eBooks, eBookshelves, eLibraries

A whole library dumped on my doorstep ...

One of the odd things about reading eBooks is that the booksellers encourage you to use only their own software for reading them. Of course this is to insure you will keep buying from them, since they have integrated their own digital "stores" as an extension of what you're reading.

Amazon is the worst culprit in this practice because they go further by using a proprietary format for their eBooks that insures you have to use their software. But Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google, Kobo and the rest do the same thing even if they agree on using the ePub standard format. Amazon even locks down their tablets to prevent you from installing reading software from other vendors. (This is the main reason I tell everyone not to buy a Kindle. Most other tablets, even from B&N and Kobo, will allow you freedom of choice.) So if you want to buy from multiple vendors you end up having to remember who you bought a book from so you can look for it in the appropriate software.

This is just weird. Imagine if you could only pick up and read one of your paper books if you could remember where you bought it. Hm, let's see. I was on my way to San Francisco, and in the airport ... or was it after I got there and went to City Lights? Or did I just take it with me to read on the trip?

It's possible to centralize your digital library with something like the Aldiko reader (for Android) or Adobe Digital Editions (Windows and Mac), but the lack of multiplatform support and digital rights management issues (the dread DRM) can make that challenging. So in practice we're ending up with these compartmentalized collections as if we had to organize our library in bookcases labeled "Amazon" et al. instead of Fiction, Biography, History, etc.

One of the downsides to this is that we're dependent on the bookseller to stay in business so they can continue to support their distribution ecosystem. How reliable is that? What would happen to all your eBooks (and music) if Amazon went belly up someday? Well, okay, maybe that's not likely. But what if it was Barnes & Noble? Not impossible, since they're struggling. It already happened to Borders, which had partnered with Kobo for eBooks. Luckily for their customers, Kobo remained open for business even after the chain of stores went down the tubes, but that was only because they were separate companies. (Kobo subsequently formed a partnership with the Independent Booksellers Association, which is why you should go to the website of your favorite indie bookseller and sign up for an account through them.)

Another case in point is Sony. The faltering entertainment juggernaut was in the eBook business at one time, and even launched one of the first readers with an ePaper display. This is where it gets personal, because the unimaginatively named "Sony Reader" was my first one. (I wrote about it here and here back in 2008.) I used it extensively for several years, mostly to catch up on the wealth of free literature available in the public domain from Project Gutenberg.

As the competition heated up with Amazon, Sony released a software update so they could convert to the ePub standard and abandon their own proprietary one. But they had missed the boat on distribution. What made the Kindle such a runaway success was not the reader or software or even the pricing available from Amazon's vast catalog. It was the ability to buy instantly over the air. Sony was too late to that party, having started out with the idea that you would shop on your desktop computer and push books onto your device through a cable. Quaint. So last year they decided to pull the plug on their whole book store to staunch the bleeding.

I was sorry to see them go. My Reader still works and still has unfinished books on it. (Be patient, Joseph Conrad, I'm getting back to you!) But I imagined my ability to re-download them vanishing. Kobo to the rescue! The Canadian company now owned by Rakuten of Japan struck a deal to take over all of Sony's existing clients along with their purchase history.

Amazingly, when the day came I didn't even have to do anything. I just got an email from Kobo letting me know that all my Sony books were now available in my Kobo library. Grabbing my tablet, I looked, and there they were. Instant gratification.

Imagine if when Borders went out of business a Barnes and Noble truck had pulled up to my front door and deposited copies of all my Borders-purchased books. Impossible of course, with traditional books. Not necessary, either, because they were already on the shelf. But with eBooks all things are possible. And necessary.

[Next time -- the changing library.]

You Want It WHEN?

We all know the feeling. We've packed everything for the trip, including the right number of socks and underwear, snacks, water bottles, reading material, chargers for the phone and tablet and computer. We even put out the cat and made sure the stove was off, the porch light on, and the neighbor knows to bring in the mail. Satisfied that all is ready, we gas up the car and hit the road. Then about a hundred miles later while merrily singing along with the radio, the moment of realization strikes, the one thing we forgot.

So, recently I found myself several hundred miles from home without two medications that I'm supposed to take every night. What to do? Call the doctor for a temporary prescription? Talk the drug store into selling me enough for a few days? What if instead it were possible to simply cause those two bottles parked on the shelf at home to transport themselves to my current location?

And of course, for some years now, that is exactly what is possible -- and in this case what was the easiest thing to do. All I needed was someone who could get into my house (thank you, you know who you are) and take them to the nearest Fedex shipping point, only a mile away. The following morning while sitting placidly in a meeting room in the rural boondocks I looked out the window to see the Fedex truck pass by, just for me.

Commonplace, I know. But consider that those precious objects had flown from Miami to Orlando -- with a change of planes in Nashville, Tennessee! -- while I slept and ate my breakfast, then managed to hop on the right truck to get to me before lunch. And the fee for this was less than two hours wages. What a wonderful world.

The Post Office used to be known for its intrepid reliability, but for the past dozens of years the crown has surely passed to Federal Express and its imitators -- UPS, DHL, Airborne, et al. A niche market initially patronized by attorneys impatient for documents has grown into a household utility, moving everything from freight down to letters (or pills) that "absolutely, positively, have to get there overnight." In some locations, and for a premium, you can even get it delivered the same day. The project that began as an MBA masters thesis about efficient distribution networks has conquered the world.

