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miriam_eI posted to a writing group recently about ebooks, trying to clarify my thoughts on the subject. In the near future I hope to enlarge upon them, but at the moment you can find them on my website:
ebooks vs paper books - why ebooks are more promising than paper books. It also briefly mentions some problems with locked ebooks.
ebooks and making a living - again, too brief, but mentions making an income from ebooks.
I posted another more full piece about some of the surprising drawbacks of locked ebooks. They are an even worse idea than I'd intuitively felt. I'm not at home at the moment (I'm posting this from my Mum & Dad's place) so don't have access to my normal upload tools. Hence, for the time being I've put it behind a cut tag, below. I think it is the better of the 3 pieces. In it I go into more detail regarding the actual details of making a living from open ebooks, though it is still too brief and I need to think much more about it:
The implications.
There is one thing you can guarantee with locked ebooks: that you will be locked out of them -- not just one, but all of them. This is because they tie themselves to your computer. If your computer ever needs a significant hardware or operating system upgrade your collection of ebooks will refuse to open for you. If you are one of those people who read a book once and never bother with it again then this might not worry you, but if you like to return to old favorites years, or even decades, later then this will mean having to buy them again... if they're still available.
If you like to lend your favorite books to friends, you'll find that you can't do this with locked ebooks. Books lent by friends is how I learned about many of my favorite authors so it makes me wonder how the less popular authors will find their audience if locked ebooks ever become the norm.
From the point of view of historians or archaeologists locked ebooks are a very worrying trend. If locked ebooks become the standard fare then our entire culture will become ephemeral. There will be very little past culture to delve into. Entire generations of ebooks will simply disappear when the locks kick in.
Securing the human race's knowledge becomes a danger too. If all the master-copies of our culture are in just a few corporate headquarters then if those fail (think terrorists, or climate induced disaster, or war, or just plain accident) we risk losing the lot. It is a little like the scene in the original Rollerball movie where all the world's knowledge is stored in a single computer which has a spasm and loses all human knowledge from the 16th and 17th Century -- all the works of Shakespeare gone, forever, as if they never existed.
The chasm between rich and poor is widened by locked ebooks too. They ensure that only people with money can afford to read. One of the most pressing problems today is raising the millions of poor to a high standard of living as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Locked ebooks make that future recede further.
Locked ebooks generally use the worst reader programs. But perhaps this should be no great surprise. The same kind of thinking that wants a more restrictive world, that doesn't mind inconveniencing the user, is not going to put much thought into extremely easy-to-use reader programs. Very conservative traditionalists will not see the enormous difference between electronic media and paper media (except as an inconvenience to be overcome), hence their reader programs will tend to emulate paper books.
Libraries might cease to exist in a world where there were only locked ebooks. Think of what a powerful force for good libraries have been in all communities, both rich and poor. No researcher can afford all the books they need to refer to. That's perhaps the greatest irony: that writers themselves need unlocked books.
Honor vs force
It seems that there are two kinds of trade.
- trade between equals depends upon honor and goodwill.
- trade between unequals, one powerful, and the other weak, degenerates to bullying and blackmail -- finding a bottleneck in supply and taking control of it.
There is undue emphasis upon greed and force these days, with little notice being taken of honor and goodwill. Perhaps this is why corporate culture has sunk to such a terrible low, exhibiting all the worst aspects of humanity.
My Mum & Dad turned a string of small businesses into successes. They insisted that the most important part of their business was goodwill. They didn't need to advertise, and they always had many happy returning customers.
So if you are wondering, "If I don't lock my ebook how can I force readers to pay?" then perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Maybe we need to consider, "How can I give someone the opportunity to show their gratitude if they like my ebook?"
If there was a link at the end of an ebook suggesting that if the reader liked it then they might want to ensure that more are written. Sending a dollar or two means they are essentially voting and giving the most tangible kind of feedback to the author.
Consider these two scenarios:
- If a million copies of your open, unlocked ebook are shared around the networks and just one in a hundred people each sends you just one dollar for it then that brings you a thousand dollars.
