In a short piece at silicon.com “futurist” Peter Cochrane talks about a potential business idea that I’m surprised doesn’t already exist: digitizing personal book collections. As I’ve said in the past, I support the various book digitization efforts from Google and others for these projects’ potential to make the sharing of knowledge easier, not because I want to read all my books (for free or otherwise) from my computer. However, I am intrigued by the option of digitizing at least some of the books I own – perhaps books I’ve read and don’t intend to read in full again. It would be nice to have searchable, digital copies of these books to refer back to, but there are some books that I could never trade in for digital doppelgangers.
Emptying the Shelves; Filling Up the Hard Drive
My Latest Article is a PDF
Important note: This essay is best enjoyed in PDF form. Download here.
This is a PDF. It’s one of the new trendy forms of creative expression. It has been around longer than the MiniDisc. The PDF is an early nineties thing. Ergo it’s trendy to use it now.
Powerpoint presentations were the last new trendy form of creative expression after they got a pecha kucha restyle and became a respected go-to format for alternative lectures (alt lec?).
When my boyfriend told me to read a hot new newspaper article about alt lit (online obviously) by Dan Holloway, it talked about a new literature “making the digital world not just its medium but its subject." The novel was still, though, the transitional traditional object that lent enough validation to this new movement that the newspaper was willing to cover it. The novel is still the idealized portable document format. The novel, Taipei by Tao Lin, was the article’s hook, and the porthole, to alt lit.
In a previous article over at futurebook.net, Dan Holloway says alt lit “deals like no other form of writing with life in the 21st century digital West.” HOORAY. This is what I/we/you've been waiting for. Not characters in novels talking in txt spk, but actually what's going on in our heads when there's so much internet in there. Described in words. And so. I expected books whose chapters are broken into bytes, to be scattered across our digital devices like narrative space dust, to be inhaled via touchscreen buttons. There was some of that. One of the most fun places to read alt lit is on The Newer York's Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, where you throw options into a content graph to find poems and prose hidden behind images. The other is Tumblr. You can also look deeper into alt lit via the alt lit players list put together by @altlitgossip on Twitter, and read some great poems about life in the digital age. Many of these alt lit authors have under 100 Twitter followers. I love this. I feel like an adult sneaking into a teenager's bedroom. I know I'm embarrassing it by even writing about it here, but alt lit is what I want to read. It's what I've been waiting to read.
Music waits for waves, film waits for movements, literature waits for forms. Has there been a new form of writing since chick lit or the New Puritans? It feels like it's all been about publishing and not what is being published. There are a surprisingly small number of waves in any artform. Wikipedia lists 37 film movements and 39 literary movements. Film was only just invented, we've had words for what feels like forever.
Style and content. That's all I want.
One of the formats which alt lit comes in is the PDF format. It’s the same format as normal lit. I shouldn’t even be saying “PDF format” because the F in PDF stands for “format.” So I’m being redundant. Like old technology. Even writing this as a Google Doc seems redundant when things like SimpleBooklet are scaleable and shareable (but unable to print or produce a PDF without mangling a careful design (which only looks careful thanks to templates, which know which shades of dark grey are tasteful for body text. In case you’re wondering, it’s #646362.)). (Not an emoticon.)
This is not a history of the PDF. The PDF was always the way to solidify your work. Like someone just beginning to make their way in the world and dictating how the tastes of this current moment in time will be remembered by generations future, the PDF is 22 years old. It needed to exist mainly because of the tight border control exhibited by different versions of Microsoft Word and other software, which wouldn’t allow documents through their gates without battering them into a spew of letters and numbers. A long-form haiku.
Adobe stepped in like an incompetent quango to administer the saving and opening of PDFs, but like anti-virus software became something of a virus in itself, elbowing in to open as many documents as it could, putting out its little red Acrobat triangle like a driver’s flimsy plastic stop sign. This accident is MINE, step back. Like Microsoft, Adobe Acrobat didn’t have the enabler attitude we’ve come to expect from technology. Our technology. Technology that has subjugated itself to us, and the thanks it gets is our shut up, let me get on, don’t reveal your inner workings, keep your interface on.
