The Age of the E-book
I live on a moderate-sized sailboat. It reduces my carbon footprint to inhabit about 300 square feet instead of the 1100 I enjoyed in my house on land. (Actually, I confess that I also “inhabit” a storage unit — but it isn’t heated — and I do sometimes take a bath — sweet luxury — at my partner’s house. But still, I’m living in and heating a far smaller space than I used to.) I used to have solid walls of bookshelf in my house on shore. So I may perhaps be forgiven for some enthusiasm for the e-book reader technology. In theory, I could still have all those shelves of books, but in the tiny space of a few SD cards and a reader about the size of a slim trade paperback.
I started exploring the strange new world of e-publishing about three years ago when planning my downsizing and relocation. I knew I was not, no way, no how, going to buy a reader from Micro$oft or Amazon (both come with large sticky strings attached, as in heavy DRM and the usual attempt to tie the user to the vendor’s document format). So I bought the Jinke Hanlin direct from China, at that time rather an undertaking that eventually involved the Bank of China and a lot of faxing.
The Hanlin is one of a new breed of “palmtop” devices with a high-res, high-contrast B&W screen that tries (and succeeds pretty well) to look like a printed page. It is paper-white with black print and graphics, quite easy on the eye (much more pleasant to read than a glowing TFT screen). Only the tiniest trickle of power is required to coerce the black pixels into staying “lit” (the unpowered state is blank off-white). On a standard cell phone battery, the device will support 3000 or so page-refreshes — a lot of reading; and it will sit quietly on standby for weeks. It all sounds rather green; very low power draw, small, open source (it displays PDF, EPUB, and several other open formats), and — hey — e-books don’t require killing trees, bleaching pulp, shipping tonnes of paper all over the globe, running giant presses, using toxic inks, shipping more tonnes of finished books all over the world, and so on. And even people with small houses can have shelves of books.
All this I suppose is more or less true — though I have no idea what the environmental cost of manufacturing one of these doodads really is, and no one is as yet required to tell us [when will carbon-cost and toxic-byproduct labelling on all industrial items become as mandatory as ingredient and "nutrition" labelling on foods?]. But my foray into the new world of ebooks, as I’ve pursued the subject further, has raised many questions — some of which strike pretty deep into the heart of property rights law and capitalism-as-we-know it, not to mention the cultural meaning of books as artifacts. [I invite anyone who's more familiar with this technology to respond with corrections, expansions, and alternative takes on the phenomenon.]
Ebooks come from two worlds, one on each side of a wall which, were it physical rather than notional and legal, would be many metres high and festooned with barbed wire, searchlights, and guard towers: the wall of Copyright. On the “public domain” or “out of copyright” side of the wall is the book space occupied by e.g. Project Gutenberg: tens of thousands of classic (and some rather obscure) titles, all copyright free and being transcribed, packaged into CDROMs, transformed from plain text to HTML to EPUB to PDF format by all-volunteer labour driven by the human impulse to share knowledge and information. On the “copyright” side of the wall is everything from low-cost self-published e-books to best-sellers owned and controlled by the various big publishing corporations.
The price for an indie ebook seems to range between 5 and 10 dollars, with “whatever you think it’s worth” (conscience pricing) in a minority of cases. DRM (digital rights management) in most cases amounts only to a heartfelt plea “not to share this book.”
The price for a mass-market popular title currently in copyright varies from 10 to as much as 30 dollars, but in most cases hovers around half of the hardback edition price. So for example, if you want the latest Terry Pratchett or similar best selling sci-fi paperback equivalent, it’ll be 10 or 12 dollars, and there will be a bewildering variety of formats.
Some of the formats will be heavily DRM’d. As with software licensing (because ebooks are essentially a mix of content and software), there are the more draconian versions (the ebook is keyed to one individual’s reader and cannot be read on any other hardware device — Microsoft Reader and Kindle, as far as I know, work like this), the somewhat less draconian versions like the new Barnes and Noble “Nook” (you can share your book with a limited number of others in a limited set of formats), and so on. Vertical integrators (aka monopolists) like Amazon want to tie their own proprietary reader to their own ebook format (though their reader is capable of reading some open-source formats as well). The formats themselves are evolving.