- If an online business sells a thousand copies of your locked ebook and you get one dollar out of every seven-dollar sale then you also make a thousand dollars.
In the first case your work is circulated to a million people, many of whom didn't pay anything this time, but might next time, especially if they are children, students, or people temporarily without free cash. This could let you build a name and a much larger following than what might be possible from the smaller number of people who buy books in the second example.
In the past publishing and distribution companies grew out of the need to operate expensive printing equipment and ship the finished books to shops and customers. Writers couldn't do this alone. We now have the ability to publish and distribute to the entire world at close to zero cost, especially if we utilise the power of peer to peer sharing (more on peer-to-peer file sharing in a minute). Now, I'm not saying that publishing houses no longer have any role to play, just that their place has shifted. Publishers can help with editing and promotion. They can coordinate authors in for anthologies, or connect them with cover artists and illustrators. They can also help organise film or other deals. But publishing and distribution are no longer something they need control. In fact controlling that could work strongly against the writer's, artist's, and even the publishing house's interests.
It is initially a little difficult to see clearly just how completely different peer-to-peer file sharing is and how much better suited it is for large populations on electronic networks. One of the most ingenious developments in recent years has been the development of bit-torrents for peer-to-peer file sharing. If a file becomes very popular then many people all trying to access it at once can bring the website to its knees and block other people people from it. Also the person operating the site often has to pay for that popularity in increased fees. Bit-torrent was developed by Bram Cohen as a solution to this. The idea is that a number of people downloading a file simultaneously make it available for sharing to others, so even if a file becomes enormously popular people will still be able to access it and the server need never be penalised for it.
So you can see how peer-to-peer file sharing has great potential to spread our words far more widely much more easily than traditional centralised systems.
I've read figures suggesting that there are about 90 million computers in the USA. China and India, with about half the world's population between them, are rushing headlong into becoming high-tech middle class economies so that number of computers will pale into insignificance soon. With the advent of cheap, low power-consumption handheld computers, often with mobile phone function as well, the potential for spreading ebooks through intimately connected peers is set to explode. In this near future, the expectation of circulating ebooks among billions of users is not unlikely.
ebooks vs paper books - why ebooks are more promising than paper books. It also briefly mentions some problems with locked ebooks.
ebooks and making a living - again, too brief, but mentions making an income from ebooks.
I posted another more full piece about some of the surprising drawbacks of locked ebooks. They are an even worse idea than I'd intuitively felt. I'm not at home at the moment (I'm posting this from my Mum & Dad's place) so don't have access to my normal upload tools. Hence, for the time being I've put it behind a cut tag, below. I think it is the better of the 3 pieces. In it I go into more detail regarding the actual details of making a living from open ebooks, though it is still too brief and I need to think much more about it:
The implications.
There is one thing you can guarantee with locked ebooks: that you will be locked out of them -- not just one, but all of them. This is because they tie themselves to your computer. If your computer ever needs a significant hardware or operating system upgrade your collection of ebooks will refuse to open for you. If you are one of those people who read a book once and never bother with it again then this might not worry you, but if you like to return to old favorites years, or even decades, later then this will mean having to buy them again... if they're still available.
If you like to lend your favorite books to friends, you'll find that you can't do this with locked ebooks. Books lent by friends is how I learned about many of my favorite authors so it makes me wonder how the less popular authors will find their audience if locked ebooks ever become the norm.
From the point of view of historians or archaeologists locked ebooks are a very worrying trend. If locked ebooks become the standard fare then our entire culture will become ephemeral. There will be very little past culture to delve into. Entire generations of ebooks will simply disappear when the locks kick in.
Securing the human race's knowledge becomes a danger too. If all the master-copies of our culture are in just a few corporate headquarters then if those fail (think terrorists, or climate induced disaster, or war, or just plain accident) we risk losing the lot. It is a little like the scene in the original Rollerball movie where all the world's knowledge is stored in a single computer which has a spasm and loses all human knowledge from the 16th and 17th Century -- all the works of Shakespeare gone, forever, as if they never existed.
