One Laptop Per Child has ties with Rupert Murdoch, the global publishing tycoon, via at least $2.5 million in donations from him. In fact, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte even sits on an ethics-related board "monitoring" Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Murdoch is the ultimate profit-driven media capitalist.
So here’s the question of the day. Why are we hearing so little about commercial e-books for OLPC’s $100/$175 laptop? And how about its planned successor, the XO-2, aka the XOXO, which might sell for as little as $75? Might such efforts grow commercial e-book markets in developing countries and maybe even the U.S., the U.K. and other relatively affluent places?
iPod-type potential seen by U.K. book people
I see some hope. Over at the Bookseller, which, like the TeleBlog, is ready to report both the pros and cons of e-books, Managing Editor Philip Jones is intrigued by the XO-2, based on a prototype; and at Macmillan in the U.K., digi-pub experts Sara Lloyd and James Long also find promise in the little machine as an e-reader. "Has the iPod moment just arrived?" reads the headline in the Jones blog.
The XO-2 as object of technolust by commercial publishers and friends? Oh, the horrors! Actually this is healthy. The overwhelming majority of content for the XO, of course, should be free and noncommerical. Social needs first. No sellout to Murdoch’s commercial side, please. But aren’t there times when the for-profit model may be better for society than the no-pay-for-creators approach? And who says Murdoch couldn’t be just one of many commercial publisher involved?
Even Vonnegut…
Even as idealistic a soul as the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was not always shy about revealing his commercial side. "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time,” Vonnegut wrote of Slaughterhouse-Five. Such heartfelt sentiments were perfectly in line with the old witticism attributed to Samuel Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote. except for money." Johnson’s biographer James Boswell reasonably tells us: "Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in literature." But in general, Johnson got it right.
Many will write out of love, but there is a certain point, if a serious writing career is to be sustained and family and personal financial needs are to be respected, when at least some compensation will help. Just ask Richard Herley, a gifted British novelist who recently wound down his shareware experiment, having found that so few people paid him, a mere 25 despite 11,000 downloads. You might say, "Oh, try the Amazon Kindle store, try this, this that," but the point is he saw cash as form of validation, even if he hardly expected to reap a vast fortune. And now, understandably, he feels burned.
The XO and the reconciliation of the profit incentive with the need for free
If nothing else, via national digital libraries in the TeleRead vein, can’t we create ways for books to be free while at the same time providing commercial incentives for writers like Herley and publishers like Macmillan? More importantly, how about different kinds of writers and publishers—those in developing countries? The charges to users there for nonlibrary books could be minor. But money from any source, library or nonlibrary, would be welcome as a tangible source of encouragement to the local Herleys, who along the way could be serve as on-the-scene inspirations for young OLPC users. With the XO computers actually providing a potential distribution mechanism for commercial books—no matter how remote the mountain village, desert waterhole or jungle hamlet—such issues are far from academic.
What’s more, why shouldn’t someone in the sub-Sahara be able to buy, say, The Kite Runner or other commercial works at a reasonable prices if they are not available via the library route? We’re not talking about a $25 hardback-sized expenditure, given local incomes. But some money from such e-markets would be better for commercial publishers than none at all, just so OLPC and related efforts didn’t turn into a one-way conveyor belt of books from the U.S. and the like to developing nations. Local and regional books, too, please; and in fact The Kite Runner’s author is a native Afghani despite his current American citizenship. Some of the most unlikely books out of developing countries might end up global bestsellers just like Khaled Hosseini’s first novel. The greater the literacy rate in developing countries, the more often this will happen as the number of readers and writers grows.
Back home in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere
Meanwhile I hope that Brewer Kahle of the Internet Archive, having proclaimed his interest in public funding for his public domain book scanning efforts, will follow my suggestions and think in broader terms, beyond payment for scanning. Same for similar library-friendly organizations, inside and outside the States.
The nonprofit Archive and other library-related organizations need to consider (1) broadening their reach to include commercial books, with fair compensation for writers and publishers, (2) involving themselves with hardware and software issues at the end-user level and (3) maybe even lobbying for a TeleRead-style system, for which they could serve as contractors. Brewster is already providing wi-fi connections to people in public housing projects in the San Francisco. Could the next step be to test e-reading machines on them, in cooperation with librarians and teachers to help the beneficiaries get the most out of the experiment? And how about other trials among middle-class populations, including elderly people who could benefit from the large "print" that electronic devices of various kinds can display ?
Such efforts could be a useful alternative to Google-zon and at the same time could link in with, say, Macmillan’s BookStore project. The creators of digital warehouses like BookStore will have only a limited amount of resources to, say, make interbook links. Better to team up with library-style organizations and share the burden—especially with giants such as Google and Amazon eager to take over so many current functions of publishers.
