--

Forematter:

This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging TechnologyConference [ http://conferences. Oreillynet. Com/cs/et2004 ], alongwith a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can'tbe released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places wherenew slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. 

This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a CreativeCommons public domain dedication:

> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)>> The person or persons who have associated their work with this> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the> public domain. >> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors. > Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. > Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. >> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, > modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived. 

--

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitionsI've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of ashort story collection online under a Creative Commons license. Aparodist who published a list of alternate titles for thepresentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck RightNow, " [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don'tthink it's true. 

No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'dcall it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them. " [Ebooks: You'reSoaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooksto come is almost visible in the way that people interact withtext today, and that the job of authors who want to become richand famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape. 

I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what thefuture of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll sharethem with you:

1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, soebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebookssells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previousinstallments in their series to coincide with the release of anew volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and thebacklist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell meabout how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-bookfar exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonnabuy it. " But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooksare a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more peoplewill read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewerpages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to bethe way that writers earn their keep, not the way that theypromote the dead-tree editions. 

2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paperbooks]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said thathe read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed theother half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write tome to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they cancopy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baenreaders use the electronic editions of their favorite series tobuild concordances of characters, places and events. 

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless youown the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that thebook is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic andartistic activities -- and not an "object. " Viewing the book as a"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, andit begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Goodquestion. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITORSCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine atext-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert theminto a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turnthem into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them overto my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced reviewcopies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to myreaders, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobilecan convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in tenminutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDFor an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout fora buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequentlycited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper booksconfer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dustsettles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feelless like ownership than having an open digital edition of thetext. 

4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a betterdeal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin onthe ground. *Amazing Stories, * Hugo Gernsback's original sciencefiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, sciencefiction magazines pay. . . A couple cents a word. The sums involvedare so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at apioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sfwriters earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all ofus could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream ofearning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one wouldplay the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentivefor writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desirefor posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of thecorpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by searchengines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled. 

Even better: they level the playing field between writers andtrolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickersin a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahooswere filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slamsat their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the bestway to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is thebest way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still withus, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's abit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that wasrecently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":

[QUOTED TEXT]

> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing. 

Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissedme off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my goodname! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at thatdamning passage:

[PULL-QUOTE]

> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first> page

You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONALPULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading ofpaying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about hisnovel, "a surprisingly bad writer, " no less, whose writing is"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writerout. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind. 

You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both egoand insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up allthe things that people are saying about your book is that it canplay right into your insecurities -- "all these people will haveit in their minds not to bother with my book because they've readthe negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is theego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is. "And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are togive it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spellyour URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!). 

5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embracetheir nature. ] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal tothe value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-abilityand send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain anebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more yourestrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform anebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as apaper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beatpaper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match themfor quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just trysending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in lessthan a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a littlestick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching apaper book for every instance of a character's name to find abeloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of apaper book and pasting it into your sig-file. 

6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorterone). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not ashorter one). ] Artists are always disappointed by theiraudience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll findcuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestylewith its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters andaction, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would bea hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of ourpenchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideaswithout worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallowchocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think ofshortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:

[Nietzsche quote]

> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days. 

In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're notpaying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, butthis quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quotewith attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogyof Morals, " published in *1887. *

Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren'tnecessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold thestoryline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their mindsfor *five years* while the story trickled out in monthlyfunnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the HarryPotter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entireforests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like RobertJordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately20, 000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one wayor another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted insoundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas ofthe Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attentionto the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish. 

7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vastmajority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No onelibrary collects all the still-extant books ever written and noone person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of writtenwork. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver ofhuman literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick withjust the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution. 

For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shareddesire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want tocomplete that collection with different texts that are asdistinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all looklike we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not lookingclosely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only presentat a coarse level of measurement: once you get into reallygranular observation, there are as many differences in our"shared" experience as there are similarities. 

More than that, though, is the way that a large collection ofelectronic text differs from a small one: it's the differencebetween a single book, a shelf full of books and a library ofbooks. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us canhope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but byanalyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generatedconclusions about the relative relevance of different pages todifferent queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, butGoogle can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets ofgoodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today. 

8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. Toround out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks aremore like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms ofretail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with agood several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossedaround as the magic number. That means that my readers have tohear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready tobuy. 

