‘Brave new book,’ cautious old Luddite

Alex Beam’s column about ebooks is disappointingly wrongheaded. Yet, Beam’s backward-looking orientation and inability to think creatively about the future of libraries is sadly very common. The troubling consequences of this flawed vision are highlighted by Beam’s discussion of Susan Flannery, the director of libraries for Cambridge. Beam notes the following approvingly:

Instead of theorizing about libraries and the future of the book, Flannery and her board are building a new, $60 million main branch to provide state-of-the-art library services for the next 20 years.

So, the people of Cambridge will be spending tens of millions of dollars on a brand new “library palace”. This appears to be a misallocation of resources on a grand scale. David Rothman has insightfully criticized the building of “library palaces” in several earlier items on the teleread blog. There is another more productive way to spend part of these funds that is inspired by a quote from Beam’s article:

Flannery calls herself “a big fan of the printed book” who now does more “reading” of audio books on her iPod than between hard covers.

Imagine hiring first-rate audio narrators to create audiobooks for large numbers of classic texts. Envision high-quality recordings of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures that are unencumbered by any copyright restrictions. Consider Jane Austen’s books set free in audio form. Oscar Wilde’s plays distributed to all for listening on iPods or MP3 players. Think of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass actually being narrated to inspire a new generation.

The next step may be more difficult to imagine for some. Suppose the MP3 files are freely released on peer-to-peer networks for everyone to share? OK, that is easy for some of you to imagine. How about making Oscar Wilde’s plays (and other works) as superlative films using great directors, actors, and actresses who are altruistically working for scale wages? Next, imagine releasing the product in divx and xvid format on peer-to-peer networks?

Admittedly, this might squeeze the budget for the elaborate multi-columned portico and lion statuary at the new main library but I think it is worthy of consideration.

He’s got a very important point everyone is overlooking. Let me put it in perspective.

Paperback of Dan Brown novel: $6.99.

Sony eReader: $349. e-Book of Dan Brown novel: $6.99. Total cost differente: $349 for the privelege of reading a book I will never be able to read again if my Sony device dies, that I can’t move to different hardware, that I can’t loan to my friend to read, and that I can’t take to the used book store to trade for something else I want to read.

Meanwhile, the Personal Literacy Unit does not require batteries, supports writing all over the freakin’ thing, weighs little, had instant random access, and is easily disposable or preservable as you wish.

Except for certain markets, the economics of eBooks do not make sense for the consumer.

I’ve just started Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ and I found this comment in the forward highly relevant to a lot of the discussion here:

The millennium about to end [has] been the millennium of the book, in that it has seen the object we call a book take on the form now familiar to us. Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium’s end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don’t much feel like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

The discussion seems to so often be about what a book should be in terms of marketing, rather than why its form is necessary for its particular intent.

“Except for certain markets, the economics of eBooks do not make sense for the consumer”

Well, e-books as they now exist. Let’s hope we can change that, especially in the format and preservation areas.

Thanks,
David

Richard overlooks one of the greatest disavantage of p-books.
If you wish to keep it, It need phisical storage space.
So now add $200 for shelving . Add whatever is being payed in rent or morgage on the space taken up by said shelves. In my case an entire room.

If books are treated as disposable items, those costs do not happen, but in that case the value of the book is lost as it disposed of.

Books weigh as much as the wood they were made from. One of the books I am currently reading (The Evolution Of Insects) must weigh over 2 kilograms.

The selling price of the new Sony machine is disastrously high in my opinion, and the price of the new iLiad is a budget-breaker. Further, for many years the selling price of individual commercial ebooks has been ruinously high, and the DRM (digital restrictions management) enforced on these commercial ebooks has been unfairly draconian. On this blog, David Rothman has highlighted the dangers of poor DRM that can, for example, lead to the electronic annihilation of an entire collection of previous ebook purchases.

The comments of “Richard” above on the often nonsensical economics of ebook publishing today are appropriate. Because of poor pricing and inadequate practicality the ebook market is currently minuscule, and the growth of the market is stalled. The next generation of ebook readers is technologically exciting. Hence, it is rather sad to see what appears to be another ebook calamity looming. Sony’s attempt to force proprietary ebook lock-in will probably be rejected by buyers. Inevitably, some media commentators will blame the entire ebook concept for the failure of Sony’s strategy. Instead, commentators should be criticizing badly chosen business plans.

Better plans are available. It is not necessary to use inflexible DRM and proprietary formats. The marvelous publisher Jim Baen uses standard formats and has avoided DRM entanglements. Kudos to Jim Baen, and I hope he has a healthy recovery from his recent medical troubles.

I don’t discount the storage space issue, but I would suggest that if you have rooms and rooms of books, you are not a mass-market consumer. Storage of books is not a problem that most people have, only serious book lovers. Then again, you’d probably pay the $349 premium because you ARE a serious book lover, but are there enough of you willing to pay that premium to make sales in the millions of units that the Sony CEO says he is shooting for?

I think the solution, outside of the DRM issues, may be a book club mentality. Give us your credit card, we charge you $25 and send you the reader with four books of your choosing on it. You agree to buy one book a month for the next X months. If you don’t make your minimum commitment in X months, we bill your credit card the $349. But at least that kind of business model, while digging a big hole up front, eliminates one of the hurdles to getting the device in people’s hands.

But that kind of business model also contributes to people on Oprah saying “I was okay until the eBook Club came to call in the debt, and now I’m bankrupt and living out of my car[1]”. I’m not sure how that would work out.

Check out my Personalized Literacy Unit, a 2003 release from the Bantam Dell labs. It’s an $8 paperback

“I already have a book, why would I need another one?”

This attitude is unfortunately common enough that it is its very own caricature — but I still suspect that the vast minority which *does* actually read books in quantity (for whom eBooks are awesome, especially when going on vacation &c.) is large enough that there *is* a significant market out there waiting to be tapped. However, there’s a much larger market for UMPC/Tablet/PDA/mp3 player etc. devices, and I suspect that any true ‘eBook revolution’ if it happens will do so through there, and not through dedicated devices.

The next (or at least *a* next) iPod is widely rumoured to have a touchscreen across the full face of it, instead of the current screen/controls divide — I would suspect that they might well make ebook reading a feature on that, in that generation or the one after. They already have the infrastructure in the iTMS and iTunes for video, audio (and audiobook) sales, and adding an eBook format ought to be relatively easy. They already know how to negotiate with music publishers, I’m sure book publishers wouldn’t be too hard to deal with. And they’ve got a readymade fairly effective[2] DRM module already in place, that just needs to be modified to contain text instead of m4a files.

[1] Well, maybe not that. Oprah only seems to interview the tastefully destitute who haven’t lost their homes yet, at least as far as occasionally channelsurfing across it can detect.

[2] Effective enough for the music publishers, at least.

“I’m sure book publishers wouldn’t be too hard to deal with.”

You’ve never talked to a writer, or a free-lance copy editor 🙂