Many readers don’t even think of e-books as real books–but rather as ephemeral Best Buy– or Circuit City-style merchandise, not that much different from Britney Spears CDs. Forget that digital books exist just as bits and bites. There’s also the Tower of eBabel, along with the accompanying threat of format-related obsolescence. Ideally the industry will get serious about a Universal Consumer Format, and even then we’ll still need an arrangement through which commercial publishers would systematically cooperate with libraries to guarantee the eternal accessibility of the material.
No, I don’t just mean limited-access archiving, but rather a formal promise to individual readers in the vein of: “With evidence of the purchase of this e-book, you will always be able to obtain a replacement copy in a current format by going to such-and-such electronic address at the Library of Congress”–or another major institution. You’ve heard of legislation to guarantee the purity of food, laws that reputable corporations want. Well, we also need meaningful legal measures to encourage the consumer-level preservation of knowledge and culture in the electronic era. Forget about DMCA-style malarkey and the prohibition against cracking for format conversation purposes; the law is the thinking of lobbyists and Hollywood-bought politicians. Consumers don’t want to have to buy a book over and over again in different formats as technology marches on, and sooner or later Net-hip voters will replace the old-coot pols who tolerate DMCAism–and then we can look forward to the EBPA: the Electronic Book Preservation Act.
In a blog item yesterday, Dorothea Salo eloquently defends the library model in terms of social justice but also warns of the format nightmare that future generations will live out if the quick-buckers in the e-pubishing industry get their way–and I believe that her wisdom would apply to my two paragraph above:
If digitization is left purely to profit-takers, poorer libraries and poorer patrons may be shut away from the best sources, and many useful materials will never be digitized owing to specialized or niche appeal. If digitization is left to publishers, my experience suggests that it will be done stupidly when it is done at all, and any benefits thereto will drown in a swamp of DRM and encryption schemes. If digitization is left to technologists, long-term usability of the data store may give way to chasing the latest gadgetry and formats. (Though I am admittedly traducing a good many technologists who are intimately familiar with data obsolescence.)
See the connection with the EBPA approach? Through cooperation with libraries that take Dorothea’s hopes seriously, e-book publishers could sell more copies. Will the publishers and the e-book software industry get it? Or will they be profit-taking pigs and not give a squat about the future–including the seriousness of electronic media? I’m skeptical. That’s why I’m thinking law here, not just polite cooperation. Most publishers are not pigs, but as the Gemstar debacle shows, you’ll never go broke betting against the greed of at least certain influential tech-oriented companies that purportedly serve the e-book industry. If the bigshots of commercial e-bookdom don’t want an EBPA, then a UCF and voluntary cooperation with librarians toward perpetual accessibility at the consumer level could go a long way in avoiding the need for a law.
Of course, I’m not sure if the Open eBook Forum at this point is the best path toward consumer-level preservation. Regardless of the membership of many prominent publishing organizations, its policies seem skewed sharply in favor of a few corporate interests such as those of Microsoft, Adobe, Palm and, especially, OverDrive, whose CEO, Steve Potash, seems to regard the OeBF as his own private fiefdom. Still, I won’t give up quite yet. Nick Bogaty, OeBF executive director, will, as noted, be a guest Nov. 20 from 3-4 p.m. CST on the E-Bookworm audio netcast. Perhaps librarians can respectfully ask him about some of the issues that Dorothea Salo raises, press for the commercial popularization of a true UCF, and at the same time ask about the possibility of a “guaranteed-readability” alliance between librarians and publishers.
How to pay for guaranteed accessibility: If need be, tax individual e-book purchases. The cost wouldn’t be that high, and publishers would have a new incentive to demand long-lived formats for e-books.
The storage issue: Costs are decreasing dramatically. If need be, however, the legislation could be restricted in the beginning to e-books that are predominantly text, which can be stored and transmitted more cheaply than multimedia.
Alternative proposal: The publisher but not the author will lose copyright if a format is no longer accessible to consumers, or if the publisher can no longer provide replacements for lost or damaged copies.
