The Future of Digital Books 256
Tabercil writes "The New York Times has an article about the mass scanning of books, which argues that actions such as Google's Book Search project are an inevitable outgrowth of the internet." From the article: "Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there?"
free login? (Score:5, Interesting)
Star Trek replicators (Score:5, Interesting)
Would we do away with all human suffering? Hunger wiped off the map? Who would endeavor to explore space or do research into new materials and computation? Would money be useless?
We have today costless information. As time rolls on, we'll have more of it. Those who currently own that information are slowly but surely losing their grip on it as it is becoming easier to replicate it with no cost.
The course of action thus far has been to build more protections into the information itself that prevents it from being copied easily. Will the same thing happen with actual replicators when they are invented?
Break Stupid Laws (Score:5, Interesting)
True story and a kind of interesting local example of what I'm talking about:
I live on a very long dead-end road. They fixed the mouth of the road I live on a while back -- it used to be a fork but now it's a 3-way stop. There was once a very dangerous fork at the mouth of the street and some neighbours complained about drainage problems when it rained (then sent the flooding bill to the town hall). The town met on the subject, and figured they would simply kill two birds with one stone, so they rebuilt the fork to make it less dangerous when they reconstructed the drainage for the whole area.
Because my street is LONG, the bulk of the people in the area live on the road that feeds up the NEW stop sign. When it was a fork, there was a YEILD sign so you could quickly look down the TINY side street and quickly go.
You would understand if you could see the way they reconstructed this area -- it makes no sense whatsoever to have a stop sign there. It should be a thoroughfare.
Guess how many people stop at the new stop sign now that the street has been "repaired"? About one in fifty.
If a law is stupid, you are obligated to break it because that is the essence of what liberty is!
Globalization... (Score:4, Interesting)
FROM THE ARTICLE:
Second, many countries will ban certain types of hardware (without macrovision, drm, etc) and other countries will get some of our business (at least mine) when we opt to purchase superior hardware that isn't limited. From the article again:
Bottom line is some of us will always buy the DRM protected stuff and only a few of us will purchase overseas if necessary to ensure we can get a device that will truly record to or from anything. The scanning of millions of books, magazines and other articles will only push change in laws, but it will take some time. Whoever wins, I'm still going to be purchasing devices that aren't locked down, even if I have to learn a bit of Japanese, Chinese or Korean to do so.
Payment and doctrine of first sale (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, that is a bit cynical. However, for high-end items like college textbooks, constant revisioning, cd/book bundles, and book/exclusive-web-site bundles are already killing the resale market. In 5 years schools will simply purchase 1-semester licenses to online materials and tack it on to the tuition as a "class materials fee."
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:2, Interesting)
So there is no cost for transferring information to electronic media? No cost to delivering Broadband Internet access to every house? No cost to store information?
COOL, what Universe do you live in? And can we all get a visa?
Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Interesting)
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books. Maybe my tastes are completely different from the people who use Kazaa, or, maybe it hasn't occurred to the KaZaaistanis to actually look for books on what is primarily a music downloading library.
I've offered Gore Vidal, P.J. O'Rourke, Trevanian, Harry Turtledove, and others, but again, no one has the slightest interest.
So whenever you hear a book publisher claim that putting books online for download for free would devastate the industry, just remember that the people who read books are definitely not the people who download files from P2P resource libraries. The claim that online downloading of so-called e-books for low price or even free would hurt the book publishing industry seems on its face to be reasonable and prudent, but in reality it is totally without merit. The people who buy books and read them don't download files from Kazaa and the P2P filesharers don't read anything without having some teacher require it as part of their final grade. They'll download comic books, yes, maybe, but actual books of coherent text and prose, not a chance.
Such it is as it is. And I don't believe that this situation will change in the coming years as more people outside of the geek community discover the P2P global library resources that are available.
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:4, Interesting)
ISBN Scan And Search (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently had to give a talk and the information I wanted to convey was scattered throughout about 50 books. I wasn't able to do a good job, and I desperately wanted to do a keyword search on each of them.
This would be a great service for a library which would allow a patron to do a full text search on all books in the library.
Imagine writing a paper on the literary impact of "The Beatles" or "Star Wars" scattered throughout diverse materials like romance novels or physics textbooks in a large library.
Re:free login? (Score:2, Interesting)
I respectfully and humbly disagree. There is nothing trival about overcoming any login or technologically-based restriction for the vast majority of educated and interested people who could be persuaded to use and download on-line books.
