Oh, no! Even record labels are pushing for a DRM standard. A lesson for publishers deailing with the Tower of eBabel in e-book formats? Here's a Slashdot item:

thejoelpatrol writes "Bad news for Apple fanatics but good news for all the crazy slashdotters who want an iPod but feel dirty using Apple's DRM: the labels are getting together and insisting that online stores standardize their DRM methods. Being the providers of the music, the labels clearly wield a lot of power, but so does Apple: without iTunes, the online music business is next to nothing. Will Apple give in? Not if they can help it -- they're on top of the world. Before anyone messes it up, AAC is an open format, while the Fairplay DRM standard is not."

"Author James Michener liked to write large books, he said, because once, when standing in a store that was being robbed, he was shot in the posterior, and the bullet passed through his back pocket and then lodged on page 450 of his novel. Ebooks can't do that. But here are some beneficial features of electronic publications that make ebooks an invaluable supplement to the paper-based books we know and love." - 26 Benefits of Ebooks, in the Publishers Cafe blog.

The TeleRead take: One of my favorites on the list is #26, the potential of e-books to change the blockbuster mentality. Meanwhile here are the first five reasons:

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of screens and less time in front of printed books.

2. Ebooks, faster to produce than paper books, allow readers to read books about current issues and events.

3. Ebooks are easily updateable, for correcting errors and adding information.

4. Ebooks are searchable. Quickly you can find anything inside the book. Ebooks are globally searchable: you can find information in many ebooks.

5. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

"Who wants to read old books?" an education lobbyist asked me some months ago when I was trying to get her to speak out against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

But then Distributed Proofreaders--which has reached Unique Book Number 5050 and yesterday put online "50 diverse and significant written works consisting of over 13,000 pages" in celebration of the 5,000+ landmark--isn't about being in vogue. It's about preserving literature and history and finding out that, yes, Barry Lyndon might appeal to you as an adult without any pop quizzes on the horizon. Oh, and not to mention offbeat choices in the vein of Boy Scouts in a Submarine--hardly a literary classic but still a window into the mindset of the past. The cost of DP's offerings on the Net? $0. This is "literature wants to be free" in the purest form.

Gutenberg's heart and soul

Today Distributed Proofreaders is the heart and soul of Project Gutenberg, the main source of PG's new editions. Until 2000, DP did not even exist, but it now has thousands of volunteers in the States and, via DP Europe, works with a like-minded organization across the Pond. DP scans in the classics and then uses volunteers to do proofing a page at a time, with many volunteers simultaneously at work on the same books--hence, the "Distributed." DP volunteers reconcile the images of the pages with the actual text. With people checking up on each other's work, the results are normally far, far more accurate than if just one volunteer proofed each book.

But back to this week's celebration and those 13,000 pages. "A mere cursory reading of this wealth of titles stirs up a sense of excitement and wonder at what is possible when enough like-minded people join together in creative endeavor," says Juliet Sutherland, DP's executive director, speaking for herself and founder Charles Franks. Here is a list of the 50 celebratory titles:

5000 - Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition, Vol II, Part I - AND-ANI

5001 - Expositions of Holy Scripture - Romans, Corinthians

5002 - Slave Narratives, a Folk History of Slavery, Vol. IV, Georgia, I

5003 - Bureau of American Ethnology Publications - The Romance of Laieikawai

5004 - TIA Children's Library - Thrilling Stories of the Ocean

5005 - The Principal Voyages ... of the English Nation, Vol. XII

5006 - General History & Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. XVIII

5007 - Historie de la Révolution française, Vol. X

5008 - Filosphia fundamental, Vol. I

5009 - Vector Analysis and Quaternions of the Cornell Math Collection

5010 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol I - Evolution of Modesty

5011 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol II - Sexual Inversion

5012 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol III - Analysis of the Sexual Impulse

5013 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol IV - Sexual Selection in Men

5014 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol V - Erotic Symbolism

5015 - The Psychology of Sex, Vol VI - Sex in Relation to Society

5016 - The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Vol. III

5017 - The Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Harrison & Cleveland

5018 - Bell's Cathedrals - Peterborough

5019 - Hubbard's Little Journeys to Homes of English Authors, Vol. V

5020 - The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII.