If you want some idea of the morass of formats and the bewildering array of devices already on the market, this comparison table makes interesting (or daunting) reading.
I’ve been chatting over the implications of ebooks with a friend who is in her spare time an indie publisher. As a publisher she is quite excited about the ebook option and is publishing her own first novel in electronic form (as well as Print on Demand, another technology having sweeping impacts on the publishing biz). As a publisher she welcomes the ebook format as a way to make books more accessible and cheaper; the minimal cost for a POD short-run copy is about $12, but after the original formatting and publicity, ebooks are “free” to “produce” (all they cost is download time and bandwidth), so she can charge a lesser price for them.
As a writer I’m rather excited by the technology as well, and for the same reason; I could charge very little for e.g. a volume of collected essays, and yet keep it “in print”. It’s also very easy to publish a book pro bono, costing only labour and download hosting space.
As a reader, however, I have some misgivings about the heavily-hyped trend toward ebooks.
I keep running across the language “please do not share this ebook,” not to mention elaborate DRMs designed to micromanage and control the reader’s use of the text. This seems to me to violate one of the primary attributes of the social artifact “book”, as we have known it: one of the essential features of books — perhaps the most essential, culturally — is that we lend and borrow them. For the last several generations, books have been a medium of social bonding, exchange, and networking. What does it mean for “book” to become “licensed software”?
And what does this mean for the equally important social construct called “used bookshop,” where traditionally, even low-income people could find affordable books (particularly in paperback editions)? In the world of ebooks there is no such thing as a “used book”. One copy, one owner, seems to be the desire of the publishing corporations.
Without used bookstores and book lending/sharing, will the market for books remain lively and robust? Is the ebook “revolution” a strategic strike by the industry against the used book stores?
What does “edition” mean, when ebook content can be updated at any moment, typos fixed, text cut or added? What guarantee does reader B have that the ebook she bought in December is the same “edition” as the one recommended to her by reader A in May? Does it matter? Should readers, like purchasers of software, be entitled to upgrades and patches as authors refine and improve their work?
What will the role of media “piracy” be in the ebook world? I note that e.g. Harry Potter fans have been manually transcribing the 600 and 700 page novels into PDF, on a volunteer basis, to share them with the world of people who can’t afford $15 or more for a physical copy; how can DRM circumvent this kind of dedication and zeal?
The entry cost (price of a reader) is not slight either. It ranges from $250 up. If books migrate to ebook-land, how many people will be de facto excluded from reading current publications by their inability to afford the reader hardware?
What happens when reader hardware becomes obsolete? Is the owner guaranteed the ability to port his/her library forward to the new generation of readers? Are ebook readers going to join iPods and cell phones as huge contributors to landfills and toxic “recycling” depots for electronic gizmos?
What becomes of public libraries?
What becomes of hundreds of thousands of titles that are not “commercially viable” enough to be worth a publishing corporation’s time and effort to scan, OCR, error-check, and format into several ebook standards — yet remain under copyright so that it’s illegal for anyone to distribute them for free in open formats? Today, the answer to the reader seeking such book is “abebooks” or (if you are lucky) your own excellent local UBS.
As a “reading experience”, I find my Hanlin reader slightly inferior to the average mass market paperback in page and font quality (and page turns are annoyingly slow); I would happily pay 3 or 4 dollars for a used paperback copy of a well-loved book, but I would definitely not pay 10 dollars for one. For me to “digitise”, say, my collection of used Terry Pratchett paperbacks (35 books or so) at $10+ each is an investment of $350+ — on my present budget, ridiculous, even for the attractive convenience of being able to carry the entire collection around in my pocket.
Living as I now do, on a fixed and fairly slender pension, I am realising that the death of used book stores and the complete takeover of the book market by ebooks (which will probably not happen in my lifetime, as the physical inventory of used books is so enormous) would mean that I could no longer afford to own any recent popular titles. My reading would be limited to indie publishing and OOC classics. Given the accelerating immiseration of what was once the middle class in N America, a growing number of people might fall into this “can’t afford ebooks” class. What would this mean for reading habits, literacy in general, as a class marker? And again, what does this mean for public libraries? Would they continue to lend out “old fashioned” paper editions specially printed for collectors and libraries only? (and if paper editions became sufficiently rare and collectible, how could libraries continue to buy them or dare to lend them out?)
