E-book Pros and Cons

Weighing the Issues

The human race will not move into the concept of e-books easily, I do not imagine. A lot of literary types tend to shun computers, some of them far too much, as being soulless machines. Moreso, the sort of consumer who buys pulpy romance or mystery to read on their lunch break or in bed while waiting to get sleepy are not the sort of person who wants to buy a PDA and carry around with them. Furthermore, there is something we consider "natural" about touching paper with our fingers, flipping pages.

E-books, though, offer us some great chances to improve the very act of writing itself, the very act of reading itself. Not only do abilities to hyperlink, have online dictionaries, and far more control for the average reader to adjust settings to their liking, it is an inherently clean source that disposes of the currently book industry's practice of throwing away tons of material each year.

I will start with the cons, and address them, and then I will move on to the pros, to show why I think that e-books need to be looked at as an alternate to our standard ways of reading.

The Cons

Techno-Sensitivity: E-books require technology. Actually, outside of handwritten books in charcoal, all books as we know it require computer technology. E-books, however, tend to require the user to have a little bit of technological know-how, themselves, as opposed to allowing some factory work to do the publishing and layout for them. It would be far too wasteful to only package e-books in "preset" devices that the end user could pick up and use without interfacing with a computer (though it could be a possibility to put the 100 greatest books or something on a small device as something of a promotion).

Care and Handling: If an eight dollar paperback gets damaged, chances are that it will still be readable. If not, it requires a mere eight dollars to replace (and time, of course). If an e-reader is damaged, then it can be considerably more expensive. In the cases of things like personal computers, standard care is needed. In the case of portable readers, this somewhat limits where it is safe to use them. It also means that books for kids are problematic, in that a kid can easily smash a sensitive piece of equipment.

The Human Factor: a lot of literary types tend to be somewhat ludditish, or tend to be somewhat older people who like to read on their patio. This means that computers might be either be distasteful or impossible to use in prime reading conditions. But it is more than this, a lot of people get tired of looking at a computer screen. Furthermore, people like the ability to turn pages, and to easy page back and forth. Some e-book reader applications do what they can to improve this, but there is only so much that can be digitally done.

The Pros

The pros, though, are far more numerous.

The Environment: The statistic once quoted to me was that it took about one tree to make a cubic yard of paper material. Let's take a look a the Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, real quick. Each Mass Market is (based on its measurements taken from Amazon.com), about 32.64 cubic inches. There are 46656 cubic inches per cubic yard, meaning rougly about 1429 copies of the DVC can be made for a good sized tree. There are 60.5 million copies of that one Dan Brown book in print, meaning that 42338 good sized trees had to be cut down to make them assuming that the books were all mass market in size, when in reality many of them are twice as large as the mmpb! If we assume that half the number were actually the hardcover book, we get 21169 trees for the Mass-Market, and we get 48043 for Hardcover, or a new total of 69212 trees. Using this to form a range and assuming a density of 500-700 trees per acre, we can see that between 60 and 138 or so acres of forest would have went into the production of this one book alone.

To be honest, this is not too terribly much, though it does not take into consideration other environmental impacts from the industry. The big deal is when you look at, say, all the books published. Dan Brown's book are a little bit of a phenomenon, admittedely, but not the only one. At 11 million copies sold of the hardcover edition of the 6th Harry Potter book, in the United States alone, we are looking at nearly another 30,000 trees. Include the entire series and the world sales, and we surely increase this by a factor greater than 10. Think of all the Stephen King books. Think of all the James Patterson novels. Think of tons of pulp romance and pulp mystery. This surely has an impact. This is ignoring other areas were "e-book" style formats even make even more sense, such as newspapers and magazines that are thrown away after a day to a months use. (I have no good statistics on recycling, but I will try and find some).

Ease of Distribution: E-books are easy to distribute. Assuming that a relatively complex e-book is about 10 megabytes in size (which is a fairly generous estimate, most of mine are less than a meg), we are talking about maybe 10 minutes of your time to download it on a slow connection. Fast connections would have them within a minute. This involves no postal costs. This involves no waiting. No missing deliveries. You can have a book "on your desk" within an hour after ordering it and it requires no leaving of the house. This includes all the benefits of removing the payment of warehouses, delivery trucks, and workers to move the books.

E-books do not Go OOP: E-books do not go out of print. They do not have lulls in the print cycle where consumers have to wait for the next batch. They can be forced out of print via removal of the digital source if publishers wish, but they do not have to naturaly maintained. All it takes is less than 5MB on a harddrive.

Revisions are a Snap: Not only is it easier for the end consumer to download correct copies, but it is relatively easy to release "patch files" that can fix currenly owned copies.

Consumer Access: One of the most important pluses for e-books, there is a near limitless increase in consumer access. Not only does this refer to the increased ease in distribution, but numerous other things. Font size, shape and color can be tweaked on the fly (in some formats). Layout can be modified to better fit the reader's needs. E-books can be fed through voice synthesizers or through braille output devices. On the fly translation programs can be run (though currently with mixed results, computer technology is getting better at this sort of thing all the time).

