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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11077 ***
+Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
+
+February 12, 2004
+
+San Diego, CA
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+doctorow@craphound.com
+
+--
+
+Forematter:
+
+This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
+Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along
+with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
+be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
+interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
+new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
+
+This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
+Commons public domain dedication:
+
+> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
+>
+> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
+> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
+> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
+> public domain.
+>
+> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
+> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
+> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
+> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
+> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
+> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
+> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
+> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
+>
+> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
+> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
+> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
+> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
+> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
+
+--
+
+For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
+I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
+short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
+parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
+presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
+Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
+think it's true.
+
+No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
+call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
+Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
+to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
+text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
+and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
+
+I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
+future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
+them with you:
+
+1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
+ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
+sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
+have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
+installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
+new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
+backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
+about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
+far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
+ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
+buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
+are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
+will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
+pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
+the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
+promote the dead-tree editions.
+
+2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
+books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
+Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
+he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
+other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
+me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
+copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
+readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
+build concordances of characters, places and events.
+
+3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't own the book [Unless you
+own the ebook, you don't own the book]. I take the view that the
+book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
+artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
+"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
+it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
+question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
+SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
+text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
+into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
+them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
+to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
+copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
+readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
+[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
+can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
+perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
+minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
+or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
+a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
+cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
+confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
+settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
+less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
+text.
+
+4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
+deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on
+the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science
+fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science
+fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved
+are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*
+and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
+pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're
+*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of of
+writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of
+us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of
+earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would
+play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive
+for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire
+for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the
+corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search
+engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.
+They can be googled.
+
+Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
+trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
+in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
+were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
+at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best
+way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the
+best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with
+us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a
+bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was
+recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
+
+[QUOTED TEXT]
+
+> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
+> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
+> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
+> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
+> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
+> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
+> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
+> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
+
+Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed
+me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good
+name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that
+damning passage:
+
+[PULL-QUOTE]
+
+> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
+> page
+
+You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
+PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of
+paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his
+novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is
+"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer
+out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
+
+You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
+and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
+the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
+play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have
+it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read
+the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the
+ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is."
+And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to
+give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell
+your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
+
+5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
+their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to
+the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
+and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
+ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
+restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
+ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
+paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
+paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
+for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
+sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
+than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
+stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
+paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
+beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
+paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
+
+6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
+one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
+shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
+audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
+cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
+with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
+action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
+a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
+penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
+without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
+chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
+shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
+but check this out:
+
+[Nietzsche quote]
+
+> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
+> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
+> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
+
+In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
+paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
+this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
+with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
+of Morals," published in *1887.*
+
+Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
+necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
+storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
+for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
+funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
+Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
+forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
+Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
+20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
+or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
+soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
+the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
+to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
+
+7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
+majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
+library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
+one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
+work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
+human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
+just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
+
+For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
+desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
+complete that collection with different texts that are as
+distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
+like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
+or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
+closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
+at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
+granular observation, there are as many differences in our
+"shared" experience as there are similarities.
+
+More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
+electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
+between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
+books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
+hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
+analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
+Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
+conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
+different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
+Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
+goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.
+
+8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
+round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
+more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
+retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
+good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
+around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
+hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
+and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
+buy.
+
+There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
+bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
+Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
+the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
+at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
+having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
+left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
+Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
+thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
+thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
+ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
+be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
+one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
+book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
+cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
+sales are healthy.
+
+We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
+*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
+computers are damned good at counting things!). This is
+important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of
+copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a
+difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
+numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
+
+But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
+book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the
+run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the
+occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books
+printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never
+exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations,
+chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
+that's why.
+
+And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
+Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some
+copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
+order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
+or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
+returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
+accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
+where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
+
+The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
+They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
+shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
+pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
+insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
+divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
+radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
+counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
+
+Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
+electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
+
+And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
+However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
+encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
+audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
+can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
+book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
+hardest and most important task any writer faces.
+
+#
+
+I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
+bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
+was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
+wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
+I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
+book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
+works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
+fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
+2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
+
+I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
+storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
+LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
+the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
+Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
+from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
+fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
+
+Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
+are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
+that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
+malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
+months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
+durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
+BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
+into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
+minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
+exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
+press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
+the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
+picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
+variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
+person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
+
+Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
+speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
+and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
+to lay out both categories of ideas.
