There was a fascinating article up at Ars Technica this week about the history of what, for lack of imagination, everyone refers to as the “e-book”. The story begins in the late nineties when you couldn’t open a magazine without reading an article about how the internet was going to change things. There were lots of theories about how, but one thing a lot of people agreed upon was that books were in real trouble. After all, the information contained in a printed and bound book could also be contained in just a few kilobytes of computer memory and wouldn’t it be great to have hundreds or thousands of books whenever you wanted to read something?
The big publishing houses were, not surprisingly, less than enthusiastic about selling their books on-line. Their business model was relatively stable and profitable, albeit a bit bizarre, and they didn’t want to jeopardize it by making unlimited invisible copies. The author, John Siracusa, worked for a company called Peanut Press that sold software and books for other people’s hardware, chiefly Palm Pilots. It’s a fascinating story.
His conclusion, more or less, is that Amazon and Apple are poised to slug this out. Apple has the hardware (iPhone) and a proven distribution network (iTunes), but it doesn’t yet have good access to the actual books. Amazon has its Kindle and a virtual monopoly on the on-line selling of books. But what he misses, completely, is the other 800 pound gorilla in the room: Google.
Google has spent the last several years digitizing millions of books, some recent some old, and making them available via Google Book Search. This caused great consternation from the copyright holders and they sued; a few months ago a tentative agreement was reached. It is fantastically complicated and may yet be subject to significant revision, but for now it looks like it may be the first step towards generating significant revenue from on-line books. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton breaks it down:
The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries. Colleges, universities, and other organizations will be able to subscribe by paying for an “institutional license” providing access to the data bank. A “public access license” will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal. And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a “consumer license” from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders. Google will retain 37 percent, and the registry will distribute 63 percent among the rightsholders.
Meanwhile, Google will continue to make books in the public domain available for users to read, download, and print, free of charge. Of the seven million books that Google reportedly had digitized by November 2008, one million are works in the public domain; one million are in copyright and in print; and five million are in copyright but out of print. It is this last category that will furnish the bulk of the books to be made available through the institutional license.
Should that come into widespread use and acceptance there’s almost no limit to the impact it could have. No more students, of any level, needing to purchase copies of Tom Sawyer or Shakespeare. A world of hard to find, out of print books opened up to literature teachers and ordinary book lovers. (Darnton rightly worries about putting that much power, essentially a majority of human knowledge, exclusively into the hands of a private enterprise.) It’s a development that could truly, as they say, change things.
Both articles are well worth reading in full, and when considered together they raise one of the biggest technical and cultural questions to face us here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We will soon be living in a world where the end product of people’s creativity, what we so derisively refer to as “content”, can be taken in anywhere and from any platform. What do we want that world to look like? What rules should govern it?
The questions of Kindle vs iPhone or Google vs Publishers are mere preliminaries. Five years from now the iPhone and its various competitors will be laughably primitive and ten years from now the networks they depend on may no longer exist (having been replaced by new and better ones). The proliferation of smart phones, netbooks, and other portable devices with big, bright screens means that anything can be a jukebox or a television or even an e-book. The real questions are of distribution, copyright and remuneration. Today the distribution is ad hoc, the copyright laws are laughably antiquated and the remuneration is anybody’s guess. None of those three is remotely stable, nor are their futures set in stone.
It ought to be fun.
