The Puget News

Charlie Stross has posted a long-ish piece with some great thought on why the commercial ebook market is failing and why he believes it continue to fail for the forseeable future.

He points to several core problems:

• lack of inexpensive ereader hardware
• crippling DRM
• insane pricing

While I agree with those points, I have issues when he calls hogwash on the “hardware problem.” Stross misappropriates a most-excellent piece by Cory Doctorow to make the point that we already spend a lot of our time reading off all sorts of computer, PDA, mobile screens. That’s true, but it misses a wide swath of what people actually read. What Cory takes the time to explain in that article is that these form factors we’re using have drastically altered the forms of the content and thereby what he calls the “cognitive style” of engaging with them. I’m not reading “The Adventures of Huck Finn” on my phone and neither are you, even though it’s part of the public domain and avaiable for free.

I don’t cook turkey in my bed and I don’t read novels in my office. We have not created a compelling digital device for reading long-form narratives in the normal places we are used to doing so. You techno-geeks might think that taking a laptop to read in bed is the same thing as a book, but it’s not. A book doesn’t wake you up to the smell of searing flesh (well, mine don’t) nor does it cause as many incendiary concerns. Don’t fool yourselves, most people want a high-contrast, light-weight device which is not their PDA or mobile phone. Hell, if you really want the idea to take off, make an ereader that’s bathtub safe. You give me a compelling hardware offering that gets me close enough to the natural experience of reading and I’m all there. A good reader is definitely a core piece of the puzzle that is missing.

To date, the Sony ereader is the best hardware I have seen. It has the contrast, the battery life, the storage, and the form factor, but it suffers from a high-price tag, zero compatibility with my personal computers (Macintoshes), and an expensive ebook store. But kudos on that device Sony, it’s the first one I’d use if everything else about it didn’t suck.

I don’t think getting all the factors right for a successful ebook offering is as far away as Stross thinks, though. Time will tell. My bet is that the first really successful hardware device will come from a major bookseller (or major media outlet), someone capable of playing hard-ball with publishers, just like Apple did when it single-handedly consolidated and grew the digital music market with iTunes. I could picture “The New York Times” selling an ereader pre-loaded with subscriptions (and/or the top 10 bestsellers from their infamous list). Barnes and Noble could packaging an ereader with “The Top 100 Public Domain Classic Novels.” It would show their customers that they’re reading enthusiasts, environmentally conscious, and hip to the fact that you have lots of choices on where you can get your books. I think we’ll see some major title in this direction within the next couple of years.

My favorite part of Stross’s article, and the part I truly believe keep many digital texts from being made available, is when he explores the outlandishness of the piracy concerns:

[…] the […] problem the publishing industry has with ebooks is their misapprehension of exactly what the “pirate” ebook field is costing them. Some otherwise fairly intelligent folks in the SFWAs anti-piracy committee think they’re potentially costing up to 30% of their revenue stream. I’d like to call bullshit on that.

There’s a figure I’ve heard quoted (unfortunately I don’t know the source so I can’t cite you chapter and verse on it) to the effect that the typical dead-tree book has, over its life cycle, an average of four readers. Moreover, sell-through in paper is around 50-60%; that is, for every book sold to a customer, 0.8 to 1.0 other books end up being returned or pulped. So the real figure is more like ten readers per book actually printed by the publisher.

Think about that. Today, publishers try like crazy to tie ebooks to a single reader via DRM, in their misplaced zeal to reduce profit leakage; but for the economic hit from piracy to equal the economic hit from libraries and second-hand bookstores and friends lending friends books, the unlicensed distribution channels would have to be shifting nine ebooks for every one that is sold commercially.

Publishers are insane if they believe that every pirated copy is a lost sale. They need to be smarter than that. Not only that, they need to be more environmentally conscious than that. The current publishing system produces an extraordinary amount of waste. People will latch onto digital texts and readers if they can be made available at a reasonable price, not cobbled with atrocious DRM, and fit into their casual reading habits. This could start happening this year is somebody starts listening to their customers.

There are only two video podcasts I watch religiously: Cool Hunting and TEDTalks. They never fail to impress and inspire.

In this week’s Cool Hunting video, I was inspired several times over by the work of Jonathan Harris, being drawn in initially by his beautiful scrap-books. Journaling, as a concept, is something I’ve always admired and yet have always failed to devote myself to. Half a dozen journals sit within my book collection, nearly all of them empty beyond the first several pages. And yet, when I look at what I actually have written, the memories come rushing back and I find the experience engaging.

