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The Future of Digital Books
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun May 14, 2006 10:29 PM
from the new-library-at-alexandia dept.
from the new-library-at-alexandia dept.
Tabercil writes "The New York Times has an article about the mass scanning of books, which argues that actions such as Google's Book Search project are an inevitable outgrowth of the internet." From the article: "Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there?"
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E-academic books (Score:5, Insightful)
Some such texts already exist (Score:5, Informative)
-MIT's Open Courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html [mit.edu]
-Textbook revolution at http://textbookrevolution.org/ [textbookrevolution.org]
-Physiscs texts at: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#langua ges [phys.uu.nl]
-The assayer at http://www.theassayer.org/ [theassayer.org]
-Open content at http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technolo gy/OpenContent/opencontent.htm [hewlett.org]
I also know a number of econometric and statistics texts that are also available as free Ebooks, but they are of interest only to specialists.
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Re:Some such texts already exist (Score:3, Interesting)
Lots of computer books do this. (Score:3, Informative)
Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Examples of cold books are the books that you use at work. You have no attachment to these books. They are there to provide information.
Digital books will wipe out the market for cold books. Digital book have one crucial advantage over cold books. You can use a search engine to search the content of a digital book.
In the bad old days, an investment analyst may have remembered reading an insightful analysis about hedging. She wants to re-read the analysis but, unfortunately, cannot remember which bloody book contained the analysis.
In the present day, that same analyst can just use a search engine to find the precise book by quickly scanning the list of books that she has read.
The opposite of cold books is cozy books. These are books that you read while you are curled up in a comfy sofa or bed. As you sip hot chocolate spiked with whipped cream, you devour every word of the book. You lovingly flip the pages as you quickly follow the heroine of your chick-lit novel.
No computer or search-engine will ever replace the cozy books. There will always be a market for cozy books. The phrase, "curling up with your high-performance notebook computer popping up page after page of the novel", just does not have that same cozy feel.
Note that the notions of "cozy books" and "cold books" are relative. A female engineer may consider a book about advanced quantum physics to be a "cozy book" for leisure reading, but a middle-aged housewife may consider a romance novel to be a "cozy book". The point is that digital books will never eliminate all paper-based books simply because cozy books will continue to survive in the digital age.
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Re:Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to a direct-light display such as an LED or CRT screen, perhaps, but I'd argue that the contrast is more than adequate. I personally find direct-light displays less comfortable to look at for long periods than reflected-light displays such as paper, but I suppose you can get used to either one; and I'll grant that the lack of a built-in light source can be a problem in dark areas, if you happen to read in such places frequently.
doesn't scroll, is unsearchable, is uncopypasteable,
Why would you need to do any of these? Maybe this is the generation gap, but at 28 and having read hundreds of paper novels, I've never once felt the need for any of those while reading. There have been a few occasions when I've wanted to go back and find a particular quote in a novel I read years ago, but that's a different usage pattern from ordinary reading--and incidentally, I've found that when I do need to search, my brain does a remarkably good job of finding the right place as I flip through the pages.
takes up physical space,
I guess if you've succumbed to the "gotta-get-em-all" Pokemon mindset, this could be an issue. I'm living in a 45m^2 apartment in Japan with two medium-size bookshelves, and already have plenty of books (around 150 at rough count) to occupy what free time I have--when I want more, I just sell some of the ones I already own.
and is a fire risk.
As is that CPU you're overclocking. No, seriously--the chance of a fire actually starting from or due to a book is probably about the same as, if not less than, the chance of a fire starting from your PC or other electronic equipment. If your apartment or house is stacked from floor to ceiling with paper books, maybe you'd have something to worry about if a kitchen fire or the like spread, but in ordinary circumstances it's really not something that merits particular concern.
I'd also add that aside from having resolution that exceeds that of electronic displays, paper books don't need electricty to read, don't suffer from bugs or require updates, and survive ordinary wear and tear much better than electronic readers (I've got a book on Japan dating from 1907--a few photograph pages are no longer glued in they way they should be, but on the whole it's in fine shape).
