E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗
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by ever more potent technologies) and the arts and
craftsmanship crowd never ceased and it is raging now as
fiercely as ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes,
and conferences. William Morris started the “private press”
movement in England in the 19th century to counter what he
regarded as the callous commercialization of book publishing.
When the printing press was invented, it was put to commercial
use by private entrepreneurs (traders) of the day. Established
“publishers” (monasteries), with a few exceptions (e.g., in
Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy) shunned it and
regarded it as a major threat to culture and civilization.
Their attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing or corporate-controlled publishing today.
But, as readership expanded (women and the poor became
increasingly literate), market forces reacted. The number of
publishers multiplied relentlessly. At the beginning of the
19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes
allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first,
black and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and
anatomical charts, and other graphics to their books. Battles
fought between publishers-librarians over formats (book sizes)
and fonts (Gothic versus Roman) were ultimately decided by
consumer preferences. Multimedia was born. The e-book will,
probably, undergo a similar transition from being the static
digital rendition of a print edition - to being a lively,
colorful, interactive and commercially enabled creature.
The commercial lending library and, later, the free library
were two additional reactions to increasing demand. As early
as the 18th century, publishers and booksellers expressed the
fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Two
centuries of accumulated experience demonstrate that the
opposite has happened. Libraries have enhanced book sales and
have become a major market in their own right.
VI. The State of Subversion
Publishing has always been a social pursuit and depended
heavily on social developments, such as the spread of literacy
and the liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As
every new format matures, it is subjected to regulation from
within and from without. E-books (and, by extension, digital
content on the Web) will be no exception. Hence the recurrent
and current attempts at regulation.
Every new variant of content packaging was labeled as
“dangerous” at its inception. The Church (formerly the largest
publisher of bibles and other religious and “earthly” texts
and the upholder and protector of reading in the Dark Ages)
castigated and censored the printing of “heretical” books
(especially the vernacular bibles of the Reformation) and
restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of
controlling book publishing. In 1559, it published the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”). A few
(mainly Dutch) publishers even went to the stake (a habit
worth reviving, some current authors would say…). European
rulers issued proclamations against “naughty printed books”
(of heresy and sedition). The printing of books was subject to
licencing by the Privy Council in England. The very concept of
copyright arose out of the forced registration of books in the
register of the English Stationer’s Company (a royal
instrument of influence and intrigue). Such obligatory
registration granted the publisher the right to exclusively
copy the registered book (often, a class of books) for a
number of years - but politically restricted printable
content, often by force. Freedom of the press and free speech
are still distant dreams in many corners of the earth. The
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other
privacy invading, dissemination inhibiting, and censorship
imposing measures perpetuate a veteran if not so venerable
tradition.
VII. The More it Changes
The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the
history of the book teaches us anything it is that there are
no limits to the ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and
booksellers, re-invent old practices. Technological and
marketing innovations are invariably perceived as threats -
only to be adopted later as articles of faith. Publishing
faces the same issues and challenges it faced five hundred
years ago and responds to them in much the same way. Yet,
every generation believes its experiences to be unique and
unprecedented. It is this denial of the past that casts a
shadow over the future. Books have been with us since the dawn
of civilization, millennia ago. In many ways, books constitute
our civilization. Their traits are its traits: resilience,
adaptation, flexibility, self re-invention, wealth,
communication. We would do well to accept that our most
familiar artifacts - books - will never cease to amaze us.
The Affair of the Vanishing Content
By: Sam Vaknin
http://www.archive.org/
“Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such
rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm.
Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed
it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem
properly.”
(Stewart Brand, President, The Long Now Foundation )
Thousands of articles and essays posted by hundreds of authors
were lost forever when themestream.com surprisingly shut its
virtual gates. A sizable portion of the 1960 census, recorded
on UNIVAC II-A tapes, is now inaccessible. Web hosts crash
daily, erasing in the process valuable content. Access to web
sites is often suspended - or blocked altogether - because of
a real (or imagined) violation by the webmaster of the host’s
Terms of Service (TOS). Millions of other web sites - the
results of collective, multi-annual, transcontinental efforts
- contain unique stores of information in the form of
databases, articles, discussion threads, and links to other
web sites. Consider “Central Europe Review”. Its archives
comprise more than 2500 articles and essays about every
conceivable aspect of Central and Eastern Europe and the
Balkan. It is one of countless such collections.
