Wearing out an eBook

Don't you hate it when you wear out an eBook, or when someone tries to palm off a worn out ebook file on you? And I don't mean when you drop the reader into the bath and the annihilation of your e-library flashes before your eyes.

No, I mean when the electronic-book file itself gets all tattered and torn, with pages you can't open without one of those rubber thumb things, or when the pages are so underlined and covered in comments that you can't read them any more, or when pages are missing, and when the book has that smell that ebooks get when someone has left them with their burger or their fish-and-chips. In short, when the file reaches that point when a conscientious electronic-book distributor would retire and replace it.

No? You don't? Well, HarperCollins have been worrying about this and have decided that—in order to avoid these problems, and in order to demonstrate the vast superiority of ebooks to actual books—their eBooks will be "available to one customer at a time until the total number of permitted checkouts is reached." They have determined "the total number of permitted checkouts" that "library ebook vendors will be able to circulate" is 26. That is right, 26, after that the license expires and a bright, shiny new electronic-book file must be purchased.

Josh Marwell, President, Sales for HarperCollins, told [Library Journal] that the 26 circulation limit was arrived at after considering a number of factors, including the average lifespan of a print book, and wear and tear on circulating copies

Of course, this announcement has no implications whatsoever for those who have been snapping up e-texts from "the sparkling digital pond" that Nicholson Baker talked about in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001). No, no, it is not a warning that replacing hard copy books or journals with digital files and then ditching the originals (individually or collectively) may not be a great idea. Because it is obvious that no other publisher of ebooks will follow suit or extend their duty-of-care in this way.

For (a lot) more on this, see here.

iPad, iBooks and ePub

Yep, I am reading Twitter, bleary-eyed (its 6AM in Melbourne), with a headache, to find out about the iPad and how it will handle text.

Well, the good news for those wanting a Kindle-killer is that the iPad has an application—and Apple have created a Store—called iBooks and the etexts sold on the iBook store will use ePub, an open source standard for ebooks. (ePub is a free and open e-book standard, by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It supersedes the Open eBook standard. Files have the extension ".epub"; see Wikipedia).

Apple have also already signed up five huge publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster—who will sell content on the iBook store.

As for the iPad, well it is pretty and works just like the iPhone, which means that flipping pages, zooming in (to text, to a table of contents etc), is easy. And it has a colour screen, handles video etc. But, as the New York Times Blog comments:

The gadget itself is transparent, a window into software. There is really only a single mechanical button on the device, the “on” button. The rest is all fingers interacting directly with software.

And, on Apple's eText-reader competition, they note

Needless to say, Apple and Amazon are on a collision course. Media (books, music, video) constitute half of Amazon’s revenues, and it won’t go down without a fight.

Apple uses the ePub format, the most popular open book format in the world. It’s unclear what digital rights management they are using and whether these books will be transferable to other devices that support ePub, like the Barnes & Noble and Sony e-readers.

Oh, and the various iPad models will cost between US$499 and 829 (A$560 and 930) and will be sold unlocked. Which means there isn't much reason to buy a Kindle DX. As one Tweet summarised it:

Kindle DX 9.7 inch black and white screen and one application $489. iPad. 9.7 inch super color IPS screen, thousands of applications $499.

It will be interesting to see what develops.

Hark, The Kindle Choir!

Monday's Age contains an article by Helen Elliott, "Kindle: A World of Literature in your Hand" (here), in which she spruiks Amazon's Kindle. As Staul62 of Melbourne comments:

Another day, another glowing Kindle 'review'. How big is the cheque from Amazon? As Bemused rightly points out, there are many e-readers out there, some produced by Australian companies, some that didn't lock us out for years and even perhaps some that don't have restrictive digital rights management and the right to come in and delete your books at will.

(I'd add that some even have colour screens, or will, according to some iSlate rumours.)

And if I read another I-can-have-a-library-in-my-handbag-what-do-I-need-all-my-old-books-for-anymore article I'll yawn myself to death. As for this, from Ms Elliott:

I don't have sentimentality for my books. Books are about ideas and what was in them is now in my head.

What a lot of tosh. Books may be "about" ideas—they may help communicate ideas—but they are physical objects and can only get in your head if they are launched into it with a canon!

And to understand and appreciate the physicality of books is not mere sentimentality, it is a recognition that "the medium is the message" as Marshall McLuhan said in 1964!

I have a very large library of etexts (because etexts are very useful) and will probably get a reader in the near future (because they are quite convenient), but don't expect to see a pile of "Free Books" outside my office any time soon.

