Wincing at Light

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God.

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.

Books are good at being paperwhite, highresolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

The only really successful epublishing — I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read — is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR’d books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF.

The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they’re cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you’re selling copies by the ten, that’s not even a business, it’s a hobby.

Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It’s zero-sum: you’ve also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill.

Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers.

Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies, like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full-bleed, four-color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done. I landed at SEATAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I’ll leave them behind. Who needs ’em?

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utilitarian one. There’s nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

– Cory Doctorow, Content, Microsoft Research DMR Talk

I want you to understand conceptually what I’ve just done here:  I’ve just proven Cory’s point. He made his book available in a digital format.  I read it.  I found something he said that made me sit up and go, “Holy Crap!  That’s brilliant!”

I wanted to share it.

I copy/pasted the bit that really knocked me out so I could share it with my friends.

Now you’ve read something of Cory’s, too — something you probably wouldn’t have read otherwise (despite the fact that I just strongly recommended this book to you like all of two hours ago.  What?  You thought I didn’t see you blowing me off?).

Cory wins, because now some of you — or even better, some random recipient audience I didn’t even intend, but who will end up here through random Googlization — will be interested enough to search out more.  A smaller portion of you will go to Amazon or your local bookseller and buy Content because you’ve been intrigued by what you read here — most of whom, I dare say, haven’t ever heard of Cory Doctorow until this moment.  (In other words, you can’t be a customer for an artist you’ve never heard of.  As Cory has famously said over and over again, the greatest threat to artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.)  Others will have the name “Cory Doctorow” dumped deep into the recesses of your brain, and 3, 5 or 10 years from now, you’ll stumble across one of his books in a bookstore and think, “I know that name from somewhere.  Maybe I’ll give this book a try.”

Cory also wins because of the simple fact that his ideas propagate. Propagation, whether it be biologically or ideologically, is always teh win.

Even more importantly, I win because I read something really cool and got to share it without having to spend four hours of my life copying it by hand out of a print book or an hour typing it into an e-mail and forwarding it to a bunch of poor shlubs.  Cool stuff is only worth knowing if you can share it with your friends.  Cool stuff is (mostly) only worth sharing if you don’t have to spend hours and hours duplicating someone else’s work just to get it out there.

You win because you’ve just been exposed to a cool idea that might never have crossed your threshold except that all down the line, the ability to reproduce this idea in its exact form (without typo-festing, summarizing or otherwise garbling the original content) was made simple and accessible by people who didn’t need to be control freaks about format.  People who decided that the most important thing was to get the information out there, and trust that they’d be clever enough to find a way to monetize it later rather than relying on old models that actually would have impeded communication in this exact case to put pennies in their pockets.

So there.