TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

‘An E-Book Thanksgiving’—for Jeff Bezos and his Kindle buddies at Amazon

By David Rothman

Moderator’s note: I’ve shamelessly adapted—for Publishers Weekly—an old TeleRead post. Happy Thanksgiving, whatever your country! Photo is of Plymouth Rock monument. - DR

Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the United States. PW readers outside the U.S. can get the real lowdown from an old column by the late Art Buchwald—the beloved humorist, newspaper guy and author who once lived in Paris and wanted his French friends to share the joy.

But as wise as he was about food and holidays, Buchwald was blind to Thanksgiving’s e-book angle, and so I’ll step in–especially in regard to the Scrooge-ish games that Amazon has been playing with digital formats. Amazon’s new Kindle reader can’t even read the copy-protected version of the company’s old Mobipocket format despite all the money people have paid for Mobi files. Hardly the book industry at its best! For the edification of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his buddies, then, let me write up Amazon and its much-hyped E Ink gizmo in Thanksgiving terms.

Soon after landing at Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims were greeted by an Indian bearing a small, glowing object with a silvery case. “It’s what we call a personal digital assistant,” explained Squanto. “We use it to read books.” And with that, he brought up on the screen a hunting guide.

“No thanks, we’ll stick to paper books,” the Pilgrims said.

“But e-books are perfect for people in out-of-the-way locations without libraries,” Squanto persisted. “Besides, we don’t want immigrants on Cape Cod unless they’re self-supporting. Read this and learn to hunt the native birds and animals.”

Early Colonial DRM

Only with much effort could Squanto persuade the Pilgrims to try out e-books. And even then, some ugly politicking went on.

At the insistence of some well-connected hunting pals of Governor William Bradford, the Pilgrims passed the DMCA law and agreed not to bypass Digital Rights Management, aka DRM (the techese for so-called copy protection)—even for legitimate purposes such as backing up e-book files.

Squanto pleaded to no avail. “The ways of the white man are unnatural.”

For a while, the Pilgrims prospered. With the Indians’ help, they could find machines using a variety of technologies. At first Pilgrims favored PDAs with backlit screens, but soon many turned to E Ink devices from a bald e-merchant who’d made the cover of Newsweek. Life was good. Even the Indians gave up their PDAs, preferring the merchant’s flashy new gizmos, which they could read in bright sunlight during their rest breaks in the fields.

Then the merchant grew homesick—so he said—and announced he was sailing back to England. Other Pilgrims protested in vain. Meanwhile the Pilgrims found themselves at odds with the Indians. But digital books saved the day. The newcomers could consult their e-books on the more arcane details of hunting and farming in the New World.

The gotchas

A few weeks later, however, the DRM locked up the Pilgrims’ e-books, rendering them unreadable. The following words appeared on their spiffy E Ink screens: “So long, suckers. I knew you’d miss me. This is my DRM, my format. I control the technology.”

The rest of the message contained pricing information and instructions for sending the requisite gold to England. The cost of the DRM was beyond even the imaginations of the Pilgrims, not just their budgets; eighty percent of the profits went to a venture capital fund set up by the King.

Bereft of the facts they needed for their daily existence, the Pilgrims could not hunt, fish and farm as successfully as before. Many starved to death.

.Epub for hunting guide publishers

The survivors grew wise. They convinced the International Digital Publishing Forum, a band of hunting-guide publishers, to get serious about e-book standards. The IDPF even added a DRM option to specs for its .epub format. Today the Pilgrims can surf to any bookstore bearing an .epub logo and know they can reliably read books with software programs identified by similar graphics. Life is good around Plymouth Rock.

Drawn by this new prosperity, the bald Newsweek cover boy has returned from England. This merchant no longer controls as big a percentage of the hunting guide market but is richer than ever, because .epub is so much less confusing to his customers. On top of that, people know they can buy and own e-books for real because the .epub can be displayed on their new machines in the future regardless of brand. They can even pass on hunting guides—entire libraries in electronic form—to their grandchildren. E-books are now a seriously permanent medium.

Oh, and that’s not the end of the story. Maybe next Thanksgiving I can tell you about the riches that followed after the Pilgrims listened to the Net-hip people at Baen Hunting Guides and wised up about DRM.

Technorati Tags: Kindle , Amazon , Jeff Bezos , Art Buchwald , Plymouth Rock , Thanksgiving

Popularity: 2% [?]