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Re:Cold Books vs. Cozy Books (Score:5, Interesting)
For a long time, I used a bookmark that clipped to the back of the book and used an arm to mark the page. The only way to lose the page with this was to drop it from quite a height while it was near the start of the book. So it worked fairly well for my problem.
But then, when I was about 18 or so, I installed an ebook reader on a Pilot. (Yes, before they adopted the name Palm.) After the initial discomfort, the fact that I NEVER lost my place in the book had me hooked. I've used a Palm device and 2 different Pocket PC devices since then, and I definitely prefer electronic reading. I would actually be willing to spend $500 on an ebook reader that does what -I- want. That means reading any format I throw at it, including LIT, Palm, RTF, HTML, anything. (IT doesn't have to support DRM tho. I won't be buying any books with DRM.) I think it'll be a while before I find this.
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free login? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:free login? (Score:5, Insightful)
The other problem is that no content provider, and few customers, actually benefits from this system. They use it at the carnival because they don't trust their minimum-wage employees with money and some other ancillary benefits of microcurrencies (makes you spend more than you intended, what have you). But for an online business, "what our customers buy" is not just useful, its their *lifeblood*. Take a look at the value Amazon gets out of cross-referencing buying habits, both in aggregate ("People Who Like Harry Potter like ...") and specific to you (recommenations, which are basically taking the aggregate data and splicing that with what they know about you from past purchases). Heck, their database is probably as important to them as their tech or brand name.
Nor do most customers care. There was never a golden age of privacy in commercial transactions, since you always have to arrange delivery of the goods and payments and that always leaves records (even if they're only memories). Even if there had been a golden age, hello, credit cards, supermarket value cards, and data mining software. Its dead and most people couldn't care less. Sure, you can scare people a little with "Dubya and the NSA can subpoena your library records" but that ceases to scare (mostly because the dangers of it are vastly oversold and the usual suspects warn about this every two weeks whether they need to or not -- see the +5 mods which are probably already above and below this comment).
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Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Interesting)
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books. Maybe my tastes are completely different from the people who use Kazaa, or, maybe it hasn't occurred to the KaZaaistanis to actually look for books on what is primarily a music downloading library.
I've offered Gore Vidal, P.J. O'Rourke, Trevanian, Harry Turtledove, and others, but again, no one has the slightest interest.
So whenever you hear a book publisher claim that putting books online for download for free would devastate the industry, just remember that the people who read books are definitely not the people who download files from P2P resource libraries. The claim that online downloading of so-called e-books for low price or even free would hurt the book publishing industry seems on its face to be reasonable and prudent, but in reality it is totally without merit. The people who buy books and read them don't download files from Kazaa and the P2P filesharers don't read anything without having some teacher require it as part of their final grade. They'll download comic books, yes, maybe, but actual books of coherent text and prose, not a chance.
Such it is as it is. And I don't believe that this situation will change in the coming years as more people outside of the geek community discover the P2P global library resources that are available.
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Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Interesting)
I always forget about Project Gutenberg. I think it'd be nice if some popular current authors would place some of their books there for free. I don't know how copyrights work in the publishing world, so I don't know if they're even allowed to, but it would be nice. Maybe not right after a book is published, but maybe a year or two after it goes on sale. That way most people who really want the book would already have bought it, and the price would be down enough so that it would be cheaper to buy it than use ink to print it at home.
That wouldn't exactly work with technical and reference books, because their prices are usually relatively high, but maybe putting them up without figures or something would work.
I guess there are people who would read entire books online, but I think a lot (most?) people would prefer to read things over a few pages on printed paper.
It'd be nice, but I doubt it'll ever happen. Publishing companies are probably too paranoid about lost profit.
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Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:5, Informative)
a good article is at http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]
you could read the rationale of the publisher and many of his autors who offer free e-book to boost the selling of other e-book/books of the same author.
trying to summarize: to them downloading a book when you are young and have few money could be the same that havig one from the local library, if you like the autor then, in the future when the money for some book will be a no-problem you will buy a lot.
