Book: Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
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Cory Doctorow >> Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
February 12, 2004
San Diego, CA
Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
--
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along
with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
Commons public domain dedication:
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> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
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--
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
think it's true.
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
them with you:
1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
promote the dead-tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
build concordances of characters, places and events.
3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the
book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
text.
4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on
the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science
fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science
fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved
are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*
and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're
*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf
writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of
us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of
earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would
play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive
for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire
for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the
corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search
engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.
They can be googled.
Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best
way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the
best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with
us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a
bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was
recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
[QUOTED TEXT]
> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed
me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good
name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that
damning passage:
[PULL-QUOTE]
> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
> page
You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of
paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his
novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is
"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer
out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have
it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read
the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the
ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is."
And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to
give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell
your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to
the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
but check this out:
[Nietzsche quote]
> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
of Morals," published in *1887.*
Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
complete that collection with different texts that are as
distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
granular observation, there are as many differences in our
"shared" experience as there are similarities.
More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.
8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
buy.
There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
sales are healthy.
We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
computers are damned good at counting things!). This is
important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of
copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a
difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the
run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the
occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books
printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never
exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations,
chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
that's why.
And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some
copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
hardest and most important task any writer faces.
#
I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
to lay out both categories of ideas.
This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time,
there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these
books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous
book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"
the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any
book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think
that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.
Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet.
I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over
ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper
circles. Writers were joining the discussion on
alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of
retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up
their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My
editor, a blogger, hacker and
guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick
Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup,
saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's
> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's
> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).
Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
rest of the world.