There is an enormous structural difference between ebook readers and MP3 players: the ability of the end-user to rip CDs to MP3 made the MP3 player enormously attractive and swiftly ubiquitous. You could convert your own existing library to the portable digital format. There’s no equivalent ease of converting a paper volume to an ebook: good OCR is expensive, scanning is time consuming and requires fairly extensive computing resources, and some formats are difficult to produce correctly without a fair amount of technical expertise. Not to mention the legal dobermans ready to unleash on any person who (gasp) shares an ebook with a friend without paying the appropriate licensing fees!
The ebook’s challenge to the used book store (and to interpersonal book lending and borrowing) raises many questions about content control, enclosure, copyright, and so on. For how many years should copyright persist? Is the “free market” a sane or workable way to fund the arts? What would be a better way? How will indie/grassroots publishing react to the ebook wave? Could authors make a living on a “shareware” and donation basis?
And one last speculative question about the ebook phenomenon: given our situation wrt peak oil, possible economic implosion, seriously disruptive conditions possible in the near future, is it wise to commit literacy, record-keeping, publishing, and the rest to relatively fragile high technology? Paper books, after all, can be read even when the power is out and the Internet is down. Heck, they can even be burned for domestic heating when times get tough.
How much would you pay for an ebook? Would it be a good investment? Why? What are the implications of the technology (for Us, as in the low-budget resistance/subversive elements, or for Them, as in the big-budget owner/controller/Enclosers)?
cabdriver:
Related: I recently found this interview with Jaron Lanier, concerning his new book You Are Not A Gadget, in the Amazon link to the work:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307269647?ie=UTF8&tag=saloncom08-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307269647
10 January 2010, 5:05 amcabdriver:
Used books are a major portion of my material possessions. It’s a dilemma: it’s costing me money to store them, but I like the access. (And buying used books does cost me less than library fines, LOL.)
There’s also something about the “hard copy aspect” of books that provides me with a measure of security about the stability of the information carried therein. I presently have much the same reservations about e-books that I do about digital voting, although I’m not sure how much of that is rationally grounded, and how much of it is simply instinctual caution.
I wouldn’t say I have a huge amount of sentimentality about bound copies of paper printed matter.
They’re heavy, cumbersome, vulnerable to wear and weather…
Lastly, I’ve even considered houseboat life myself, and realize that I’d come up against serious and irrevocable constraints in the case of books, both in terms of space and vulnerability to damage.
For now, I’m remaining landbound, and holding on to my stacks.
10 January 2010, 5:16 amJon:
The energy used in producing nine or ten computers is enough to produce an automobile.
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1275.html
——————–
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Peak Oil and the internet…hmmm…
10 January 2010, 3:48 pmDeAnander:
I guess the question haunting me is this: Is the ebook an “appropriate technology” direction, or is it just another disposal gadget enabling further Enclosure of information and deepening the “digital divide” (the big gap in information access and opportunity between those who can afford the fairly steep entry and maintenance fees to participate in the online pseudoworld and those who cannot)?
Which leads us to another question: are those on the “wrong” side of the digital divide (people without fancy gadgets or internet connection) necessarily the losers in the extremely reality-based times that appear to be coming our way? or are folks like peasant farmers, the Amish, small towns and villages considered ‘backward’ and ‘cut off’ from the world, actually *more* likely to survive and thrive if techno-industrial civ stumbles or even falls?
10 January 2010, 5:47 pmJon:
Re:
Which leads us to another question: are those on the “wrong” side of the digital divide (people without fancy gadgets or internet connection) necessarily the losers in the extremely reality-based times that appear to be coming our way? or are folks like peasant farmers, the Amish, small towns and villages considered ‘backward’ and ‘cut off’ from the world, actually *more* likely to survive and thrive if techno-industrial civ stumbles or even falls?
Put this way, I think you’ve answered your (rhetorical?) question.
10 January 2010, 7:16 pmI think the “virtually enclosed” populace is the loser anyway.
Rhisiart Gwilym:
I live on a small boat too, De, with all the benefits which you mention (no fuel bought for heating, cooking or movement for at least fifteen years now; all needed fuel gathered from local wood when out with the dogs; enforced simplicity of lifestyle, with minimal room for lots of stuff, so little stuff; etc.)
