Book People Archive

Re: speaking e-book? 

"Leslie Evans" <lbevans@[redacted]> wrote:

> I have a set of bookmarks on my browser to publishers of books in
> digital formats and websites devoted to discussing them. Out of
> about 20 sites, six incorporate a name for their product in their
> site name. 5 call them "ebooks," and one calls them "electronic
> books." None call them "etexts."

And probably none of them get what it's all about. Any site with
"ebook" in its domain name will advocate that Johnnie-come-lately term
of course. They are hawking a product. But it's misguided; etext (or
just "text") hasn't yet caught on with the publishing industry because
they haven't grasped what it's all about -- they're scrambling
replacing _paper_ with an _electronic display screen_, which is
totally not what electronic text is all about. They're spinning in
circles with money flying everywhere, and in the end it will have
accomplished nothing except maybe taken away more human liberties as
they bend the laws to accomodate their dim non-vision. It's clueless
and embarrassing!

"eBooks" are a novelty, a whimsy you're meant to purchase, sit and be
entertained with. The word "eBook" is the jargon of the year, like
"cyber-" anything on a store shelf, and it will not last. It's used
either unwittingly or to sell one of these gadgets to someone else who
does not know what it's about. Or to sell electronic texts put in
vapid proprietary formats. They actually want to push this junk on
libraries! And the wicked cycle continues ... but the future is most
certainly _not_ in these ridiculous "eBook Reader" contraptions and
self-serving proprietary formats.

"Etext," electronic text, is a wondrous new container for our
words. With etext we'll write, read, copy, cut and paste the books of
the future and all of our accumulated works and history. This etext is
making the codex obsolete. It is the future of the book.

So what this is all about, this great shift, is text that can be read
and manipulated by machines. Machine-readable text in a file on a
computer, electronic text, is just that -- it's just a
file. Preferably in plaintext with minimal "net convention" markup,
but it can have formatting commands too. This mail message you see
here is an etext. You can type anything you want into a file and it is
an etext. All computers are etext readers. That's half the problem
right there -- I feel these companies ain't got no vision. Why strip
out half the power of the computer (its ability to _write_) and just
make a handheld that you can only use to _read_?

Who cares if the pirates & profiteers don't get it, and don't call it
that word? They don't want you to see it for what it is; they want to
sell you objects and make a lot of money so they can buy a new
McMansion for themselves and their offspring and take a cruise
vacation and buy whatever they want at the mall. The corporate
terrorists take all your rights away for their self interest, force
government to let them monitor you with internal passports, and put
Dmitry Sklyarov in jail (see <http://www.freesklyarov.org/>). That's
"eBooks."

They don't get it and their systems aren't designed to make sense or
do the right thing -- profits are higher in the short term selling
plastic contraptions and information-as-objects. Not a world I desire
or would ever want to work toward. It isn't one worth having, at any
price.

So let them have eBooks. I'll take electronic text and work toward
something better.


Here's a great intro FAQ:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/net/etextfaq.html

Enjoy etexts made public for you by the librarians of the future,
the current stewards of our heritage:

http://promo.net/pg/
http://ibiblio.org/
http://archive.org/
http://www.etext.org/
http://eserver.org/
http://www.eldritchpress.org/
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html
etc. ...