5021 - Jonathan Swift - Poems, Volume II

5022 - Paul Mariéton Une histoire d'Amour

5023 - Library of the World's Best Literature, Vol. VI

5024 - Holinshed Chronicles: The Historie of England, Volume II

5025 - De Kerels van Vlaanderen by Henrik Conscience

5026 - The Forty-Five Guardsmen by Alexandre Dumas

5027 - Memorie del Presbiterio by Emilo Praga

5028 - La Esmeralda by Victor Hugo

5029 - Correspondence, Volume I - George Sand

5030 - As Farpas, Vol. I

5031 - Atlantic Monthly - Issue 71 Sept. 1863

5032 - Bay State Monthly - Vol. I, Issue 5 May, 1884

5033 - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1844

5034 - Continental Monthly - Vol. I - Issue 2 Feb 1862

5035 - Current History by The New York Times, Vol. I

5036 - Lippincott's Magazine - 1872, No. 2

5037 - Mc'Clure's Magazine - January 1896

5038 - Notes and Queries - Vol. I, Number 19, March 9, 18136

5039 - Punch - Vol. I, July 17, 1841

5040 - Scientific American - No. 821, September 26, 1891

5041 - The American Missionary - October, 1888, Vol. XLII. No. 10.

5042 - The Journal of Negro History - Vol. I, No. 1, Jan. 1916

5043 - International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6

5044 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement & Instruction - Issue 360

5045 - The Tatler, Vol. I

5046 - A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear

5047 - Nonsense Songs and Stories by Edward Lear

5048 - More Nonsense by Edward Lear

5049 - Laughable Lyrics by Edward Lear

5050 - Nonsense Books by Edward Lear, DP Compilation

For months we've been saying that D.C.'s favoritism of Hollywood comes at a price. In the worst "Ugly American" tradition, Washington has used trade negotiations to inflict Orwellian, lobbyist-inspired copyright laws on unwilling countries.

Since nothing is "free" in in bargaining, Hollywood most likely is hurting U.S. industries outside entertainment. The more the U.S. pushes for the MPAA and RIAA, the less it can bargain on other issues such as agriculture or manufacturing.

Negative PR for us Yanks

Meanwhile the Hollywood-championed laws abroad might alienate young people overseas as more learn of our role in the obnoxious copyright laws in their own countries. That could eventually turn some hackers in developing countries against us, perhaps with expensive and even lethal consequences (care to have hospital computers hacked from afar?). The only good news here is that some developing countries are becoming more aware of the conflict between economic prosperity and sleazy laws imported and enacted to favor special interests in the States.

As if to show how bizarre DC's priorities are, here's the latest from today's LISNews--another indication that the Hollywood tail is wagging the Washington dog:

The San Jose Mercury News has a brief item informing us of a new Department of Justice crusade against copyright infringers. Attorney General Ashcroft told prosecutors that the Justice Department response to intellectual property theft "must be as forceful and aggressive and successful as our response to terrorism and violent crime and drugs and corruption has been.''

Isn't it a Sept 10th frame of mind to equate the economic losses of companies well able to defend themselves with massive losses of human life? Shouldn't finite federal resources be used to protect the greatest number?

Some e-books are nothing more than disguised ads for marketers who write or sponsor them. Is the new Google Print service going to foster more of this, at least indirectly, by linking books with advertising?

In Google's case, the ads for products related to books will not be in the works themselves, just viewable in part of your screen. And you'll see excerpts, not entire books. But how long until mainstream publishers start experimenting with ad-supported books in a major way?

Excedrin and Roth

I have mixed feelings. Do you really want to read a headache-reliever ad in the middle of the latest Philip Roth novel? Suppose that the trend starts with popular-level books and spreads even to the better regarded ones. Will this be the book industry's way to cope with fear of piracy? Will publishers start wanting people to swap book files, so as to boost the circulation figures--perhaps compiled through server records showing accesses to graphic files--for advertisers? Does this mean that characters will drink only advertiser-blessed beer? Will villains in fiction always drive the cars of rival companies?

Possible excesses

Some of the regulars on the eBook Community List, such as Ed Howdershelt and Roy Lewis, see sponsor-supported books as inevitable, and Ed, at least, believes that authors and advertisers can avoid excesses. I'm not so certain. What's more, I wonder how many nonfiction books, supposedly neutral, will reflect the interests of the sponsoring businesses. It will be fascinating to see how things shape up.

Either way, the Google experiment could be significant. Remember, many Google users are expecting content to be free, and some publishers may adjust their business models accordingly. In fact, new publishers may spring up to take advantage of the model.

Some more details

Meanwhile here are more details about Google's books-in-search experiment, from the Associated Press:

Although entire books will be scanned in, the new feature won't let people read them entirely online. But participating publishers must allow people to read at least 20 percent, said Susan Wojcicki, Google director of product development. Book listings, which include title, author and number of pages, will appear at the top of Google's main search results page. Books already have been submitted by more than a dozen publishers, including Penguin, Wiley, Hyperion, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, Princeton and Scholastic.