There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable tobringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text ofthe book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and lookingat the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of nothaving to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger kingleft behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundredthousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" tenthousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that forever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that wouldbe a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: ifone out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of mybook bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloadscost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and thesales are healthy. 

We also like to think of physical books as being inherently*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, sincecomputers are damned good at counting things!). This isimportant, because writers get paid on the basis of the number ofcopies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes adifference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precisenumbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold. 

But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of abook, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of therun to make sure that the setup is right and to account for theoccasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of booksprinted is approximately the number of books ordered, but neverexactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer andthat's why. 

And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Somecopies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn'torder them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale tableor in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some arereturned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morningaccompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the placewhere the spare sock in the dryer ends up. 

The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copiesshipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting workspretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough fordivvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies forradio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough forcounting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off. 

Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts ofelectronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable. 

And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed orencoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find heraudience. There are more competitors for our attention than wecan possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting abook under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is thehardest and most important task any writer faces. 

#

I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries andbookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until Iwas lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew Iwanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfictionbook out, two more novels under contract, and another book in theworks. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, sciencefiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]

I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10, 000 of them, instorage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARYLADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappearsfrom the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Sciencefiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computersare fundamentally different from modern books in the same waythat printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they aremalleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by manymonths' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind ofdurable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATEDBIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a bookinto something that could be simply run off a press in a fewminutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping thanexaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenbergpress meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member ofthe ruling class could amass a library, and that rather thanpicking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a hugevariety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed fromperson to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]

Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot ofspeculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certaintiesand a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk isto lay out both categories of ideas. 

This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the MagicKingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on theone hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, thenew and scary practice of ebook "piracy. " [alt. Binaries. E-booksscreengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to noticethat the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds withthe notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worryingabout: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats ifintarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?

A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks. " Onemeaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is tosay, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes foruse on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on aspecial-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" orunauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made bycutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at atime, then running the resulting bitmaps through an opticalcharacter recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to becleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errorsintroduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that thesebooks also have deliberate errors, created by mischievousbook-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that anybook-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I thinkthat this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about. 

Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field overebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-rippercircles. Writers were joining the discussion onalt. Binaries. Ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear ofretaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw uptheir credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. Myeditor, a blogger, hacker andguy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named PatrickNielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:

> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). > Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that> "home taping is killing music. " It's hard for ordinary folks to> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced. 

Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send meto a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New Yorkin the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of ProjectGutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to startlicensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to theturn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my firstnovel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!). 

Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked sillyby legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warnerfor carrying the alt. Binaries. Ebooks newsgroup. This writeralleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failureto do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for theincredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyrightlaws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome DigitalMillennium Copyright Act or DMCA. 

Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there whothought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given theduty of actively policing and censoring the websites andnewsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirementthat ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was anunlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left upto judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings fromesteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC]. 

This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to myboots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved theFirst Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with therest of the world. 

Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be anopportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebookstuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On theother hand, there were more books posted to alt. Binaries. Ebooksevery day. 

This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:

1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day[GRAPHIC]

2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day[GRAPHIC]

These two certainties begged a lot of questions. 

[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]

* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper

* People want to own physical books because of their visceralappeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on howgood books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or howevocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)

* You can't take your ebook into the tub

* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer

* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time

None of these seemed like very good explanations for the"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low toreplace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more timereading off a screen every year, up to and including my saintedgrandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue thatcertain technologies aren't ready for primetime because theirgrandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends meemail all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves toshow off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at herFlorida retirement condo)?

The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. Itseemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paperbooks, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think alittle about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is thehistory of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the AmericanRevolution. 

Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printedon rare leather by monks. The only people who could read themwere priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really coolcartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read thebooks aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantlynon-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in priceyincense that rose from censers swung by altar boys. 

Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. MartinLuther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] Heprinted Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, anddistributed them to normal people who got to read the word of Godall on their own. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of theprinting press:

[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]

* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of theilluminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked thetypographical expressiveness that a really talented monk couldbring to bear when writing out the word of God

* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-casefor Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authorityof the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it neededimpressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity. 

* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was noincense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knewthat reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?

* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminatednumbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in anyapocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate thattranslation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, runninga quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good steadfor centuries. 

