RE: e-books and heritage

[Kevin McLauchlan <KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com>]

Philomena Hoopes said:

> What frightens me is, first, the limited range of authors and 
> titles that
> e-Books will be likely to offer; second, the factors that 
> will determine
> that range; and finally, the limited lifespan of what could 
> conceivably
> become the publication format of choice. 
> Obviously, at this stage it is not an all-or-nothing dilemma. 
> Paper and
> electronic media are likely to exist side by side very 
> happily for quite
> some time, as did LPs and magnetic tape. But looking down the 
> road...how
> many of you are playing your music on LPs, and how many on CD or DVD? 
> Blessed be the secondhand bookshops, libraries, and 
> book-search agencies.

I admit to a similar uneasiness, for exactly those reasons.

On the other hand, whether your (our) fears become 
reality might depend a lot upon the formats that become 
popular.

Here's a thought, though... before writing was 
widespread, there was quite an oral tradition.

One aspect of that tradition was that, while the 
timeless stories found their way into everyone's 
repertoire, at the same time everyone gave those 
same [?] stories a personal interpretation/shade/
twist/overtone...  They edited and added as the 
mood (or local tradition, or the likely prejudices 
of the bandit who just became king of the local 
tribe) prompted them to do.

But, once writing became the way to carry and 
present stories and poems, much of that variety 
was frozen and lost.  When you go to the trouble 
of scribing an epic song, you MIGHT combine [what 
you see as] the best of two or three versions, 
that you happen to recall, or that are locally 
available from minstrels and bards.  But, that 
means dozens or hundreds of variants become lost.

All that to say, the situation that you fear is 
nothing new.

My take on the situation is this:

When books are distributed in printed form, the 
ones that get into print are the ones for which 
somebody is motivated to incur the costs.  Usually, 
that "somebody" is a publishing company with an 
eye to a fat profit.  But, there are lots of other 
motivations and venues for expressing them. Plenty 
of people resort to the vanity press for reasons 
of vanity and for reasons of specialized audience.
Still, far more manuscripts are rejected by the 
big publishers than are accepted, and the self-
publishers or users of vanity press are self-selecting.
They print THEIR stuff. They've got no reason to 
print yours. Yours won't get printed until you 
mortgage your Mom and become one of THEM.

Now, it seems to me that as we head toward eBooks, 
a couple of possibilities loom:

Microsoft
or
Linux

Well, not really, but it got your attention. How 
about 

proprietary format
or
open-source?

If the model that makes it big in the marketplace is 
the Microsoft model, then eBook contents will be 
encrypted and produced in closed formats that are 
locked to particular technology.  The naked ASCII 
(or UNICODE?) text will be jealously preserved, 
behind bars and security, by publishers.

In that case, what you fear will happen every few 
years.

If the model that makes it big in the marketplace 
is the Linux and GNU and open-source model (of 
literary publishing), then the text will be widely 
available for any book, and the motivation for 
distribution and inclusion in particular formats 
will be tied to advertising revenue or other methods 
of paying the people who create and promulgate.

That is, "Jerry Springer: My Life as the Boob of 
the Tube" will become widely available as soon as 
Jerry's ghostwriter hits the last [Enter].

But if you want it on your favorite brand of ebook, 
you'll need to pay somehow to have it in the right 
format and on the right media.  If you want all kinds 
of add-ons and annotations and other attractions, 
you'll need to pay individual suppliers and incorporate 
them all yourself, or you'll need to pay a Red Hat or 
a SuSE or a Caldera equivalent to package them for you.

In that case, the raw content will exist as long as 
there are people willing to give it computer storage 
space, but the worthy works will be republished in 
the new format of the day, every few years... using 
that widely-available source text (in all its nakedness).

With that said, there's probably some truth to the
assertion, by Douglas Adams, that we techy-writer 
types will at least have the opportunity to exert some 
suasion regarding the model that prevails. For one thing,
we might have some say in which ebook formats receive 
our docs when (in the next year or five) that becomes 
an issue. By doing so, we have an opportunity to build 
up some inertia in one direction or another.

Microsoft?
Penguin? (linux penguin, that is...)  ?

Whups!  The crystal ball just went murky.

I guess real life *could* differ.    :-)


Kevin McLauchlan
kmclauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com