Harris’s journals have a freedom to them I’d love to attempt in my own journaling. The pasting of travel mementos, paintings in watercolors, pencil sketches, and words, all take advantage of where his mind is at during the time of creativity. It seems somehow easier to avoid writer’s block if you don’t have to write. While I am not the painter or the sketch artist he is, I am certain that I too can aspire to create something which is at least occasionally worthy of exploration and self-review, and that seems like as good a place to start as any.

Most of my friends are creative and feel like they should be spending more time on their artistic endeavors than they actually do. In the act of creating a journal, to exploration and archival of detritis of those things that make up a life, there is a built-in review process for ideas and thoughts, all done in an environment where the intention is not necessarily to share with others. It’s a place to work out your good and bad ideas. This is freeing. MySpace and blogging somehow seem like poor substitutes.

Moving from interior spaces to exterior explorations, Jonathan’s other works shown in the video are websites focused on filtering the shared experiences of others through creative digital visualizations, automated web-based aggregators, and inventive new use of old metaphor.

• We Feel Fine - A “Global study of human emotion using large-scale blog analysis”
• Universe - The exploration and creation of modern mythologies visualized as astral constellations.

If you missed it above, here’s that link to the video.

Let me know what you think of it. Have any of you tried journaling/scrap-booking in the past? Do you still do it now? Does anyone know of any good websites which discuss this sort of autobiographical creation?

Walt Mossberg, technology writer for the Wall Street journal, wrote and filmed a piece (see embedded video below) today which makes a really great point about copyright. The current legislation, [PDF], was written by the record labels and the media industry. Internet companies have since added a clause to it, protecting some of their own rights. The only audience not reflected in the legislation is the audience of the consumer, and that needs to change.

This is an issue I have been discussing at length with several friends recently. Specifically, we’ve been discussing what changes when libraries go digital (as Google, Amazon, etc. are helping them do with scanned texts, etc.) and how the library’s goal of information availability is at direct odds with those of corporations whose goal is to maximize payment for those resources. A blurry line is being crossed right now and nobody know how to respond 100% appropriately yet.

Walt boils this down to the right conversation that needing to happen at the national level and ultimately the legislation which needs to be written on behalf of the consumer - complete details on what constitutes acceptable use of the material we buy. Certainly part of my enjoyment of my media is sharing the experience of listening, watching, or reading with my friends. At what level does that cross the line? The current DMCA does not allow for, or detail, the bounds for reasonable use. It instead focuses on making all users feel a bit criminal, even when we’re just mimicking old use cases - recordable cassette tapes, creating mixed CDs for friends, etc.

Many moons ago, about 1,780 of them to be exact, I used to manage much of the Amazon.com customer review process, the stuff you don’t see from the front-end of the site - the moderation and maintenance of tons of reviews on millions of products. It was a fun job and I learned a ton about the legalities of free speech, how vicious people can be when they’re using assumed identities, and how nasty publishers/authors of crappy books can be when their books are called crappy in customer reviews.

I was also around for much of the initial craziness around protecting the identities of children online. At Amazon, we had to build separate processes for children to submit customer reviews an egregious hack which exists until this day (just look at the top of the page where it says “Under 13?”) and we had to shut down places where kids activiely congregated due to legal risk, such as discussion boards for Harry Potter, where children were being social with each other and perhaps sharing too much personal information with each other. Never mind the fact that we clearly stated you needed to be 18 to register for an account.

Here’s the deal, I’m all for protecting children, but the solutions that work are those which limit where kids can go on the internet - either on the software side or on the parenting side. COPA was justifiably struck down as a bad idea last week, a violation of free speech. It’s been unenforceable ever since it was created. These matters were a huge headache for me in my old role. I am glad that the law is maturing enough to deal with these matter more consistently and realistically.

Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. wrote that parents can better protect their children through software filters. He also stressed that COPA fails to address threats—such as online predators on social networking sites—that have emerged since the law was written. COPA only targets web site operators, not their users. COPA has been through several legal rulings and has never been enforced.

According to The New York Post, the “Brooklyn Public Library hopes to team up with Netflix to deliver DVDs and videos to anyone in the borough with a library card,” for free. As a movie watcher, I think it’s a lovely idea. As a realist, I think this doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

Why would Netflix agree to this? Sure, they could get paid as the delivery mechanism for each movie sent to a library user, but it would actively canibalize their own subscriber base, potentially to a large degree. Seems like stupid risk to me. Any possible benefit they could gain as a service provider to the library would likely be more than out-stripped as a cost against their subscriber-revenue. And to top it off, the Netflix spokesman doesn’t know anything about the deal.

This story is a dud. It’s about the Brooklyn Public Library creating a wish list of things they’d like to do, and one of the ideas leaking . The New York Post should be ashamed of posting this as a story. It would have been more valuable being reported as a rumor and then speculating on why it might/might not work. Hey wait, that’s just what I just did.