The PDF, I said, was a way to solidify your work. To rasterize, to merge layers, to save as jpg. Its current popularity could be seen as the paranoid end of the spectrum of our reaction to the multiplicity of devices. In opposition to the free and open new scaleable mediums which, like a diplomatic middle child, squeeze or stretch themselves to suit whatever screen or software you’re using. The PDF is more the controlling parent. It has tight reins on content. It bullies your screen and software into displaying things exactly as it presents them.
So, the PDF as one of the chosen formats of the dawners of the new literature. I get it. I thought it would be the app, but I get it. The app is too CD-ROMy. The PDF is democratic (probably more so than that other early nineties format for content, the zine, which required access to a photocopier, and is the existing cultural format I would most closely layer PDF alt lit over.) At the library it’s cheaper to use the computer than the photocopier.
One of the first alt lit PDFs I looked at had a long string of nacho crisp emoticons across the page (or, since crisps don’t emote, icons). A whole packet of them on repeat.
PDF PDF PP PDF PDF PPF PPr PFr Pr
Here’s the interactive bit. While writing this PDF, which I initially did with pen and paper before typing it into a Google Document, printing it to my desktop as a PDF and emailing it to a website, before them uploading it and you opening it on some kind of screen, none of which has yet happened at the time of typing (this bit wasn’t in the pen and paper draft). Back when it was just pen and paper, I noticed a funny thing. When you write the word PDF a lot, it becomes difficult to form the letters. Try it yourself. Write "PDF" on repeat, and you’ll get something like what’s happening above. Words as broken crisps. The PDF as pen-twister. Its letters are all slightly alike, a straight stroke down the left then a double hitch. Get a pen and paper and try it now.
Congratulations. You just wrote alt lit. You’re part of a worldwide handwritten PDF poem.
I also wrote a song about PDFs, but sound can’t be rasterized yet... Oh no, wait, it can. Adobe truly is an acrobat.
You can’t edit a PDF or make one on your smartphone without a trawl through an app store. Yet there’s something in it. From the moment I read about alt lit and cracked open a few PDFs, I wanted to create one. My latest article is a PDF. A congealed bit of technology, something we’re trying while we wait for literature’s savior format, not an app, not a Kindle download, but some new form yet to be discovered, being discovered by alt lit, being hidden by PDFs. A form which affects content. Here’s my stone tablet. Did you get a pen and paper yet?
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Gutenberg Eulogies?
Is there a "crisis in reading?" Last quarter's Barnes & Noble conference call; the well-publicized demise of certain book review supplements and independent bookstores; the gripes of our editor friends; and a whiff of desperation around the marketing of literary fiction (typically referred to as "so tough" or "a hard sell") would seem to confirm the encroachment of electronic reading matter - email, Facebook feeds, blogs - on the territory of print. Many of my students, ten years younger than I am, do not read books for pleasure. Sometimes, they don't even read for school.On the other hand, a literary author, Jhumpa Lahiri, last week stood athwart the New York Times bestseller list. And huge chain bookstores apparently find it profitable to operate in towns like the one I grew up in, where previously you bought what K-Mart was selling, or you got bupkis.A recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts raised some alarms. "Fewer than half of all American adults now [read] literature," the NEA reported. But, as many among the commentariat were quick to point out, the NEA was methodologically hamstrung by its insistence on defining literature as fiction and poetry; does our weekly New Yorker binge count for nothing? And so the "Death of Reading" metanarrative receded, for a time, into the murk that birthed it.Receded, that is, until Ursula K. Le Guin insisted on rousing it, via an essay in the February issue of Harper's Magazine. The thrust of Le Guin's argument was that readers weren't the problem, exactly; that pessimism about reading can be blamed on the conglomerates that have, in the last two decades, swallowed most of New York's most esteemed publishing houses. With its modest margins and arcane payment schedules, book publishing is more a labor of love than a maximizer of shareholder value, Le Guin pointed out; for every Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, a thousand midlist authors languish in the wings. To the News Corps of the world, she posed the question, "Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?"But responses to Le Guin's piece have inadvertently suggested an alternative explanation for the angst about the health of reading: the publishing world's formidable self-regard. The editors whose letters grace Harper's April issue are talented and admirable people (without them, some of my favorite books would not have found me), but none of them seem able to see in Le Guin's essay anything other than a reflection of their own personal accomplishments.On one hand, Andre Schiffrin, founder of The New Press and a vociferous critic of the publishing conglomerates, pronounces Le Guin "right on." After describing how his quondam employer, Bertelesmann-controlled Random House purged staff and backlists, "leaving only a hollowed-out label that can be affixed to any new book the group acquires," Schiffrin declares, "Literary publishing is insufficiently profitable to meet corporate expectations.... One solution to this problem," he suggests, "is to create not-for-profit firms as we did in starting The New Press."On the other hand, Lorin Stein, Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, finds Le Guin's essay "so depressing, in its knee-jerk snobbery and thoughtlessness, one hardly knows where to start." Le Guin's heroic readers of yore, he argues, "were part of a mass market, created by 'moneymaking entities' in the business of selling books." Without profit-motivated publishers (such as Holtzbrinck-backed FSG), writing becomes a pastime for the few who can afford to write for nothing, with no prospect of fame or glory beyond the cozy ring of 'our own people.' Fewer readers means lower stakes, lower standards, and more crap getting passed off as the real thing.Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief of the independent press New Directions, quite naturally defines the stakes more modestly. "Readers will always be here," she writes, agreeing with one of Le Guin's propositions. "That's how writers like W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño [both published by New Directions] catch on like wildfire. There have never been so many thriving, struggling, astonishingly nimble small literary presses busy making beautiful books."And, of course, a reader affiliated with Columbia University sees an industrial strategy to rule the world through publishing - which is even more whimsical in its premises than Mr. Stein's notion that writers under the current dispensation aren't already people who more or less "write for nothing, with no prospect of fame or glory." (Or his parallel conceit that the nature of the book business remains substantially unchanged from the era of the "Ivanhoe-reading cowboy.")Is there a crisis in reading? Impossible to say, when "our own people," the arbiters of literary culture, decline one of its most valuable functions: self-criticism. To be fair to the editors quoted above, their enthusiasm on behalf of their respective projects is evidence of a laudable commitment to the culture of the book; as Lorin Stein puts it, "This is a business I believe in passionately." And if we are to blame someone for changing the subject from the state of reading to the state of publishing, it should be Le Guin herself. Still, in aggregate, these responses work to confound, rather than to clarify. Their diagnostic power is that of the Rorschach blot.
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The Trail of the #AmazonFail
I learned about the Amazon de-ranking debacle on Twitter (follow me @EdanL, y'all). People love to argue that Twitter is a time-wasting site for people to announce what they're doing: They're doing their taxes, or they're drinking the best beer ever, man, or they're on the toilet. And it's that, certainly, but it's also an incredible way to spread information and start a dialogue. Most of the people I know on Twitter are other writers, or editors, critics, or publishers. I've learned a lot about the book world since signing up.But I digress.I was by turns upset and confused by the Amazon story (known on Twitter as #amazonfail) and I still am. What am I to believe, and what will it mean, in the long run, even after the "glitch" has been fixed? Am I simply being paranoid? Is mine simply the blanket distate-for-Amazon of an independent bookseller? Maybe. I don't know. I do know there's been a lot of valuable dialogue on this "ham-fisted cataloging error," and I thought I'd highlight some of it here.Mark Probst's Live Journal post started it all, and Carolyn Kellogg's reporting at the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy helped me track the story as it evolved.There's this thought-provoking post from Richard Nash, who argues that we can't give Amazon the benefit of the doubt because, ...in a world where whiteness and straightness are 'norms' and males benefit from our patriarchal history, it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors. As a contrast, here is Sara Nelson's (of The Daily Beast) interpretation of the reaction on Twitter and the blogosphere: That book lovers seized on this recent de-listing scandal as a vehicle through which to vent their frustration and rage at big bad Amazon makes perfect sense; to have a politically correct hook on which to hang one's argument makes whatever revenge one might wreak all the sweeter. Meanwhile, Clay Shirky had another angle about the Amazon fury: Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began.At the Vromans Bookstore Blog Patrick used #amazonfail to talk about the danger of putting our faith (and dollars) into one company, and drew a connection to our shift to monoculture farming: It's taken us some thirty years (since the passage of Earl Butz's "Get Big or Get Out" Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea. (This post, actually, reminded me of these posts Patrick penned for the Millions almost two years ago.)There are many other posts and reports on #amazonfail, including this one from the New York Times. And there is a petition to boycott Amazon, which, at the time of this writing, has collected over 26,000 signatures.It feels funny reporting all this on The Millions, which links to Amazon. This is not my choice, but one I understand and accept. We also have our Collaborative Atlas of Bookstores and Literary Places, and an upcoming walking tour of indie bookstores in NYC (Can we do one for LA next year? Maybe by bus/metro?). It's this diversity, and our excellent content, that I admire, and why I'm proud to write for this blog, links or not.And, before I go... In the spirit of Twitter/Blog culture, I would love to hear your responses to #amazonfail in the comments.