Beware of depending too heavily on just a few stars, warns a Wired article on sales patterns for books, music and films. In many cases it may even be more expensive to evaluate than to release wares to the market, and see how actual buyers respond. And the same most likely would apply to e-books, not just p-books and the rest.

The article is especially relevant to the DRM debate since copy controls actually can interfere with sales of the smaller providers of music and almost surely books from minor publishers as well. As numerous small-fry can verify, DRM makes their books less valuable, harder to own, less likely to be the topic of buzz. On the eBookCommunity list, Lida E. Quillen, publisher of Twilight Times Books, has already called attetion to the Wired article, and she is so, so right.

Here's a key point in the piece by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired:

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

What if PDAs came bundled with different e-book readers to ease installation chores? Or suppose a dedicated machine in the old Rocket eBook vein did the same thing to help the innocent cope with the Tower of eBabel.

The PDA scenario is only a dream, but Bookeen has just released the Cybook tablet for innocent victims of the the format wars. It comes with a 10-inch, 800X600 LCD, Mobipocket and a bunch of other readers, and hopefully others will be on the way. From France, the company's Laurent Picard writes:

Cybook is now officially available for the United States (and the rest of the world), thanks to our brand new web site (including an online store with secured payment). The site has been online for only 5 minutes; Michaël and I wanted you to be the first one to be informed, as we greatly appreciate the great job you do with TeleRead.

With the Cybook, we are now very happy to introduce the world's first true open multi-format e-book reader. The Cybook supports the following common e-book formats: PRC, PDB, HTML, RTF and TXT. Bundled e-book readers are: Mobipocket Reader (PRC), µBook Reader (PDB, HTML, RTF and TXT), Boo Reader (BOO) and Boo Reader Vision (BOO). Additionally, we provide Internet Explorer, DOC and XLS editors, a mail manager, an audio player… And more to come!

We have worked in partnership with Mobipocket and GowerPoint to adapt and optimize their readers for the Cybook large screen. You can read both in portrait and landscape modes and, with the 600 x 800 resolution, the e-reading experience is really great.

We did not forget connectivity, as you can synchronize your documents with your PC (ActiveSync through USB, infrared, serial and network), automatically download your favorite e-news with Mobipocket Web Companion, surf the web in your sofa with a Wi-Fi card, connect to a local network with an Ethernet card and, thanks to the built-in modem, read and answer your e-mails while on vacation.

As we discussed a few months ago, our market vision is based on e-reading openness and comfort. We honestly think we have today the best offer available. The Cybook price is 600 euros (excluding taxes) and the price in US dollars (or British pounds, Canadian dollars, yens, Swiss franc) varies according to exchange rates.

For the last few months, we have been selling preview versions of the Cybook and the feedback was really great even with beta versions; we will publish our current and new customers’ reviews on the site...

Down in Houston, Robert Nagle writes a highly literate and readable blog called Idiotprogrammer: Musings on Culture & Technology by Texas Writer. He likes the TeleBlog overall but recently said one of my August posts was too harsh on Eric Alterman, author of an Atlantic article on Hollywood's mostly liberal political donors. I'd asked why the Atlantic had run "9,000+ words on Hollywood money and not one bloody mention of copyright or Jack Valenti, the master lobbyist who has so brilliantly marshaled Tinsel Town's millions even if he is an idiot about tech."

"Eric Alterman is no nut," Robert said of the writer of the Atlantic article, "and he is certainly not corruptible by influence-peddling (despite some tenuous relationships with the previous administration). Why did Alterman overlook the copyright issue? First, except for content creators (and libertarian-minded teens who download copyrighted material without guilt), many people just don’t see a reason to get all worked up about copyright reform. They perceive it as not affecting them."

Spin vehicle for Podesta?

Regardless of that and other arguments, I'd still maintain that Alterman wittingly or unwittingly reflected the spin of ex-Clinton White House aide John Podesta, a vigorous fighter for The Dark Side in the copyright wars. Alterman is a senior fellow at Podesta's Center for American Progress. In Alterman's words, Podesta and certain other liberal think tankers often "strategize on the phone with Hollywood consultants, and occasionally make the trek to Los Angeles for a fundraising dinner," just as certain journalists offer comfort to the standard suspects. With all that in mind, I find it hard to believe that Podesta relationship did not figure to some extent in the writing of the Atlantic article. Too much of the piece read like a press release in praise of Hollywood liberals. I'm a liberal myself, a lifelong Democrat, but I'll not ignore the obvious--that the Motion Picture Association of America uses even innocently given money from Hollywood as force against schoolchildren, library users in general, and other victims of the donation-driven copyright laws from the Clinton era.

