The New York Times has a second look at e-books in An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back. For me, e-books never went away — I will read physical books on occasion, but 90 percent of the books I read these days are e-books that I load on my Pocket PC.
I definitely identify with the NYT’s featured e-book reader,
One such reader is Rebecca Kroll of Scotch Plains, N.J., a live-in caretaker for an autistic teenager, who says she burns through three or four books a day and purchases 50 to 100 a week, an expensive habit that she says costs her up to $400 weekly. “Storage is a big issue with me,” Kroll says. Before she discovered e-books a little over a year ago, 12,000 books crammed her apartment from floor to ceiling, leaving her desperate for more shelf space. Although Kroll says she was initially ill at ease with computers, she now does most of her reading on a laptop and stores thousands of romance and science fiction fantasy novels on two computer disks.
Exactly. I used to have several thousand books crammed in my house — they’re all history now, off to used book stores or trashed. It’s nice to know that if I wanted to, even without using compression, I could fit about 1,500 books on a $70 1gb SD card, and carry another 1,500 around on a second 1 gb SD card. 3,000 books in a tiny space for the price that a single halfway decent bookcase would cost.
The article also notes the ongoing war over DRM,
Already a culture war reminiscent of the one surrounding Napster is shaping up in the world of digital books. My college-age son is in the contingent that reads e-books almost exclusively from free Web sites because of the greater flexibility offered by their unencrypted books. Such sites usually offer plain-text format, which allows him to print as many pages as he needs, or to copy a long quotation from a book electronically and paste it into his term paper. Free sites, at least the legitimate ones, are limited to books for which the copyright has expired. Yet they are popular, especially among students assigned classic works. The University of Virginia library, which makes 1,800 titles available free from its Web site, has sent more than 8.5 million downloadable books to readers since it started the service in August 2000.
Some believe that all e-books should be free of software protection limits. Cory Doctorow, an advocate for less restrictive digital rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made his first novel available free online. He argues that digital content’s unique forms of adaptability — to e-mail, computerized cut-and-paste and software translation engines — are all areas where paper books lag. In his view, anyone who puts a software lock on an e-book is crazy.
I won’t buy an e-book that has DRM, unless I’ve already got a tool to crack the DRM. Adding DRM eliminates much of the usefulness of having the book in electronic format.
The leader here, of course, is Baen’s Webscription program, which allows the reader to download pretty much every book Baen publishes, completely DRM free, for either a month subscription fee or a per-book fee.
The other thing about Baen is that it is significantly cheaper — as it should be — to buy its books online rather than in paper form. For example, $15 will get you all 7 of the books Baen published in April 2004; an incredible deal given that sci-fi paperbacks tend to retail for $5-$7 these days.
It’s a shame that more publishers don’t take Baen’s lead.
Source:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back. Sarah Glazer, The New York Times, December 5, 2004.