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Books Online
You may have heard. Google has just launched a service called Google Print. Like Amazon, Google's service allows people to search through books. Google announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair that are adding a lot of major publishers and they will be adding many titles. As with Amazon, there is a limit to how many pages you can view. And, at this stage anyway, it's not possible to search the book database exclusively. I've found that the best way to get a Google Print result to show up is to type the word "book" and then whatever it is you're searching for. It'll be interesting to see if this develops further.
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A 2013 Cheat Sheet for All You New Kindle (And Other Ereader) Owners
With each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books.
Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular. Looking at the statistics that Amazon provides us, 45% of all the books bought by Millions readers at Amazon after clicking on our links this year were Kindle ebooks. Last year it was 33% and the year before it was 25%, so the trend continues unabated.
So, for all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices, here are some links to get you going.
For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals in 2013. If you are new to the ereader game, we hope you'll pick up these titles:
Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O'Connell ($1.99)
The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99)
They are also available on Apple and other platforms.
Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2013 (which you'll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Publishers appear to still be having luck pricing ebooks pricing above the magic $9.99 number that has been a focus for many in the industry (all prices as of this writing).
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ($7.50)
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner ($10.99)
Selected Stories by Alice Munro ($10.74)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton ($8.59)
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon ($10.99)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri ($9.99)
Tenth of December by George Saunders ($8.99)
Fox 8 by George Saunders ($0.99)
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer ($8.99)
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda ($11.04)
MaddAdam by Margaret Atwood ($1.99)
Other potentially useful ebook links:
Editors' Picks
Best of 2012
Top 100 Paid and Free
Kindle Singles
And in this fractured ebook landscape, you've also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and the IndieBound ereader app that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don't forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics) available for years.
Happy Reading!
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Amazon Gets Into Publishing
Readers may discern a disconnect between the prevailing economic mood and the relentless innovation of online superstore Amazon. Even as whole segments of the economy crumble, Amazon is spearheading a whole new consumer electronics category with the Kindle, and as if that wasn't audacious enough following it by releasing a bigger, more expensive version.Now Amazon is embarking on another bold effort. It's entering the publishing business with a program called AmazonEncore, a program that leverages all of the myriad data Amazon can collect to find overlooked books with potential mass appeal, which it will then rerelease under the AmazonEncore imprint. The first AmazonEncore title, to be released in late August, is Legacy, a fantasy novel originally self published by 16-year-old writer Cayla Kluver. AmazonEncore is an intriguing idea that will no doubt send self-published authors' hearts racing. It's also worth noting that these books won't be Amazon exclusives. Amazon is going head to head with traditional publishers with plans to make AmazonEncore books available in "national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers."While it seems like Amazon is getting may from its core competencies with forays into consumer electronics and publishing, the online retail giant isn't insane. Amazon is actually designed to do well in recessions, and with traditional book retailers and publishers facing challenges, Amazon is seizing the opportunity to grow its market share and enter new markets and businesses. BusinessWeek recently pointed out this dynamic: "Amazon continues to benefit disproportionately from the general shift to online commerce and the careful shopping behavior that consumers are exhibiting during the downturn. The breadth of the products it offers through independent merchants and its own expansion into new categories, along with low-priced shipping in the U.S. and abroad, continues to woo shoppers."Amazon's willingness to innovate and invest in book-focused initiatives during this downturn will leave it with a very big footprint in the industry when the economy begins to recover.
