Slashdot: E-books solving a problem consumers don’t have.
The most successful electronic books are published online for free in a standard format like HTML. (That doesn’t mean that they have to be written in HTML; my book is written in XML and transformed into various formats, including HTML.) But open online publishing takes advantage of all the strengths of the Internet:
- free indexing, via the major search engines. My book even has a search box that uses Google’s free web site search.
- free viewers for every platform, via the web browser of your choice. Books are mostly text, with maybe a few images. Not much there to go wrong with web browsers. Keep the HTML structure simple, and use semantic tags like H1/H2/H3, and you can be compatible with mobile and low-resolution displays as well.
- possibly free distribution, depending on the subject matter and license. Sites like Andamooka will host copies of books published under free licenses, like GNU Free Documentation License. Sites like LinuxDoc will host your technical books. My book is even listed in the FreeBSD ports distribution.
In other words, electronic books can be more useful than their printed counterparts, be more convenient, and can grant more rights to their readers. However, “E-books” as developed by major publishing companies have none of these benefits.
- They require expensive, proprietary hardware. There is no standard format for e-books, so e-books published for one hardware reader will not work in another. Lose the hardware, and you lose all your books. The hardware is several hundred dollars — not the kind of thing you’d like to lose on the subway.
- They are not redistributable. In order to “protect” their “intellectual property” (a weasel phrase if I ever heard one), publishers have placed insane technical hurdles placed on legitimate e-book readers: you can’t transfer an e-book from one device to another (say, to give it to a friend when you’re done with it, or to transfer it to a new reader device that you’ve bought). This eliminates the social aspect of books (at least mainstream books), which is that you get them from your friends and give them to other friends. In some cases, you actually make friends by sharing books. Publishers want to eliminate this secondary market, because they think it doesn’t make them any money. (It is true that it doesn’t make them money on specific books, but probably false in the long run since it exposes people to authors that they wouldn’t otherwise know about. If those authors have written other books, this can end up making tons of money for the publisher. Just ask any Terry Pratchett reader.)
- They take away rights readers are used to having. Other than not being able to give it to their friends, readers are used to being able to do certain things with digital documents, like printing them, saving them to their hard drive, copying and pasting portions to emailing to their friends, and so forth. Many e-books don’t even let you print them; none let you save the book (or any portion of the book) to your hard drive or share it in any way with your friends. E-books are encrypted (and locked into proprietary hardware) to prevent exactly this sort of beneficial behavior. (Trendy note: Free Dmitri Sklyarov.)
No wonder people hate them.