In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execspatiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn'tget any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know ifthe rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would dropmid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the pointsraised above with equal certainty. 

What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the waysthat Luther Bibles kicked ass:

[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]

* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire themwithout having to subject themselves to the authority andapproval of the Church

* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You nolonger had to take the Church's word for it when its priestsexplained what God really meant

* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of booksflourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarshipand so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initialpopularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion. 

Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of amonkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made theGutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles asuccess. 

By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have preciouslittle to do with the reasons to love paper books. 

[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]

* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from amidlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to handby women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens havesocial life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever getto see each other face to face; the only kind of book they canpass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the singlefactor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from afriend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely tosell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volumein a series!

* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Macevangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's atruism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded arebog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believeit. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. Butthe interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates toldthe New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception is. " Why did Napstercaptivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it wasbecause 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't availablefor sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were allthe songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that hadbeen lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smilewhen we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, butthey share the trait of making the difference between acompelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radioprogramming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to themajority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronictext means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it ona webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; youcan ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the textfor a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download the book do so for thepredictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to samplea chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy thebook -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-textexperience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printingout a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach ratherthan risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty. 

Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of thenotion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into thewall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to acast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer thatcries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt itsholder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all youhave is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. 

The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of theInternet is to move bits at very high speed around the world atlittle-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of theebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text andsending it around. 

Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopolyover copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mousecartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disneyswings a very big stick on the Hill). 

This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:

[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]

* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peersthat strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them fromgetting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty muchtrue: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from theirpublishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow thatstrong copyright protects you from your *readers*. 

* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for business. 

* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're inthe business of grabbing as much copyright as they can andhanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers intosigning over improbable rights for things like theme park ridesand action figures based on their work -- it's also why literaryagents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the booksthey represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to longto shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?

* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of$150, 000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and theirrepresentatives have all kinds of special powers, like theability to force an ISP to turn over your personal informationbefore showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrongside of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify themfrom infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers toprove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even inthe case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at theopening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assumingpotentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quotingmaterial around them, and are scared off of public domain textsbecause an honest mistake about the public-domain status of awork carries such a terrible price. 

* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Courthearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the worksin copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but thatfiguring out who these old works belong to with the degree ofcertainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economicapocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn onthem. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expirelong before the copyright on them does. Today, the names ofscience fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, ArthurConan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are stillknown, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritualdescendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- iftheir work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it mightjust vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to thepublic domain. 

This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such athing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth. 

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio tothe pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its firstpreference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the easewith which it can reproduced. 

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that businessabout how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive thanthe technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, theVaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radiohad to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*control over who could get into the theater and hear them performto a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who couldbuild or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of themperforming. For that matter, look at the difference between amonkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)

Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has tradedoff its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated bybespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by mastercraftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't asexpressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- asdid radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, handillumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale incomparison to the ability of an individual to actually get acopy of her own. 

Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists stillhand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards atCarnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies ofmusicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes onthe character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printingpress, all the books that are better-suited to movable typemigrate into that new form. What's left behind are those itemsthat are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely oncreamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is mostenjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity. 

Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it'sa lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's aphotocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monasteryand several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased controldemands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights ofcreators with their audiences. 

For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a newcopyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio wasinvented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to therecord labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TVwas invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters tosell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate. 

Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev wasgenerated in response to the last generation of technology. Thetemptation to treat copyright as though it came down off themountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" realproperty) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, currentcopyright only considers the last generation of tech. 

So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this theend of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive theprinting press, science fiction will certainly weather the adventof bookwarez. 

#

Lagniappe [Lagniappe]

We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to dobefore I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus orextra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extrato thank you for your patience. 

About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in theMagic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the mostrestrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed myreaders to do was send around copies of the book. I wascautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, itfelt like I was taking a plunge. 

Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the textof Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMANREADABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have myblessing to create derivative works from my first book. You canmake movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEKHIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else torip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hackingmine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially. 

The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see whathappens when I get in up to my knees. 

The text with the new license will be online before the end ofthe day. Check craphound. Com/down for details. 

Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under aCreative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domaindedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it seefits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day isthrough. 

#

EOF

That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kindattention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for moredetailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot themhere in plain sight. 

Cory Doctorow

Midflight over Texas

February 4, 2004