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Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested! (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps if book publishers put the same kind of pressure to eradicate scanned books form the web, books will move to P2P networks. However I doubt they ever do: enough people prefer reading books from paper,
Re:free login? (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition, once the content is available at all, it can easily be copied. (For the same reasons real DRM is impossible.) Then we can set up an encrypted p2p network and serve it up anonymously. In the case of pure text, the storage space required is incredibly small, less than 1 MB for an entire book. So I can store about 9,000 books on a single DVD and over 500,000 on a hard drive and share it on an anonymous, encrypted p2p network. The small size also means bandwidth isn't a big issue for text.
Bandwidth may be an issue for movies, but you can fit over 100 movies on a single hard drive, and as long as you don't want to watch the movie right at that moment, bandwidth for movies shouldn't be a problem either. (People download movies all the time over p2p.) With proper p2p, anonymizing and encryption, there is no information that can be gained about the actual information being transferred on the network.
Searching shouldn't be a problem since we could adopt a hierarchical system similar to DNS but based on some library category system. Instead of
Copyright would be a nightmare since the holder of the copyright is the one that sets rates, and can charge different rates to different people. However, since different countries don't have the same rules regarding copyrights, you could access the material from a country where it wasn't copyrighted or where it has expired. This really isn't a solution, but it is a workaround.
The biggest issue I see is that artists and authors have the rights to their own work and don't want to give it away - they like to get paid for what they have done. In addition, the storage cost for everything would be quite high. Maintaining petabytes of active storage is expensive and being able to serve it at a decent rate is also expensive, so there has to be some revenue model or at least public funding.
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Re:free login? (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno about your claim that you can store 100 movies on a drive. Maybe if you have a really big drive or you compress your movies down to some shitty quality. My experience is that a 300GB drive
Star Trek replicators (Score:5, Interesting)
Would we do away with all human suffering? Hunger wiped off the map? Who would endeavor to explore space or do research into new materials and computation? Would money be useless?
We have today costless information. As time rolls on, we'll have more of it. Those who currently own that information are slowly but surely losing their grip on it as it is becoming easier to replicate it with no cost.
The course of action thus far has been to build more protections into the information itself that prevents it from being copied easily. Will the same thing happen with actual replicators when they are invented?
Infinite food != end to hunger (Score:5, Insightful)
The real world introduction of replicators would see well-governed nations (which are mostly already rich) get even richer, and poorly-governed nations (which are mostly already poor) get even poorer as their governments confiscated their replicators and used them for the benefit of the power-elite (more phasers to oppress the masses and cheaper rates on ballots for one-party elections! Sweet!). And lots of Western academics would say "See, this is why we need socialism, look at how capitalism produces rich and poor people and inequitably distributes the wealth of the world", because academics who have never actually had their stuff ganked by a totalitarian mob have a very rozy view of the whole process.
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Extending your analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Infinite food != end to hunger (Score:3, Informative)
You can transform the nutrients of the soil, a seed and water into a tomato while using solar energy when you plant and care for that seed. The matter contained in the tomato must come from somewhere, a certain amount of energy will be needed to accompli
Physics != Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Funny)
Do we look like seemingly nothing to you, sir? I'm insulted and demand an apology.
- The Tiny Dwarfs Working in Replicators Syndicate (TDWRS)
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Insightful)
You're assuming we have limitless access to energy to power the thing, right?
Personally, I foresee a rampant culture of hedonists and drug addicts. There are plenty of people who, given the ability to replicate anything on a desk at no cost, will ask for heroin or coke or porn without even thinking twice.
Most of the rest will ask for bars of solid gold, because they're not smart enough to realize twelve million other p
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, his description of hell before judgement day is a place where people can make absolutely anything they want just by imagining it. People are imperfect, though, so their imaginings are also - and so nothing works great. Also, with no economic forces holding people together, bickering with neighbors drives people further and further away from each other (since they can always find a strech of land and think up a new house for it).
It's an interesting notion.
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Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that, but what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous? What do gun control laws mean if a
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Funny)
Picture this: Some guy with a replicator ordering: "Plutonium, weapon grade, 50Kg".
Now picture the look on his face when his newly replicated plutonium becomes supercritical only a few metres away from him.
Nobody and their neighbours makes such a mistake twice.