+
+This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
+Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time,
+there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
+one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
+new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
+screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
+that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
+the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
+about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
+intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
+
+A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
+meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
+say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
+released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
+use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
+special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
+[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
+unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
+cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
+time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
+character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
+cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
+introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these
+books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous
+book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"
+the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any
+book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think
+that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.
+
+Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet.
+I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over
+ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper
+circles. Writers were joining the discussion on
+alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of
+retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up
+their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My
+editor, a blogger, hacker and
+guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick
+Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup,
+saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
+
+> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
+> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
+> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
+> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes.  Partly it's
+> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
+> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
+> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
+> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
+> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
+> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
+> doesn't work.  In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
+> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
+> avoid noticing that music didn't die.  But the record industry's
+> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
+
+Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
+years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
+to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
+in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
+Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
+licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
+turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
+novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).
+
+Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
+by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
+for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
+alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
+since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
+to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
+incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
+laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
+Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
+
+Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
+thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
+duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
+newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
+that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
+unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
+to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
+esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
+
+This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
+boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
+not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
+First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
+rest of the world.
+
+Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
+opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
+stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
+other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
+every day.
+
+This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
+
+1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
+
+[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
+
+* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
+
+* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
+appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
+good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
+evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)
+
+* You can't take your ebook into the tub
+
+* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
+
+* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
+
+None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
+"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
+replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
+reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted
+grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that
+certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their
+grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me
+email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to
+show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her
+Florida retirement condo)?
+
+The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
+seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper
+books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a
+little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.
+This is interesting because the history of the book is the
+history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
+ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American
+Revolution.
+
+Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
+on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them
+were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool
+cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the
+books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
+non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey
+incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
+
+Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
+Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He
+printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and
+distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God
+all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.
+
+Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
+printing press:
+
+[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
+
+* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
+illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the
+typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could
+bring to bear when writing out the word of God
+
+* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case
+for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority
+of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed
+impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.
+
+* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
+incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew
+that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
+
+* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
+numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
+apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
+translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
+a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
+for centuries.
+
+In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
+patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
+get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
+the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
+mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
+raised above with equal certainty.
+
+What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
+that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
+
+[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
+
+* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
+without having to subject themselves to the authority and
+approval of the Church
+
+* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
+longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
+explained what God really meant
+
+* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
+flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
+and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
+popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
+
+Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
+monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
+Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
+success.
+
+By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
+little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
+
+[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
+
+* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
+midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
+by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
+social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
+to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
+pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
+factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
+friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
+sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
+in a series!
+
+* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
+evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
+truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
+bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
+it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
+the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
+the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
+"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
+the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
+because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
+captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
+tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
+because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
+for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
+the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
+been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
+when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
+they share the trait of making the difference between a
+compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
+programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
+majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic
+text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on
+a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
+can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text
+for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig.
+In other words, most people who download the book do so for the
+predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample
+a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the
+book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text
+experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing
+out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather
+than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
+
+Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
+notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the
+wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a
+cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that
+cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
+holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
+have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
+
+The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --
+is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
+Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
+little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the
+ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and
+sending it around.
+
+Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
+That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
+over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
+(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
+copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
+cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
+swings a very big stick on the Hill).
+
+This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
+
+[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
+
+* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
+that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
+getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
+true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
+publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
+strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.
+
+* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
+You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
+Calling them crooks is bad for business.
+
+* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
+the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
+hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
+This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
+signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
+and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
+agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
+they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
+to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?
+
+* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
+especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
+$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
+representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
+ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
+before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
+This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
+side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
+publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
+from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
+prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
+the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
+opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
+potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
+material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
+because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
+work carries such a terrible price.
+
+* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
+hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
+in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
+figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
+certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
+apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
+them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
+long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
+science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
+Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
+known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
+descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
+their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
+just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
+public domain.
+
+This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
+thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
+too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:
+a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
+
+From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
+the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
+preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease
+with which it can reproduced.
