Book People Archive

What's an ebook? and what's a book? stating the obvious (which often seems to be ignored)

According to Amazon.com, "An e-book, or electronic book, is a digital book
that you can read on a computer screen or electronic device. A reader is the
device or software to which you download your e-book in order to read it.
Amazon.com currently supports the Microsoft software reader. You can
purchase an e-book from Amazon.com at any time, but you must have a reader
installed and activated on your computer before you can download an e-book
you have bought."

For the world's largest seller of books, that is a very limited definition
of ebook, and an even more limited policy -- as if Microsoft needs to be
part of the equation? Actually, I've been selling ebooks -- plain text on
ordinary diskettes -- through Amazon for a couple years. And now I'm adding
a line of audio-text books on CD ROM. You can find my works by searching
their main catalog. But you'd never know I was in the ebook business from
the ebook section of their site. In my righteous indignation, I wanted to
send a message to Amazon, giving them an accurate definition of ebook.

So what is an ebook? What's going on? What's likely to happen? And how does
this get tied into all the silliness over Napster?
             
I'd be tempted to define an electronic book as a book distributed in digital
form, rather than on paper. It may be distributed by download, email, ftp,
on diskette, on CD-ROM, on DVD, etc. Its format may be plain text, HTML,
SGML, PDF, or any of a variety of encrypted formats. Unless special
restrictive technology is applied, an ebook can be freely copied to
computers and from computer to computer and saved on digital storage media
of all kinds. It can also be printed on a computer printer and read in paper
form.

Audio or talking books include recorded human voice reading the full text.
And like other digital information, they can be distributed in a wide
variety of ways in a wide variety of formats. The audio may also be
presented together with the associated text, on the Web or a CD or in a
specialized device, like the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To try to get a grasp on what is going on, and the immediate and long-term
implications, I tried to step back, set aside today's technology, and
consider what is a book?

A book is a meaningful assemblage of many words. Computers can remember any
sequence of characters or code, regardless of whether it has meaning. But
humans can only deal with lengthy content if it can be interpreted by
them -- they can store very little raw data, but vast amounts of meaningful
information. So you might say that when it comes to large sets of data,
computers can store anything, but humans can only store books.

Today, very few people bother to memorize entire books. It takes talent,
training, and dedication to do so. In our day, it would probably take the
incentive of strong religious belief to accomplish such a monumental feat,
like memorizing the Koran, when such easier means are readily available for
saving and accessing book content. But when necessity dictates -- e.g.,
prior to written language and in imagined scifi worlds like Fahrenheit
451 -- humans can expand their memorizing capability far beyond what we
consider normal today.

The content of a book can be created by a human, communicated from one human
directly to another (by voice or other direct signals), or stored in code
for later retrieval by him or someone else (if there is agreement on the
code). The first codes were visual (written language and its forerunners on
the walls of caves). A visual code can be implemented by hand (using a
chisel, stylus, pen, etc.) on virtually any solid medium (including sand) or
by the use of machinery (like printing presses and typewriters) on media
designed for their use (such as paper or cloth).
             
In the past, whatever could be represented visually could be duplicated
photographically. And whatever you could duplicate photographically, you
could make multiple copies of, using printing equipment, at some cost. And
whatever could be represented with sound could be recorded using analog
media, like tape, and then duplicated or broadcast, at some cost.

Today whatever can be represented visually or in sound can be easily
converted to digital form. Once in digital form, it can be stored, copied,
and distributed at practically no cost.

Keep in mind that the mind also converts sound to meaningful form to
remember it -- as words or music or both combined. I hear a story and retell
it to my kids. I hear a ballad and play and sing it to other audiences. I
hear a tune, whistle it, sing it, play it on a variety of instruments,
improvising along the way. Someone hears that and does likewise. The brain
serves as a storage medium -- sometimes imperfect, sometimes creative.

So where does this lead us?  What is the end point?

We need to remember that the human brain is the ultimate storage and
retrieval device for books and music and that this means of storage and
retrieval fundamentally involves interpretation and change. "Meaning" refers
to the brain's interpretive power. We see or hear raw data and remember the
"meaning" -- what results when we have decoded the data and adapted its
content to our unique needs and perspectives.

Sooner or later technology will make it possible to vastly enhance the
memory power of the human brain -- biologically, electronically, or a
combination of both. Whether it's a pill or a microchip that provides the
enhancement, the brain itself will become the primary storage medium for
books -- just as it was in the days before written language.  Today,
advanced computers can store and retrieve everything that their user sees or
hears over the Internet. In the future, your enhanced brain will be able to
store and retrieve everything that it sees, reads, or hears.

In other words, sooner or later, books and music will be free. The pace of
adoption of technology and the speed bumps of legislation can slow our
approach to that point. But that's where we are headed.

In the digital world, what do you sell and buy when you sell and buy a book
or a piece of music? In the past, you sold and bought physical objects that
were needed to store the information. It cost money to reproduce those
physical objects, so you paid enough to provide incentive for producers,
manufacturers and distributors to perform their roles.

Now there is no physical object and there is little or no associated cost
for reproducing, storing or distributing the content.

So what value do publishers add? And what is a reasonable way to compensate
that effort?

Today, publishers of books and music are fighting a rear-guard action,
trying to artificially create in the digital world barriers to reproduction,
storage, and distribution. They are doing this by means of encryption
schemes and associated devices for reading books and playing music.

They are also depending on legal barriers to defend both their ownership of
the content and their means for limiting access to it. They are turning to
the courts again and again to fight off new threats. But since their content
no longer needs to be embodied in physical objects, it becomes very
difficult to trace where it goes and who copies it and stores it and
redistributes it, or to figure out the path by which the copy on this
computer got there. Also, in the past, if there was an instance of theft, in
most instances, the perpetrators had the same economic incentive as the
original producers -- they wanted to make, distribute, and sell physical
copies of the content. If they were successful, they were easy to track
down. And if they weren't successful, they were insignificant and not worth
bothering about. But today, the folks who are copying, storing, and
distributing books and music are doing so just to enjoy it and to share it.
There are millions of them, all doing it on a small scale, and using
technology that makes it easy for them to cooperate with one another without
ever communicating directly with one another. Just imagine the enforcement
nightmare that that presents.

It would be better for publishers to devote their money and their creativity
 to finding new business models that work in a world where books and music
can be duplicated, stored and distributed for free, where they have no
control over  content once it has been made available to the public, just as
they have no control over it once it has entered my mind.

Richard

Richard Seltzer, seltzer@[redacted] http://www.samizdat.com
Internet marketing consultant http://www.samizdat.com/consult.html
Online discussion at Web Business Bootcamp http://webworkzone.com/bootcamp
Audio book of The Lizard of Oz http://www.samizdat.com/liz
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