Unless people have a solid background in computer systems and network software techniques and stategies, they will be blocked by even the simplest digital restriction.
Authors and artists are going to have to adjust to a world of massive digital copying by learning to massively increase their output, or finding private wealthy patrons and sponsors as in the middle ages. Or, they can publish full works as books and then also maintain nearly daily blogs and weekly commentaries on their books such as James Howard Kunstler does at www.kunstler.com.
As far as learning to massively increase their output goes, are there any authors who actually use speech-to-text software to create their works? Or are most of them still grappling with the issue of whether to use computers or typewriters to do their writing? I heard a talk by author Gay Talese last week where he mentioned that he writes out everything that he published in longhand script and sends it to his publisher a hundred pages at a time. But he's nearly eighty years old and still traveling and writing, so we should give him some slack. But some 25 year old writer should definitely be just dictating prose to her laptop and have it immediately uploaded to her website.
Re:Break Stupid Laws - not the only avenue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that, but what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous? What do gun control laws mean if anybody can get an AK-47 at the push of a button? What about producing infectious diseases like anthrax or ebola, or even creating a nuclear weapon? Does anyone know if Star Trek (or other sci-fi) ever analyzed such issues?
Finally, if replicators can easily create new replicators, how can anybody possibly hope to keep such things from becoming widespread?
Conspiracy Theories (Score:5, Interesting)
1) It is infinitely easier to distribute.
2) It is significantly easier to index.
3) It is significantly more malleable.
In most cases the digital-information-haves cast these properties as inherently benevolent in nature. Unfortunately this is not the case. These properties are instead morally neutral. While a universally accessible, fully indexed, fully accessible digital archive of all the books on earth sounds like an idea which on the whole will benefit humanity we can not ignore the darker side to digital information.
1) Information that is infinitely easier to distribute can lead to infinite information being available. The more information there is available the more we depend on gatekeepers to provide us what is relevant.
2) The index of information is a form of information in it's own right (meta information) which itself contributes to the glut of information previously mentioned.
3) The more malleable information becomes the more it is subject to alteration. Each version of an altered document adds to the information glut leading us back to a greater dependency on information gatekeepers.
As the technology for digital books develops and less people find books as convenient as their counterpart in the digital world people will inevitably begin replacing their books or simply stop buying printed books. I don't think this is as much a science fiction dream as it may sound. How many of you still read a printed newspaper?
We may need no convincing to burn our books. They may never need to be outlawed. They will instead be subtly subverted by the insidious desire for "convenience". The kings of convenience will then be free to rule using the most powerful political tool in the information age: FUD.
It's about the marginal cost. (Score:3, Interesting)
Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Examples of cold books are the books that you use at work. You have no attachment to these books. They are there to provide information.
Digital books will wipe out the market for cold books. Digital book have one crucial advantage over cold books. You can use a search engine to search the content of a digital book.
In the bad old days, an investment analyst may have remembered reading an insightful analysis about hedging. She wants to re-read the analysis but, unfortunately, cannot remember which bloody book contained the analysis.
In the present day, that same analyst can just use a search engine to find the precise book by quickly scanning the list of books that she has read.
The opposite of cold books is cozy books. These are books that you read while you are curled up in a comfy sofa or bed. As you sip hot chocolate spiked with whipped cream, you devour every word of the book. You lovingly flip the pages as you quickly follow the heroine of your chick-lit novel.
No computer or search-engine will ever replace the cozy books. There will always be a market for cozy books. The phrase, "curling up with your high-performance notebook computer popping up page after page of the novel", just does not have that same cozy feel.
Note that the notions of "cozy books" and "cold books" are relative. A female engineer may consider a book about advanced quantum physics to be a "cozy book" for leisure reading, but a middle-aged housewife may consider a romance novel to be a "cozy book". The point is that digital books will never eliminate all paper-based books simply because cozy books will continue to survive in the digital age.
Re:I learned something (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know. On our street the crew was fixing a broken water line. They used a vac and water jet truck to make mud and suck it up. It made a nice small hole about 8 inches in diamater and about 2 feet deep.
I found they use it because it can't cut into nearby underground phone/electric/gas/cable service. A shovel is too dangerous for many curbside utility repairs. They were not permitted to use a shovel.
Shift, not paradigm change ahead for books (Score:5, Interesting)
With DVDs and CDs (ie: video and music) you need a hardware system to access the content. With a book, the hardware is in the pages and the binding. So when we're talking about e-books, we're talking about changing the playback hardware, not just the distribution channel for the content.