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Amazon’s digital book initiative: paying by the page
As Google stokes controversy with its Google Print service, Amazon has unveiled its own digital book offering, one that's sure to make the publishers happy. Amazon is launching two services, Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. According to an AP story on the new products: With its new Amazon Pages service, Amazon.com Inc. plans to let customers to buy portions of a book - even just one page - for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased. Both services are expected to begin next year.CEO Jeff Bezos shared some addition details as well: For Amazon Pages ... the cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference works. Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book could also look at the entire text online, at any time, for a "small" additional charge, Bezos said. For instance, a $20 book might cost an extra $1.99. And Bezos offered up a quote that was most certainly directed at Google's recent run ins with publishers: "We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors." The story is also filled with positive comments from different publishers and an Authors Guild representative. Random House released a statement saying it plans to "work with online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals and other appropriate vendors to offer the contents of its books to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page-view basis."So, it seems to me that a showdown between Amazon and Google may be shaping up in the digital books market. Will publishers opt out of Google Print en masse and back Amazon, who, in their eyes, seems to be offering a more secure revenue stream? More importantly, are people ready to pay for books by the page, and will they turn their backs on Amazon for trying to spoil Google's free books party?Meanwhile, at the Official Google Blog, the Googlers are extolling the virtues of the public domain books that have recently been made available at Google Print. The post links to a number of searches that show some of the breadth of material that is now available at Google Print. Note that they are positioning this as "Preserving Public Domain Books."Previously: The publishers' big blunder
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Confessions of a Book Pirate
For several years, it seemed as though the book industry was getting a reprieve. As the music industry was ravaged by file sharing, and the film and TV industry were increasingly targeted by downloaders, book piracy was but a quaint cul de sac in the vast file sharing ecology. The tide, however, may be changing. Ereaders have become mainstream, making reading ebooks palatable to many more readers. Meanwhile, technology for scanning physical books and breaking the DRM on ebooks has continued to advance.
A recent study by Attributor, a firm that specializes in monitoring content online, came to some spectacular conclusions, including the headline claim that book piracy costs the industry nearly $3 billion, or over 10% of total revenue. Of all the conclusions in the Attributor study, this one seemed the most outlandish, and the study itself might be met with some skepticism since Attributor is in the business of charging companies to protect their content from the threat of piracy.
Nonetheless, the study, which monitored 913 titles on several popular file hosting sites, did point to a level of activity that suggested illegal downloading of books was becoming more than just a niche pastime. Even if the various extrapolations that led to the $3-billion figure are easy to poke holes in, Attributor still directly counted 3.2 million downloaded books.
For some, however, the study may inspire more questions than answers. Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out, and after a few hours of searching - stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites - I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk.
He lives in the Midwest, he's in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he's the publishing industry's ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he's also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he's downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers. As is typical of anonymous online communities, he has a peculiar handle: "The Real Caterpillar." This is what he told me:
The Millions: How active are you. How many books have you uploaded or downloaded?
The Real Caterpillar: In the past month, I have uploaded approximately 50 books to the torrent site where you contacted me. I am much less active then I once was. I used to scan many books, but in the past two years I have only done a few. Between 2002-2005 I created around 200 ebooks by scanning the physical copy, OCRing and proofing the output, and uploading them to USENET. I generally only upload content that I have scanned, with some exceptions. I have been out of the book scene for a while, concentrating on rare and out of print movies instead of books because it is much easier to rip a movie from VHS or DVD than to scan and proof a book.
I have downloaded a couple thousand ebooks via USENET and private torrent sites.
