Book: Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
C >>
Cory Doctorow >> Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
every day.
This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]
2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
[GRAPHIC]
These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)
* You can't take your ebook into the tub
* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted
grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that
certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their
grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me
email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to
show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her
Florida retirement condo)?
The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper
books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a
little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.
This is interesting because the history of the book is the
history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American
Revolution.
Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them
were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool
cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the
books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey
incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He
printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and
distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God
all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.
Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
printing press:
[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the
typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could
bring to bear when writing out the word of God
* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case
for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority
of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed
impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.
* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew
that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
for centuries.
In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
raised above with equal certainty.
What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
without having to subject themselves to the authority and
approval of the Church
* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
explained what God really meant
* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
success.
By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
in a series!
* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
they share the trait of making the difference between a
compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic
text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on
a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text
for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig.
In other words, most people who download the book do so for the
predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample
a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the
book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text
experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing
out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather
than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the
wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a
cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that
cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --
is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the
ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and
sending it around.
Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
swings a very big stick on the Hill).
This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.
* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
Calling them crooks is bad for business.
* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?
* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
work carries such a terrible price.
* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
public domain.
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:
a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease
with which it can reproduced.
(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than
the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the
Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio
had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*
control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform
to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could
build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them
performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a
monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change,
Napster is peanuts)
Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by
bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as
expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as
did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in
comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a
copy of her own.
Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at
Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of
musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.
The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on
the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing
press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items
that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that
*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on
creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most
enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.
Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's
a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a
photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery
and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
creators with their audiences.
For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real
property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current
copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the
end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the
printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent
of bookwarez.
#
Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or
extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra
to thank you for your patience.
About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most
restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my
readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was
cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it
felt like I was taking a plunge.
Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text
of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN
READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my
blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can
make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction
(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK
HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it,
with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to
rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking
mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.
The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
happens when I get in up to my knees.
The text with the new license will be online before the end of
the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain
dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see
fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is
through.
#
EOF
That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind
attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more
detailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them
here in plain sight.
Cory Doctorow
Midflight over Texas
February 4, 2004