By Tim Condon, Tampa PC Users Group
tim@free-market.net
When you say "file-sharing on the Internet," everyone thinks "Napster" or "Gnutella" or "Freeinet." Viz. swapping music files, usually in the MP3 format. But there’s a potentially more important form of file-swapping "piracy" (which you call it if you’re on a certain side of the debate) that’s so far received little attention. And that form of swapping really, reeeeellly needs wider discussion...and your attention....
But first, a late report from the Napster legal battlefield. When last we checked in, it looked like the Napsterites were going to go down for the count. In August both the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and a bunch of pile-on musicians went before the Federal District Court in California asking for an injunction to shut the Napster Internet site down for copyright infringement (uh, music piracy to the rest of us).
At a hearing, held on July 26, 2000, the Napster lawyers were stunned (and the RIAA suits elated) by the open hostility shown by Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel toward the Napsterites. That first hearing was only an opening barrage by the music industry plaintiffs, asking for a preliminary injunction to shut down the Napster web site while the litigation proceeded. Well.
To the surprise of everyone—not least of all the music industry lawyers—the judge proceeded to enter an immediate injunction ordering the Napster web site to shut down within 48 hours (thus causing a stampede from the 60 million or so users who wanted to stock up before the party was over).
But wait! The Napster lawyers instantly filed an emergency appeal to the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which is the level directly below the U.S. Supreme Court), and that court overturned the injunction and ruled that the Napster site could remain open and operating until the court case was finally decided. Whew!
Which is where things stand today as scores of millions of music lovers merrily share and download free copies of just about any music you can imagine...ahem...royalty-free. Observers of the legal dust-up predict it won’t be surprising if the matter ends up before the Supreme Court. And for those of us who can’t see how the Napsterites can survive, take a look at the arguments of their renowned lawyer, David Boies, interviewed in the October 2000 issue of Wired magazine at http://www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies.html. His arguments, even in the face of what "appears" to be music piracy by many millions of people, actually appear quite powerful.
All of which is a digression. What could be more powerful and more interesting than the Napster vs. Music Industry struggle? Just this: A more important industry than the crooners and rock ‘n rollers, even if the absolute dollar-numbers aren’t as large. I speak of course of the mother of all information tsunamis, the publishing industry itself.
Consider. Each year anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 books are published in an industry that generates about $20 billion per year, while the music racket generates approximately double that, weighing in at about $40 billion per year. But when you talk about book publishing, you’re not talking about screaming adolescents who occasionally smash up defenseless hotel rooms. You’re talking about the successors to Johannes Gutenberg, the foundation upon which civilization itself rests. (I mean, how do you train architects and astronauts and doctors and lawyers and physicists and scientists and teachers and entrepreneurs and all manner of other Indian chiefs without...books? Compare and contrast those societies today which have plentiful books with those, rare though they may be, that don’t.)
So what’s going on? Just this: The battle over music file-sharing isn’t just a fight over who’s going to be able to control and distribute the artistic creations of musicians. It’s the opening salvo in a struggle over the "unauthorized" sharing of all kinds of information files over the Internet. Including music, books, magazines, graphics and pictures of all types of artwork (including photography, painting, sculpture, poetry, you-name-it), and all other possible forms of "information." After all, this is what the Internet ultimately excels in more than anything else does: The quick, universal, virtually costless distribution of information.
Thus, the desperate attempts by some in the music industry to maintain a monopoly in distribution are mirrored in the publishing industry...but with a twist.
In the publishing industry there’s no easy way to get best-selling books into digital, and thus downloadable/tradable, format. I mean, it’s not like a music file where you play it one time with a ripper running, and then it’s on your hard drive for sharing forevermore. To get a book into digital format on your hard drive, you’d either have to digitize it by scanning or otherwise copying it, or you’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, by bribing someone at the publishing house to give you a copy of the book on a disk, which hasn’t seemed to happen...yet.
Nevertheless, the writing is on the digital wall: The days of the tree-killing, codex book are numbered, and those numbers are small. Does it make any sense to keep chopping down trees to fuel the cumbersome process of creating paper, then printing on the paper with ink, then putting all the pages together and then binding and gluing them with cardboard covers in the form of a book? Let’s face it, whether hardback or paperback, books are heavy, expensive, and cumbersome. In a word, "wasteful" (with apologies to all you bibliophiles out there).
