HTFB

The product is the data. To be truly appealing, ebooks need to be in a portable format like HTML, or for greater versatility and genericness I suppose, XML, easily converted to whatever device you want to view it on, be it a book reader, pda, nanotechologically active piece of paper or dotmatrix display made out of the lights on the side of a skyscraper. This obviously makes the copyright people itch, but it’s barely a worse situation than print, which is easily scanned.

I have seen the Sony reader, and while I love the look of the screen, I can’t help but view it as a PDA whose screen refresh is so slow that it’s no use for anything else. As a prototype or proof of concept, it’s lovely. As a device you might use, I can’t see it. What it will do, though, is usher in a next generation of PDAs once the next generation of eInk screens arrive, with colour support and a decent refresh rate. Those will be credible devices for reading books, papers, webpages etc.

We need some sort of wrapping, though. Sony Readers or something?

only thing wrong with Public Lending Rights here is that the numbers don’t stack up…
I might look into this, as it’s an interesting question.

Vive la révolution, I guess.

As they currently exist, I really hate micropayments – they’re fiddly, all over the place and require too much commitment on the part of the user. I want to pay an author 25p every time I read a new book, but I don’t want to go to the bother of setting that up for every little author. I’ve read both of Cory Doctorow’s books, and have no particular interest in owning a paper copy. I’d happily pay him his share, but I really really don’t want to subsidise an organisation that cuts down trees, pulps them, prints on them, then distributes the result to my local Borders, because I really have no interest in that happening.

If Cory Doctorow makes 25p on each sold book, that’s the cost of the data. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay 50 times for that for the bulky paper wrapper. I’m very much becoming of the mind that books, cds, dvds and what have you are akin to the over-elaborate packaging that people are up in arms about in the supermarkets. They’re just physical tokens that imply my right to access the data, and as such they cost too much for the job they do, and take up too much space.

If I could, I’d have an organisation that I either subscribe to or better yet have my government fund, who hunts down and pays those people for me every time I download something new from them. As such the only thing wrong with Public Lending Rights here is that the numbers don’t stack up to conventional publishing, and I wonder if that was always the case, or whether the payments have just failed to keep up with inflation due to poor funding.

When Shirky says “The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft” he is of course entirely incorrect. Taxation is another one. Subscription to vital resources is another. No-one really considers where the tax they pay goes, they just take all the great free public services. Nor does anyone, as they pay their utility bills, reflect on all the great times they’ve had with electricity or water over the last quarter. Once they get direct debits sorted out, I doubt most people consider electricity at all. It’s just something that happens like air and gravity. My dream/proposal is that info/data/content becomes like that. Turn the tap, novels, music, films all come out. You don’t ask why because that’s just the way it is, any more than you marvel at the wonders of concrete paving and not getting your shoes muddy as you walk down the street.