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Star Trek replicators (Score:3, Insightful)
If the current trend holds, we'll DRM the hell out of everything, be it physical or virtual, creating artificial scarcity to replace natural scarcity.
Perhaps the current trend will not hold in the long run. But it could still be very ugly for a while. As I see it, the fundamental problem is that n
Not if the writers got anything to say about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Same is true with greed story lines. No federation level race can have any desire to gain precious jewels because they can be easily replicated in any amount you want. So none of this gold pressed latinum nonsense.
The true concept of the replicator was rarely if ever used. In its full glory it would create a world without needs or wants. There would be no scarcity. Not of essentials and not of desirables. You could feed anyone and feed them on the finest foods.
99% of writers could never accept this. They had to introduce limitations or else their story telling techniques could not work. What is the point of sharing a rare bottle with someone. Rare? Just upload its pattern and anyone who wants to can have it.
So they introduced limits, like that it never tastes as good. HOW? Since replicators and transporters are similar technology either they create a perfect copy (and we been told time and time again that transporters do exactly that) or they do not and transporters would be useless.
In Star Trek the true replicators would ruin a lot of the stories because there would be no limit on resources, there would be no value to rare metals and precious stones, there would be no scarcity. Now check how many ST story lines respect the original vision of the replicator.
That is your clue as to the effect it would have on real life. All the current systems would collapse.
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Re:We obey the Laws of Thermodynamics on this site (Score:3, Informative)
If we can replicate, then presumably we've cracked the problem of turning energy to matter and back. If we start running out of energy, we convert some more matter into energy.
If we start to run out of matter, we go get some from any of the many celestial bodies nearby. It's not like Jupiter is doing anything terribly important with it's extra matter (I'm assuming that if we can do all that other stuff, why not space travel as w
It's about the marginal cost. (Score:3, Interesting)
Break Stupid Laws (Score:5, Interesting)
True story and a kind of interesting local example of what I'm talking about:
I live on a very long dead-end road. They fixed the mouth of the road I live on a while back -- it used to be a fork but now it's a 3-way stop. There was once a very dangerous fork at the mouth of the street and some neighbours complained about drainage problems when it rained (then sent the flooding bill to the town hall). The town met on the subject, and figured they would simply kill two birds with one stone, so they rebuilt the fork to make it less dangerous when they reconstructed the drainage for the whole area.
Because my street is LONG, the bulk of the people in the area live on the road that feeds up the NEW stop sign. When it was a fork, there was a YEILD sign so you could quickly look down the TINY side street and quickly go.
You would understand if you could see the way they reconstructed this area -- it makes no sense whatsoever to have a stop sign there. It should be a thoroughfare.
Guess how many people stop at the new stop sign now that the street has been "repaired"? About one in fifty.
If a law is stupid, you are obligated to break it because that is the essence of what liberty is!
Re:Break Stupid Laws - not the only avenue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Break Stupid Laws (Score:3, Informative)
Roundabout Safety Comes to America [tfhrc.gov]
Globalization... (Score:4, Interesting)
FROM THE ARTICLE:
Second, many countries will ban certain types of hardware (without macrovision, drm, etc) and other countries will get some of our business (at least mine) when we opt to purchase superior hardware that isn't limited. From the article again:
Bottom line is some of us will always buy the DRM protected stuff and only a few of us will purchase overseas if necessary to ensure we can get a device that will truly record to or from anything. The scanning of millions of books, magazines and other articles will only push change in laws, but it will take some time. Whoever wins, I'm still going to be purchasing devices that aren't locked down, even if I have to learn a bit of Japanese, Chinese or Korean to do so.
Re:Globalization... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but then we have to deal with crap like "Animar farm" and "The Bibre"
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Payment and doctrine of first sale (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, that is a bit cynical. However, for high-end items like college textbooks, constant revisioning, cd/book bundles, and book/exclusive-web-site bundles are already killing the resale market. In 5 years schools will simply purchase 1-semester licenses to online materials and tack it on to the tuition as a "class materials fee."
It could be a huge help (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally dont like to read from the screen, and LOVE reading or listening to books on tape but theres pretty good tools out there to read the text for you in english like openbook.
But I have a blind friend and certainly can see how something like this could help him, because I see how he struggles to find good books he can read and has to jokearound with his scanner just to read something that is not available electronically. He does good now, has two diplomas but he had his mom was scanning books for him like 24/7...
Think outside the box a bit...
ISBN Scan And Search (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently had to give a talk and the information I wanted to convey was scattered throughout about 50 books. I wasn't able to do a good job, and I desperately wanted to do a keyword search on each of them.
This would be a great service for a library which would allow a patron to do a full text search on all books in the library.
Imagine writing a paper on the literary impact of "The Beatles" or "Star Wars" scattered throughout diverse materials like romance novels or physics textbooks in a large library.
Conspiracy Theories (Score:5, Interesting)
1) It is infinitely easier to distribute.
2) It is significantly easier to index.
3) It is significantly more malleable.
In most cases the digital-information-haves cast these properties as inherently benevolent in nature. Unfortunately this is not the case. These properties are instead morally neutral. While a universally accessible, fully indexed, fully accessible digital archive of all the books on earth sounds like an idea which on the whole will benefit humanity we can not ignore the darker side to digital information.
1) Information that is infinitely easier to distribute can lead to infinite information being available. The more information there is available the more we depend on gatekeepers to provide us what is relevant.
2) The index of information is a form of information in it's own right (meta information) which itself contributes to the glut of information previously mentioned.
3) The more malleable information becomes the more it is subject to alteration. Each version of an altered document adds to the information glut leading us back to a greater dependency on information gatekeepers.
As the technology for digital books develops and less people find books as convenient as their counterpart in the digital world people will inevitably begin replacing their books or simply stop buying printed books. I don't think this is as much a science fiction dream as it may sound. How many of you still read a printed newspaper?
We may need no convincing to burn our books. They may never need to be outlawed. They will instead be subtly subverted by the insidious desire for "convenience". The kings of convenience will then be free to rule using the most powerful political tool in the information age: FUD.
yeah whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
Noone reads ebooks as it is now, because a screen is an impractical medium for books.
Indexing them all will be neato bambino for quick searches and whatnot, but most people don't want to be glued to a screen for that long. Besides, books smell cool and computers do not.
housed in the ministry of truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Shift, not paradigm change ahead for books (Score:5, Interesting)
With DVDs and CDs (ie: video and music) you need a hardware system to access the content. With a book, the hardware is in the pages and the binding. So when we're talking about e-books, we're talking about changing the playback hardware, not just the distribution channel for the content.
This is important because for music and video the internet (file sharing) has only really altered the distribution channel for content, not the playback hardware.
I think e-books have not taken off because the market likes the existing playback hardware: paper pages and binding. I don't think that is likely to change as long as prices for books remain affordable. Unless the point of production of the playback hardware shifts to the end-user (ie: a home book-binding color laser printer or something like that), this is likely to remain so. And even if such devices were possible, people would probably still buy 'the real thing'. After all, there have been home cappucino machines for a long time, yet Starbucks is booming. These are probably the main reasons why books and bookstores have been a booming business since the inception of the internet, and not the other way around.
The situation may be different in places where books (and Starbucks) are not affordable, like in - say - Bangladesh. And this electronic resource will be wonderful for serving those communities. But giving such markets access to books electronically doesn't constitute any loss of sales since they aren't buyers in any case.
For all of these reasons, I suspect this resource is going to be a fantastic research tool, but I doubt it is going to be a paradigm change so much as a subtle shift for the distribution of the written word.
old tech (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh... I'm like sooo last century.
New ways of compensating artists/authors/etc (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why stop anywhere? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't we have blogs for that already?
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Re:I learned something (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know. On our street the crew was fixing a broken water line. They used a vac and water jet truck to make mud and suck it up. It made a nice small hole about 8 inches in diamater and about 2 feet deep.
I found they use it because it can't cut into nearby underground phone/electric/gas/cable service. A shovel is too dangerous for many curbside utility repairs. They were not permitted to use a shovel.
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Re:E-Books? (Score:4, Insightful)
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