Conquered is not too strong a word. Along with ubiquitous low cost transportation and cheap electronic communications, the existence of such revolutionary courier service was a hallmark of the free market countries who faced off against the centrally managed systems of their rivals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In fact, I remember reading about an experiment that was conducted not long after the USSR collapsed and Western companies were beginning to explore the novel possibility of doing business there.

The test was performed simultaneously in the USA and Russia. In America identical packages were sent by 3 rival services coast to coast to the same address. All three arrived the following morning within 30 minutes of each other. In Russia they tried to send a package from Moscow to the newly renamed St. Petersburg (nee Leningrad). I can't recall how long it took, but it was a l-o-o-n-g time, and its arrival was anything but certain. We're talking weeks, by which time whatever the package contained was no longer urgent.

Forget military applications; how could you even run a country that way in the modern world? The answer is, you couldn't, not successfully, and package delivery was only one more sign of the many failings of a system that was decaying and collapsing of its own weight. The experimenters described the act of taking something to be shipped to a government office during one of its few open hours, standing in long lines, perhaps to be told that the package was not wrapped properly and sent home to find some string. Here you don't even have to wrap it, they will wrap it for you and do a better job of it than you might yourself.

Did you know Fedex can even help you ship backwards in time? What? OK, it's only a rare example, but here's how it works. You know they have a cutoff time each day. It might be 6 pm if they're picking up, or 8 pm if you're taking it to one of their main shipping offices. But a company I used to work for was part of a nationwide chain. When one of our East coast customers needed to overnight some prints after hours, we sent a digital copy to another location in California where they had plenty of time to produce the prints and get them to Fedex before the cutoff there -- which of course was 3 hours later than in the East. One wonders what might be possible in modern day Russia, which spans 9 time zones.

So let's hear it for our overnight shippers, expediters of the modern age, who have made the likes of Amazon possible, and then enabled us all to provide the same service from every mom and pop shop in the land. It may not be sexy, it may not be high tech, but it gets there, absolutely, positively. And hey, I've got my pills.

Long Live Big Brother!

1984 becomes the first unbook, but probably won't be the last ...


What a coincidence -- no sooner was the digital ink dry on my recent blog about the 25th anniversary of 1984 than Orwell's notorious novel made news again by disappearing from Amazon's Kindle readers everywhere. This must mean it's time to reflect once more about the issue of copyright and rights management in the digital era.

Apparently Amazon was notified by the legitimate copyright owners that their digital editions of 1984 and also Animal Farm had been obtained from an illegitimate third party source, so they were obliged to stop distributing them. What makes the story bizarre, and should put consumers on alert, is that Amazon went way beyond what was required of them and decided to use their "Whispernet" back door into all Kindles everywhere to recall (i.e., delete) all the copies that had been downloaded previously.

Customers received refunds, but were not even told that their books were now vanished as if they had never been. They had become "unbooks."

Now, as everyone should remember, Winston Smith, the diligent worker bee of Orwell's imaginary world, toiled away at his desk in the Ministry of Truth carefully excising past references to news that had been revised and people who had been done away with: "unpersons." He did this by pasting brown paper over their pictures in old newspapers, and by redacting the text until it resembled a passage of testimony on the Iran-Contra affair. The operative government slogan was: Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.

But just when we thought we were safe because things have worked out differently, along comes this new digital technique capable of instantly removing all references to any digital content. The battle is not lost yet, because regardless of Amazon's deletions there are still lots of hard copies of Orwell out in the world, and perhaps some legitimate digital copies as well -- maybe even a fugitive one living on a Kindle somewhere, saved only because it is in some remote area of the planet where Whispernet cannot reach. But the example shows what is possible and should give us cause for concern.

With the immanent demise of the print editions of all newspapers, we will soon get used to the idea that our sole source for information is the digital archives of the Internet. And alas, the memory of online sources is brief and subject to loss and revision. Under a regime with the will to do so (let's pick China as an example), the nerve-nexuses of the Internet can be constricted, spying software can be installed on your computer by law, and what you can and cannot access can become very much a matter of centralized control.

And never mind deleting books or articles -- how about just revising them, perhaps while they are still being read? Remember that election last year where our editor lambasted the other party's candidate? Well, as you can see, you are mistaken, because he was clearly backing the winner from the start. Remember the famous photo of the young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square? Well, your memory must be playing tricks on you, because you can search all day and you will never again find a copy of that photo.

Our defense against this potential tyranny is still vigilance, as always. The battle of information flow between the top-down central authority model and the bottom-up grass roots model gives hope that there is at least an alternative. But we also need to start choosing our battles while we can still win them. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is still a winnable debate.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has stripped us of some basic rights that we used to take for granted when we bought a book or record. We need to make up our minds to resist. We can do it economically, by boycotting publishers and distributors who engage in practices we don't approve of, or politically, by demanding legislative change, or in courts, where organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up on our behalf. (Check out their take on this issue here.)

One commentator on the irony of this fate befalling 1984 observed that it might have been even more ironic if it had happened to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, about a society that had burned all its books. But there is probably small chance of that happening as long as the publishers need to have something to sell us. Rights management is really about having a way to sell us the same thing multiple times, the way we are expected to pay every time we watch a movie.

I'm much more concerned about the possibility that the next time I read it there will be something funny about the ending of 1984. Winston Smith, bright and shiny after graduating from the rehab program in the basement of The Ministry of Love, joins the Anti-Sex league with his pal Julia. They move into a plush new apartment suitable for Inner Party members and live happily ever after. Winston can't imagine what ever got into him to question things the way he did. But that's all in the past now, where it can be safely ... revised.