While most Americans are oblivious to the copyright horrors, it isn't as though Alterman is ignorant of the issues here. Even if not a blogger, he presumably would care as a writer; and, in fact, he appears to--if you extrapolate from a clueful item he picked up from Sivacracy.net on HarperCollin's piggish 'tude about book titles. The multibillion copyright giveaway is not an issue in the press, probably for because of the media's conflicts of interest, but Alterman should have known enough to have at least devoted a few words to it. The lack of a copyright reference is bizarre.

Robert's own heart is in the right place on copyright matters--he's a big supporter of the Creative Commons concept--and I guess that we'll just have to agree to disagree on Eric Alterman. Furthermore, let me note Robert is no flack for Alterman, whose media book he likes but whose Web blog he describes as "not particulary well organized."

Cancer sticks vs. piracy

Originally I was going to avoid further mention of the Atlantic piece, or at least wait before striking again--there being so many new and enticing outrages--but I couldn't resist coming back to the subject after picking up the the October issue over the weekend and finding three letters responding to Alterman.

None of them, alas, raised the copyright issue, either because the Atlantic would not print copyright-related letters or because no one bothered to write in, a detail that I concede would strengthen Robert's apathy theory. My favorite letter of the three came from Jonathan Polansky in Fairfax, California and discussed Hollywood and tobacco.

I heartily recommend the Polansky letter to Sen. Hatch and supporters of INDUCE-style legislation who depict P2P companies as evil Fagins luring young music lovers to their moral doom. Polansky didn't link the donations and the horrid anti-Net legislation that Hollywood money has bought from Hatch and others. But he zeroed in on something else that perhaps should be much more of a priority for a Mormon senator than a copyright jihad:

Not only are Hollywood's PG-12 and R-rated movies blowing more tobacco smoke than films have at any other time since 1950, but smoking scenes are responsible for recruiting half of all new adolescent smokers in the United States each year--390,000 kids, worth $3.2 billion in lifetime revenue to the tobacco companies. Solid scientific evidence of catastrophic harm has attracted the keen attention of more than half of America's state attorneys general and compelled America's major health association to call for an R rating on movies with tobacco imagery."

Who says games are anti-story-telling? That's the word from Dan Jackson, who is well known for his past efforts on behalf of convertlit, but who in another incarnation is a gungho gamester. I'm more into text--both the e- and p- varieties--than games. Just the same, I'm pleased to reproduce his argument that, yes, the right games can actually advance the art of story-telling:

One of the original reasons for the TeleRead initiative was fear that video games would drive young people away from an appreciation of story-telling of the kind in books.

I disagree. Games are just as capable of telling a story as books are. Examples of such a level of storytelling ability are usually only found in Japanese-originated RPGs though, which tend to be a sadly-neglected part of the games market (certainly over here in Europe, anyway). I'm not talking about mass-market stuff like Final Fantasy, which clearly only still exists because Square Enix likes money, but other titles of which only a few have made it to the Western world - titles like Xenosaga and Star Ocean 3 (which are the most recent examples I can think of). Xenosaga is a multi-volume sci-fi epic, and even though reports on the Japanese import version of Episode 2 suggest that the gameplay has gone way downhill compared to Episode 1, I expect that there will be a sizable number of people who will buy it when it makes its way to the States just because they want to experience the next part of the story (myself included - I finally accepted that Namco aren't going to release it over here in backwater Europe and bit the bullet and imported it - which thankfully is still not illegal, even if mod chips are). The reason that Sudeki didn't turn out any good was because it was supposed to be the Western answer to Japanese RPGs and consequently the developers probably just took a bunch of concepts from "popular" RPGs and tried to mix them together, ending up with a mess. To be honest, the fact that the Japanese are still coming out with games that use what's basically 2D isometric graphics - and that those games are SELLING (Disgaea, Phantom Brave, La Pucelle) - should give some indication that it IS possible for games to have some attraction other than the eye candy.

(P.S. I just remembered that Square Enix's latest property to make it over here, "Full Metal Alchemist", also comprises a PS2 game as well as a 51-episode animated series, and while I expect them to commercially exploit it as far as possible, I have hope that it might stand up better to that kind of treatment than the Final Fantasy franchise has)

One of the original reasons for the TeleRead initiative was fear that video games would drive young people away from an appreciation of story-telling of the kind in books. That's still of concern. A new book, however, tries to reconcile matters. From a reader-submitted book review in Slashdot:

Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction by Andrew Glassner takes a look at what we know about stories, what we know about games, how they work (or don't work) together now, and how they might work together in the future."

...if you've played enough storytelling abominations like 'Sudeki,' you will know that game creators usually don't make very compelling storywriters. So the first quarter of the book is a crash course on the fundamentals of writing stories--characters, plot, and techniques.