Steve Potash, founder of OverDrive, has been getting it between the eyes on the eBook Community List and in the TeleRead Web Log. But how could we not fight the gouge that his Content Reserve distribution arm wants to impose on publishers–up to $300 a year for storage of just one e-book? Nor will I forget the thousands he’s owed book people such as Mary Z. Wolf, who, in turn, must pay her authors. This is Steve’s bed, made not so crisply in cahoots with his partners Microsoft and Adobe. He splurged on expensive servers before he should have, and he rented out space in an art museum for a Gatsby-fancy party. Steve wants his PR and flash to move e-books into the consumer mainstream. Meanwhile the oppressive DRM and format wars of his partners are among the biggest reasons why the industry today brings in less revenue than Tom Clancy does by himself.
And yet, far from hating Steve, I am simply pushing for him and the rest of e-book business to acquire a true sense of purpose, so that more people read, period, and not just in a new format. I’ve done what I could to praise him for endeavors such as OverDrive’s laudable collaboration with the Cleveland Public Library and other systems to get best-sellers online, as well as for his people’s work for the blind. His library sites have shown a real flair often missing from the genre. But the looks of OverDrive sites should be just a start. Let me tell you how I feel about the book industry of today and what kind of a role e-books could play if Steve and the rest of the old guard would allow.
We begin with issues that transcend e-books; just how much excitement is there today about books of every kind? Very little for the most part, compared to the past, despite the hordes of authors peddling their wares on cable channels. Book Magazine has folded. I go to the drugstores today, and what do I see? Oodles of genre novels and not that much else. The nonfiction consists of diet books and the like. What a contrast to the paperback rack I used to enjoy in my youth at the local People’s Drugstore. You could read Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, not to mention such provocative, popular-level nonfiction such as Black Like Me. The books weren’t free, but they sold for a fraction of the costs of today’s paperbacks, a bargain even by yesteryear’s prices; and chances were that I could also find a good selection at the local library. I read genre fiction then and do now, and I’d worry about a rack purged of it; but can’t we also have just a little more Roth and Oates and younger equivalents?
Steve, I want that newsstand revived online–as a library full of both literary and popular novels and far more, such as up-to-date technical books, educational software, videos, audios, with as many as possible of them free, paid for by way of a national digital library fund and private philanthropy and local libraries; in short, a variety of funding sources, so that neither bureaucrats nor corpocrats can control our reading. We’ve got millions of new Americans who need to be brought into the culture, we’ve got the unemployed in need of new skills; and yet many libraries are going begging, especially school libraries as a recent news clip from California shows: Poverty plagues school libraries: Districts struggling to obtain new books. At one school, some books on the space program are several deades old.
E-books could be a way of spreading less-whiskered books around cheaply through libraries and bookstores alike. Imagine making them part of the schools. Think of whole classes sharing and discussing the same novels and dissecting them in blogs, the best entries to which the teachers could point all the students. Imagine friends file-sharing their own favorites, while publishers and writers collected due compensation. Imagine tired working couples being able to guide their kids’ reading from home rather than hauling sons and daughters off to the local library, which, in rural areas, may be 50 or 100 miles or more away. Imagine ghetto children not have to worrying about getting shot or stabbed. Imagine my sick, hurting wife being able to enjoy a truly well-stocked online library, full of authoritative titles on her ailments, as opposed to her having to wander from Web site in search of nondreck. Alas, many boomers will be in her situation. We need to show compassion and prepare, adjusting libraries to them rather than squandering hundreds and hundreds of millions on downtown library palaces forever.
But a TeleRead-style national digital library system won’t happen without winning the confidence of politicians, an unattainable goal if the e-book industry turns out to be nothing more than welfare for the wasteful middlemen and hangers-on it was supposed to chase away. I love good distributors and other behind-the-scenes players who can add value, such as by matching a trout book up with a fishing site; but, please, let’s keep the parasites away or encourage them to evolve into genuine contributors to the industry. We need to channel the money for online libraries into royalties and effectual promotion, not expensive proprietary formats and problematic DRM schemes that deny readers a sense of ownership. Steve may argue that some technophobic publishers and his partners insisted on full-strength DRMing of digital books even though the paper ones are piratable. Regardless, however, he consented, and thanks to his Faustian nonbargain, DRM-related expenses are no small burden for him and his customers today.
