I love Luddites. The e-book industry has a long way to go before society can take digital books seriously as a durable medium, and the Luds are ever so helpful in reminding e-boosters of the work ahead—in such areas as e-book standards, genuine ownership of e-books and related archiving strategies. We need wake-up calls.
The prominent journalist Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian in the U.K., obliged e-bookdom recently with a tech-skeptical column headlined When it comes to kissing and telling, you can’t beat this 15th century gadget: The floor of memoirs has again proved the worth of the book as a receptacle for almost all the human imagination can device.
Spot-on criticism from Sir Simon
“Long after emails have been wiped, tapes have decayed, CDs have rusted and computers have crashed, dusty books will remain as silent witnesses on the shelf,” wrote Sir Simon. “Power lies in their simplicity and indestructibility. They are a habit we will never kick. We love them because we know they are for ever.”
As a realistic fan of both E and P, I in fact agree with him on the above specifics. E-bookdom is egregiously deficient for now in preservation-related areas despite some progress with, say, the ePub standard or the estimable but less than fully comprehensive efforts at the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. The publishing industry, libraries and others can change that. But at present, e-books and e-text in general are far from trustworthy, and sometimes the publishers themselves can be the biggest threat, as shown by the still-unexplained link vandalism against me at Publishers Weekly; Luddites at work? Among the killed items was a plea—in the vein of this one—for truly trustworthy storage of e-books.
Amazon as a possible threat to true ownership of e-books
Within e-bookdom itself, as opposed to PW, a magazine, one of the most notable examples of preservation risks is Amazon.com, the very company that wants millions of people to entrust their personal libraries to it. Amazon, of course, is the megacorporation behind the Kindle tablet. Because the Kindle is headed for the U.K., I would encourage Sir Simon to share with his readers the following story from Harrie Franks, an Amazon-abused reader: “I had a system crash two years ago and after restoring 60 e-books in PDF format I was unable to get them authorized again. I contacted both Amazon and Adobe but both were unable to help. In fact, Adobe never replied to my emails. Amazon seems not to sell e-books any more and they are unable to give me a re-download.” Actually Amazon was killing off Adobe books to herd publishers and shoppers into its own Mobipocket format, not to mention the one for the Kindle, which was on the cusp of release. So much for Amazon’s past respect for its e-book customers and for E as a permanent medium.
Worse, a credible source has quoted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as having said at one point that Amazon eventually might abandon books. Perhaps Bezos changed his mind after the Kindle made the cover of Newsweek, but a cogent lesson arises here. We mustn’t entrust book to business people alone.
Beware of Google, too
As a preserver of books, Google, which is partnering with some libraries, comes across as more trustworthy than Amazon (disclosure: I own a speck of Google stock for retirement purposes).
But even Google is no substitute for a truly comprehensive strategy to preserve books, and if nothing else, I agree with the concerns that Sara Lloyd at Pan Macmillan has expressed about the search-engine company, which, like Amazon, will be competing with publishers (as an aside, let me strongly recommend “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21th century” even if I don’t agree with absolutely everything she said there—see Parts I, II, III, IV and V, with one more on the way for the Digitalist blog).
Cooperate with Google, I say, sell your books through it, make them searchable via the engine, but don’t rely on it for everything. Pan Macmillan and others should follow the Lloyd suggestions and plan to sell access to books directly to consumers. Not only that, I would encourage Holtzbrinck, the ultimate owner of Pan Macmillan and countless other imprints, to continue its BookStore efforts to warehouse books. Same for other private companies associated with the publishing industry.
The glories of personal ownership of books
At the same time, I would argue that if Pan Macmillan and others care about the permanence of books, they should make it easy for individuals to own them forever for use on their own machines. The Tower of eBabel, all those clashing book formats, is the enemy of permanence. Operating systems and gizmos over the decades will come and go. Digital Rights Management, as shown by the Adobe-Amazon example and Franks’ nightmare, aggravates the problem.
