Transmissions

Why I Like Print; or, "E-books Can Go to Hell"

by Dragorn

I'm a big fan of books.  I have a lot of books.  Ask anyone who ever got suckered into helping me move.  I've still got most of the Inside Macintosh books.  From 20 years ago.  For System 6.  In Pascal.  Somewhere I've still got service manuals for VT100 terminals.  Probably buried under the other stacks.

In the past six months, every vendor seems to be trying to roll out an e-book reader that will save us from stacks of moldering pulp - Amazon (of course), Sony, Acer, Samsung, Apple, Nook, iRex, Apple, and now, Nintendo.  Read books in 320x240 on your DS, and put the savings into Lasik.

Being fundamentally lazy, and with an apartment full of an amazing quantity of crap already, I'd love to have my entire collection in digital form - but I'll never give up the printed copies.  The problem isn't the technology (for the most part) anymore.  Most of the readers have solved the problems of battery power, viewing angle, and resolution by this point.

The real problem is e-books shift the balance of power.  Instead of treating books like physical objects, they're treated like licensed software.  Arguably, owning a copy of a book has never truly meant that you "owned" that book, but I'm pretty sure I never had to agree to a thirty page EULA before being allowed to check out at the bookstore.

The EULA may vary from vendor to vendor, but generally serves the same point - turning the book from a physical object into rented data.

What are you giving up switching to books as software, assuming your books use DRM lockdown, which many (if not most) do?

1.)  Loaning books to your friends.

Sure, you could loan the entire device to a friend for a week, but you can't loan your digital copy.

Considering the entire point of DRM is to prevent unauthorized copying by locking an instance of the software to a specific device, you'd think lending would be easy to implement (connect device, deauthenticate on your device, authenticate on your friend's), plus, it would sell more devices: "Sure, you can borrow that, but you need a FooBook too."

Some devices (such as the Nook) advertise that borrowing is possible, however, there are significant limitations.  A book may be "loaned" only with the permission of the publisher.  If a publisher doesn't want to let you loan a book, too bad.  It can only be loaned to a person once, and it can only be loaned for a specific period of time.

2.)  No used book stores.

You don't "own" the book, and you're not permitted to resell it.

This means no cheap college texts, no book co-ops, no recouping some of your money when you no longer need a reference book, and no getting rid of books you'll never read again.

3.)  No anonymity.

How much of your privacy you give up remains to be seen.

I can still walk into a bookstore and buy a book in cash with no record of the transaction (other than the assumed security footage).  Even ordering online has more privacy than DRM-regulated e-books.  A book order can be correlated to my account, but who says I didn't give it to someone else?

No such protection on e-books, as flimsy as it may be.  Each book is correlated with the exact readers allowed to access it, which are correlated with the accounts used to purchase it.  The DRM system can't have it be any other way.

There may be even more privacy concerns, however.

Many e-book readers allow user annotations on books.  Where are those annotations stored?  Are they public?  Oftentimes, margin annotations are the most personal interactions someone has with a book.  Does the license that you agreed to allow the company to share them with other users, mine them for advertisements, or appropriate them for whatever other uses?

4.)  Hardware lock-in.

While progress is finally being made towards common formats with EPUB coming to the fore, most buyers will still be locked into a specific platform.  Thanks to DRM, a protected book from one vendor won't be portable to another platform unless they authorize the transfer.

You say you love your device?

You're not interested in being able to move to a different vendor and keep your books?  What happens when a device supporting your current format of books isn't made anymore, goes out of business, or decommissions the authentication methods needed?

If you think it won't happen, look at the history of DRM on other platforms: DRM systems from the biggest players in the field, including Microsoft and Walmart, have been shut down, leaving users with no option but to repurchase their content.  Again.

5.)  Format decay means your collection will be left behind.

Let's face it.

There haven't been a lot of changes in the format of printed media.  It's not like a book you bought is going to become unreadable five or ten years later.  Still have a working VHS player?

6.)  Remote and invisible censorship.

The extremely well popularized incident where Amazon remotely deleted content from readers should have been enough to drive this home, but apparently it wasn't.

When the ability to access content requires the cooperation of a controlling agency, you risk no longer having access to the content you bought when you want it.

More insidiously, electronic content is mutable.

The book I have on my shelf isn't going to change itself unless I go and buy a new edition, but it's entirely possible to have a new version pushed to your device automatically.  Sure, it's convenient, but what if the new version is actually censored to avoid offending the company owners' sensibilities?  Walmart, for example, is known for selling radio-edit music, and removing adult content from recently acquired Vudu.

This is all more than just crankiness about having to buy all my books again.

Changing books to mutable, licensed, non re-sellable electronic content fundamentally changes how we interact with them and what is available to us in the future.  One of the many values of printed media is the ability to archive it, unchanged.  Maybe it's not such a big deal if your generic fiction book changes over time.  But then again, some of the most treasured books are first editions or editions with specific errors.  It's definitely a much bigger deal if newspaper, magazine, and journal articles disappear when someone disagrees with the content, or if the content gets changed.

Some of these problems can be overcome, and some can't.

Using public, open formats allows content to be moved to new devices, but only if it is not encrypted and if the new devices allow custom code to run on them.  Non-DRM books can be moved between devices and vendors (though again, only if the device allows unprotected content to be viewed in the first place).  Moving bookmarks, margin notes, and other meta-content may not be so simple; there is no reason a vendor would want to enable you moving to a different device, leaving any annotations you make trapped on the original hardware.

It's unlikely that the complaints of a minority will change how electronic content is licensed, but a potentially dangerous precedent has already been set.

So keep buying tree pulp, and if you must buy electronic, go for DRM-free and open standards.  And hope that you have friends with strong backs.