The hardware and software issues of the iPod model
In line with the second issue, the hardware and software details of the iPod model, let’s consider a requisite—usability, especially by nontechnical people.
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/a> The current XO-1 hardware (photo) reminds me of a child’s tree house, hidden amid leafy branches. Your friends have to tell you where the tree house is; and similarly you must learn to lift up the twin wi-fi antennas before the case will open. Then there’s the issue of maneuvering the various parts so the laptop becomes a tablet. Luckily, from afar, the hinged XO-2 prototype seems a little simpler to someone using it for the first time. It opens up like a book and includes facing "pages," the dual screens. Even the current XO-1 isn’t that much of a physical puzzle for the people who spend just a moment reading up on it, or who enjoy help from a friend. It has other virtues. The keys are small, but guess what. This is indeed a child’s laptop, and if you can afford it, you can plug in a separate keyboard. The screen is a delight even though the contrast could be better in both the glow mode and the reflective one. Yes, I’d also complain that the touchpad, used to move the cursor and help issue commands, isn’t accessible from the e-book mode (workaround: a mouse). What’s more, the XO-1 could be smaller and lighter. I’d also like to see Kindle-easy wireless connections that worked away from WiFi. That’s about it with my biggest nits about the current XO-1 hardware.
If those were the only issues, the XO-1 could in fact qualify for the iPod analogy! The XO-2 could do even better. In fact, my biggest problems with the XO-2 physically would be not with e-reading features but with the virtual keyboard, through which the keys appear on the screen—not the best news if people are to type at it, hour after hour. The XO-2 truly comes across as more of a reading machine than a creation machine. It is smaller and lighter than the XO-1 and could be good for those elderly people who suffer from arthris and have trouble holding weighty large-print books.
XO laptops’ e-reading software: iPod simple not—but it could be
Here’s the deal killer for the present XO, at least, as an iPod equivalent from an e-book perspective—the software. The good news is that the right open source or commercial software could make the XO-1 iPod-simple. In effect, the world would get a nice e-reading gizmo fit for use in developing and wealthy countries alike; and the XO-2 could be even better.
What needs to be done? Here are some thoughts for OLPC, Brewster and others:
1. Give people and institutions a choice of an e-book-configured XO or one with the present kind of software.
The XO-1 comes with many fine learning activities. The catch is that many don’t work or aren’t that easy for adults, at least, to cope with. Exhibit One is the horrid software for reading. Even months after its introduction, it falls short of my expectations.
OLPC intended its e-reading software to be seamlessly tied in with the Web browser and integrated with the learning journals based on activities and dates and all that. But the end result is a veritable mess compared to the usual file and/or name-of-book approach. Oh, how I hate it, and I suspect that more than a few people feel the same way. While you can use the XO-1’s mediocre Web browser to read e-books found by file names, the process can be convoluted (tip: use a memory card to reduce the complexities associated file paths). Even then, the browser lacks amenities of good e-book software such as word lookups.
Beyond that, the XO-1’s main e-reading software favors PDF. The problem is that PDF often doesn’t work out that well on small screens, and users can’t change font styles. PDF is a convenient software for people doing digitizing. But it often can be a horror for end users, especially kids with learning challenges. While publishers and others can come up with customized versions of PDF optimized for a particular machine, I thoroughly dislike that approach. E-books, no matter where they come from, should just work on many devices, the way audio CDs or MP3s do.
2. Replace or at least augment OLPC’s third-rate reader with one where you can easily change the sizes and styles of the fonts. The current reader lets you modify the sizes. But when I do, the reader on more than a few occasions has crashed. Nor can I vary margins or spacing between lines. Customization could especially help children with learning difficulties; in fact, they should also be able to change the screen colors.
One customizable open source program that might be improved and adapted for the OLPC machine is FBReader. Granted, FBReader is deficient in such areas as the handling of images, and it also could be made simpler to use. But with extra resources from OLPC and friends, this could more easily happen.
3. Include the ePub e-book format of the International Digital Publishing Forum. ePub is nonproprietary, and major commercial publishers will be switching to it in time. Yes, FBReader can handle it. Some FBR-suitable classics in ePub already exists at Feedbooks, which is eager to expand their number, and I suspect that the Internet Archive could create a large number of ePub titles via conversion from its current collection—this on top of the commercial titles that could be available via ePub.
The IDPF’s format is far from perfect but is much more pleasant in most situations for people to use on small screen machines. The dual-screened XO-2 won’t have that much real estate for people to work with. PDF, on it, too, could be veritable disaster without files especially made for it. Brewster, OLPC and others in the nonprofit sector should resist the temptation to think, "Ah! This will just make users more dependent on our libraries." That attitude would be just the classic Microsoft approach, or the one Amazon has used in trying to herd customers into the DRMed Kindle format. By contrast, nonDRMed the nonDRMed ePub format can put the XO machines in the publishing mainstream.