+
+(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
+about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than
+the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the
+Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio
+had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*
+control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform
+to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could
+build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them
+performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a
+monkish Bible and a  Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change,
+Napster is peanuts)
+
+Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
+off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by
+bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
+craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as
+expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as
+did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
+illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in
+comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a
+copy of her own.
+
+Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
+hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at
+Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of
+musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.
+The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on
+the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing
+press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
+migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items
+that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that
+*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on
+creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most
+enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.
+
+Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's
+a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a
+photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery
+and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
+demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
+creators with their audiences.
+
+For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
+copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
+invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
+record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
+was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
+sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
+
+Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
+generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
+temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
+mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real
+property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current
+copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
+
+So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the
+end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the
+printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent
+of bookwarez.
+
+#
+
+Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
+
+We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
+before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or
+extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra
+to thank you for your patience.
+
+About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
+Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most
+restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my
+readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was
+cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it
+felt like I was taking a plunge.
+
+Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text
+of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
+"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN
+READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my
+blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can
+make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction
+(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK
+HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it,
+with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to
+rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking
+mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.
+
+The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
+happens when I get in up to my knees.
+
+The text with the new license will be online before the end of
+the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
+
+Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
+Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain
+dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see
+fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is
+through.
+
+#
+
+EOF
+
+That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind
+attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more
+detailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them
+here in plain sight.
+
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+Midflight over Texas
+
+February 4, 2004
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11077 ***
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #11077 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11077)
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11077 ***
+
+
+
+
+Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
+
+February 12, 2004
+
+San Diego, CA
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+doctorow@craphound.com
+
+--
+
+Forematter:
+
+This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
+Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along
+with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
+be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
+interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
+new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
+
+This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
+Commons public domain dedication:
+
+> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
+>
+> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
+> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
+> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
+> public domain.
+>
+> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
+> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
+> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
+> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
+> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
+> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
+> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
+> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
+>
+> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
+> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
+> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
+> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
+> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
+
+--
+
+For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
+I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
+short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
+parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
+presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
+Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
+think it's true.
+
+No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
+call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
+Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
+to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
+text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
+and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
+
+I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
+future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
+them with you:
+
+1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
+ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
+sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
+have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
+installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
+new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
+backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
+about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
+far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
+ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
+buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
+are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
+will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
+pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
+the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
+promote the dead-tree editions.
+
+2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
+books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
+Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
+he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
+other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
+me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
+copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
+readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
+build concordances of characters, places and events.
+
+3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't own the book [Unless you
+own the ebook, you don't own the book]. I take the view that the
+book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
+artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
+"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
+it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
+question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
+SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
+text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
+into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
+them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
+to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
+copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
+readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
+[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
+can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
+perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
+minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
+or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
+a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
+cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
+confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
+settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
+less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
+text.
+
+4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
+deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on
+the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science
+fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science
+fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved
+are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*
+and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
+pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're
+*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of of
+writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of
+us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of
+earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would
+play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive
+for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire
+for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the
+corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search
+engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.
+They can be googled.
+
+Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
+trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
+in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
+were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
+at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best
+way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the
+best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with
+us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a
+bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was
+recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
+
+[QUOTED TEXT]
+
+> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
+> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
+> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
+> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
+> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
+> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
+> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
+> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
+
+Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed
+me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good
+name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that
+damning passage:
+
+[PULL-QUOTE]
+
+> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
+> page
+
+You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
+PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of
+paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his
+novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is
+"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer
+out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
+
+You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
+and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
+the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
+play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have
+it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read
+the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the
+ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is."
+And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to
+give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell
+your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
+
+5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
+their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to
+the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
+and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
+ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
+restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
+ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
+paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
+paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
+for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
+sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
+than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
+stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
+paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
+beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
+paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
+
+6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
+one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
+shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
+audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
+cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
+with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
+action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
+a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
+penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
+without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
+chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
+shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
+but check this out:
+
+[Nietzsche quote]
+
+> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
+> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
+> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
+
+In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
+paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
+this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
+with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
+of Morals," published in *1887.*
+
+Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
+necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
+storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
+for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
+funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
+Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
+forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
+Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
+20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
+or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
+soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
+the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
+to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
+
+7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
+majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
+library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
+one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
+work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
+human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
+just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
+
+For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
+desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
+complete that collection with different texts that are as
+distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
+like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
+or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
+closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
+at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
+granular observation, there are as many differences in our
+"shared" experience as there are similarities.
