E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗
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movies he owns…all from one vote of Congress… . .
Congress should not be allowed to write laws that create
windfall profits for 1% of the population and take away a
million books from all the rest.
Q. What does PG intend to do about the legislative asymmetry
between content producers and creators - and content
consumers? Lobby Congress? Testify? Protest? Organize
petitions? Place “Gone with the Wind” on the Internet and wait
for a show trial?
A. PG Australia already has done Gone With The Wind, as their
50th e-Book, that’s good enough for me at the moment.
Eldred v. Ashcroft was originally drafted as Hart V. Reno, but
the lawyers, Lessig & co, wouldn’t include one word of mine in
the case, so I fired them.
Q. Gutenberg texts are sometimes used as freebies within a
commercial (Monolithic, Wallnut Creek) or semi-commercial
product (such as the Public Domain Reader). Is this
acceptable? Why don’t you charge them a license fee?
A. Walnut Creek PG CD’s weren’t free and they sent us nice
donations. The commercial outfits have to pay for a license,
the non-commercial ones usually don’t. Each case is
separately decided. While we don’t do any ads on our sites, we
don’t insist that others don’t.
Q. Technology is often considered the antonym of “culture”.
TV, for instance, is berated for its vulgar, low-brow,
programming. Hollywood is often chastised for its indulgence
in gratuitous violence and sex.
A. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of
their audience. As long as these are “commercial applications”
that’s what you will get. What else could you possibly expect?
These are all examples of “capitalism gone awry”.
By the way, I’m not anti-capitalism, I really am an Ayn Rand
freak, figure that out…hee hee!
I am doing Project Gutenberg for the most selfish of reasons -
because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it.
Q. E-books are equated with low-quality vanity publishing.
Yet, PG seems to embody the conviction that technology can do
wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy,
civil society and so on.
A. e-Books do wonders for the dissemination of culture,
literacy, democracy, civil society and so on. You do realize
that the Declaration of Independence is/was the FIRST man-made
item in all of history that everyone can have, in as many
copies as they want. Do you realize that a 5 gigabyte section
of a hard drive can hold a million copies of that file,
uncompressed?
Terabyte drive systems are already available for only around
$2,500. Ten years from now 5T hard disk partitions will be
able to hold a billion copies.
Q. Are you a romantic believer in the power of technology to
bring progress?
A. Well, I’m certainly an incurable romantic, and I believe
that technology can bring progress, but I don’t know if they
are, or have to be, related… .
Q. And do you see any dangers in e-books and freely available
e-texts (e.g., hate speech)?
A. Once you start censoring, you are playing with Pandora’s
Box. Just look at what they are doing with Little Black Sambo,
who wasn’t even black, and with Uncle Remus, who was? This is
awful. “Song of the South” was required viewing when I was in
school and now I can’t even show this generation what we were
required to study when I was a kid…1984 really did arrive.
…
Q. In some ways, you “compete” directly with other bastions of
education - libraries and universities. How do you get along?
What about other repositories of knowledge such as Project
Bartleby? Governments?
A. Actually, we cooperate with them, not compete with them. We
make all our files available to them and encourage them to
make the texts available to everyone. Some of them view this
as competition, but we don’t. Some prefer to control
distribution…to be a gate that they can open and close at
will…We prefer the doors always to be open.
Have you ever considered why, with the hundred millions of
dollars granted to found e-Libraries at the major universities
some ten years ago, and undoubtedly hundreds of millions more
donated since then, why you are doing an interview with
someone sitting at a basement, running computer hardware and
software that is 10 and 20 years old?
If any college, or company, much less university, city,
county, state or country was willing to do this, you would
have never heard of me.
Q. What has been the personal cost? It must have been
frustrating and exhausting and elating and rewarding … In
retrospect: are you happy with it? Would you have done it
again?
A. I can’t think of anything more rewarding to do as a career
than Project Gutenberg. It is something that will reach more
people than any other project in all of history. It is as
powerful as The Bomb, but everyone can benefit from it. And it
doesn’t make a decent weapon. It doesn’t cost anyone anything
and it is the very first, though obviously primitive, example
of The Neo-Industrial Revolution, when everyone can have
everything - though they are sure to pass a law against it.
I said this in 1971, in the very first week of PG, that by the
end of my lifetime you would be able to carry every word in
the Library of Congress in one hand - but they will pass a law
against it. I realized they would never let us have that much
access to so much information. I never heard that they passed
the copyright extension 5 years later. It was pretty much a
secret, just as is the current one, unless the Supreme Court
strikes it down. Only then will it make the news.
Congress passed that copyright law together with impeachment
proceedings of President Clinton, just to make sure it never
made the news.