Because, contrary to the claims of Amazon and members of the Kindle-spruiking-choir such as Helen Elliott, an etext is not a substitute for a book any more than an electronic version of a journal is a replacement of a journal (as I have explained before).

Collation Software for Editing

A query came up on the Exlibris List about "Collation Software," by which the person posting the query meant the computer equivalent of a Hinman Collator: a devise that allows the close comparison of type features of multiple copies of the same page. Famously, Hinman used his Collator to compare multiple copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works to identify many slightly different impressions of each sheet and page.

As is often the case on academic lists, the answers to this query veered off in a slightly different direction. This was partly because there is no Hinman-style collation software, but it was also because "Collation Software" can mean the collation (i.e. comparison) by textual editors of multiple copies of the same text.

Comparing different editions/issues/states of the same text is necessary if one is to create a single text from multiple—and conflicting—texts (or witnesses). This sort of comparison is also necessary because it establishes what differences exist between texts, which enables an editor to establish the relationships between them (whether Text C is a reprint of Text A or Text B) and the importance of these differences (whether Text B was corrected by the Author or by the printer). These differences are usually accounted for, and evaluated in, the critical apparatus of a critical edition, specifically in the list of variant readings, in a series of lemma, stemma and sigla. (See here for more on Copy-text editing.)

As it turns out, there is a free, open-source collation tool called Juxta that will generate a list of variant readings (i.e., a full list of lemma and stemma) from any number of witnesses. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will. The primary collation gives a split-frame comparison of a base text with a witness text. Juxta can also display a "heat map" of all textual variants, or a "histogram" to display the density of variations.

I tested the software out very briefly on a few texts that I am editing and was delighted both with the split-frame comparison and the "lemmatized schedule" (the list of variant readings, in a series of lemma, stemma). My only concern thus far is that it seems that the texts must be stripped of all font-formatting before they can be compared and "lemmatized." So, every instance of italics or small caps being added, removed or reversed is lost. This is a huge loss, because the difference between "bite me" and "bite me" is just as important as that between "bite me" and "boot me."

Nevertheless, the software will come in very handy when I am trying to establish the relationship between the twelve editions of the text I am working on. And it will be great to be able to generate a "lemmatized schedules" against which I can check the list of variant readings I have compiled the old way. And, at the price, who can complain?

Selling Content vs Selling Paper

Paul Graham has published an essay on his site (here) that was picked up by Cory Doctorow on boingboing.net. A colleague (Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario) thought I might be interested in it. She was right.

Graham starts:

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more? […]

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

Graham's argument isn't exactly news to book historians. In 1932, W. W. Greg wrote: "what a bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his." ("Bibliography—an Apologia," (W. W. Greg, “Bibliography—An Apologia.” The Library, 4th ser. 13 (1932): 113–43).

Those who believe that Greg is right can feel a bit like the the "flappers" of Laputa, who must constantly remind star-struck literary historians that the books that have captured their attention are, basically, unimportant. Eighteenth-century book history does not begin and end with Pope, Swift, Fielding, Sterne or Haywood and Burney, nor are the works of these authors particularly important. As I have said before, more "ordinary" books are almanacs, tables of interest and other practical books, then, perhaps, sermons etc. With such books, it is more obvious that "words [are] printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics."

Graham continues: "Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell. Some seem to think they're going to sell content—that they were always in the content business, really. But they weren't, and it's unclear whether anyone could be." The remaining option is to focus on the physical object, printing "magazines" and books that are "made lush in a way that would be hard to match digitally" (coffee-table books, food-porn: books as prestige wallpaper).

Regarding authors, with the advent of digital books,

Whoever controls the device sets the terms. It's in their interest for content to be as cheap as possible, and since they own the channel, there's a lot they can do to drive prices down. Prices will fall even further once writers realize they don't need publishers. Getting a book printed and distributed is a daunting prospect for a writer, but most can upload a file.

This is put a little clumsily, and Cory Doctorow criticises this, but Graham's point seems to be, that, as the device-makers are likely to maintain a monopolistic control of the market for digital books, they will have the power to pay author's such small sums, that the authors would be better off not playing the game at all. And just as musicians "give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts" and small academic journals are now publishing articles for free and "make money from one of a dozen permutations of advertising"; so authors may be better off publishing their works for free and trying to cash-in on their "books" in new ways.

Of course, what is left out of all of this is the second-hand and antiquarian market, where good books have always cost more; where literature is valued, where the market remains strong, and where the meaning of certain written or printed signs is the business of the bookseller."