TM: Do you typically see scanned physical books or ebooks where the DRM has been broken?
TRC: Most of what I have seen is scanned physical books. Stephen King's Under the Dome was the first DRM-broken book I downloaded knowingly.
TM: Why have you gone this route as opposed to using a library or buying books? Do you consider this "stealing" or is it a gray area?
TRC: I own around 1,600 physical books, maybe a third of which were bought new, the rest used. I buy many hardcovers in a given year and generally purchase more books than I end up reading, so I have not chosen to collect electronic books as opposed to paper books but in addition to them. My electronic library has about a 50% crossover with my physical library, so that I can read the book on my electronic reader, "loan" the book without endangering my physical copy, or eventually rid myself of the paper copy if it is a book I do not have strong feelings about.
I do not buy DRM'd ebooks that are priced at more than a few dollars, but would pay up to $10 for a clean file if it was a new release.
I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may. Perhaps this will change as the Kindle and other e-ink readers make electronic books more convenient, but the Baen Free Library is an interesting experiment that proves that at least in that case, their business was actually enhanced by giving away their product free. That is probably not a business model that will work for everyone, but what is shows is that as a company they have their ear to the ground and are willing to think in new directions and take chances instead of putting their fingers in their ears, closing their eyes, and railing against their customers, as the
music industry is doing. The world is changing and business models have to change with it.
Three additional points:
1) With digital copies, what is "stolen" is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that was worth x dollars. With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.
2) Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore - a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.
3) Just because someone downloads a file, it doesn't mean they will read it. I realize that buying a book doesn't mean someone is going to read it either, but clicking a link and paying $10-$30 is very different - many more people will download a book and not read it than buy a book and not read it.
In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing... although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers. Realistically and financially, however, I feel the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks.
TM: How easy is it to go online and find a book you're looking for? How long does it take to download and how much technical expertise is required?
TRC: I have specific tastes, so it is usually not very easy to find specifically what I am looking for. The dearth of material I was interested in is what prompted me to scan in the past, in order to share some of my favorite, less popular authors with as many people as possible. It does not take much time to download once something you want has been found, however, and little technical experience is required.
Since books are generally very small files, they can be downloaded in minutes. You can then convert the file using one of many applications, for instance Mobipocket Creator, to PRC or another format that works with your reader. You can then plug your Kindle into your computer and copy the file over. The entire process typically takes 5-10 minutes.
BitTorrent technology is easy to install and use, and just about anyone can install the basic software needed and begin downloading their first torrent in less than an hour. However, discovering and gaining access to private torrent sites (invite only) can take a lot of time - and of course, that is where the good stuff is. Public sites (no account needed) and semi-private sites (sites that require an account, but usually have open enrollment) have a limited selection, but are easily accessible and anyone with basic computer skills can find and download very popular novels.
Usenet is an older technology, and is considered a safer place to pirate files. For older users like me who were around at the beginning of the internet it seems very simple, but to newer computer users it may seem unnecessarily complex, and more expensive because you need an account separate from your regular internet connection to access it.
TM: Once you've downloaded a book, what format is it in and how do you read it? On you computer? Printed out?
TRC: My preferred format for distribution is RTF because it holds metadata such as italics, boldfaces, and special characters that TXT does not, is easily converted to other formats using Word, cannot contain a virus, and is an open format that will be readable forever. Other popular formats are DOC, HTML, PDF, LIT (Microsoft Reader), PRC (Palm), MOBI (Palm), CBR (rar'd image files) - and there is a new format with each new reader that is released. Most formats can be converted to your preferred format with enough ingenuity or the
correct software.
To read, I convert to PRC and load the books onto my Kindle. Before I got that, I read on my Palm or laptop.
TM: How long does it take you to scan a physical book?
TRC: The scanning process takes about 1 hour per 100 scans. Mass market paperbacks can be scanned two pages at a time flat on the scanner bed, while large trades and hardcovers usually need to be scanned one page at a time. I'm sure that some of the more hardcore scanners disassemble the book and run it through an automatic feeder or something, but I prefer the manual approach because I'd like to save the book, and don't want to invest in the tools. Usually I can scan a book while watching a movie or two.
