The Future of Copyright and Publishing (Part 3)

Well, I'm back from Carrefour, and I am incredibly disapointed with their lack of Parmesan cheese.

Anway, I was talking about devices. Now, this is a word not traditionally associated with reading or books. In fact, for many bibliophiles a certain amount of Luddite attributes are worn like a badge. We like to feel the pages of the book as the weight of the right hand slowly transfers to the weight of the left hand. We like the sight of a shelf of books--the way their mismatched colors and sizes create a narrow horizontal patchwork across our otherwise boring walls. The feel of a particular book may bring back memories of a person, place, or time worth remembering. Even the smell of an old book is comforting even when we know that it may just be the beginnings of mildew.

However:

It's probably time to move on. Books are, afterall, a technology--probably the most successful technology and important technology, placed even above the wheel. It may be time not necessarily to eliminate books, for there will always be need of them, but it may be time to replace the book in certain instances with electronic editions.

Ugh! Right?

Who the heck wants to read their computer screen all day! Good thing that is not what will happen. Technology is changing in such a way that we now have devices that can display type that looks remarkably like paper. The screens are not backlit, so it does not strain the eyes of the reader. If you have been to Amazon.com recently you will have been bombarded with the hard-sell homepage trying to get you to look at something called the Kindle.

The Kindle is one of many devices being sold right now with the new e-ink technology that pretty much relicates the look of a printed page. I know it's not a real book, but there are some advantages. For example, you can change font size if you have poor sight. You can store hundred, and with an SD card, thousands of books on the device. (This is great for people who travel a lot or move around internationally because it is so hard and expensive to move books). You have instant access to purchase hundreds of thousands of titles from the device itself via a free wireless connection that stretches across the states. Jeepers, this is starting to sound like a commercial for the dang thing, but trust me, it's just that I am excited about what this kind of technology means for the individual writer.

Amazon sells these books online with no enormous cost and no time to manufacture the book. The book is a ile only a few hundred kb in size. It can be downloaded in seconds even from a very slow connection. This ease of distribution has allowed for Amazon to allow people to self publish at no cost other than a cut of the purchase price for each item sold. This entirely cuts out the need for a publisher to give the public access to your book. That is concept one about what is huge in ebook distribution.

The second concerns what you are thinking right now. How do people know I have published a book? Traditionally, publishers sent their books to major newspapers to be reviewed. Interestingly, the readership of traditional news sources is dropping, while the readership of well established as well as specialty blogs such as sci-fi or literature specific blogs is skyrocketing. A blog such as www.boingboing.net might take a little known book such as The Endless Belly Button and review it on their site. Tens of thousands of people read this site and many others like it every day. The sales of that little known book went way up due to the positive press it recieved from this non-traditional source.

It's hard to wrap my mind around what is happening, and thus it is difficult to use words to explain what many people feel in their gut. That something is happening right now where traditional print and technology converge. We are uncertain how this will all end up, but something will happen.

It feels like i went on a bit of a rant, so I have to ask myself something. What does this all have to do with copyright? Well, it's just that technology is forcing us to look at how we protect intellectual property, and how we distribute and use books, magazines, newspapers, and knowledge in general. It seems as though Creative Commons is a fantatic example of what people are doing to help not just avoid the issue of piracy and technology, but shows the ingenuity of how we can harness its powers. And it is Creative Commons and movements similar to it that make us look into the technology, devices, distribution, and advertisement of all printed works coming out now and in the future.

I ask all of you to visit th creative commons site and take a look at everything they are doing. It is fascinating. You can publish something right now under Creative Commons. In fact, I would be interested to know if anybody in this class has done so? Many teachers use it to post their writings, and many people use it with their flickr photos.

I have got to go to sleep.