booktwo.org

With all my recent ranting about Digital Rights Management (DRM), I thought I should post some of the reasons for the unrest. Then I came across BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow advertising the course he’ll be teaching at UCLA this semester. It’s called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?” and the course description sums up the potential dangers of DRM better than I would:

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights Management” — the anti-copying measures that computers employ to frustrate their owners desires. These technologies literally attack their owners, treating them as menaces to be thwarted through force majeure, deceit, and cunning. Incredibly, DRM gets special protection under the law, a blanket prohibition on breaking DRM or helping others to do so, even if you have the right to access the work the DRM is walling off.

But DRM’s just the tip of the iceberg. Every digital act includes an act of copying, and that means that copyright governs every relationship in the digital realm. Take a conversation to email and it’s not just culture, it’s copyright — every volley is bound by the rules set out to govern the interactions between large publishing entities.

Playing a song for a buddy with your stereo is lawful. Stream that song to your buddy’s PC and you could be facing expulsion and criminal prosecution.

Every interaction on the Web is now larded over with “agreements” — terms of service, acceptable use policies, licenses — that no one reads or negotiates. These non-negotiable terms strip you of your rights the minute you click your mouse. Transactions that would be a traditional purchase in meatspace are complex “license agreements” in cyberspace. As mere licensors, we are as feudal serfs to a lord — ownership is conferred only on those who are lucky enough to be setting the terms. Our real property interests are secondary to their “intellectual property” claims.

When the computer, the network, publishing platforms, and property can all be magicked away with the Intellectual Property wand, we’re all of us pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd. Our tools are turned against us, the law is tipped away from our favor.

Imagine, twenty years from now, you have a digital library of all your favourite books. Hundreds of titles, the fruits of two decades of collecting - entirely legally - the greatest works by the greatest writers. Then you switch brands and buy a different computer, or ereader, or whatever, and suddenly the code which these books are stored in decides that you no longer have the right to read the books - books you own, have paid for, wish to re-read. This is the situation that will present itself if DRM issues are not resolved, if we don’t consider all the possibilities right now.

My recent post on Adobe’s Acrobat-disguised-as-an-eReader Digital Editions software drew a response from m’learned friends over at Mobileread. Alexander Turcic pointed out that DE doesn’t only support PDFs, but also the forthcoming Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), a new standard for content creators and consumers - about which the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has just published a press release.

The new standard also includes a container standard for packaging ebooks (the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format, or OCF), and is intended to make it easier and cheaper for all concerned. The IDPF and the OEBPS have some fairly heavyweight backers too - Adobe themselves, unsurprisingly, the Hachette Book Group, ebookseller Mobipocket (another of Amazon’s recent acquisitions), Random House, Simon & Schuster, and many others.

But the OEBPS isn’t the only standard available, and this is where it gets interesting. Their main rival, OpenReader, is a non-proprietary standard which nevertheless includes a standardised DRM. At first glance, this sounds counterintuitive to our position on DRM - in general, a bad thing for readers. But the OEBPS’s lack of a standardised DRM means that any publisher can slap their own conditions on the ebooks - meaning, for example, you could only read a particular book on a Sony Reader, just like you can only listen to MP3s from the iTunes store on an iPod. And the presence of people like John Perry Barlow endorsing OpenReader gives us a great deal of hope.

What is without doubt is that a new and consistent standard must be settled upon before the ebook market takes off and the book world gets into a VHS/Betamax type fight. The strength of the web’s open standards community comes from the fact that grassroots organisations had time to flourish before the corporations stepped in. With Adobe’s and the Publishing Conglomerate’s billions depending on this, that won’t be the case here. Both standards are based on XML, but there are many significant differences, and choosing the right one will be crucial for the future of books.

