Living All In

With all the hubbub about the Kindle, I found Mark Pilgrim’s observations on corporate convenience snarky, prophetic, chilling, and just plain great! It’s a good lesson in paying attention to related threads of conversation and reminds me of the doublespeak from studios leading up to the (still unresolved) TV writers strike.

And now, Pilgrim’s The Future of Reading:

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Act II: The act of giving

[I]f he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong…

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

[Y]ou can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Act III: The act of lending

As you may have read in the newspapers over the past few days, we’ve been criticized by the leadership of a small, but vocal organization because we sell used books on our website. This group (which, by the way, is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out) claims that we’re damaging the book industry and authors by offering used books to our customers.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild

Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for previous versions of e-books — like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they evaporate after the loan period — and Bezos says that he’s open to the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Act IV: The act of reading

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 5

The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Act V: The act of remembering

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3

Act VI: The act of learning

If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

From The Times (UK):

Here’s the typical eBook/Google intro…

GOOGLE and some of the world’s top publishers are working on plans that they hope could do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music.

The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry.

With 380m people using Google each month, the move would give a significant boost to the development of e-books and have a big impact on the publishing industry and book retailers.

Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, said: “We are working on a platform that will let publishers give readers full access to a book online.”

And here’s the non-standard, new stuff from Google’s eUro eBook cHief:

He did not believe taking books online would mean the end of the printed word but it would give readers more options when it came to buying. “You may just want to rent a travel guide for the holiday or buy a chapter of a book. Ultimately, it will be the readers who decide how books are read,” he said.

He added that after many years of setbacks the electronic book looked poised to go main-stream. Commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their mobile phones.

See, at least Jens has a realistic view that eBooks add options but don’t come close to replacing books from trees.  I can envision some people renting a travel guide for a holiday, I just can’t see most people doing so.  Same with buying a chapter of a book for reading.  As much as people tout their multi-tasking skills, I doubt many people will toggle from paper/digital/paper when reading chapters 1, 2, & 3 of the next Ted Dekker novel just because the person’s traveling for the weekend.

In a previous post about Microsoft and eBooks, I mentioned the scanner that Google and Logos Bible Software uses.  It’s very cool.  Check out a demo here.

As for the Japanese reading novels on their cellphones, Japan is a literal graveyard littered with failed ‘cutting edge’ devices and digital lifestyle changes never adopted by the West.  Somebody tell Google it’s a cultural thing.  Scanning for reference is one thing, but the future is not now.  It very well may be coming, but eBooks are still the fodder of breathless reporters and eInk manufacturers.

An article by Gethan Ward in the Tennessean yesterday made an attempt to tackle the eBook conversation while talking to Nashville area publishers.  Unfortunately (but predictably) journalists and industry ‘experts’ are still missing the point.

The article fused together the growth in digital Biblical reference works with the pursuit of the elusive killer iPod-like eBook reader that has yet to materialize (sorry Sony.)  Time and time again, these two conversations become one just because the talk is about digitized books.  Stop the insanity!

With the exception of the Bible itself, no one wants to carry around Wiersbe’s Outlines of the New Testament, the entire works of the Early Church Fathers, or any other biblical reference work on an eBook reader.  eBook readers (conceptually) are best suited for fiction and non-fiction categories like biographies, business, news, and self-help.

What Ward either didn’t grasp (or wasn’t told) is that the value of a library of digital reference works surrounding the Bible is in having a software app that ties those reference works together allowing search, cross-reference, dictionary lookup in multiple languages, etc.  In other words, programs like Logos Bible Software, Quickverse, and e-Sword.   Now to Ward’s credit, those programs did come up in the article, e-Sword in a round-a-bout way when quoting ex-Nelson employee Phil Stoner who now is peddling book downloads for the e-Sword freeware program at estudysource.com.

I have little doubt that the article was probably prompted by Nelson’s recent press release announcing the partnership with Quickverse.  But frankly the article was all over the place talking about PDAs, software programs, and eBook readers.

As I tackled in a previous post (and probably will need to tackle again says Don Quixote,) people that smell the second coming of the iPod in an eBook reader device are missing key differences between how music is consumed and how the written (pixelized) word is consumed.  If you haven’t read the post, I encourage you to do so.  In the hopper is a presentation on the subject I plan to make to help educate any publishers or retailers that will listen to help separate the myth and hype from reality and where I think the future of digital publishing is headed.  I’ll roll out the outline here on the blog as it’s created.