As far as the cost, the happiness, the frustration - I am a
natural born workaholic and idealist, so I overcome the
technical frustrations. It’s the social frustrations that are
the hardest to deal with, the people who want permanent
copyright, even though the extensions are already bringing
about “The Landed Gentry of the Information Age.”
Q. Any thought about the future?
Precedents set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Law could well have
an enormous unpredicted effect on computer applications of the
future. One such application is the “printing” of solid three
dimensional objects, often referred to as Rapid Prototyping,
or RP. These printers have been with us since the 1980’s and
now are in a price range of the 5 megabyte hard drives on the
first computer to house Project Gutenberg in 1971. If you
count the inflation factor, they obviously are much more
affordable.
In addition to cost reductions, these 3-D printers now can
print on a variety of materials. The list of printable
substances should expand over the years until we can
eventually print out actual working items, rather than the
models we print out today.
Given that very inexpensive printers today can print in
millions of colors, and that color computer printers were
pretty much non-existent 30 years ago, we should at least
consider the possibility that printers 30 years from now might
be able to “print” on an extremely wide variety of materials,
and that someday we will be able to “print out” a car and
drive it away.
This copyright law covers 95 years. Let’s look back to 95
years and see the “copyright” to what things we may want to
print out would have just now expired:
1. The Wright-Brothers’ airplane and blueprints.
2. A dozen brands of early automobiles.
3. Everything Edison invented until he was nearly 60.
Obviously there are many more.
The point here is that under current intellectual property
law, it would be difficult to print out anything invented
today that reached the market in two years - until 2100, a
time when these items would no longer have any use.
When the Star Trek Replicators become a reality, will it be
illegal to actually use them?
Will all food items be Genetically Manipulated Organisms so
that it will be impossible to find natural foods that could be
copied?
When I grew up in Washington state, there were plenty of wild
blackberries, raspberries, apple trees, pear trees, plum
trees, grapes. I never even considered buying any of these at
a store. But today there has been a serious effort to
discourage free food supplies, and not only in Washington, but
also in most other states.
Last night at dinner, one of our volunteers remarked that he
expected that by the end of his lifetime he might be eating a
dinner of replicated food. I pointed out that by that time -
“they” would make it very difficult to find any kind of food
not protected against replication by intellectual property
laws and that THAT was one of the major reasons for extending
copyright, so that WHEN it would be possible for everyone to
be well-read & well-fed, they will have made it illegal to do
so.
The trend is that everything should cost something. In some
places there are even machines that dispense a breath of fresh
air…for a price.
Do we really want to create a civilization in which everything
has a price…when there are machines that could copy
anything?
The E-Books Evangelist
Interview with Glenn Sanders
By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
Q. Why electronic publishing?
A. I was first introduced to electronic publishing on the
Internet in the late 1980s and became intrigued by the power
of this revolutionary development. Then, when Mosaic released
the first Web browser in 1992, the Internet finally had a
visual aspect. Suddenly, the vast Internet was transformed
from a dimly lit warehouse for data storage and exchange, to a
visible library and gallery for information. I was hooked.
In 1994, while teaching at a university in Japan, I created
what was probably one of the first (if not the first)
paperless reading classes. I taught myself HTML and built 26
Web-based reading lessons for the “comparative cultures”
course I taught there. The reading material in each lesson
linked to related websites and information. Instructions were
included for the exercises, which usually included finding
information or doing research somewhere on the Web. Students
emailed their results to me, and I emailed feedback and grades
to them. Students were not required to come to class, but were
required to turn in their “class work” results to me by Friday
evening.
Since then, I have created numerous Web sites, published a
number of electronic & print books, and hundreds of
articles. In the late 1990’s I saw the confluence of three
factors that foretold the electronic publishing and e-book
revolution. The first was the imminent ubiquity of the
Internet. Next, was the growing need for mobile access to
information, and the availability of so much data in the
digital domain.
Finally, I could see the day when technology would catch up
with my vision of a portable information tablet. As of summer
2002, I am still waiting, but technological developments are
rapidly nearing the time, probably somewhere around 2005, when
affordable, portable, readable, wireless reading devices will
reach the mass markets. The company where I work, Rolltronics
Corporation, is developing thin, flexible electronics
technology that will enable many of these devices in the
future.
While living in Japan and working at Fujitsu, Inc., I founded
eBookNet and began toying with the design of a next-generation
information display device. In 1998, I founded eBookNet.com,
which became a renowned Web site that provided news and
community services for the e-book and e-publishing industry
for several years.
In 1999, NuvoMedia (the company that pioneered the current
generation of electronic reading devices with its “Rocket
eBook” in 1998) acquired eBookNet and hired me. NuvoMedia
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