+
+More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
+electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
+between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
+books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
+hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
+analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
+Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
+conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
+different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
+Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
+goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.
+
+8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
+round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
+more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
+retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
+good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
+around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
+hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
+and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
+buy.
+
+There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
+bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
+Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
+the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
+at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
+having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
+left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
+Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
+thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
+thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
+ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
+be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
+one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
+book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
+cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
+sales are healthy.
+
+We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
+*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
+computers are damned good at counting things!). This is
+important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of
+copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a
+difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
+numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
+
+But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
+book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the
+run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the
+occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books
+printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never
+exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations,
+chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
+that's why.
+
+And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
+Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some
+copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
+order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
+or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
+returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
+accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
+where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
+
+The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
+They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
+shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
+pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
+insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
+divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
+radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
+counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
+
+Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
+electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
+
+And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
+However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
+encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
+audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
+can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
+book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
+hardest and most important task any writer faces.
+
+#
+
+I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
+bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
+was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
+wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
+I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
+book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
+works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
+fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
+2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
+
+I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
+storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
+LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
+the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
+Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
+from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
+fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
+
+Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
+are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
+that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
+malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
+months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
+durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
+BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
+into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
+minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
+exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
+press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
+the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
+picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
+variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
+person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
+
+Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
+speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
+and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
+to lay out both categories of ideas.
+
+This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
+Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time,
+there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
+one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
+new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
+screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
+that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
+the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
+about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
+intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
+
+A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
+meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
+say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
+released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
+use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
+special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
+[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
+unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
+cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
+time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
+character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
+cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
+introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these
+books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous
+book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"
+the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any
+book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think
+that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.
+
+Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet.
+I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over
+ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper
+circles. Writers were joining the discussion on
+alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of
+retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up
+their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My
+editor, a blogger, hacker and
+guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick
+Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup,
+saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
+
+> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
+> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
+> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
+> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes.  Partly it's
+> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
+> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
+> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
+> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
+> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
+> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
+> doesn't work.  In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
+> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
+> avoid noticing that music didn't die.  But the record industry's
+> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
+
+Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
+years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
+to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
+in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
+Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
+licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
+turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
+novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).
+
+Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
+by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
+for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
+alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
+since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
+to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
+incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
+laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
+Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
+
+Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
+thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
+duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
+newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
+that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
+unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
+to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
+esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
+
+This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
+boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
+not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
+First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
+rest of the world.
+
+Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
+opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
+stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
+other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
+every day.
+
+This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
+
+1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
+
+[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
+
+* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
+
+* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
+appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
+good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
+evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)
+
+* You can't take your ebook into the tub
+
+* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
+
+* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
+
+None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
+"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
+replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
+reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted
+grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that
+certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their
+grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me
+email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to
+show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her
+Florida retirement condo)?
+
+The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
+seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper
+books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a
+little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.
+This is interesting because the history of the book is the
+history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
+ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American
+Revolution.
+
+Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
+on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them
+were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool
+cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the
+books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
+non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey
+incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
+
+Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
+Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He
+printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and
+distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God
+all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.
+
+Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
+printing press:
+
+[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
+
+* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
+illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the
+typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could
+bring to bear when writing out the word of God
+
+* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case
+for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority
+of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed
+impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.
+
+* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
+incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew
+that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
+
+* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
+numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
+apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
+translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
+a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
+for centuries.
+
+In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
+patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
+get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
+the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
+mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
+raised above with equal certainty.
+
+What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
+that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
+
+[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
+
+* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
+without having to subject themselves to the authority and
+approval of the Church
+
+* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
+longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
+explained what God really meant
+
+* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
+flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
+and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
+popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
+
+Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
+monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
+Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
+success.
+
+By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
+little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
+
+[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
+
+* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
+midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
+by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
+social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
+to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
+pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
+factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
+friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
+sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
+in a series!