This is important because for music and video the internet (file sharing) has only really altered the distribution channel for content, not the playback hardware.
I think e-books have not taken off because the market likes the existing playback hardware: paper pages and binding. I don't think that is likely to change as long as prices for books remain affordable. Unless the point of production of the playback hardware shifts to the end-user (ie: a home book-binding color laser printer or something like that), this is likely to remain so. And even if such devices were possible, people would probably still buy 'the real thing'. After all, there have been home cappucino machines for a long time, yet Starbucks is booming. These are probably the main reasons why books and bookstores have been a booming business since the inception of the internet, and not the other way around.
The situation may be different in places where books (and Starbucks) are not affordable, like in - say - Bangladesh. And this electronic resource will be wonderful for serving those communities. But giving such markets access to books electronically doesn't constitute any loss of sales since they aren't buyers in any case.
For all of these reasons, I suspect this resource is going to be a fantastic research tool, but I doubt it is going to be a paradigm change so much as a subtle shift for the distribution of the written word.
Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Interesting)
I always forget about Project Gutenberg. I think it'd be nice if some popular current authors would place some of their books there for free. I don't know how copyrights work in the publishing world, so I don't know if they're even allowed to, but it would be nice. Maybe not right after a book is published, but maybe a year or two after it goes on sale. That way most people who really want the book would already have bought it, and the price would be down enough so that it would be cheaper to buy it than use ink to print it at home.
That wouldn't exactly work with technical and reference books, because their prices are usually relatively high, but maybe putting them up without figures or something would work.
I guess there are people who would read entire books online, but I think a lot (most?) people would prefer to read things over a few pages on printed paper.
It'd be nice, but I doubt it'll ever happen. Publishing companies are probably too paranoid about lost profit.
Physics != Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation; as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
Aristotle, The Politics 350 BCE
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:2, Interesting)
In Transmetropolitan, the Makers (essentially the same idea; a rather sentient machine that transforms matter into goods) had to be upgraded because they were creating drugs for their own consumption. IIRC, the machines were programmed to disallow recreation of copyrighted material or anything overly dangerous...but due to their sentience, some of the seedier ones just did as they pleased.
Re:Some such texts already exist (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:5, Interesting)
For a long time, I used a bookmark that clipped to the back of the book and used an arm to mark the page. The only way to lose the page with this was to drop it from quite a height while it was near the start of the book. So it worked fairly well for my problem.
But then, when I was about 18 or so, I installed an ebook reader on a Pilot. (Yes, before they adopted the name Palm.) After the initial discomfort, the fact that I NEVER lost my place in the book had me hooked. I've used a Palm device and 2 different Pocket PC devices since then, and I definitely prefer electronic reading. I would actually be willing to spend $500 on an ebook reader that does what -I- want. That means reading any format I throw at it, including LIT, Palm, RTF, HTML, anything. (IT doesn't have to support DRM tho. I won't be buying any books with DRM.) I think it'll be a while before I find this.
Re:free login? (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno about your claim that you can store 100 movies on a drive. Maybe if you have a really big drive or you compress your movies down to some shitty quality. My experience is that a 300GB drive can hold about 43 DVD-quality movies ripped in their full glory. At an average size of around 7GB each they aren't especially small files for transmission over the shitty slow Internet most of us Americans have even if we have broadband. Maybe you could get the average size down to around 5GB if you stripped out all the non-movie parts of the DVD rips.
I don't bother downloading movies over P2P because it's cheaper, counting time spent trying to download via P2P as having a value, to just buy them and I'm unsatisfied with the poor quality of most rips.
I don't think a DNS system makes much sense for complex queries. Really the current search server model makes the most sense except they'd be more logical if the servers they index would update their own data rather than having to be spidered. The really tricky part is classification of the stored data which I think will end up being a combined system of human contributions and computer processing. Let people vote on quality of content and tag the content and let smart systems such as neural nets learn from the human input to identify the content and give it's own best guess as to file types, content, quality, etc. I've done a lot of work with different AI techniques for identifying objects in photos and videos and I think a good enough result could be produced to give human contributors a solid place to begin their own identification.
Copyright in general is a seriously broken concept that needs an overhaul. In general globalization is making things interesting because laws to vary and with technology enabling people to easily access files anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world it's quite easy for things to be available even if they shouldn't be by a user's country's laws. For the most part I'm for getting rid of copyright and for the remainder they need to stabalize the laws worldwide to be the same. This is only one issue that makes me wonder if it's time to begin looking at a single worldwide government.
