Lawrence Lessig's e-book Remix in the Mac app Preview (click to enlarge)
With all the fuss over the development of e-readers, I’ve been thinking about how Supraterranean content and my own writing might be read in the future. Apple has almost self-terminated with their overblown product announcements that seem to happen four times per year. Last decade my weariness over the iPod — which at first seemed to be more of a body decoration than a song-playing device — gave way to the fact that I really liked having thousands of songs in my pocket.
But every year Apple pisses off more and more people. With the iPod, it was a new model every frickin’ year… just to make sure they could extract more money from you. It also created the illusion that they were in a constant state of technological innovation (which they most definitely were not).
Then came the iPhone, and while dorky men in their ’30s and ’40s enjoyed lining up at the Apple store for each new model, the rest of us begrudgingly dealt with the proprietary control because of how much we liked the infinite number of apps. The element of control had been a problem with the iPod as well, but it didn’t affect the user experience to the point that I ever regretted buying it. I jailbreak my iPhone — but if I couldn’t, I’d still probably be able to justify owning the thing. Because of that device, I have mobile (and, sometimes, WIFI) access to Google Maps, email, social media, calendar, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, and more… not to mention a decent digital camera, an audio recorder, and a few dozen albums of MP3s.
In other words, this technology helps more than it hinders, and — in my opinion, at least — it took us a while to get to that point. Yet I am very skeptical about the advent of e-readers, since the only ones currently available (to my knowledge) are the Kindle and the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle is a best-selling device, but because of the proprietary hardware/software and DRM-protected media, Kindle books aren’t owned; they’re rented. And now I hear reports that the iPad could be the “anti-Internet” (see NPR’s article from 4/5/10) doesn’t really surprise me at all. The concern there isn’t just DRM content, but also that Apple has strict policies about which apps they’ll allow in there iTunes Store and, therefore, on their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
The book industry saw what happened to the major record labels last decade and they want to avoid the same demise. So naturally, Apple is following suit with their previous “maximum security prison” tactics in attempting to court not only book publishers, but really any mainstream media producers (i.e., newspapers, magazines, journals) who have been fretting over losses in subscription and advertising revenue. I’m still convinced that media conglomerates won’t get more than 15 or 20 percent of their customer population to pay for everyday content, especially when it comes to news. But I wonder if they’ll try to impose pay walls to view websites on a device like the iPad that don’t exist on the regular Internet.
My concerns are exacerbated because I just found a really cool feature on the Mac application Preview, which is essentially an image and PDF viewer. At some point in recent history, an update to the program built in an annotations feature. Now I can easily highlight, underline, box in, or make notes next to the text as I read PDFs. Since I am the type who likes to underline passages with pencil as I read, this makes it likelier that I will transition to e-books in less time. And that’s the main goal here, since we’re using far too much of Earth’s natural resources to create books in the first place.
But if I do read an entire e-book instead of obtaining a used paperback, that’s a big investment on my part — almost a nod of confidence towards whatever technology I use to read the e-book. If I take notes in Preview, I want to be able to reference those notes in the future on whatever platform or device I choose — not just for the foreseeable future; for the rest of my life. This may just be my heightened paranoia, but I wonder if Apple will let annotations from Preview be viewed on a device other than the iPad.
These are the civic and cultural issues that dominate my thoughts right now: content distribution, copyright law, and the threatened equality of the Internet. Just two days ago the New York Times reported that a federal appeals has ruled that the F.C.C. can’t legally force content providers (in this case it’s Comcast) to provide equal Internet access to all. The case was really about BitTorrent transfers, and the users who upload and download large files like movies.
Obviously the debate isn’t really about Comcast’s clogged networks; it’s about control. I know this because, as Google has been hinting at regarding their upcoming Fiber network (and as the news media covered at the end of March), people are now capable of providing Internet at “50 to 300 times faster than the DSL, cable and fiber-optic networks that connect most U.S. homes to the Internet today.”
Web 3.0 is going to be all about content and data, and we — the people — need ensured access to the Internet in order to continue the natural progression that come inherently with information and interconnectedness. Meanwhile current Internet providers (Comcast and AT&T are the biggest) will be under a lot of pressure from the content mega-bosses (News Corp, Viacom, etc) to control what we have access to, and how we access it.
What we’ll really need, in addition to Internet at higher, unregulated speeds, is an e-reader device with zero proprietary control. I’m sure plenty of devices are currently in design or production mode. I’ve already heard of Microsoft’s Courier, which features two screens that open like a real book. Sony’s PSP will be entering the race soon, and Nintendo’s DSi XL has already.
Call me an anti-establishment diehard, but I’m willing to predict that whichever of these devices has the least controls over usage will be most successful in the long run.
Similar Posts:
- Back to Business (May 27, 2010)
- Printing Custom Books from Wikipedia (June 4, 2010)