+
+* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
+evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
+truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
+bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
+it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
+the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
+the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
+"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
+the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
+because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
+captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
+tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
+because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
+for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
+the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
+been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
+when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
+they share the trait of making the difference between a
+compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
+programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
+majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic
+text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on
+a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
+can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text
+for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig.
+In other words, most people who download the book do so for the
+predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample
+a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the
+book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text
+experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing
+out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather
+than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
+
+Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
+notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the
+wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a
+cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that
+cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
+holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
+have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
+
+The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --
+is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
+Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
+little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the
+ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and
+sending it around.
+
+Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
+That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
+over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
+(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
+copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
+cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
+swings a very big stick on the Hill).
+
+This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
+
+[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
+
+* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
+that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
+getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
+true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
+publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
+strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.
+
+* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
+You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
+Calling them crooks is bad for business.
+
+* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
+the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
+hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
+This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
+signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
+and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
+agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
+they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
+to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?
+
+* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
+especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
+$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
+representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
+ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
+before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
+This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
+side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
+publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
+from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
+prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
+the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
+opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
+potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
+material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
+because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
+work carries such a terrible price.
+
+* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
+hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
+in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
+figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
+certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
+apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
+them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
+long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
+science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
+Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
+known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
+descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
+their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
+just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
+public domain.
+
+This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
+thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
+too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:
+a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
+
+From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
+the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
+preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease
+with which it can reproduced.
+
+(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
+about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than
+the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the
+Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio
+had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*
+control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform
+to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could
+build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them
+performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a
+monkish Bible and a  Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change,
+Napster is peanuts)
+
+Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
+off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by
+bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
+craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as
+expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as
+did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
+illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in
+comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a
+copy of her own.
+
+Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
+hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at
+Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of
+musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.
+The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on
+the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing
+press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
+migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items
+that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that
+*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on
+creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most
+enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.
+
+Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's
+a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a
+photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery
+and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
+demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
+creators with their audiences.
+
+For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
+copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
+invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
+record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
+was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
+sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
+
+Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
+generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
+temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
+mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real
+property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current
+copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
+
+So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the
+end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the
+printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent
+of bookwarez.
+
+#
+
+Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
+
+We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
+before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or
+extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra
+to thank you for your patience.
+
+About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
+Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most
+restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my
+readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was
+cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it
+felt like I was taking a plunge.
+
+Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text
+of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
+"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN
+READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my
+blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can
+make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction
+(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK
+HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it,
+with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to
+rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking
+mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.
+
+The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
+happens when I get in up to my knees.
+
+The text with the new license will be online before the end of
+the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
+
+Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
+Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain
+dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see
+fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is
+through.
+
+#
+
+EOF
+
+That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind
+attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more
+detailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them
+here in plain sight.
+
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+Midflight over Texas
+
+February 4, 2004
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11077 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, by Cory Doctorow
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+Author: Cory Doctorow
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2004  [eBook #11077]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EBOOKS: NEITHER E, NOR BOOKS***
+
+
+Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
+
+February 12, 2004
+
+San Diego, CA
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+doctorow@craphound.com
+
+--
+
+Forematter:
+
+This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
+Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along
+with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
+be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
+interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
+new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
+
+This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
+Commons public domain dedication:
+
+> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
+>
+> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
+> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
+> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
+> public domain.
+>
+> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
+> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
+> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
+> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
+> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
+> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
+> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
+> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
+>
+> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
+> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
+> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
+> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
+> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
+
+--
+
+For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
+I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
+short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
+parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
+presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
+Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
+think it's true.
+
+No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
+call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
+Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
+to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
+text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
+and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
+
+I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
+future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
+them with you:
+
+1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
+ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
+sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
+have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
+installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
+new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
+backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
+about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
+far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
+ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
+buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
+are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
+will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
+pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
+the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
+promote the dead-tree editions.
+
+2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
+books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
+Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
+he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
+other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
+me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
+copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
+readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
+build concordances of characters, places and events.
+
+3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
+own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the
+book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
+artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
+"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
+it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
+question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
+SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
+text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
+into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
+them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
+to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
+copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
+readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
+[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
+can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
+perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
+minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
+or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
+a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
+cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
+confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
+settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
+less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
+text.
