Here's the thing about ebooks: they are inevitable. There is no point in having one set of technologies for transmitting lots of words infrequently, another for fewer words more frequently, a third for audio, a fourth for video, and something else entirely for combinations of words and audio and video. That latter one can do just fine for all the others, thank you, and soon will. Within a few years (or a couple decades), we will drop the "e" from "ebook" as we have dropped the "digital" that used to precede "camera"; all books will be ebooks.
The recent scandal surrounding the Kindle, though, has reminded us of the things that can go wrong when you keep your books where people more powerful than you can get to them. Granted, the Nazis didn't apologize afterwards, they didn't offer anyone their money back, and they ran a government, not a business. (That latter bit makes the 1984 thing more scary, by the way, not less.) But they also had to work a lot hard than did Amazon to get at those books. If all books are ebooks, and the arbiters of reading technology can purge certain titles from that technology by flicking a switch, they can delete every copy of any book (that post-dates that technology) that has ever existed.
Let me not get into whether "that could happen here." Let me instead point out a couple of things:
- It already has. We just didn't notice, because not many people have Kindles, and we didn't care, because lots of us have paper copies of 1984. Neither of these things will continue to be the case for long; see above.
- Governments are panicky, corporations are pushovers when it comes to the rights of their customers, and they will work together to shield each other from accountability.
- You think only people who live in countries with sound governments read books? Cast yourself 30 years into the future. (...And pretend that all countries and companies are exactly as they are today. In fact, never mind: just cast yourself into a situation in which all books are digital.) The Chinese government will pick a book it doesn't like and tell Amazon, and Sony, and other companies to delete it from all of the book readers in their country. They will do so.
- Open, DRM-free formats for digital books. No one should be able to decide that we aren't entitled to read our books anymore, and no one should be able to force us to read those books on a certain device. Fortunately, these exist.
- Multiple devices to choose from that support these formats, and the ability to move titles between these devices without help or consent from any central authority. The point is to prevent others from deleting your books remotely, so it's important that these devices can be disconnected from public networks and that they do not provide remote read or write access without authorization. This requirement is harder to meet today.
- The ability to generate a physical, non-digital copy. You can leave paper in a damp cave for two thousand years and still read it. You can't do that with an ebook reader.
It's not perfect. The iPhone isn't free of remote exploits (re: the link: yes, that's an "exploit"). I can share books between my iPod and my computer only -- as far as I can tell -- if they originate on the latter. And of course, the iPod doesn't have an electronic paper screen, which hurts readability. But the books are plain text- or EPUB-formatted, which I like, and the iPod is not a dedicated ebook device, which I also like; it makes it harder for The Man to find my books.
If the music industry is any guide, the future will look something like this: someone will finally release a killer device; we will all buy it. Ebooks will become ubiquitous. But lock-in and draconian tactics will piss us off, and we will work hard to circumvent and defeat The aforementioned Man. The Man will eventually give up. I'm optimistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment