michael said:
Considering the 40th Anniversary of eBooks
happy birthday, project gutenberg!
40 years ago...one title available at Project Gutenberg.
perhaps even more amazing: after its first 20 years, project gutenberg only had 100 e-texts in its library -- still more "proof of concept" than anything else... but it took only 12 more years to expand to 10,000, and gain the heft to merit the appellation "library", with this growth fueled by _individual_digitizers_... all this got the attention necessary for larger efforts, such as internet archive and google, and thus we saw the possibility for electronic-books to finally emerge, after a decades-long period of quite painful gestation. and thus, in 2011, we have the "coming of age" time for e-books, when amazon reports that it sells more e-books than p-books, while self-published authors -- always insulted previously with the "vanity" slur -- discovered (quite by accident) that a direct connection to their audience enabled them to make _big_ money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even millions... just as shocking, a wide range of e-book hardware is available in all the digital-gadget big-box stores, and even being touted in slick commercials on television. my word, even barnes&noble is in the e-reader game! so there is definitely cause for celebration! :+) at the same time, however, the news is not all good... and the ugly part of the equation can be summed up in one word: greed. unsurprisingly, leading this side are the corporations, this time in the form of the boys at the publishing houses, who are extremely reluctant to give up their gravy train, so are draggin' their feet... you know all the tactics... copyright legislation, d.r.m., an "open standard" called ".epub" that is a piece of shit, and every fear/uncertainty/doubt issue they can muster. but, hey, we _expected_ those selfish kids to be greedy; after all, it's the object of the capitalist game they play. what really hurt is that they were joined by a group of _authors_, who couldn't see the vast potential in being free of their corporate masters, and thus joined them in suing the google scanning project... and then what _really_ brought the house crumbling down was when google decided to turn evil, and buy out of the lawsuit by throwing some chump change to their "opposition" from extraction via onerous extortion of you and me... google deduced it could get the public and libraries to pay for access to google e-books... so essentially the "global library" we envisioned has been morphed into a "global bookstore", a monopoly with too-high prices. and just today, google announced "iriver story", some e-book tablet "integrated" with its e-book platform... "through which you can buy and read google e-books over wi-fi". thus the bait-and-switch is fait accompli. will future generations even know what a "library" is? or will they have access only to the books they pay for? what about the rest of the world, much of which cannot begin to afford the ridiculous rates google will charge? just how hard will the greedy capitalists fight this fight? i don't know the answers to these questions, but i can say that, at my age, i'm less optimistic than i once was. it is entirely possible that we won the battle for e-books, but lost the war for a global cyberlibrary accessible to all. so again, happy birthday, project gutenberg! but now starts the hard part... -bowerbird