The chasm between rich and poor is widened by locked ebooks too. They ensure that only people with money can afford to read. One of the most pressing problems today is raising the millions of poor to a high standard of living as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Locked ebooks make that future recede further.
Locked ebooks generally use the worst reader programs. But perhaps this should be no great surprise. The same kind of thinking that wants a more restrictive world, that doesn't mind inconveniencing the user, is not going to put much thought into extremely easy-to-use reader programs. Very conservative traditionalists will not see the enormous difference between electronic media and paper media (except as an inconvenience to be overcome), hence their reader programs will tend to emulate paper books.
Libraries might cease to exist in a world where there were only locked ebooks. Think of what a powerful force for good libraries have been in all communities, both rich and poor. No researcher can afford all the books they need to refer to. That's perhaps the greatest irony: that writers themselves need unlocked books.
Honor vs force
It seems that there are two kinds of trade.
- trade between equals depends upon honor and goodwill.
- trade between unequals, one powerful, and the other weak, degenerates to bullying and blackmail -- finding a bottleneck in supply and taking control of it.
There is undue emphasis upon greed and force these days, with little notice being taken of honor and goodwill. Perhaps this is why corporate culture has sunk to such a terrible low, exhibiting all the worst aspects of humanity.
My Mum & Dad turned a string of small businesses into successes. They insisted that the most important part of their business was goodwill. They didn't need to advertise, and they always had many happy returning customers.
So if you are wondering, "If I don't lock my ebook how can I force readers to pay?" then perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Maybe we need to consider, "How can I give someone the opportunity to show their gratitude if they like my ebook?"
If there was a link at the end of an ebook suggesting that if the reader liked it then they might want to ensure that more are written. Sending a dollar or two means they are essentially voting and giving the most tangible kind of feedback to the author.
Consider these two scenarios:
- If a million copies of your open, unlocked ebook are shared around the networks and just one in a hundred people each sends you just one dollar for it then that brings you a thousand dollars.
- If an online business sells a thousand copies of your locked ebook and you get one dollar out of every seven-dollar sale then you also make a thousand dollars.
In the first case your work is circulated to a million people, many of whom didn't pay anything this time, but might next time, especially if they are children, students, or people temporarily without free cash. This could let you build a name and a much larger following than what might be possible from the smaller number of people who buy books in the second example.
In the past publishing and distribution companies grew out of the need to operate expensive printing equipment and ship the finished books to shops and customers. Writers couldn't do this alone. We now have the ability to publish and distribute to the entire world at close to zero cost, especially if we utilise the power of peer to peer sharing (more on peer-to-peer file sharing in a minute). Now, I'm not saying that publishing houses no longer have any role to play, just that their place has shifted. Publishers can help with editing and promotion. They can coordinate authors in for anthologies, or connect them with cover artists and illustrators. They can also help organise film or other deals. But publishing and distribution are no longer something they need control. In fact controlling that could work strongly against the writer's, artist's, and even the publishing house's interests.
It is initially a little difficult to see clearly just how completely different peer-to-peer file sharing is and how much better suited it is for large populations on electronic networks. One of the most ingenious developments in recent years has been the development of bit-torrents for peer-to-peer file sharing. If a file becomes very popular then many people all trying to access it at once can bring the website to its knees and block other people people from it. Also the person operating the site often has to pay for that popularity in increased fees. Bit-torrent was developed by Bram Cohen as a solution to this. The idea is that a number of people downloading a file simultaneously make it available for sharing to others, so even if a file becomes enormously popular people will still be able to access it and the server need never be penalised for it.
So you can see how peer-to-peer file sharing has great potential to spread our words far more widely much more easily than traditional centralised systems.
I've read figures suggesting that there are about 90 million computers in the USA. China and India, with about half the world's population between them, are rushing headlong into becoming high-tech middle class economies so that number of computers will pale into insignificance soon. With the advent of cheap, low power-consumption handheld computers, often with mobile phone function as well, the potential for spreading ebooks through intimately connected peers is set to explode. In this near future, the expectation of circulating ebooks among billions of users is not unlikely.