Similar and much larger treasures have perished since the dawn
of the digital age in the 1920’s. Very few early radio and TV
programs have survived, for instance. The current “digital
dark age” can be compared only to the one which followed the
torching of the Library of Alexandria. The more accessible and
abundant the information available to us - the more devalued
and common it becomes and the less institutional and cultural
memory we seem to possess. In the battle between paper and
screen, the former has won formidably. Newspaper archives,
dating back to the 1700’s are now being digitized - testifying
to the endurance, resilience, and longevity of paper.
Enter the “Internet Libraries”, or Digital Archival
Repositories (DAR). These are libraries that provide free
access to digital materials replicated across multiple
servers (“safety in redundancy”). They contain Web pages,
television programming, films, e-books, archives of discussion
lists, etc. Such materials can help linguists trace the
development of language, journalists conduct research,
scholars compare notes, students learn, and teachers teach.
The Internet’s evolution mirrors closely the social and
cultural history of North America at the end of the 20th
century. If not preserved, our understanding of who we are and
where we are going will be severely hampered. The clues to our
future lie ensconced in our past. It is the only guarantee
against repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. Long gone
Web pages cached by the likes of Google and Alexa constitute
the first tier of such archival undertaking.
The Stanford Archival Vault (SAV) in Stanford University
assigns a numerical handle to every digital “object” (record)
in a repository.
The handle is the clever numerical result of a mathematical
formula whose input is the number of information bits in the
original object being deposited. This allows to track and
uniquely identify records across multiple repositories. It
also prevents tampering. SAV also offers application layers.
These allow programmers to develop digital archive software
and permit users to change the “view” (the interface) of an
archive and thus to mine data. Its “reliability layer”
verifies the completeness and accuracy of digital
repositories.
The Internet Archive, a leading digital depository, in its own
words:
“…is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with
major historical significance — and other “born-digital”
materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with
institutions including the Library of Congress and the
Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record
of public material.”
Data storage is the first phase. It is not as simple as it
sounds. The proliferation of formats of digital content has
made it necessary to develop a standard for archiving Internet
objects. The size of the digitized collections must pose a
serious challenge as far as timely retrieval is concerned.
Interoperability issues (numerous formats and readers)
probably requires software and hardware plug-ins to render a
smooth and transparent user interface.
Moreover, as time passes, digital data, stored on magnetic
media, tend to deteriorate. It must be copied to newer media
every 10 years or so (“migration”). Advances in hardware and
software applications render many of the digital records
indecipherable (try reading your word processing files from
1981, stored on 5.25” floppies!). Special emulators of older
hardware and software must be used to decode ancient data
files. And, to ameliorate the impact of inevitable natural
disasters, accidents, bankruptcies of publishers, and
politically motivated destruction of data - multiple copies
and redundant systems and archives must be maintained. As time
passes, data formatting “dictionaries” will be needed. Data
preservation is hardly useful if the data cannot be searched,
retrieved, extracted, and researched. And, as “The Economist”
put it (“The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 22nd,
2001), without a “Rosetta Stone” of data formats, future
deciphering of stored the data might prove to be an
insurmountable obstacle.
Last, but by no means least, Internet libraries are Internet
based. They themselves are as ephemeral as the historical
record they aim to preserve. This tenuous cyber existence goes
a long way towards explaining why our paperless offices
consume much more paper than ever before.
Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property
By: Sam Vaknin
Three years ago I published a book of short stories in Israel.
The publishing house belongs to Israel’s leading (and
exceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which
stated that I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the
sales of the book after commissions payable to distributors,
shops, etc. A few months later (1997), I won the coveted Prize
of the Ministry of Education (for short prose). The prize
money (a few thousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing
house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the
book belongs to them because they own the copyright.
In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses,
the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like
this : if the rights to intellectual property were not defined
and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on
the risks associated with publishing books, recording records,
and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative
people will have suffered because they will have found no way
to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it
is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the
refrain.
But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very
limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only
select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation
(most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael
had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come
close to deriving subsistence level income from their
profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly
creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property
rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael
Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least
as much as they are artists.
Economically and rationally, we should expect that the
costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its
market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.
Consider a publishing house.
A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potential
audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like
this) - would have to be priced at a a
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