SKOPJE, Macedonia, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Books have been reducing in cost and increasing the scope of their distribution, amid protests from vested interests, for the last 500 years. E-books just represent a continuation of this trend.
One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to issue this declaration: "The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely."
UNESCO still defines "book" as "non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers".
Yet, have the innovations of the last five years transformed the concept of "book" irreversibly?
The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own, private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on demand or packaged as an e-book.
Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age-old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book identifiers. Is the "original" the final, user-customized book -- or its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible for unique identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does the user possess any rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of the original authors still apply?
Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.
Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors -- they are a new medium, an altogether different reading experience.
Consider these options, among others:
-- hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content and reference tools;
-- embedded instant shopping and ordering;
-- divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines;
-- interaction with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard;
-- collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities;
-- automatically or periodically updated content;
-- multimedia capabilities;
-- databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related decisions;
-- automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities;
-- full wireless pico-networking and scatter-networking capabilities.
In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on five important capabilities of e-books:
-- as portals or front ends to other sources of information,
-- as self-referencing texts,
-- as platforms being "fingered" by other resources,
-- as input processed by machines, and
-- as nodes in networks.
E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols, lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e-book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.
E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and, ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision and fawning.
The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment -- the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna) surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).
Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA, all books are portable. The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It disseminates its content virally, by being circulated, and is not diminished or altered in the process. Though physically eroded, it can be copied faithfully. It is permanent and, subject to faithful replication, immutable.
Admittedly, e-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer drives). They are format-specific. Changes in technology -- both in hardware and in software -- render many e-books unreadable. And portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity).
The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50 years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe swelled from a few thousand to more than 9 million. And, as Marshall McLuhan noted, it shifted the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution (i.e., "communication") to the visual mode.
E-books are only the latest application of age-old principles to new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a surge in content creation and dissemination. The incunabula -- the first printed books -- made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from the tyranny of monastic scriptoria and "libraries".
E-books are promising to do the same.
In the foreseeable future, "Book ATMs" placed in remote corners of the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work affordably.
The Internet is the ideal e-book distribution channel. It threatens the monopoly of the big publishing houses. Ironically, early publishers rebelled against the knowledge monopoly of the Church. The industry flourished in non-theocratic societies such as the Netherlands and England, and languished where religion reigned (the Islamic world, and Medieval Europe).
Part 2 of this analysis will appear Friday. Send your comments to: [email protected]