For the technically minded, specifications for both standards are available at www.openreader.org/spec/ and www.idpf.org/oebps/oebps1.2/. Some interesting places to go for more info include OpenReader Director of Strategic Information David Rothman’s blog at www.teleread.org (and his excellent piece in Publisher’s Weekly on the overcomplication of ebooks), and the blog of Abobe’s General Manager of ePublishing Business, Bill McCoy.

Fascinating review of (the not terribly new) The Future of the Page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, over at Blogcritics.com.

Immediately, we confront the first puzzle not directly discussed within the book, but nevertheless obvious the instant we pick it up in our hands. This book is palpable. It is larger than a paperback. It is filled with illustrations. In fact, one chapter is printed on glossy paper. Why a book? Why not a website? Why not a collection of web pages?

…

It may simply be the case that 500 years of entrenched reading habits have not yet met the right catalyst to undo our literary inertia. The generation which has driven a revolution in the delivery and enjoyment of audio and video is not yet mature enough to have an impact upon the publishing industry. We have yet to witness amongst publishers the same sort of uproar that gripped the RIAA as teenagers around the world began to share audio files through Napster. But the publishing industry’s day may yet arrive. Shortly after this book’s release, Google announced a partnership with several major libraries to scan their collections as fully searchable text. As the use and architecture of the world wide web is increasingly determined by those (younger) people who have been weaned of or have never really felt attached to print media, the publishing industry will have no choice but to adapt. And it will have to begin by reconceptualizing the page. It is in this task that The Future of the Page may prove most valuable.

…

Again, in the silence, we find ourselves drawing a conclusion which is not so surprising after all: the challenge we face is not about adjusting to new ways and new ideas; it is about the age–old struggle for power.

That’s on order at Amazon, then.

Whenever I try to tell people how the traditional book is on the way out and we’ll all be reading very differently a lot sooner than people think, the standard response is that people like traditional books, they like the look and feel, and nothing will ever substitute for that.

Well, sorry, but it will. I believe that a majority of people will switch to reading ebooks very quickly once the technology closes the look and feel gap between trad books and eReaders. And one of the key advances in this is electronic paper: a neutrally coloured, flicker- and glow-free display visible at wide angles with very low power consumption. This has been improving for a while - E Ink’s imaging film is the stuff used in Sony’s Reader and others. The tech specs are lovely, and if it’s not quite identical to paper yet, it soon will be.

The advent of true electronic paper draws a little closer with Brit boffins Plastic Logic’s announcement of 150ppi and 100ppi fully flexible active-matrix displays using E Ink Imaging Film.

Stick a few sheets of that between soft or hard covers, and what have you got? Oh look, a book.

Adobe have just dropped the first fruit of their takeover of Macromedia - and it’s book-related. New eReader technology Adobe Digital Editions is a Flash-based Rich Internet Application - that is, it takes all of the online benefits of connectivity and streams them through a pleasant, pervasive interface that lets you interact with things rather than just look at them. Supposedly.

The most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly how easy it is to install and play with. Go have a try over at Adobe Labs. There are plenty of free sample books available there too.

Once launched, it becomes less easy to see why Adobe think DE will “energize the eBook and digital publishing market” - the first impression is of a kind of iTunes bookshelf:

Books download very quickly, and appear as thumbnails in your library. It all looks very nice. However, there doesn’t seem to be very much beyond this: essentially, these are just PDFs, a format that, while pretty, is actually extremely strict and quite limiting. As a result, the reading display, which appears when a book is selected, is nothing to shout about (click for full-size version):

It’s nice and clear - big, obviously - but it’s still got that classic PDF problem: no scrolling. Pages jump from one to the next - like a paper book, admittedly, but counterinuitive and confusing on a screen - and there’s little whitespace, which is how paper books draw the eye to the text and away from the distractions of the margin. And we’re not even going to start on the fact that it appears to be set entirely in sans-serif fonts.

So what’s the difference between this and a regular PDF, apart from a slick, web-based interface (very now)? Not much, that I can see - it’s essentially Acrobat on Flash. Except that the PDFs now come wrapped in another proprietary format, ETD, with all kinds of extra DRM opportunities built in for the publishers.