What’s the alternative? Why, the "ebook" of course! Everyone’s heard about them, few have seen one so far, and almost no one has purchased one. Why? A number of reasons: The first widely available electronic book, the "Rocket Ebook," was guilty of poor execution and high pricing. It had a dull monochrome screen and was priced at several hundred dollars (for the early-adopters). Now the Rocket Ebook has been discontinued when two ebook manufacturers, SoftBook Press (maker of the Softbook Reader) and NuvoMedia (maker of the Rocket eBook), were purchased by a company named Gemstar. As a result, both the Softbook Reader and the Rocket eBook were discontinued, to be replaced by two new offerings by Gemstar, manufactured by Thomson Multimedia and sold in the U.S. under the RCA brand.
The new ebooks, the REB1100 and REB1200, are currently priced $300 and $700 respectively. The 1100 has a monochrome screen and weighs 18 ounces with batteries that last 20 to 40 hours between recharges, while the 1200 is larger, weighing 33 ounces, with a color screen and batteries that last from 5 to 10 hours.
While the pricing is a problem for many of us, that’s not the real show-stopper. The problem is that Gemstar is trying the same old trick seen repeatedly in the computer industry: It is attempting to lock REB 1100 and 1200 purchasers into a proprietary, closed merchandising system whereby content can only be purchased through Gemstar or Gemstar-approved content providers. That is, you may generally only purchase your reading matter from RCA or approved publishing houses working with them...and guess what that does to the pricing structure?
Some of the big publishing houses, in their desperate scramble to co-opt the nascent electronic publishing industry, have seen to it that an electronic text downloaded to an ebook reader generally costs either the same or—get this—even MORE than a hardback edition of the same book you can buy in a store. Incredible? The publishers have all kinds of arguments as to why ebook texts—with no paper, no ink, no weight, no distribution costs, etc.—should cost the same as tons of books printed the old way.
When it became clear that Gemstar was going to try to pull the closed-system switcheroo on its ebook purchasers, observers immediately raised objections. Ebook crusader and columnist Kelly Ford, upon learning of Gemstar’s plans, wrote, "I love eBooks. I love the Rocket eBook. I'm anxious to buy the RCA eBook. But, even I am not willing to spend $300 (or $700 for the REB1200) for a device that locks me into buying content from a single company. This is a recipe for disaster. From the consumer's perspective, it reeks of corporate arrogance and will ensure that their collective wallet remains shut." Amen to that.
So electronic book publishing isn’t going to happen any minute now, at least not in a huge way. Let’s give it, oh, say two years before open standards are put into place and the entire paper-based publishing industry starts to crumble and reconstitute itself. The ebook industry awaits a light, low-cost, reasonably-priced device with a high-resolution color screen and reasonable battery life. Not to mention the easy availability of books from many origins, priced in a way that reflects the reality of the savings to the publisher (which may in time become the author personally, thus cutting out the middleman publishers and their current distribution monopoly entirely).
Fortunately, the RCA e-readers are only the tip of an emerging iceberg of electronic reading devices. Sony and other Japanese companies are said to be looking at producing low-cost e-readers (can you say "Playstation II"?). Xerox is said to be looking at the possibility of producing one. A company named Everybook, Inc. has developed expertise in both ebook software and producing an electronic reader that was to have been called the "Everybook Reader." Shaped and read like a regular book, it was to have had a very high resolution color screen and open-standards software so that content could be obtained from myriad locations. Now Everybook, Inc. has spun off its hardware division, resulting in a new company named N-Vision Technologies (http://www.nvisiontek.com/) which will manufacture and sell the codex-type e-reader.
The N-Vision e-reader looks so good, in fact, that I wrote them a few weeks ago asking when their product would be available. This is what I got back: "Thank you for your interest in our product. We are currently trying to raise capital to bring this product to market. Once funded, we are about 10 months away from production. We are about 3 months away from having alpha units to demo to the world, and 5-6 months away from Beta/test units. We appreciate your support of this product.....it’s been a tough road, but our team is dedicated to bringing this product to market. I will try to keep you posted on our progress. Cheryl, EVP Operations and Sales, N-Vision Technologies, Inc."
Oh boy. Personally, I can’t wait. I think the age of the paper book is about to come to a quick end. Electronic e-book readers will be better, lighter, cheaper, more convenient, more versatile, and perhaps most of all, more fun to read (the advent of devices that can talk to you and play music while you’re reading; allow marginal notes, underlining and other marking; automatically bookmark pages; etc. is almost upon us). It’ll save a lot of trees, too.
What do the rest of you think? u