So why aren’t 100 million people downloading e-books and reading them on their sharp-screened PDAs or dedicated devices? For more than a decade we’ve harped on the need for public libraries to popularize the technology–a Good Thing for the commercial side, too. Then e-books will reach the masses. In order to appreciate the technology, you need to use it, a frustrating but very real Catch-22. But imagine a mix of good content and the ability of Americans to borrow decent e-book readers from their local libraries. The right infrastructure online in the TeleRead vein, such as a good universal catalogue and more sophisticated linking and archival capabilities, would also help.
Doubt the above? Well, below, we’ll offer some quotes from Edison, His Life and Inventions–a 1910 biography by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin. And then, in the technical standards area, we’ll provide a less flattering parallel. But first the positive:
Nothing is more difficult in the world than to get a good many hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do something they have never done before. A very real difficulty in the introduction of his lamp and lighting system by Edison lay in the absolute ignorance of the public at large, not only as to its merits, but as to the very appearance of the light. Some few thousand people had gone out to Menlo Park, and had there seen the lamps in operation at the laboratory or on the hillsides, but they were an insignificant proportion of the inhabitants of the United States. A newspaper description of or a magazine article may be admirably complete in itself with illustration, but until some personal experience is had of the thing described it does not convey a perfect mental picture, nor can it always make the desire active and insistent. Generally, people wait to have the new thing brought to them, and hence, as in the case of the Edison light, an educational campaign of a practical nature is a fundamental condition of success.
Significantly, the biography goes on to describe the need for an infrastructure to support the Edison light.
Another serious difficulty confronting Edison and his associates was that nowhere in the world were there to be purchased any of the appliances necessary for the use of the lighting system. Edison had resolved from the very first that the initial central station embodying his various ideas should be installed in New York City, where he could superintend the installation personally, and then watch the operation. Plans to that end were now rapidly maturing, but there would be needed among other things–every one of them new and novel–dynamos, switchboards, regulators, pressure and current indicators, fixtures in great variety, incandescent lamps, meters, sockets, small switches…
How applicable to e-books! Despite all the ballyhoo, we still lack the proper infrastructure and the necessary wrinkles to add full value to the new medium, such as stable and precise interbook linking capabilities.
But what about another issue, e-book standards? Here the Edison parallel holds true in a negative way. Electric lights might have caught on faster without the distractions of the AC/DC war, in which, by the way, Edison was on the wrong side. He was like the advocates of proprietary e-book formats–fixated on immediate commercial interests at the expense of the industry as a whole. Even a genius can’t always be right. Stupidly and stubbornly, Edison ignored the pleas of Nikola Tesla to go AC–an idea that the wizard of Menlo Park considered downright un-American.
Eventually, as described by invention authority John H.H. Lienhard, “Edison took out a commercial license to use AC. The world found out why after he’d made clandestine visits to Auburn Prison. He’d built an electric chair. Now the American public would see what AC could do to a human being. Before the chair was first used on a fellow named William Kemmler, Edison’s people started killing larger animals in their demonstrations. ‘Is this what your wife should be cooking with?’ they asked.”
Shades of some of the moronic arguments against a Universal Consumer Format for e-books? Oh well, at least no one’s getting killed–unless you count the writers and publishers who are losing out because of the Tower of eBabel.
Update, 1:30 p.m. EST: I emailed Prof. Lienhard and learned that he, too, is hardly smug about the present condition of the e-book industry. He and his son have put online a PDF of A Heat Transfer Textbook, 3rd Edition, via a server at MIT, where the younger Lienhard is a full professor in heat transfer and fluid mechanics (the older Lienhard is an international authority on similar matters and is a professor emeritus at the University of Houston). The father-son book is a popular download, but my hunch is that many serious readers are printing it out rather than actually reading it on their computers. That’s Adobe for you. On the positive, the online project does allow for faster revisions and must be a godsend for students and schools with limited budgets.
