how the Senator was lusting after the very kind of soft money donations that Edwards said he wanted banned by law. The man was a human cash-raising machine. One wonders about possible quid pro quos, including possible compromises of the Net on copyright issues. An excerpt from the Washingtonian article:

I interviewed Edwards at the height of last year's debate surrounding campaign finance reform which he supported. Yet even as he voted to ban soft money, he was breaking records raising it. Of the $5.5 million he raised in 2002, $4.3 million was "soft money" that went to his PAC, New American Optimists, and helped fund the travel and expenses of his nascent presidential campaign.

When I asked Edwards whether he thought he was pushing the envelope (even under the old law) by spending the soft money in a way that advanced his presidential ambitions--to do so directly would have been illegal--he refused to answer on the record. When I pushed, he became petulant, saying the reasoning behind my question was illogical. For ten minutes I pressed, restating the question in different ways. Each time, he professed not to understand.

In the end, he was on the record refusing to sully his reputation by discussing money. Yet it would have been a rare day that he didn't leave the Senate office and glide across Massachusetts Avenue to his sixth-floor PAC office to make dozens of calls asking for the very donations he'd just voted to outlaw.