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Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy the Book

post #1 of 7
12/29/09 at 9:47am
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http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855

Plenty of food for thought here.
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post #2 of 7
12/29/09 at 2:01pm
Oh, shut up, Cory Doctorow.

Edit: It's a great article. I do agree with the guy, but he tends to be a little reactionary. And the publishing industry is realizing, like the music industry, that DRM-ing books is not the way to go. With the e-reader I've been selling at work, one of the big selling points is that B&N books are not copyright protected, and you can read non-copyright protected eBooks on it. Especially when you consider one of the reasons these types of devices haven't completely taken off like the iPod is copyright related.

But yeah, he says a lot of very worthwhile stuff.
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post #3 of 7
12/29/09 at 2:53pm
This is a fantastic lecture.

Rath, the publishing industry may be interacting with the individual reader in a more ethical fashion that the recording industry has with the individual listener (relatively speaking), but Doctorow's points in the second part of the talk about libraries and periodical licenses are spot-on. I know it's not something that most people think of very often, but anyone who has attended any sort of institution of higher learning or accessed electronic periodicals through their public library has been affected by the shady dealings of scholarly publishers, both from a financial and discursive standpoint.

Additionally, it is worth noting that the very nature of digital content shifts the monetizing of information into the middle of our interaction with it. If we have a license and not ownership; if we help a company turn a profit every time we click, we have to think long and hard about how this shift changes the way we interact with information and how this shift has the potential to change the information itself.
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post #4 of 7
12/29/09 at 3:01pm
I agree with him about libraries and licencing in particular, and honestly, I don't think these e-readers are ever going to replace books and libraries, which is something I try to bring up when discussing them with customers. I think books are ingrained in our social DNA, and it's going to take a lot to rewire that. (Although I was speaking to a customer who works in international publishing, and they say when the revolution comes, it's going to be in the form of in-store printing. There are machines already out there where you'd walk into a bookstore or even a convienence store, find your book on the database, pay for it, and it would print and bind it for you right there. The customer pointed out that when you're talking about getting literature into the hands of the developing world, being able to pay for a book like an ATM as opposed to having to download it is much more effective.)
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post #5 of 7
12/29/09 at 10:34pm
I work for an independent bookstore and we are getting an on demand book printer in a couple weeks. It's expensive as hell but the goal is that we will have every book you can think of in stock at the click of a button. It's the small guys way of competing with the massive stock of Amazon. Basically, you can wait 2-10 days to get a rare, hard to find book or you can get it in 5 minutes from us. I'm interested in seeing how it will work, I special ordered 'Surreal South 2009' and our local distributor didn't have any in stock so I'm going to have to wait a couple weeks to get it. The lady I was ordering it from said that once the machine is in place it would have been in my hands by the time I paid for it.
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post #6 of 7
12/30/09 at 1:49am
ChadB: will yall be able to get books that are POD such as Warren Ellis' new book Shivering Sands? Or is this just for rare books?
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post #7 of 7
12/30/09 at 7:04pm
I believe it is for anything with a few exceptions. I know it does not do color pages so comic books and the like would be out. In the future as the technology grows a color printer will likely be added. Also, I think the limit for the paper cutter is around 500 or so pages so longer books would be out as well. I presume current hardcover books would be out. But anything out of print and available on the internet in pdf format is a go. Also, in print things are available as well, the bookstore pays a royalty fee and that allows them to print.

The other really cool thing is that if you wrote a novel you can put it on a flash drive and bring it to the store and in 5 minutes have a professionally bound book version of it.
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