E-Books and Retro Glue Protect the Vested Interests of Publishing

By MICHAEL JENSEN

The future of publishing is complicated enough to imagine without the new e-books -- Microsoft Reader, Rocket eBook, SoftBook, and the rest -- complicating matters by using Buck Rogers containers to spruce up 500-year-old publishing processes. Call me a curmudgeonly futurist if you must, but I'm not too thrilled about these new electronic-book toys, which are supposed to end publishing as we know it -- yet will actually perpetuate it.

The e-book gizmos are admittedly cute, colorful, and capacious. They're even readable, especially when they use one of the two recently introduced display techniques (CoolType from Adobe and ClearType from Microsoft) that employ "quarter pixels" to create surprisingly smooth letter curves. Those curves provide greater legibility on the same ol' L.C.D. screen, which now seems to approach ink-on-paper quality.

The tools for human users seem generally sound -- simple buttons, easy "page turning," and straightforward navigation between chapters. You can read these books at will on your laptop, once it's equipped with the proper software, or you can carry hundreds of titles on a special gadget. It's the future, now. What's not to like?

Surprisingly, a lot, much of it attached by what I call "retro glue."

Retro glue attaches old thinking, old values, and old habits to new technologies. Retro glue can be a comfort, allowing the best elements of the old to adhere to the new so that we can see how similar the new thing is to our old standbys. It's what drove Model T's to look like buggies, what prompted early movies to be staged like theater. It's how every new technology is accepted -- by recapitulating its predecessor.

The e-book devices all strive to present a page of text exactly like a familiar printed page, and the button that turns each "page" doesn't even require you to consult a user's manual. But retro glue can also attach things that don't belong. And the retro glue dripping off the e-book may, I fear, attach the worst of the last century's paradigm of intellectual property to the new century's publishing models.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a digital enthusiast. The Open E-Book Standard -- OEB, the coding structure that underlies most e-books -- is a solid and predictable set of codes that will evolve over time and could become a standard for electronic publication. But the publishing industry didn't develop such a consistent, broadly supported standard to make it easier to create an infrastructure for integrating human knowledge. OEB was developed by the Association of American Publishers with the help of Microsoft and other companies, and the emphasis has been on safeguarding intellectual property and ensuring that the current economic and authority models hold sway.

Consequently, it's publishers, more than technical folks, who are excited by the e-book. It works the way publishers want -- that is, much differently from the World Wide Web. The Web was embraced so rapidly that it caught the content industry -- publishers, agents, music producers, even authors and other creators -- flatfooted. What's radical about the Web is its ability to connect people to things that interest them. Its structure presumes open access and encourages the free exchange of ideas, the linking to other sites, and the connection of carefully presented content with more-informal material. It empowers both amateurs and professionals to make their stuff public in new ways.

Nowhere in the Web's self-organizing tangle of interconnections, however, is there much structural encouragement for those who have authority over selecting, collecting, enhancing, or disbursing intellectual and creative content. The fact that no locus of control exists on the Web disquiets the many powerful people whose careers have been devoted to the care and feeding of such loci. "Disquiets" isn't quite right: "Scares the hell out of" is more apt.

These people have made a living by controlling who gets published and produced, what prices are charged, and similar issues. The trend toward "disintermediation" now looms for them like the perfect storm. They can see a future in which we won't require an industry of intermediaries.

The e-book tries to reverse that trend with retro glue -- mostly, I fear, to protect the deeply vested interests of for-profit publishing.

One of the catch phrases in the e-book seminars given by Microsoft and others is "don't get MP3ed," a reference to the free-music-file phenomenon that has music-industry executives worried about how long their careers may last. Unlike the Web (where open access is presumed unless specifically restricted), the OEB was designed to presume restricted access. An e-book producer who wants to give away an OEB document must specify that the book has a zero-dollar price. The producer can grant rights to browse, loan, print, and the like, but the basic assumption is no access without permission and payment.

The e-book also seems to glue the old "each book is an island" model to the electronic future, discouraging access to related, meaningful material. For-profit publishers will rarely link to anything else unless they already own it. At the same time, the e-book locks us into a page-centric, linear-narrative structure, instead of giving us a hyperlinked, contextualized document.

Finally, the e-book retro-glues to electronic publishing old models of intellectual-property ownership that encourage publishers to lock away content, restrict access, organize marketing and publicity, manage digital rights, sell each bit individually, register users with the proper authorities -- in general, to treat intellectual property like a commodity. The e-book allows the conglomerates that dominate publishing to further consolidate their control.

With e-books, publishers with sufficient resources can get the added bonus of a technical infrastructure that allows them to track reading patterns, prevent unauthorized access, and preclude secondhand reselling. E-books also make it easier than ever to charge a user for the right to quote material -- it's a snap to charge by the paragraph, once the content is coded with paragraph-level charging in mind. That requires an infrastructure to keep records of ownership and use, which raises costs and reinforces the need to charge for access. It also requires advertising, to entice people to buy something they can't browse or view on demand.

The costs all add up to a dramatic gamble of capital. The greater the initial gamble (a.k.a. an investment), the less likely that individual authors, filmmakers, or artists can take the gamble alone. While the old models of publishing may have required such huge investments up and down the "value chain," the easy access to material offered by the Web no longer justifies that framework.

For more than a decade, I've been arguing that publishers will still be valued in the electronically connected world of everything, everywhere, all the time. I still hold to that. But I also believe that today's trends point toward a different intellectual-property landscape from the one that informed old models of publishing.

In the past, it made sense to have a huge infrastructure for publishing, because the risk of publication was so high. To publish a book required a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars, to be recouped by selling enough copies to pay back the investment and then some. It made economic sense to hedge every bet with confirmation from agents, editors, and book buyers before publishing a book, and it made business sense for authors (notoriously bad in their judgment of their own work) to give a lion's share of the profit to the publishers taking the risks.

It still makes sense to do that in many cases, but the environment has changed: With digital technology, the risk can be made less dangerous, the outlay less extreme. Without the gamble of print runs, new publishing options -- and new opportunities -- open up.

We need to be asking how we can ensure that the virtues of the old system -- quality control, added value, selectivity, etc. -- can be maintained in the new environment. We need to make sure that creators get paid (although I believe that people will always find ways to support creative expression, albeit with perhaps less remuneration than the creators would wish). We must also take care that publishers aren't wiped out. They do far more than just vend books. They develop, enliven, enrich, and improve. Publishers are professionals; professionals almost always do a better job than amateurs; and customers are almost always willing to pay for quality. Centralized organization is often more efficient than alternative models. Yet we must also remember that publishing is not exclusively a business.

In short, I believe that our civilization ought to be able to do a lot better than reproducing the worst qualities of the current system. E-books aren't -- and shouldn't be -- the wave of the future. In truth, I'm expecting that the Open E-Book Standard will grow into a generally accepted code set for publications; that a free, creator-ready set of mechanisms will be invented to allow writers to present their work in an e-book format over which they will retain control, and for which they will get some form of direct payment.

I also find it unlikely that e-books will become a monopoly container for content. Rather, they will become one of the many ways we use digital tools to read, watch, and investigate our world. E-books will fill a niche, along with cheap Internet machines, broadband Web access, autonomous search agents, cell phones, PalmPilots, universal personalized access to the Internet, and other communication methodologies crowding the horizon.

But I also think that it's important to recognize the e-book for what it is: a cute technology that, while useful, has the jetsam of the past affixed with gooey retro glue.

Michael Jensen is director of publishing technologies at the National Academy Press.

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article