Captain Jack Borrow
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Courtesy of angermann |
As lightweight e-ink screens like the Sony Reader become more popular, publishers are starting to think about how to crack down on pirated books online. These aren’t the 200-rupee, hastily photocopied titles sold at Bombay traffic signals. These are the books themselves boiled down to their essence, denuded of pretty fonts and layout, a reduction simmered slowly in OCR and RTF. They’re traded online if you’re technical and know where to look.
What you get, more often than not, is a slim document which looks like it sprang directly from the author’s brain. Athena as bulimic. Seven years of work compressed into a startlingly small file. 200 KB text files are not uncommon. RTF, PDF, and reader formats like LIT (Microsoft Reader) and PRC (Palm Reader) are bigger, while MP3 audiobooks are larger still. But even full PDF scans are merely two songs in size.
The selection online leans techie, toward sci-fi and fantasy. Big sellers up to ten years old are widely available. Unauthorized Harry Potter translations abound. Other new releases are not as common. Older Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Julian Barnes, Michael Chabon, Alexander McCall Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino, Khaled Hosseini, and nonfiction titles like The Looming Tower tend to be available. By and large, younger Brooklyn writers in vogue are not.
As reader sales pick up, broad-based book piracy is inevitable. A Napster or Limewire for books is trivial to write. DRM software locks are ineffective because print books are easily scanned and OCR’d. Which raises all kinds of interesting questions the music and movie industries are grappling with as well. How will authors make their bread? Legitimate ebook stores have terrible selection right now and come with hassle-filled DRM which locks content to individual devices. Is there a way to affix small, inexpensive locks on ebooks, as opposed to keys in software, to keep honest people honest? Will authors give away entire books, or parts of books, as a promotional tool? Or will that reduce the perceived value of their sweat equity to zero?
And which kinds of readers will prevail: slim, lightweight readers with easy-on-the-eyes e-ink screens ($300), or inexpensive subnotebooks with keyboards, Internet access and conventional LCD screens (also $300)?
on Monday, April 7th, 2008, 11:59 pm in Business, Literature, Tech › 
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i want to be excited about this sony reader business, but there’s something about it (mbe the fact that you can’t write in the margins/dog-ear pages) that’s unappealing
Some readers let you bookmark. Others (prototypes) can be rolled up and put in your pocket. And imagine one with a touch interface to quickly skip pages…
Manish,
I got the ebook reader - thanks to your recommendation
Never properly thanked you - I absolutely love it. My daily commute is a total pleasure as I have uninterrupted reading timeplus it fits neatly into my handbag .So many people have struck up conversations with me on the train - everyone wants to know what it is and how I like it.
Cherez: I was exactly of the same mind - thought that the pleasure of turning pages and holding a book could not be replaced by an LCD screen.But the sony ebook reader is great .Best of all, with its capacity of holding multiple books - I never run out of stuff to read!
That’s great, Runa. So glad you like it too. One down, millions to go!