But the one big problem for me is what to do with my library, which at the moment is mostly in storage boxes in my shore-based workshop. Don’t much like the ebook idea, though. Apart from the questions which you raise, it just feels like such a transient technology, prone to easy and fatal breakdowns, which, as the Synergising Global Crises start to savage us seriously, will pretty certainly proliferate.
On the other hand, a book, even if severely foxed, can still be read and lent for hundreds of years after its manufacture, as long as it still just about holds together, and remains legible. And it’s also easy to copy, even if your only means of copying is a mediaeval scriptorum with pen and ink.
Think I’ll stick with my Luddite instincts. But good luck with your mini, portable library. Sounds great whilst you have it. Keep those physical books in dry storage somewhere, though, just in case.
And yes, my partner has a small but beautiful land house, and that place is a sweet luxury to me too, a few evenings a week. Compromises, compromises!
11 January 2010, 4:46 am(Boer) Tom:
If one buys a book to inform/share with others, one can readily share it. How possible is that with the e-book?
11 January 2010, 10:20 amBob Watson:
Jon–
Addendum published today to the article you referenced:
Clarification added 16th January: A report about online energy consumption (Google and you’ll damage the planet, Jan 11) said that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle” or about 7g of CO2 per search. We are happy to make clear that this does not refer to a one-hit Google search taking less than a second, which Google says produces about 0.2g of CO2, a figure we accept. In the article, we were referring to a Google search that may involve several attempts to find the object being sought and that may last for several minutes. Various experts put forward carbon emission estimates for such a search of 1g-10g depending on the time involved and the equipment used
And while I’m at it–if the average car these days contains several dozen microchips, how does that change the “9 or 10 computers equals one car” equation?
11 January 2010, 12:18 pmDeAnander:
@Rhisiart — wow, didn’t know you were a liveaboard. Let’s compare notes sometime — maybe via email as others may not be interested in the gritty details of boatlife. I am not doing as well as you on kicking the fossil habit… but that’s for another diary
Anyway, greetings. The boat can be seen at her website svtaz.org/blog, btw, if you’re curious.
11 January 2010, 1:24 pmgdenby:
For obsessive info collectors, paper can get to be quite a nuisance. I’m happy that my younger son has become a voracious reader. The down side is that his room is already almost jammed with books, and they are spilling over into the room one of his sisters moved from just a few months ago. Thankfully, most of what my wife reads comes from the library. Any more in our own possession, and I wouldn’t be able to walk across the bedroom without stumbling over some volume spilling from under the bed, the dressers, the night stand.
I like to cook. The shelf in the kitchen is filled. I have stacks of cook-books under the living room couch. And then there’s the closet filled with disintegrating pulp. And the shelves of rotting 19th century parlor music. Etc. Oh, and my in-laws house has an entire floor stuffed with books, periodicals, and newsprint, most of which cannot be retrieved without an hour of digging.
So, yeah, an e-reader that I could keep on the counter and search through a few thousand recipes seems ever more attractive. And then a few thousand volumes to peruse while I wait for the bread to rise.
11 January 2010, 3:40 pmPaul:
Interesting piece De, thank you. I’ve worked in the IT industry all my life and still feel, at heart, that digital media are somehow transient. As the magnetic domains used to store the data get smaller, they also become more vulnerable to random change. CDs and DVDs have moved from being “archive quality” to having a recognised shelf life, and don’t get me started on the “cloud”!
Printed material is less convenient in many ways – bigger, heavier, harder to search – but it’s got a smell and a feel that my Sony PRS-505 never had (it’s dead now which shows another expensive vulnerability), even though the Sony fitted into a backpack with 100+ books and some more related to work on an SD card.
The real e-book issue for me is the yet-to-be-resolved one of DRM and the publishing industry’s preference for massive restrictions on use. Yes, authors deserve to be paid, and I don’t agree with the transcription of HP books even though I’m not interested enough to read them in either format. DRM however is bad for a number of reasons, amongst which it allows someone else to control what you can read, and permits snooping on what you have read.