Proprietary formats are not the future of eBooks, not only because consumers hate intrusive DRM as much as publishers love it, and have consistently shown this by migrating to apps with weaker DRM wherever possible, but because they will want to read their eBooks on a multiplicity of devices, not all necessarily from the same company, and will choose the format which allows them to do this.

This new app offers absolutely no advances on other eReaders - in fact, it’s a step back. Please try harder, Adobe.

Sources: Adobe Press Release, The Book Standard, ZDNet.

Another week, another interesting piece in the Times, which claims e-retailing, with Amazon.co.uk as its core exponent, is growing by 25-30% per year, expecting to make out at £10.3 billion when eBay, Tesco and the rest are all counted up. This is balanced by the slightly bizarre claim that “the market share of internet retailing [could be capped] at about 10%,” due to concerns about “after-sales service, a high rate of product return, and the pressure to make websites a more exciting experience for consumers.” In fact, these concerns (the first two at least) only really apply to electrical goods: the traditional big catalogue sellers - books, clothes, and increasingly food - are already inured to such problems.

As Amazon’s market share creeps over 20% - and Waterstone’s belatedly separates out its online retailing - the likelihood of Amazon entering the publishing business grows ever stronger. Such a move would allow them to hand-pick big authors for exclusive deals, and provide a home for the thousands - nay, millions - of unpublished authors desperate to get their books out but wary of the stigma of self-publishing: the real ‘long tail’ of the book industry. BookSurge is the start of this - ebooks must be the next stage.

Then again, they have to beat off IBM first.

I was recently re-reading my Masters dissertation, a rather inept analysis of the abstract classification problem: how to computationally document and classify not only the content of, say, images but also their emotional appeal and resonance. The problem was, unbeknownst to me, being solved or at least massively advanced by ad hoc systems such as tagging and folksonomies even as I wrote it. However, much of the paper was also concerned with the encoding of stories: how narrative, and the conditions that are required to make such a thing not only logically consistent but interesting, can be recorded on a computer; how it is encoded in the human mind; and the potential equivalences and interfaces between the two.

Obliquely inspired by these musings, I’d like to propose booktwo.org’s first Projects. One is a variation of the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse parlour game, also known as Consequences, where the first player draws the head of a body and folds the paper over to conceal their work, the next the torso, and so on. The other, more general, I like to think of as akin to British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates - a collection of bound chapters presented to the reader in a box, to be read in any order they preferred.

Both of these simple exercises provide possible models for the networked, or wiki, book - collaborative works that use the wisdom of crowds to create texts which surpass the knowledge of any individual contributor. Examples we have cited before include McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY and MIT’s We>Me, the former a massively-moderated work of analysis, the latter an edited, mass-authorship textbook. What I’d like to see created is the networked novel.

Plan One: Exquisite Corpus will present to the user the last few lines of an existing text, and an entry box. Only when they have added to the story as they see fit will they be able to view the text in its (temporary) entirety. Is this even possible? Can a coherent narrative develop from disparate strands? We shall see.

Plan Two: Infinite Entries will take the form of a Wiki, but unlike traditional information-bearing wikis this site will carry stories. On entrance, the visitor will be sent to one random entry containing a story, quote, or fragment, from which multiple linked paths extend. The possibilities are endless.

Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions? Please chip in. We’ll let you know as soon as the Projects are available for use…

Our spy at the recent Digital Print World expo at London’s Earl’s Court reports that Canon was displaying a new set-up they call “One Book” - a digital printer combined with a perfect binding machine. The system requires the addition of a separate colour/litho printer for the covers, which are then fed into main set-up, but this doesn’t sound too difficult to automate, and can deliver about ten copies an hour according to our souce.

