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Rabbi gives Sony an e-book-only deal: Just how would God or Gods feel about E and DRM?
September 20, 2009 | 11:58 am
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By David Rothman
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of the earlier Kosher Sex, is distributing his latest book exclusively through the Sony eBook Store.
The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger, won’t even be available as a paper book, according to the Washington Post’s Stephen Lowman. Rabbi Boteach wanted the book out ASAP.
What advice would you give the Rabbi, and not just on the E-vs.-P issuei? How about such earthly matters as formats and DRM?
A little background
By way of background, the Sony store this year is to forsake its usual proprietary format for Adobe-DRMed ePub. It may or may not yet be there yet; I don’t know. Either way, I’m almost certain that Sony or others DRMed the Rabbi’s title.
So what does this all mean in a religious context—either Jewish or nonJewish. If you believe in God or Gods, do you think that He, She or They would care about the medium that writers and publishers use? And how would such a being or beings feel about DRM? I’d also welcome atheistic perspectives. Tact, please! No hellfire-and-brimstone for those disagreeing. We’re a global blog with visitors of many beliefs or lack thereof.
Meanwhile here are more details from the Post:
While Boteach said there are thousands of books lining his walls, 80 percent of his book reading is done on the Reader. As an Orthodox Jew, he refrains from use of electrical appliances on the Sabbath, so the drag of a scrollbar or the tap of key will never wholly replace the lifting of a page in his house.
But the device has taken hold. Most nights Boteach’s Reader winds up at his bedside. He recently purchased another Reader for his children, with his 16-year-old son devouring such tomes as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The two recently read Heart of Darkness. (One of the blessings of reading the classics is that many are in the public domain and can be downloaded for free onto open format e-readers.)
Note: Normally we don’t get into religious topics—that’s Paul’s strong preference. But I think this case is close enough to the core subject matter of the TeleRead Blog for it to be an exception.
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Comments:
Actually, he put on a rather revealing performance at the Sony press conference for their new Readers that I attended.
He more or less took over the panel and proceeded to, rather shamelessly I thought, self promote himself and his books, much to the irritation of the other panel members who couldn’t seem to shut him up. His performance pretty much eviscerated the point of the panel which was to discuss the new Sony “Words Move Me” site. So much so that I didn’t bother to report on the panel’s discussion in my coverage of the event.
Thanks for that tidbit, Paul. No telling where the TeleBlog will turn up, eh?
Meanwhile I’m curious if anyone has replies to the questions I raised. Somewhere–I can’t it now–there was even an essay on DRM from a Christian perspective.
All the major religions, I’d hope, would have an interest in long-term preservation of material, for the sake of learning from the past and making certain that acts of genocide and other great evils did not go forgotten.
Thanks,
David
My experience is that the religious are no less greedy than the non-/irreligious, so it doesn’t surprise me that DRMing his book (in hopes of insuring greater personal profit) is at least as important, if not more important, than spreading the word. Imagine what the world would be like today if DRM had been around at the time of writing the Bible (both Jewish and Christian versions) and the Koran. I doubt the gospel of good would have been widely spread.
My impression of Boteach is that he is a self-serving, name-dropping excuse of a Rabbi. Google his column after Michael Jackson’s death for a sampling.
I’m Jewish myself, but not religious. Still, it does occur to me that the Old Testament and New Testament are full of stories, advice and rules that were intended to be freely distributed. The Ten Commandments did not come with DRM
You asked how God would feel about drm and publishing mediums. I doubt God cares. I think God wants His message spread to everyone, freely. The more accessible, the better. I don’t remember reading about the Sony store in the bible. Seems a little exclusive to me.
I think a better question is how God feels about people who use Him as a method of making money, and where that money goes.
That God cares about publishing formats is to suggest that He is like a person who would entertain technological preferences.
May He save us from archaic concepts of Himself. God willing, E-publishing will help to bring us notions of the Divine with more explanatory power. One of my favorites is this passage from Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment:
“In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.
“In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological gestalt – and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word ‘being,’ since it is the source from which all being emerges.
“That being exists in a psychological dimension, a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multiloving constant focus.”
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, a Seth book by Jane Roberts (Amber-Allen, 1997)
I think that Paul’s strong preference that the blog should not “get into religious topics” is reasonable. So here is some humor tangential to religion.
If there is a creator Godhead then one can inspect the nebulae, planets, flora, and fauna and try to infer the divine intentions. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane reviewed the multitudinous ramifying life forms on Earth (900,000 known insect species) and concluded that the creator had “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” [1]
Reviewing the world of digital publishing, it appears that the creator loves the proliferation of incompatible ebook formats encrusted with clumsy and aggravating DRM. However, this celestial infatuation may be illusory because the variants may become extinct soon, and ePub may prevail as the one-true sought-after apotheosis.
[1] The earliest citation for Haldane’s comment is 1959, and the reference says it might be apocryphal.