+
+4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
+deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on
+the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science
+fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science
+fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved
+are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*
+and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
+pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're
+*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf
+writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of
+us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of
+earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would
+play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive
+for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire
+for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the
+corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search
+engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.
+They can be googled.
+
+Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
+trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
+in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
+were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
+at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best
+way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the
+best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with
+us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a
+bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was
+recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
+
+[QUOTED TEXT]
+
+> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
+> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
+> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
+> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
+> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
+> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
+> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
+> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
+
+Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed
+me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good
+name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that
+damning passage:
+
+[PULL-QUOTE]
+
+> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
+> page
+
+You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
+PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of
+paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his
+novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is
+"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer
+out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
+
+You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
+and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
+the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
+play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have
+it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read
+the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the
+ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is."
+And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to
+give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell
+your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
+
+5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
+their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to
+the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
+and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
+ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
+restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
+ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
+paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
+paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
+for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
+sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
+than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
+stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
+paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
+beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
+paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
+
+6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
+one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
+shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
+audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
+cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
+with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
+action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
+a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
+penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
+without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
+chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
+shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
+but check this out:
+
+[Nietzsche quote]
+
+> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
+> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
+> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
+
+In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
+paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
+this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
+with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
+of Morals," published in *1887.*
+
+Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
+necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
+storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
+for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
+funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
+Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
+forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
+Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
+20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
+or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
+soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
+the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
+to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
+
+7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
+majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
+library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
+one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
+work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
+human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
+just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
+
+For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
+desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
+complete that collection with different texts that are as
+distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
+like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
+or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
+closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
+at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
+granular observation, there are as many differences in our
+"shared" experience as there are similarities.
+
+More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
+electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
+between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
+books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
+hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
+analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
+Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
+conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
+different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
+Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
+goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.
+
+8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
+round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
+more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
+retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
+good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
+around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
+hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
+and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
+buy.
+
+There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
+bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
+Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
+the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
+at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
+having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
+left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
+Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
+thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
+thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
+ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
+be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
+one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
+book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
+cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
+sales are healthy.
+
+We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
+*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
+computers are damned good at counting things!). This is
+important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of
+copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a
+difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
+numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
+
+But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
+book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the
+run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the
+occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books
+printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never
+exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations,
+chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
+that's why.
+
+And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
+Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some
+copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
+order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
+or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
+returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
+accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
+where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
+
+The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
+They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
+shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
+pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
+insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
+divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
+radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
+counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
+
+Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
+electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
+
+And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
+However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
+encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
+audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
+can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
+book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
+hardest and most important task any writer faces.
+
+#
+
+I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
+bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
+was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
+wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
+I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
+book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
+works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
+fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
+2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
+
+I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
+storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
+LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
+the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
+Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
+from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
+fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
+
+Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
+are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
+that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
+malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
+months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
+durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
+BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
+into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
+minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
+exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
+press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
+the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
+picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
+variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
+person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
+
+Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
+speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
+and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
+to lay out both categories of ideas.
+
+This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
+Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time,
+there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
+one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
+new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
+screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
+that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
+the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
+about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
+intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
+
+A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
+meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
+say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
+released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
+use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
+special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
+[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
+unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
+cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
+time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
+character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
+cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
+introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these
+books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous
+book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"
+the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any
+book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think
+that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.
+
+Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet.
+I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over
+ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper
+circles. Writers were joining the discussion on
+alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of
+retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up
+their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My
+editor, a blogger, hacker and
+guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick
+Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup,
+saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
+
+> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
+> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
+> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
+> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes.  Partly it's
+> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
+> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
+> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
+> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
+> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
+> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
+> doesn't work.  In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
+> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
+> avoid noticing that music didn't die.  But the record industry's
+> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
+
+Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
+years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
+to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
+in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
+Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
+licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
+turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
+novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).
+
+Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
+by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
+for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
+alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
+since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
+to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
+incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
+laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
+Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
+
+Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
+thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
+duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
+newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
+that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
+unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
+to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
+esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
+
+This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
+boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
+not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
+First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
+rest of the world.
+
+Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
+opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
+stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
+other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
+every day.
