Ebooks, piracy, and mass education

Will local libraries be forced to revolutionize themselves to survive? Will your friends be able to email you every book you ever wanted? Will books become more affordable than ever?

My attitude towards [ereaders and ebooks] has been changing recently as I've thought about the possibility of them helping make books more accessible. Of course for traditional publishers, especially small ones, this has all sorts of scary connotations. But if ereaders make it easier to share a copy of [Revolutionary Suicide] with my homie, and make it more convenient for him to actually read, should we be mad?

There's been [a lot of talk] about Digital Rights Management technology, but it seems inevitable that, given a handful of years, that will prove futile. It looks like the PDF format is primed to become the MP3 of books; such a widely used format for presentation text that it will be impossible to control. Given that ereaders view PDF files just fine, it's no surprise that most pirated books are in PDF format.

The wack-a-mole analogy seems accurate to me. Try to stop some internet community from sharing a book and ten more communities will probably make it available. No wonder two of President Obama's most historic appointments are going to be his [Copyright Czar] and [Cybersecurity Czar].

Remember that scene in The Matrix where we first see Neo (aka Mr. Thomas A. Anderson) making a sort of "e-drug" deal, exchanging a disk for "two grand"? In the real world they say "knowledge is power"; those disks Neo was slangin might symbolize it pretty soon.



(SOURCE: New York Times) With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books: Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.

For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.” (continue reading)