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Everybody has their favourite play material. Mine is the book. Leave me in front of a well-stocked domestic bookshelf, or in one of the great world bookshops - like say New York's The Strand (or the extremely lamented Compendium Books in Camden Town, London) -and I'm effectively back in kindergarten: smile on the lips, lost in the flow, needing only occasional watering and nutrition.
The only property fantasy I've ever had is that of a proper domestic library, worthy of the six or seven thousand books I have scattered across two houses and two garages. (When my band Hue And Cry gets the Bond theme - hey, it's only a matter of time - I'll post you on my progress).
So discussions about 'the future of the book' - and they are multiplying at some rate - are profoundly interesting to me. And mostly because I am fearful about whether technological change is going to enrich or deprive, expand or contract, my biblio-play.
Nicholson Baker wrote a warning book a few years ago, when the trend for major libraries to digitise their book collections (with some of them throwing away the physical originals) started to pick up speed. Though his tone was high-alarum, some points stuck with me. What about software obsolescence - the book-images encoded in a particular file format, which would be increasingly difficult to read as future document systems evolved?
And what about the usage question, elaborated later by Lawrence Lessig in various books. Do we want to get into a situation where a digital book might be rented rather than owned? Where the freedom to read the object you possess (or give it away) as you wish, is placed by a 'right of access' to a tightly-copyrighted and -controlled piece of software - access which can be changed on the terms of the publisher? (Unless, that is, you know your friendly neighborhood crypto-hacker).
Lessig's conclusion was clear: we need to use the law to ensure that we can own a digital copy of a book, in the same way as we can own a physical copy of a book. If I have a digital book, in my digital reader, I want to be able to mark it, annotate it, lift quotes from it, gather it together with others books, and - most importantly - give or lend it to my friends and colleagues as I wish. That's the way I play with my physical books: and as many neo-Luddites say, you can do that with your wood-pulp-and-ink, no batteries (or e-commerce encrypted connection) required.
But as I've blogged recently, this would put the publishing industry in the same position as the music industry. Digitisation means potentially infinite copies of anything - and so the whole 'scarcity' model of publishing falls down (here's an object that costs money, available from shops now). As you might expect - see iTunes as the music biz's most coherent response to this - code has to be deployed to impose that scarcity again.
Though from reports I've read of Amazon's Kindle, it's much tighter than iTunes in terms of how much cultural material can be shared. iTunes at least allows you to pass their DRM'd stuff to a few people: unless you lend people your Kindle, you can't pass on (and certainly not sell, or even Oxfam-gift) your Kindled book-purchases. This feels wrong, and oppressive, and I expect the Luddite resistance to it will be easily mustered.
Yet as a biblio-player, do I dream of the ultimate digitised book-and-text system? Indeed I do. And the way it might fit into my lifestyle and productive choices is fascinating me.
I make a lot of Glasgow-London trips (for love and money) on a wifi'd train; and when static I prefer to do my daily tasks in public, convivial and wireless places. Yet as I lug around my overstuffed, maybe-I'll-need-this-one bookbag from destination to destination, I often pine for a device which could contain hundreds of my relevant textbooks - and which could also add search, notetaking and copy-and-paste functions from my laptop. And not just textbooks, but pdfs taken from the web.
The handle-ability and durability of such a device would be crucial. And though the current e-books look like bad props from early Star Trek episodes, I get a sense of how they could be designed from my last few months experience with the iPhone. I am inching through a reasonably-legible copy of Joyce's Ulysses at the moment, got for nothing (out of copyright I guess) with the Stanza reader. Mildly thrilled with the experience, I've already read three Shakespeare plays that I never really got to grips with at University. There's volumes from Nietzsche, Emerson and Guy Debord all waiting for me there.
For me, classic literature - the more quotable and epigrammatic the better - really works on an iPhone. I guess this is because so much emotional traffic comes through my own particular device, it seems like a great resource to turn to something evidently wise and considered - in the same space where your fuck-ups (and triumphs) are so regularly transacted. But I might be making an aesthetic virtue out of the fact that they're all out of copyright, and thus free to use. Reading on the iPhone generally confirms the possibility of e-book reading being as tactile and intimate as pulp-book reading currently is.
Two articles hovering around at the moment - Victor Keegan enthusing on the rise of e-books, and First Monday pointing out the surprising consensus of practice between Google's books digitisation and more ostensibly "open" projects - are useful in laying out the potentials and pitfalls of the e-book. The First Monday piece actually notes that Google's 'do no evil' slogan is reasonably in operation here: in comparison with Brewster Kahle's competing Open Access Project, Google Books is more powerful (you can search all books - I'm beginning to use many of their pages in blog citations), they're equally as judicious about terms of usage, and they're as open about the library sources they digitize their books from.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Google have good library ethics: as the FM piece reminds us, Google's founders Brin and Page were "developing enabling technologies for digital libraries. Their work focused on the use of citation analysis to rank the relevance of digitized books to specific queries. The resulting technology was applied to Web site archives as an experiment, and the rest, as they say, is history."
But the transmission of all this plenitude to a durable, portable device, that is as stand-alone and self-sufficient as the book in your bag, has not yet been achieved (though one imagines, as Keegan does, that their Android mobile operating platform will be one obvious conduit. And the advent of "netbooks" clearly answers a demand for portability).
Yet for me, it's clear that the 'ethics' of access to the content of books has to be sorted out, so that we can be full 'players' with their knowledge and value. Until the wisdom of the library and fair-usage properly informs and shapes the growing e-book culture, I won't be rushing for this latest bit of kit any time soon. I'll just have to build up those shoulder muscles, so I can lug around those oh-so-vital volumes. Oh, and write the Bond theme.
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