Just why how can the e-book industry win over Sir Simon, as a future believer in the permanence of E, if access to his titles must be linked to a particular company, whether in publishing or technology? Listen to him, Pan Macmillan. Think of those decaying tapes and less-than-“forever” CDs—and also of the fact that most publishers do not last decade after decade, and that it would be foolish for book readers to depend just on them for preservation of books.
Needed: A Preservation Triangle for E
In place of the present situation, where e-book buyers must so often rely on the kindness of strangers for permanent access to their purchases, I suggest a Preservation Triangle for e-books and other electronic media.
–Leg #1 would be the publishing industry itself, as well as publishers or quasi-publishers such as Google or nonprofits such as the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. As much as I believe in well-stocked national digital library systems, I distrust governments. Here in the States, the Bush Administration has warred against the dedicated people at the Environmental Protection Agency and tried to wipe out its library system. It takes a certain amount of vanity to run for, or seize, high office in any country. The leader of every nation, ipso facto, just by dint of being who he or she is, has a bit of an image-fixated megalomaniac inside. It is folly, folly, folly to entrust governments alone with the preservation of books. I want both BookStore and Google and others to be around to help spread around, say, title exposing the environmental disasters that Bush and friends have given us.
–Leg #2 would be public libraries and others. The U.K., the U.S., every country, should ultimately have a well-stocked national digital library system with provisions for fair compensation for creators. Such systems could store e-books and other digital items via a variety of media and regularly check files for integrity. Alas, initiatives of this kind are costly and should be safe from the temptation of many a publisher to cut corners. Here in the States, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation assures that your bank deposits, up to a certain level, are safe. We need a similar system to guarantee the safety of books—both for personal access to purchases and for future access by scholars and others. Libraries and corporations should work hand in hand toward this goal. Same for schools. If we don’t want books simply to be fodder for snippetizing and Wikipedia articles, then the school systems need to accustom students to full-length texts, particularly narratives, early on. Libraries, too, could be part of this m
ission. We need to preserve books in the public mind, not just on the shelves; and long term, libraries will count immensely.
The permanence of libraries—well, permanence when politicians and wars allow it—would be one way to help assure the survival of networked books, which depend on links from many sources. But that is not the only argument for widespread use of the library model to distribute e-books, beyond the ability of libraries to reach wide variety of socioeconomic groups.
Sometimes, you see, we need libraries and archives to protect the private sector for itself; witness the accidental loss of countless old radio programs, as well as old recordings and films. On top of that, we go back to Publishers Weekly’s zapping of Web links for recent blog posts, not just by me but also by David Nudo, the former PW publisher, as well as those by Karen Holt, the ex-duty editor and former Web editor who hired me. Who says the private sector can’t play Big Brother? In a Web sense, PW, which would have earned advertising income from the blog archives, tried to make nonpeople out of Nudo, Karen and me. I hate it when anyone, government or corporate, commits such obviously Orwellian acts, whether against blog posts or e-books. My own posts for PW tended as a rule to be on such serious topics as Locking up Dickens, but PW blithely deleted tens of thousands of my words from public view, while lovingly preserving beefcake photos from another blogger. Luckily the TeleBlog had run similar items—on Dickens and the rest, that is. But PW’s link-kill thwarted graduate students and others who had naively followed up on the magazine’s invitation to link to my E-Book Report blog.
–Leg #3 would be individual owners, who should be able to buy nonDRMed e-books in a standard format—ePub, along with HTML ideally—for them and their descendants to be able to keep forever. Genuine private ownership of e-books and other digital content is one way to thwart government censorship or PW-style Big Brotherism on the private side. Short of invading homes electronically or physically to wipe out the books, there would be nothing despots could do.
Outside the Preservation Triangle: P-books
Finally, as a preservation tool, may I suggest something outside the E Preservation Triangle—yes, paper books in case digital preservation fails. Fight on for old-fashioned books, Sir Simon. My favorite Luddite would have been pleased. Whatever the medium, E or P, books to deserve to be a “forever” medium.
Related: Is the e-book over already? on The Bookseller site—a provocative blog item by Managing Editor Philip Jones.
On a personal level I lost about 300 paperbacks to a leaky garage roof recently. Don’t talk to me about the permanence of p-books.