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By jdb, March 10, 2010

Though genre books have tended to be longer in the last couple of decades, the old 60-70k books have an advantage in that a reader can get the whole story in a brief period. If you want more, you buy another book. I also always liked how they fit in your pocket. I wonder if ebook stories will get shorter in general. Freed from the ‘container’ of paper book form, the economic impetus of the publisher and the writer is to provide fewer words for more money. At the same time, people might not spend as long on a screen book as they would with paper, especially if the device they are using is multi-function and they choose to move on after shorter periods of time. Mainstream reading habits might be changing anyway, with or without ebooks, as people use their time differently. The incredibly popular James Patterson books are pretty slim and the chapters look to be between five hundred and a thousand words.

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By jdb, March 5, 2010

Hyperbooks, interactive electronic books with media embedded, were a lot more exciting 20 years ago when they were just being talked about. Now that they’re actually here in something like the original form envisioned in the 1970′s, it’s hard to see the killer application, they reveal themselves to be an expensive and fragile way of doing very cheap things. Books and toys for children are durable and cheap, and essentially disposable. Ipad’s aren’t.

Unlike word processing, layout engines, photo editing, video games etc., which were all new ways of doing things and made work and fun cheaper, hyperbooks don’t really do anything new. So far nobody has wanted embedded movies and sound on cd-rom or the web so I don’t know why they’ll want it here.

Hyperbooks do let you zoom into information and explore down different pathways,  self-selecting what you want to know, but hypertext is internet-native and pretty well established, and serves us better on a network where it can connect to related and/or new resources. Actually, that’s the whole point. Otherwise there is no advantage over flipping pages back and forth (which still has it’s own ergonomic set of advantages for learning and research over hypertext.)

Though it’s important not to underestimate the gee-whiz factor, Hyperbooks get a yawn from me. Truth be told, I’m disappointed but not really surprised. The thrill was gone a while ago, for me. The whole thing really did sound like it was going to be better than this, once upon a time.

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By jdb, April 7, 2009

(originally published 1/2008)

‘It’s inevitable’ they all say, books will be replaced just like those dumb LP’s were, those obsolete optical discs! The future is digital and the future is now!

People have been saying ‘now’ for about fifteen years. Is it now yet? Where’s the damn Ebooks? It’s inevitable, right? Of the few inevitable things from the 90′s that are still on schedule, this is not one of them.

One of the big problems is that there aren’t enough ebook reading devices. Kindles are too expensive to be anything other than a luxury. So therefore, there’s no big rush to push ebooks. It’s the old hardware/software courtship ritual… if there were more reader devices, there would be more books and if there were more books there would be more readers.

Some US colleges are talking about distributing reader devices for textbooks, all the textbooks would be electronic. That might create a nice installed base to market to. It would also, incidentally, make it impossible for students to share textbooks or pay a lower price for used…

One of real problems withe the medium in my mind is that the ebooks don’t fit into one of the main ways people get and deal with books. You can’t just hand them to a buddy. Even if they end up on his device, they are less likely to read it because its not some physical object they come across all the time, that they have to manage and decide where to keep. You can’t unload a box of knowledge on your friends or kids and be able to tell whether they’re reading them, treasuring them or trashing them.

And what about libraries? there’s no DRM for ‘loaning’ unless you’re loaning out the readers too, and what library wants to go into the hardware business? It’s unlikely there will be functional and prevalent DRM for that – it requires the participation of, say, Bertelsmann, and what do they get out of it? Bear in mind that they still control your digital copy and have merely given you permission to read it.

(Update 4/09- see Authors Guild vs. Google for developments on the library issue, there are now excerpts of ‘library books’ available on Google (truth be told, most of each book can be read.) Authors are compensated with a pittance of ad revenue, which has proven so abundant as of late, and the authors will have no ability to opt out.)

(Update 8/09- the nerw Sony readers allow you to get books from a library that automatically expire after three weeks, then someone else can ‘borrow’ the same copy. Now why didn’t I think of that?)

The ebook, the piece of software, is not the library’s to lend, and there’s no productive fair use here, like with print, because if you have that then the cat is out of the bag like it is in Bertelsmann’s music division – and then there’s no more publishing company, it’s not like music that you can stream in wal-mart and collect state mandated royalties.

You don’t get to share an ebook like you do hard copy. Without insecure hardcopy, ebooks can be encrypted and DRM’ed. The only thing publishers can really do to control a print book once its printed and sold is to find them and burn them, and that is both expensive and culturally unacceptable. Which is getting to the root of the ‘problem’, the real reason why no one is jumping to replace their books with text files. It’s the culture.

People who like books, like books. They like to go to big book stores and mess around with books. They whisper in book stores as if they were in a monastary. They like stacking books up on shelves, like old monks preserving knowledge. They like the user interface of paper books, the touch, smell etc. They like to bury them in the desert so people might be able to enjoy them a few thousand years from now. Bits and bytes won’t last that long, you’ve got to have some good hardcopy.

The culture of books is an old one, books are much more ingrained in our collective consciousness than is recorded music or the use of small digital devices… you are talking over a thousand years of ascribed value here, people like books. They like the way books make them feel about themselves. I believe they like them because books are a proven method for the distribution and preservation of culture, knowledge and deep values across both space and time. Ebooks are not. We can only hope that books are not going anywhere.

And honestly, if they do, we might be in for some trouble.