what is lost

I bought and read my first e-book on a phone this year using an iPhone app. I don’t plan to repeat the experience, not because it was horrible but because I know too many booksellers personally and until it’s easy to buy from them I’m not planning to purchase e-books. But I felt as if I needed some experience with e-books.

The good side? It didn’t weigh much when traveling and I could read it in the dark on the long shuttle ride from the airport. The bad side?

Let me count the ways.

First, the pages look ugly. There’s no other way to put it. There is no page design, just letters poured into a mechanical box, no art in the chapter headings, no thought given to initial capitals, words broken in the wrong place, justified lines full of gaps like bad teeth. And of course no page numbers. The design of a page in a printed book is a nearly invisible pleasure. Page design is something I appreciate more since seeing what is lost when it’s absent.

Second, reading on a phone is fine for e-mail and  for short form texts on a web page, but it’s hard to get lost in a book when you have to turn pages every paragraph or so. I also found it strangely disorienting to have only a bar at the bottom of the page telling me where I was in the book. A sense of place, of orientation in the arc of the story is harder to grasp. (I found this also true when I held my most recently published book in my hands for the first time. The last chapters felt different when measured between the thumb and fingers and the growing weight of the left side than when I was scrolling to the end of a document. Though I did read the galleys on paper, I shifted the pages to the back of the stack as I read and so was surprised by how profoundly the anticipation of an ending affects the reading experience.)

Third – I don’t like a future for the book in which sharing is disabled and ownership of an immutable copy no longer exists. It bothers me that a corporation could reach into my personal library and pluck a book back or alter it. I don’t like the fact that there is no such thing as fair use in a world of licensed content and that I can’t give a friend or family member a book I read and loved. Sure, I could buy them a second e-book version, but it’s not the same as handing on the book I read.

Fourth – this post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation spells out just how much we give away to Google and Amazon when we let them be our “bookstore” and “library.” Real booksellers and librarians have stood up for reader privacy. Personal information is a valuable commodity to these corporations. I don’t like the idea of my reading habits becoming a commodity and I don’t like the aggregation of readers’ behavior becoming a huge data mine of our minds.

Google’s new Google Book Search Project has the ability to track reading habits at an unprecedented level of granularity. In particular, according to the proposed Google Books Privacy Policy, web servers will automatically “log” each book and page you searched for and read, how long you viewed it for, and what book or page you continued onto next . . . your Kindle will periodically send information about you to Amazon. But exactly what information is sent? Amazon’s wording — “information related to the content on your Device and your use of it” — reads so broadly that it appears to allow Amazon to track all content that users put on the device, regardless of whether that content is purchased from Amazon. Some security researchers have indicated that the Kindle may even be tracking its users’ GPS locations. Is this the future of reading?

God, I hope not. Cory Doctorow has put some of this in sharp perspective in “How to Destroy the Book” in which he argues that the true pirates are the corporations who are remaking our book culture so that they can be in the center of it, controlling books for the sake of profits. He contrasts this perspective with that of “people of the book” who love books, want to fill their houses with them, and pass favorites on to their children.

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

What he said.

photos courtesy of brewbooks and Josh Bancroft.

why bloggers are boycotting AP

How convenient it is. Want to quote a news item in your blog? Just sign up here to pay per word.

I thought AP was a cooperative that encouraged the sharing of news among news organziations. Turns out its job is to rewrite copyright law. I thought this was benighted when I first heard about it. But it’s even sillier than I thought. Here’s a snip from their license agreement:

In consideration of the rights granted to You under this Agreement, You agree to pay the Licensing Fees specified in the order form. You hereby authorize Publisher and/or its authorized agent to collect the fees due from You under this Agreement by invoice or by debiting such fee to Your credit card entered on the Order Form. You warrant that You are the rightful owner of the credit card and are authorized to use such credit card. You further warrant that You are at least 18 years old.

My take: If You adhere to This Contract, You are a gullible Fool.

Parody is also no longer fair use. Nor can you offer any criticism.

You shall not use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to the author, the publication from which the Content came, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or depicted in the Content. You agree not to use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to or damaging to the reputation of Publisher, its licensors, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or referenced in the Content.

Apparently all uses of anything digital are licensed, not a matter of copyright. And I’ve probably violated a license by sharing this.