4. In considering software for the XO and successor, don’t just think about ease of reading but also ease of downloading. Go beyond the usual Web-based downloading options, and truly use the toaster-simple approach of the iPod store.
Reinvented as a reader for those choosing the e-book-optimized option, the XO machines should boot up with a book-related menu that gets down to business. Such a menu could include an Amazon-style list of books likely to interest the reader, based on previously supplied information and usage patterns, as well as a search box where you could specify the name of the author, the title, the topic and so on. Also it would be wonderful if videos were integrated with the library, to whet interest in books and authors and encourage illiterate parents and children to learn to read together. In India, none other than movie captions have promoted literacy. "The most effective literacy program for adults in India is same-language captioning of Bollywood musicals," observed OLPC News, "using the karaoke technique of coloring the syllables as they are to be sung." Easily used and reliable text-to-speech software would also be helpful.
5. Try to avoid DRM, as hinted earlier; and encourage partners to do the same. Use social DRM and digital watermarking if need be, but not traditional DRM, given all the technical complexities it creates, along with the fact that technologica
l changes may render DRMed books inaccessible in the future. Not to mention the reliance on the DRM vendors. Hard enough on ordinary readers—who can’t even own books for real, because the technology may change—DRM would be even more of a disaster when used in developing countries with less sophisticated users.
6. Start up focus groups of library users and bookstore customers of all ages—children included, obviously—and see if the software is indeed usable. Trust users, educators and librarians more than programmers on usability issues.
7. Go after funding for development of e-reading programs and related software to make this possible. Perhaps on K-12 matters, OLPC could make peace with Walter Bender, the former OLPC staffer who broke away to form a company devoted to popularization of the Sugar user interface and related software. But from an e-reader perspective, the Sugar interface is a disaster.
8. To induce the open source programmers to be competitive and serve users better, keep the XO platform open to commercial alternatives. Frustratingly, OLPC dissed Pepper Computer when Pepper came up with a linux suite offering Mobipocket, regular Firefox and other software choices that would have made the XO-1 far, far more desirable as an e-book reader than the present mess. See a video and Engadget commentary and UMPC Portal item. The Pepper software suite was for early XOs, alas, and won’t work with the actual production models. Can Negroponte please ask Pepper for an update and play better with the company than he did before?
Also as long as Negroponte now apparently sees OLPC as a little less of an education project and more of a laptop project than earlier, he should indeed go ahead with his plans to team up with Microsoft, with the understanding that open source alternatives will indeed remain and that the company’s DRM-mania be kept at bay. Microsoft just might find it could do well by doing good—that its involvement with OLPC could make up for the losses it took on its digitization project. As much as I like open source, I don’t want such an approach to be the only alternative for OLPC and the rest of the world; here’s to competition to avoid debacles like the OLPC e-book reader.
9. Finally, yes, OLPC should worry more about kids and less about dominating the hardware market. It should work with other hardware-related efforts and organizations like the Internet Archive and the IDPF toward appropriate technical standards.
The real barriers: Human, not technological
For now, unfortunately, the biggest barriers may be human rather than technological. Brewster Kahle in the past, at least, seems to have downplayed the idea of offering standard copyrighted e-books rather than not just the public domain and Creative Commons varieties. I’d hope he’d be entirely flexible these days, and that publishers would, too. Worse, some well-meaning people in the free and open software communities seem hostile to the idea of commercial books, or, yes, diversity in software models. All this needs to change; just as in evolution, vive la différence.
At the other end, I hope that commercial publishers will recognize the merits of working closely not just with libraries but also with nonprofits such as the Internet Archive—Bertelsmann took a good first step in arranging for a German-language snapshot of Wikipedia. Will Macmillan’s BookStore also reach out to the nonprofit sector? There might even be a place for nonprofits allying with warehouse-distributors such as OverDrive—well, assuming that they and their publisher clients can indeed be open-minded about the harm that DRM does.
If nonprofits and people on the commercial side can abandon their dogmas about business models, then e-books will stand more chance of becoming iPod-popular without book people having to turn the keys of the industry over to Amazon and Google. Not that I don’t see a place for those companies, too. But the interest of society at large, as well as those of writers and publishers, shouldn’t suffer. Different business models—productive alliances between profits and nonprofits, extending resources available to all—would make such a desirable outcome for more likely.
Disclosure: I own a tiny speck of Google stock. I’m hardly anti-Google: I just don’t want Google and/or Amazon to control the book business. There are even civil liberties issues. One corporation-control would be a nice choke-hold point for government censors.
Related: Library books you can KEEP forever—and other ideas to help public libraries survive the digital era, an earlier TeleRead post.