+
+This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
+
+1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
+[GRAPHIC]
+
+These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
+
+[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
+
+* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
+
+* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
+appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
+good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
+evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)
+
+* You can't take your ebook into the tub
+
+* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
+
+* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
+
+None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
+"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
+replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
+reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted
+grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that
+certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their
+grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me
+email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to
+show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her
+Florida retirement condo)?
+
+The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
+seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper
+books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a
+little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.
+This is interesting because the history of the book is the
+history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
+ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American
+Revolution.
+
+Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
+on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them
+were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool
+cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the
+books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
+non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey
+incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
+
+Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
+Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He
+printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and
+distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God
+all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.
+
+Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
+printing press:
+
+[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
+
+* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
+illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the
+typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could
+bring to bear when writing out the word of God
+
+* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case
+for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority
+of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed
+impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.
+
+* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
+incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew
+that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
+
+* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
+numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
+apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
+translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
+a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
+for centuries.
+
+In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
+patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
+get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
+the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
+mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
+raised above with equal certainty.
+
+What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
+that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
+
+[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
+
+* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
+without having to subject themselves to the authority and
+approval of the Church
+
+* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
+longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
+explained what God really meant
+
+* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
+flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
+and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
+popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
+
+Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
+monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
+Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
+success.
+
+By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
+little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
+
+[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
+
+* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
+midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
+by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
+social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
+to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
+pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
+factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
+friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
+sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
+in a series!
+
+* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
+evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
+truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
+bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
+it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
+the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
+the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
+"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
+the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
+because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
+captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
+tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
+because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
+for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
+the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
+been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
+when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
+they share the trait of making the difference between a
+compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
+programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
+majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic
+text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on
+a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
+can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text
+for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig.
+In other words, most people who download the book do so for the
+predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample
+a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the
+book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text
+experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing
+out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather
+than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
+
+Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
+notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the
+wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a
+cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that
+cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
+holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
+have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
+
+The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --
+is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
+Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
+little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the
+ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and
+sending it around.
+
+Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
+That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
+over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
+(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
+copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
+cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
+swings a very big stick on the Hill).
+
+This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
+
+[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
+
+* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
+that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
+getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
+true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
+publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
+strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.
+
+* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
+You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
+Calling them crooks is bad for business.
+
+* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
+the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
+hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
+This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
+signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
+and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
+agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
+they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
+to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?
+
+* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
+especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
+$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
+representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
+ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
+before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
+This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
+side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
+publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
+from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
+prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
+the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
+opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
+potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
+material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
+because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
+work carries such a terrible price.
+
+* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
+hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
+in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
+figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
+certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
+apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
+them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
+long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
+science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
+Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
+known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
+descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
+their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
+just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
+public domain.
+
+This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
+thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
+too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:
+a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
+
+From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
+the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
+preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease
+with which it can reproduced.
+
+(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
+about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than
+the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the
+Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio
+had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*
+control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform
+to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could
+build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them
+performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a
+monkish Bible and a  Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change,
+Napster is peanuts)
+
+Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
+off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by
+bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
+craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as
+expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as
+did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
+illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in
+comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a
+copy of her own.
+
+Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
+hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at
+Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of
+musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.
+The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on
+the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing
+press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
+migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items
+that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that
+*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on
+creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most
+enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.
+
+Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's
+a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a
+photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery
+and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
+demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
+creators with their audiences.
+
+For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
+copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
+invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
+record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
+was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
+sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
+
+Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
+generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
+temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
+mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real
+property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current
+copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
+
+So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the
+end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the
+printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent
+of bookwarez.
+
+#
+
+Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
+
+We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
+before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or
+extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra
+to thank you for your patience.
+
+About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
+Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most
+restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my
+readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was
+cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it
+felt like I was taking a plunge.
+
+Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text
+of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
+"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN
+READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my
+blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can
+make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction
+(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK
+HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it,
+with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to
+rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking
+mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.
+
+The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
+happens when I get in up to my knees.
+
+The text with the new license will be online before the end of
+the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
+
+Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
+Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain
+dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see
+fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is
+through.
+
+#
+
+EOF
+
+That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind
+attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more
+detailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them
+here in plain sight.
+
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+Midflight over Texas
+
+February 4, 2004
+
+
+
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