Hat tip to Ann Bartow at Sivacracy.

block (that) quote

It was bound to happen. The New York Times reports that AP is beginning to bristle at bloggers who quote from their news stories. They have asked the Drudge Retort (a left-leaning response to the Drudge Report) to remove some of its posts that quote from 39 – 79 words from news stories. They would prefer a paraphrase and a link. According to an AP spokesman, even their headlines are “creative content” that “has value.” Oops. I should have paraphrased that.

As a blog reader, I’m not taken with this idea. Yes to links, by all means – I want to see the original – but yes to direct quotes, too. The value of a news story isn’t diminished when it’s quoted (not paraphrased) and I don’t think it hurts a newspaper’s bottom line to have its content discovered through various channels. I know I read more newspapers now than in pre-Internet days, thanks to links encountered online. And if I’m interested, I do click through.

But for whatever reason, AP is concerned that their creative content is being stolen and says they will be developing fair use guidelines for bloggers. Good luck with that!

u dub printers run amok!!!

A bunch of slacker printers at the University of Washington were illegally downloading films and got caught. Well, they weren’t actually downloading anything, but they got caught anyway. Researchers reverse engineered copyright enforcement mechanisms in use at BitTorrent and found that you can easily direct the automated enforcement to send takedown notices to networked printers. So far, the printers have not received any pre-settlement letters. (Hat tip to BoingBoing)

whiplash

So Harvard Law decides that all the research they publish will be open access. Yay! This seems to be gaining ground. All the hip schools are doing it. Be the next faculty on your block . . .

Meanwhile, the House passes a bill that creates a cabinet-level position to address the terrible threat of piracy and increases the RIAAs blackmail demands. Yeah, this is exactly what our federal government needs to do. Not. And LA has decided homes of pirates are kinda like crack houses.

This is a very, very strange moment in our history….

J.K. Rowling and the Half-Baked Lawsuit

The New York Times has an interesting piece on J.K. Rowling’s efforts to prevent a small publisher in Michigan from publishing a Harry Potter lexicon – a companion piece to her famous series. At issue is whether people have a right to write books about other books. In this case, Rowling (and her co-plaintiff, Warner Brothers Entertainment) say she should have the exclusive right to publish a companion book without competition. She also, apparently, believes the characters and the imaginative world she created are her exclusive property, and any use of them is an illegal derivative work.

This reminds me of the lawsuit that tried to prohibit publication of The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone With the Wind told from the perspective of a black character. In that case, the courts found that it was a permissible parody and threw out a lower court’s preliminary injunction as an “abuse of discretion” by the courts.

In any case, Lawrence Lessig points out that if commentary and reuse of cultural materials is a crime, then we’re either a nation of creative criminals – or just creative people exercising our rights.

Addendum: an interesting series of comments can be found here. It sounds like a tangle of lawsuits, but I still think people should be allowed to write books about books, and that includes compiling information from them in a new way. There’s an interesting article on fair use in higher education – not at all the same situation as this issue – but it made me think about the word “transformative.” When is something a rip-off, and when is it really made new? The act of reading a book makes it new for each reader.

There are a lot of layers here. If we had a more balanced copyright law, closer to the original “for a limited time” idea in the Constitution, and if culture were not treated as a commodity, I think we’d have fewer of these hairs to split.

if a picture’s worth . . .

. . . a thousand words, how much is a song worth? $9,250, if you’re convicted of downloading it illegally. A jury in Duluth has just found a woman accused by the RIAA of illegally downloading music guilty in the first file-sharing case to go to jury trial. Though this case sets legal precedent that will encourage the RIAA’s efforts to punish file sharers, the number of people sharing files has tripled since the music industry started aggressively targeting the practice

Stay tuned to Threat Level for further updates.

New: analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which suggests there’s a better way to go about this:

In the Duluth, MN court where the case was heard, some interesting facts have emerged, among them Sony-BMG’s head of litigation Jennifer Pariser suggestion under questioning that the lawsuits are losing money for the RIAA. Whether she’s right or not — we’ve long suspected that these lawsuits are at least breaking even, and the RIAA refuses to say — millions of dollars have been spent on these suits, and millions have been paid to the RIAA, with no sign that a penny of that money has gone into the pockets of artists.

Radiohead has some interesting thoughts on artists and pockets. Meanwhile, lots of discussion over at Metafilter . . .