Once scanned, the output needs to be OCR'd - this is a fairly quick process using a tool like ABBYY FineReader.
The final step is the longest and most grueling. I've spent anywhere from 5 to 40 hours proofing the OCR output, depending on the size of the book and the quality of type in the original. This can be done in your OCR tool side-by-side with the scan of the original image or separately in your final output type (RTF, DOC, HTML, etc.). If there are few errors on the first few pages of text my preference is to proof in RTF, otherwise I do the proof within Finereader itself.
TM: What types of books do you look for? What is generally available? Is any fiction or popular non-fiction available?
TRC: I restrict my downloads to books I will likely read - this includes some popular novels, literary novels, and general non-fiction such as humor, biography, science, sociology, etc. Unlike DVD rips, the newest releases are not typically available two weeks before the product is released, if at all. I'm assuming that this is due to the smaller devoted audience books have, as well as the increased difficulty of sharing a book.
TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?
TRC: I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me - bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.
I'm sure that there are others - the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand.
TM: Is it your sense that a lot of people are out there looking to get books this way? Or is it just a tiny group?
TRC: I would say that there is a small unaffiliated "group" of people responsible for sourcing the material.
Also, keep in mind that everything I'm saying applies mostly to fiction and general-interest non-fiction.
Textbook, programming and technical manuals are all over the place and its very easy to obtain almost anything you want. I assume there are more sources for that material, and that their high price is a larger factor in people deciding to pirate them. Similarly, there are many communities creating comic, graphic novel and magazine content of whom I am only vaguely aware.
TM: Do you worry at all about getting in trouble for scanning and uploading ebooks?
TRC: A little, but the books I do are typically not bestsellers and are rarely new. I figure I have a bit of a buffer if trouble comes down because the Stephen King or Nora Roberts or "whoever the latest bestseller is" scanners would be the ones to get hit first. I've done a lot of out-of-print stuff, and when it is not out of print it's books by authors like John Barth - someone who no longer sells very well, I imagine.
I've debated doing some newer authors and books, but I would need to protect myself better and resolve the moral dilemma of actually causing noticeable financial harm to the author whose work I love enough to spend so much time working on getting a nice e-copy if I were to do so.
TM: What changes in the ebook industry would inspire you to stop participating in ebook file sharing?
TRC: This is a tough question. I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn't be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle. Even in this situation, I would probably still grab a book if I stumbled across the file and thought it might interest me - or if I wanted to check it out before buying a paper copy.
I was impressed by the Indie filmmakers of the movie "Ink" - when their movie leaked before the DVD was released, they put a donation button on their site doubleedgefilms.com. I donated even though I haven't watched the movie yet, just because of their thoughtfulness and sincerity. This didn't seem to work for King's "The Plant", but I think that had a lot to do with the lack of reading technology at the time. I would like to see the experiment tried again by someone like Eggers or Murakami - someone with a very devoted fanbase.
Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die - I don't know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty "stealing" from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.
One thing that will definitely not change anyone's mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison - attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.
[Image credit: Patrick Feller]
I agree! I'd love to have some of my old college text books in a digital, searchable format for reference. Other books are best left to the paper copies. It's just no fun to lay under a shade tree in the park and read Hemingway on your laptop. And what about curling up with a good book and a warm blanket on a chilly night? It's just not the same when it's on the computer screen.
Max! I can see it now… we start unpacking in our new place, and you (as always) happily take the task of shelving the books. I'd go unpack the kitchen boxes, return to check on your progress, only to find you on page 16 of your plan to digitize our entire book collection with nary a book on a shelf. Millions readers, you may think I'm exaggerating here, as I am known to do. However, friends who visited our Chicago apartment might recall that Max stuck a library-style card with a Library of Congress number on it in the front cover of each book prior to shelving anything. This ensured that the books would be sitting next to their appropriate neighbors and any books I borrowed from my own shelves would be returned to their proper place. Max, I'm going to have to say no to this plan – and I thought I was a serious cataloger!