I don’t have an answer, but I find Charles Stross’s views refreshing – he gives electronic versions of his books away for free and considers them advertising. He claims to have figures to back his views too.
11 January 2010, 7:44 pm(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
There is an often invisible, but important, secondary digital divide – much of the more useful information is available at a price – (scientific) journal articles are often ~$30 or more a piece, with strong recommendations against sharing (copyright) – although much nonsense also get published, and in physics, much of the ‘new’ research is insignificant and often flawed… Can a relatively complete scientific `education’ be popularized? On the flip side, it often takes one middle-class individual (anyone who can afford internet and/or a camcorder) in a ‘third world’ country or neighbourhood, to provide effective access to entire (impoverished) communities to information, and to spread information about crimes against such communities. The first step is to make common cause. I’ll link some blogs to the Abahlali baseMjondolo related matters – this organization does (used to – they’ve been under ANC attack) urban agriculture in the shanty town in which they are based.
As for the ‘backward’ – I don’t think it is an either/or matter – we rise or fall together – their knowledge may be spread through various media, even if they elect not to participate directly in it. A more pressing concern is whether these people will survive these system(s) until said system(s) implode sufficiently to no longer be an immediate threat. Also, there is a wide-spread implicit assumption that stepping away from the technology may lead to an improvement, e.g. in ecology (CO2 above regarding google) – unlikely, as we simply have some access to the technology, but the technology is only moderately dependent on our participation – can we achieve more or less by not participating? With e-books, the reader technology may cause more harm in the short term – I recall there was extra violence against people in eastern Congo-Kinshasa to get the tantalum for the capacitors for the playstation 3… Can we use some google searches in a campaign to reduce overall consumption substantially? How much base CO2 is used per unit time by the google infrastructure in the absence of searches? How much CO2 is used by institutional entities in doing google searches?
A dedicated blog, anti-eviction campaign, Africa Files, Video of violence, Centre for civil society, Cynthia McKinney
@Jon
11 January 2010, 9:03 pmQuite a few foundries have switched to water recycling, due to the water shortages in the midwest USA (where many of them are located); don’t have any references handy on that right now though.
Jonathan:
There has been I think an interesting marrying of electronic technology and the good old library.
I recently rediscovered my local small town library this winter, not only to cut down on expenses but also because I just have too many books laying around, in teetering piles and stuffed in closets. A “digital” upgrade has really done it wonders. We can now search online from home for books not only at the library (which has a very modest collection) but also through their statewide inter-library system. There has yet to be a book I couldn’t find – even some obscure titles.
They also will e-mail you when your requests are in and also when you books are due, which can be renewed online. I have yet to have late fees – which were always a problem for me in the past.
I also noticed that the place was really busy when I was there last, and learned that the number of people visiting the library is at record highs – too bad the state just cut their funding.
11 January 2010, 9:46 pmyk:
Book aspect to Google in China:
“[Google] also deferred to government anger over its plan to digitalize books and apologized to a Chinese author for scanning parts of her book—a step it hasn’t taken in other countries, where it routinely scans books without paying copyright fees”: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704675104575000772033650164.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular
“Google contends that its project complies with copyright law because it only posts snippets of book to the web if it does not have explicit approval from the copyright holder for a complete reproduction. But Chinese authors aren’t the only ones who believe Google has gone too far.” :
13 January 2010, 4:26 pmhttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/11/googlebooks_and_china/
xenia:
from experience, i can tell that google actually restricted the viewing of many of the pre-20th century books in the last year or so. whereas i was often able to view and download books that i need for my study of the pre-modern world, now i can’t even view them. mysteriously, they’re not public domain any more. certainly, google’s claim that they are spreading knowledge is highly dubious. on the other hand, pricing for many academic books, especially those that never make it into paperback, is hideous. for instance, many books on african and latin american languages and cultures are priced at 100-200 dollars and above. certainly, people from those countries can’t buy them, just as they can’t visit the museums in the “first world” to view their own cultural artifacts which were stolen from them.
the struggle about ebooks is very interesting. ultimately, what makes a great university is often “merely” a great library. a freer access to books and to knowledge makes a lot of those places insecure in their privilege to be the exclusive, elite producers of knowledge.
14 January 2010, 9:17 am