Online Dictionaries: It is relatively easy to incorporate an online dictionary system. Double click the word and a proper definition can pop out. Bibliographic information, translation of Latin or Greek or German/French passages (as classics are want to include) can be on the fly, as well as annotation that pops notes out right on the screen instead of requiring you to thumb through pages and save your place. References in non-fiction books can be followed on the fly.

Digital Illustrations and Music: Digital picture format increase what is possible with illustrations included in books. Picture reading Harry Potter books and actually getting to see the moving pictures described. Intended soundtracks and affects could be included right off the bat.

E-books Do Not Wear: Libraries would not be forced to repair books. Stores would not have to trash books with tears on the covers. They would last as long as their digital storage, and could be backed up indefinitely.

Stores and Libraries Do Not Need Multiple Copies: Libraries would make "copies" on the fly. Same of stores. No huge stacks to deal with, and all that implies. Greatly increased personal space for browsers to relax, assuming they want to go to the source.

Indie Publishing Boom: Lastly, there could also be an indie publishing boom. Maybe with not the same level of distribution, but nevertheless one could get their own personal books out to the hands of readers. In fact, this is something that is happening now.

Digital Copyright Issues

This is going to be one of the stickiest parts of an expanded e-book presence, how to handle copyrights. Right now, books are one of the "hardest" things to rip to a warez site; partially because it tends to take more effort (even if computer scanners are used) and partially because people tend not to respond to it with as much enthusiam. But, as more easily accessible books become available, there is always the danger that more and more people will download copyrighted books.

Part of me is forced to say "so what". As I have heard defenders of openly available and "unprotected" e-books say, "so they just go and get the book from a library, instead?" Books are a different sort of industry. People swap them all the time. People check them out. People read them in stores. Generally, the book industry has been ok with this. Do they really think that book lovers will turn their backs on their favorite authors?

Not to mention, I have yet to see any type of copyrighted material that someone hasn't found a way to rip off. Sure, sometimes it is more trouble than its worth, but it is there. Hacker-types are amazingly resourceful. I have thousands of e-books on my computer. Some of them are very nice "rips" of books that were never in an e-book format to begin with.

If people are going to steal, then they are going to steal. I can't answer for music or movie downloaders, but I can say that bibliophiles like to support their favorite author. Not making it readily available just means that people are going to take a week to rip it off. On the other hand, making it readily available can net quite a few new fans, many of which are not too worried about dropping 3-6 dollars per digital copy.

The Rowling Complaint

I have no source to back this up, but I have heard that JK Rowling was against making a digital copy of her books because she was afraid that someone would add something to them and then redistribute them to kids who might no know better. There are some problems with this argument (for one, how many kids would be downloading from a warez site?) but it had a core of truth. If e-books are potentially editable, how does one stop some business or individual from inserting or altering text? I have some public domain ebooks that have huge ads placed in the middle.

I think this is one of the reasons why businesses should more readily accept e-books as a whole. They can publish MD5 style verifications. When you start to read the e-book, the reader runs the checksum. If it fails, it gives the user the chance to stop the e-book from loading or continuing. Parents can set it up so that only verified e-books can be read by their children, and so on.

Formatting

Outside of publisher fears of copyright control, I think the biggest issue facing ebooks is going to be formating. ASCII, Unicode, PDF, RTF, DOC, LIT, PDB, PRC, JPG, HTML, XML, etc. There are a number of possible formats. Each has pros and cons of their own. JPGs can be read by pretty much any computer without anything more than a default install, but probably would require a lot of space and offer little as far as text-to-voice applications and reformating text to make it easier to view. PDFs offer the most control for the designer over the end product (well, most outside of the overly static picture format), but do not allow much alteration to go down, and require one a fairly small number of viewers to see it. RTF can be seen with most default installs, but some formatting gets goofy, and so on.

HTML (specifically XHTML) seems to be the way to go. It enables both visible text and data type information to be stored in the main file. Hyperlinks can be used to set up pagination, or at least chapter seperation. Through the use of anchors, at least a rudimentary bookmark system is easy to set in place, usable by any webbrowswer. Illustrations can be shown inline. CSS enables some fairly complex formatting to take place. What's more, with a specialized packaging system similar to RAR, you can put all the various text files, illustrations, and cover images into one archive and then a browser could be designed to open the archive as a whole. All of this is existent technology.

A Model Store

Let me end this with a brief description of a model store designed around e-books. An average sized bookstore can hold something along the lines of about 40 to 60 thousand books. This takes up something like 600 to 8000 square feet of space, a good amount of it dedicated to foot paths and chairs to sit and read.

Assuming the average e-book file to be about 3MB, you could store 60 thousand e-books on about 200 Gigs of harddrive space. This means a home computer could store the entire text of a average sized bookstore. It does not require multiple copies, so it would actually have more titles.

You could use a bank of computers, each with about 500 Gigs, to act as a network of servers. You would be able to have half a million titles offered, maybe even a million. All people have to do is sit down, browse through your selection, and then download it to their storage device at check out. You could possibly set it up so that "dead tree" copies are available for many noted titles, allowing the shopper to browse in a more traditional way.