Decades later I still have some of the old books from People’s Drugstore–yellowing, but still accessible. I also have the books my late father left me. How many of today’s e-books will still be around 30 years now? Perhaps not that many if Gemstar is a clue. My rejection of DRMed commercial books–at least the ones I can’t find as freebies–goes on with new enthusiasm. Why should I buy “protected” e-books when, because of the uncertainties of DRM, I may only be renting them? Suppose Palm Digital Media goes out of business? Or Microsoft tires of e-books? Must we remain in bondage to the DRM dons who don’t give a squat about the permanence of our private collections? Do we really want to continue letting them cheapen the medium? And what about all the lost opportunities in areas such as precise interbook linking if proprietary formats and copyright zealotry so ruthlessly interfere? A Universal Consumer Format, combined with more reasonable DRM Lite, could help allay publishers’ piracy fears and allow for all kinds of new technical capabilities.
So far, however, at the misnamed Open eBook Forum under Steve’s leadership as president, the story has been, “Same old, same old, same old.” Besides, this man should focus on saving his company, not rescuing the OeBF from progress in formats and other areas.
A healthier OverDrive, the kind I’ve love to see, could offer the industry a genuine service by, for example, continuing its activities in library Web site creation. But Steve imperils those opportunities when he deprives publishers of money owned, in violation of contractual commitments–thereby almost surely raising questions in the minds of some librarians he is courting. I wish Steve well. I also wish him the courage to resign from the OeBF presidency for the good of the industry, his employees and their families. Ideally he can come clean about his company’s financial situation. As some have suggested, I’d even be willing to stop the campaign against those $300-a-year gouges of one-book publishers if only Steve would say: “Give us a little more time, this is only temporary, help me stay in business so I can help you. The storage fees will stop after a year.” Could the lawyer in Steve be preventing him from telling the full truth? Is he worried about providing publishers with lawsuit ammo? Well, the truth might be nothing compared to the financial damage from the ill feelings. Steve cut hundreds of publishers out of the loop–despite the thousands of dollars in revenue from already-made sales that these small business people had entrusted to him. Leveling with publishers just might reduce legal risks.
The causes of Steve Potash, OverDrive and e-books at large will not be helped by the rant that Dorothea Salo wrote yesterday after the TeleBlog picked up her “I was right” item on OverDrive. Among the targets of her latest tantrum was the Universal Consumer Format, the very creature that Steve has resisted for so long because of his ties to the software industry. Given the library world’s interest in open standards as a way to create new options for readers–and reduce expenditures of tax money–I’m baffled why Dorothea would knock the UCF, which would be fortified by MathML for mathematical expressions and SVG for more elaborate graphics. None other than Jon Noring, an invited expert to the Open eBook Forum and acting vice chair of the Publication Structure Working Group has championed the idea. I’ve linked to the UCF concept exactly as he, an XML expert, has expressed it. The UCF is just as described, a consumer format for Jane and Joe Reader whose format needs will be far less than, say, those of a researcher at a nuclear lab–although, yes, Jon himself has worked among nuclear scientists. Just about all of the time for the typical reader, a good UCF will suffice, as Jon sees it, especially if plug-ins are available. It would be a shame to let the Tower of eBabel remain in place because of the nitpicking of people like Dorothea who should know better. A properly designed UCF would be far more powerful and versatile than the crappy and rather proprietary alternatives with which Steve’s friends have stuck us. Is Jon’s idea perfect? Of course not. But it’s a good start, courageously posted with the goal of eliciting further feedback in a constructive vein. Yo, Dorothea?
Along the way, I’m disappointed to see Dorothea snapping at me even though I picked up her comments in a manner she should have viewed positively. No good quote goes unpunished, eh? I do respect her wisdom on XML and the like, for the most part, even if she is a tad jihad-prone. Her latest gem assures us that “I do my own damn dirty work,” complete with an immediate denial that she is muddying up Steve. Reminds me of something I wrote December 21. Back then I noted that “Dorothea has been kicking around Potash, her ex-employer, for years,” and I apologized for “encroaching on her territory. Sorry, Dorothea. It will happen again.” And again and again and again if Steve deserves criticism of his actions. Sorry, sister. You’re writing a blog, not a private diary, and, alas, I agree with much of what you say about him. The general rule is, “If you don’t want people to link to it, don’t write it.” Increasingly we’re an Open Source Society these days, as you, working toward your MLIS, ought to know. Links happen. In fact, this much-facilitated exchange of ideas is all the more reason to promote standardization in e-book formats and other areas. A UCF, anyone? Look, Dorothea, worry less about Steve’s image online and more about schoolchildren, other library users including boomers with mobility problems, and the toy-sized industry that he and his pals have unwittingly helped stunt.