I think there needs to be a working model by which authors can get paid for their work. I don't think this requires 200 years of copyright protection on a work or DRM or any other of that crap which is incompatible with technology and freedom of speech. Poeple need to make a living and pay for costs such as storage and bandwidth but they don't need their own little monopoly that lasts centuries after they're dead. My general plan for copyrights and patents is that they should be $1 the first year and double every year until the own decides to let the copyright or patent lapse. I don't think DRM is needed to get people paid. Some people will always find ways to steal but the vast majority of people are willing to pay a fair price if it's easy to do. Setting up some sort of control structure by which when authors submit their work to search engines for indexing that those search engines will know the price and handle charging the users and getting the authors paid would be ideal I think. Google Base and some of their other work seems to be heading this direction so we shall see how it works out. I think iTunes is a prime example that people are willing to pay a fair price for something freely available if it's easy enough to do so.
I know servers and bandwidth are expensive as I maintain several servers that host websites, email, file sharing, etc. It can add up quick if your not paying attention - especially file sharing. Even finding hosted servers of fat pipes with 1TB of filespace each took me a lot of work and was fairly expensive (around $250/mo each box).
Re:Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. I collect non-drm'd books and keep them on my PDA. I like having them with me so that I can read them on a whim. Otherwise I would have to drag a cubic metre of decaying paperbacks around with me.
In the past I have lent paper books to people and never got them back. Electronic information is better for me and I don't lose anything by not having it on paper.
But I won't agree to DRM. I may as well get the paper copy then.
New ways of compensating artists/authors/etc (Score:5, Interesting)
Far fewer Open E-texts than relevant publications (Score:3, Interesting)
Ad (1) Do we need additional etexts?
The list of e-texts on the sites shown might look impressive, but it isn't really. It's a convenient aid to a decent university library but nothing more. In addition it took me quite some time to find these sites, and it took the site builders untold hours to put their sites together. And still it's terribly sketchy.
Why do I say it looks more impressive than it is?
-the topics tend to be covered in a very incomplete way
-the only area that is covered fairly well is undergraduate (first and second year) Mathematics and basic Physics.
-to my feeling there seems to be a positive correlation (but I didn't check this) between open e-texts and subjects that are studied by people who really really _want_ to study them
All full e-texts in these sites were made available by their copyright holders or have had their copyrights expired. What Google is planning to do is to make al books searcheable (including those under copyright) and to display only such small morsels as is consonant with fair-use. That's a very different story.
I for one would pay good money to be able to do an occasional full-text search of textbooks. And I would be happy to then either lend those books from the library or to buy them outright.
Ad (2) Should we be afraid of a Google monopoly on book searches?
I am as suspicious of monopolies as the next person, but this is a service which genuinely doesn't exist at the moment. I firmly believe that we can expect nothing of remotely comparable quality from existing publishers. If Google makes money from building such a valuable resource, why not let them? And should there turn out to be problems, we can always address them later, once actually we have a service such as Google is planning.
As a case in point I would remind you of the situation with scientific journals. There is _no_ single system that allows me to do full-text searches in scientific journals. Most scientific publishers offer (ruinously expensive) searching services for their own journals to libraries, and mostly they let you search for abstracts, keywords, and authors only. The quality of the search engines usually ranges from barely acceptable to really poor and they simply can't hold a candle to the quality of the Google search engine. This is because publishers usually put only bitmaps of their full articles on-line (even to paying subscribers !), which effectively renders them unsearcheable.
Conclusion
The long and the short of it is that it really isn't in the publisher's interest to make their books and articles too easy to search. Publishers generally aren't about making knowledge accessible to society, they are about maximising profits by monetising copyrights (no censure intended). They (probably rightly) feel that allowing their publications to be searcheable won't help them sell more copies. Why would that be? Full-text search as proposed by Google would allow people to look a a page or a passage of their books and decide that (a) the book or article is of no use to them, or (b) that they now know enough and don't need to buy the book or article, or (c) that the book or article is a must-read. Mostly the answer will turn out to be (a) or (b). So they block it (which makes perfect sense from their point of view).
Of course this is counter to the best interest of researchers, but they usually aren't copyright holders. That might surprise some people, but researchers usually have to sign away their copyrights in order to get their work published. And they aren't in a very strong bargaining position because their jobs depend on publishing regularly in well-rated peer-reviewed journals.
I would definitely support a national library doing exactly what Google is planning. Unfo