Also quoted is a report in Print Week magazine about a different printer which combines all these steps, and is being touted as a ‘coffee shop’ machine, echoing the comments by Bryan Appleyard we noted recently.

More news when we have it.

Following our extended coverage of the Sony eReader, I thought we should point towards a few other ways to read eBooks - chosen, it must be said, pretty much at random, but no less illustrative for that.

• Engadget on Panasonic’s Word Gear. This looks nice, and is competitively priced against the Sony. Unlike the Sony, it’s a fully-featured, colour screen, which means vastly reduced battery life, but the chance to view movies, photos, and, in the example given, scantily-clad Japanese girls.
• Symbian explain all about eBooks, and how to read them on their OS Phone. As Apple endlessly prevaricate over the appearances of an iPhone, it seems likely more PDA/Phone producers will integrate eBooks into the mix.
• MobileRead take a look at the Chinese STAReBOOK e-book reader. Pricier, but clean-looking.
• Engadget (again) on this quite beautiful Fujitsu 4096-colour e-ink reader. Only a concept so far, but… See? See?
• And finally, the Turnover: designer Timothy Yeoh’s concept for “two pages with infinite possibilities…”

Of all these, it is the most distant - the Turnover (above) - which is the closest to being the real breakthrough in this technology - precisely because it so closely resembles a real book (including the physical turning of the pages, and dogearing the pages to bookmark). The true successor kills by mimicry - and then evolves.

In Sunday’s Times, Bryan Appleyard wrote about the future of books. It’s a great article and deserves to be read in its entirety, but since we’re here we’ll note the key points, which are tantamount to articles of faith around these parts:

“Over the past decade, power in the book industry has drained away from publishers to the bookshops.” This is incontestably true, and Appleyard notes its main effect: publishers must now pay the booksellers vast sums to have their books placed in the areas of their bookshops in which they will sell. Without front-of-store positioning, and the stacks of cash that secure them, books don’t sell in bricks-and-mortar stores. I’d tell you the sums, but then I’d have to kill you. The corollary is that “this has shifted publishers’ lists dramatically downmarket.”

“Books are about to hit their iPod/iTunes moment, when new technology drives down costs, transforms the medium and provides simplified, targeted distribution.” For Appleyard, this means the POD revolution: the book you want, in your hands, anywhere. While I’m very attached to this model, I’m going to stick to the belief that as soon as a digital reader looks enough like a book for readers not to care, who’s going to want to keep killing trees? We’ll stick with him for the moment, though.

“People love books but — because of poor education, the decline of the quality of bookshops and the mistaken marketing wisdom that real books were a strictly minority interest — they could find nowhere to think and talk about them.” I don’t have a point here: this is just a great quote. And we - meaning people + technology - are going to solve this problem, any moment now.

“Starbucks is indeed looking at [POD].” Really? I would love to know where this came from. That said, it’s hardly surprising. Why go to a bookshop, and then to your nearest cafe, pub or even park, when you can just pick the book up at your final destination? Plenty of other people are looking at POD too, promise.

“There will be a fundamental difference between a book bearing the HarperCollins or Faber & Faber logo and one bearing that of some teenage bedroom geek.” This is where we get into sticky territory. The key here is that the big publishers, following years of consolidation, have budgets that allow staggeringly pervasive levels of promotion and marketing, which will drive readers towards their products even if they are of lower quality than the bedroom geek’s. But the music revolution has shown that bedroom geeks can also direct the industry, c.f. the impact of myspace. Where is the myspace for authors?

“The effect will be seismic, almost certainly more radical than the impact on the record industry of MP3 technology.” Are you getting it now? The Times says so. Come with us.

“Thus, the truth known to bloggers and surfers alike: that real books — “the long tail” of the business, as it is fashionably known — are infinitely bigger than the tat market we are currently being offered by the malign finances and politics of the industry.” Welcome to Book 2.0.

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Because we enjoyed this so much, we should put in a link to Mr. Appleyard’s personal site.