Depending upon what circles you travel in, you may have noticed the currently flurry caused by the release of the Kindle from Amazon. Based upon the eInk technology developed by Joseph Jacobsen of the MIT Media Labs the Kindle is similar to offerings from Sony and iRex but has added the Amazon marketing engine behind it along with an EV-D0 connection they're calling Whispernet.

Pictures of the Amazon Kindle, the Sony PRS-505 eBook, and the iRex iLiad (in order)

Key to this technology is that the display only uses power to change the display (i.e. page turns) and is nearly the same contrast ratio as black ink on white paper. The concept of being able to carry around a huge reference library on a single slate like device has been around for quite a while. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame envisioned slates taking the place of paper onboard the starship Enterprise, while still giving users the portability and ease of use of their paper analog. Librarians been having discussions with publishers on the over all copyright, and loanability of an eBook. I've personally seen papers at library conferences, panel discussions and LOTS of listserv entries all talking about the pro's and con's of an eBook. Some of the discussions have been:

Pro's:
- Automatic expiration of a loan book through electronic means.
- Patrons can checkout LOTS of books on a self serve kiosk
- Even reference books can be checked out to a single user and have it expire in hours instead of days.
- Shelf space is VERY expensive and this doesn't take up much space at all
- Floor space costs to heat/cool/clean and this only needs environmental for the servers
- No more lost books

Con's:
- More IT support needed to handle kiosks, servers, etc
- Expansion of data center to handle servers, etc
- Hassles with publishers on electronic loan policies
- Patron tech support costs
- Patron complaints about the loss of the experience and feel of a good book
- Just how do you inventory an eBook?

It's very interesting just how varied the opinions of publishers are on the topic. Tim O'Reilly has been very public on his opinion and just what the industry will have to do in order for this technology to be adopted.

So while similarly interested, Bill Pollock (Founder of No Starch Press) has been taking a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) approach and has had PDF versions of many of their books available along with special deals for those that would like to own both a paper copy and an electronic copy.

I've also sent off email queries to the PR reps for a wide variety of publishing houses and O'Reilly and NoStarch were the only ones to respond. (Go figure...everyone else is old school brick and mortar)

There also happens to be a professor that is taking his entire office reference collection (most out of print anyway), slicing off the spine, dropping it into a high speed duplex scanner and then dumping those PDF's onto SD cards for his Sony eBook. To keep in the spirit of the copyright, he's then recycling the paper of the original book so that he still only owns a single copy of the book. His comments have been nothing short of glowing on being able to travel into remote locations with his entire reference collection.

So while we still have a LONG way to go, the world seems to be warming to the concept of an ebook and if we can finally get the major vendors to agree upon a standard for ebook DRM (Digital Rights Management) we might see more titles become available in coming years. I for one, really like the approach by Bill Pollock of NoStarch where they do a digital watermark with the owner's information on the PDF, but that's it. A breath of fresh air and NoStarch should give itself a pat on the back for this gutsy move. Truly FOSS dude...

So I'm sincerely hoping that publishers will get a hint that reference books are MUCH more valuable when you can easily carry them around with you and that perhaps the model at NoStarch is something to take a good hard look at. I'm sure the librarians of the world (My wife included) will be waiting in the wings for the dust to clear from this battle.

Oh yeah, as a personal frustration: Hey folks, if you go electronic, it no longer costs that much to "reprint" a book that's been out of print for years. Why should an ebook ever go out of "print", now publishers can afford to keep a book in their catalog just about forever (or at least until the copyright expires) with no printing costs to deliver the product. Translated, the gravy train can go on just about forever and you don't have to walk away from those small classroom print requests of less than 100 copies anymore. Electronic books can now be a "long tail" product that can keep making profits just about forever.

Posted by Brian Chee on November 26, 2007 02:54 PM