Book People Archive

(No subject)

I was surprised at the flame letters I got from the venerable Michael 
Hart, and Michael Stutz. It what appeared to be a dry discussion over 
terminology (etext vs. ebook) we got a venting of considerable hostility 
toward commercial contemporary digital publications. I have no 
investment at all in the terms etext or ebook, though I prefer ebook 
because it is books that I am interested in. But what I saw in the 
Hart-Stutz letters was a dismissal of newly written books for sale in 
digital format. This really surprised me. I can agree that the super 
copy protected formats now used by the big publishers reduce even my 
interest to zero, but that is because I don't read etexts (I will use 
Michael Hart's terminology) on screens but with a text to speech engine 
that cannot access such files; if they came with an adequate audio 
reader I would feel quite differently about it. But there is also a 
cottage industry of small publishers all over the English-speaking world 
who offer new authors at modest prices in HTML or other accessible 
formats. I am not ready to predict that these will all disappear for 
lack of interest. Should etexts be limited to high class literature that 
is out of copywright, i.e., 70 years old? I balance my ebook recording 
and listening between these classic (and free) books, and buying ebooks 
from contemporary authors. I cannot use any of the highly copy protected 
books circulated by Barnes and Noble etc. and do not buy those. But I 
often buy books from the little "presses," usually at $5 to $7 a book, 
just to get something contemporary. And at least a few of them are 
surprisingly good (for example, Online Originals, 
http://www.onlineoriginals.com/).  I am not at all ready to predict as 
Hart and Stutz do that these will rapidly disappear for lack of 
interest; given the success of the Internet in connecting niche market 
purveyers with their potential audience, small publishers may well be 
able to stay afloat indefinitely.  If there is no interest in reading 
contemporary material in digital format why should there be a sustained 
interest in reading much older material in this more or less difficult 
format?

There is an extremely valuable service being performed by the Gutenberg 
in particular in digital preservation, and in promotion of the library 
model of free mass availability. It is also very objectionable that 
publishers are trying to use intellectual property rights and copyright 
to throttle distribution of works that should be in the public domain. 
All this aside, there is also a place in the digital world for sales of 
new material, whether it conforms to the free model or does not. In the 
paper world we have libraries in which there are free books, and book 
stores in which there is a price tag. There would be no libraries if 
publishers did not have bookstores in which to make back their costs, 
and it is not surprising that publishers try to prevent free copying of 
their current line. To this extent I agree with the two Michaels: I do 
not think there is a mass market at this time for digital works, old or 
new. Paper is still more portable in most situations for the vast 
majority of readers. Few people are really going to sit at computer 
screens to read books, and books in Palm Pilots are for use in doctor's 
offices and will not be read fast enough to make much of a commercial 
market. However, we have seen the growth of a mass market for audio 
books on casette and CD over the last decade. It is estimated that a 
decade from now, text to speech technology will be virtually 
indistinguishable from real human readers. At that point the vast world 
of digital publishing has the potential to open up to a readership 
comensurate with its potential. Digital books or etexts will not emerge 
from an archivist and hobbyist niche until they are transformed into 
audio books, when electronic text to speech readers become better and 
simpler than they are today. The first steps on that road will be taken 
later this year when Microsoft adds support for text to speech to its 
Pocket PC 2002 operating system. It is more likely than not that the big 
commercial publishers will hold out long enough with their ebook line to 
connect with this potential audience, eight or ten years from now, in 
which case the copy protected model will win a place for itself in the 
digital world, and etexts of all kinds will have a chance to 
dramatically increase their circulation. In the big picture is it 
premature to predict the death of this format.

Leslie Evans
Los Angeles