E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (summer reading list txt) 📖

(fortified

by ever more potent technologies) and the arts and

craftsmanship crowd never ceased and it is raging now as

fiercely as ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes,

and conferences. William Morris started the “private press”

movement in England in the 19th century to counter what he

regarded as the callous commercialization of book publishing.

When the printing press was invented, it was put to commercial

use by private entrepreneurs (traders) of the day. Established

“publishers” (monasteries), with a few exceptions (e.g., in

Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy) shunned it and

regarded it as a major threat to culture and civilization.

Their attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing or corporate-controlled publishing today.

But, as readership expanded (women and the poor became

increasingly literate), market forces reacted. The number of

publishers multiplied relentlessly. At the beginning of the

19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes

allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first,

black and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and

anatomical charts, and other graphics to their books. Battles

fought between publishers-librarians over formats (book sizes)

and fonts (Gothic versus Roman) were ultimately decided by

consumer preferences. Multimedia was born. The e-book will,

probably, undergo a similar transition from being the static

digital rendition of a print edition - to being a lively,

colorful, interactive and commercially enabled creature.

The commercial lending library and, later, the free library

were two additional reactions to increasing demand. As early

as the 18th century, publishers and booksellers expressed the

fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Two

centuries of accumulated experience demonstrate that the

opposite has happened. Libraries have enhanced book sales and

have become a major market in their own right.

VI. The State of Subversion

Publishing has always been a social pursuit and depended

heavily on social developments, such as the spread of literacy

and the liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As

every new format matures, it is subjected to regulation from

within and from without. E-books (and, by extension, digital

content on the Web) will be no exception. Hence the recurrent

and current attempts at regulation.

Every new variant of content packaging was labeled as

“dangerous” at its inception. The Church (formerly the largest

publisher of bibles and other religious and “earthly” texts

and the upholder and protector of reading in the Dark Ages)

castigated and censored the printing of “heretical” books

(especially the vernacular bibles of the Reformation) and

restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of

controlling book publishing. In 1559, it published the Index

Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”). A few

(mainly Dutch) publishers even went to the stake (a habit

worth reviving, some current authors would say…). European

rulers issued proclamations against “naughty printed books”

(of heresy and sedition). The printing of books was subject to

licencing by the Privy Council in England. The very concept of

copyright arose out of the forced registration of books in the

register of the English Stationer’s Company (a royal

instrument of influence and intrigue). Such obligatory

registration granted the publisher the right to exclusively

copy the registered book (often, a class of books) for a

number of years - but politically restricted printable

content, often by force. Freedom of the press and free speech

are still distant dreams in many corners of the earth. The

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other

privacy invading, dissemination inhibiting, and censorship

imposing measures perpetuate a veteran if not so venerable

tradition.

VII. The More it Changes

The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the

history of the book teaches us anything it is that there are

no limits to the ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and

booksellers, re-invent old practices. Technological and

marketing innovations are invariably perceived as threats -

only to be adopted later as articles of faith. Publishing

faces the same issues and challenges it faced five hundred

years ago and responds to them in much the same way. Yet,

every generation believes its experiences to be unique and

unprecedented. It is this denial of the past that casts a

shadow over the future. Books have been with us since the dawn

of civilization, millennia ago. In many ways, books constitute

our civilization. Their traits are its traits: resilience,

adaptation, flexibility, self re-invention, wealth,

communication. We would do well to accept that our most

familiar artifacts - books - will never cease to amaze us.

 

The Affair of the Vanishing Content

 

By: Sam Vaknin

 

http://www.archive.org/

“Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such

rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm.

Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed

it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem

properly.”

(Stewart Brand, President, The Long Now Foundation )

Thousands of articles and essays posted by hundreds of authors

were lost forever when themestream.com surprisingly shut its

virtual gates. A sizable portion of the 1960 census, recorded

on UNIVAC II-A tapes, is now inaccessible. Web hosts crash

daily, erasing in the process valuable content. Access to web

sites is often suspended - or blocked altogether - because of

a real (or imagined) violation by the webmaster of the host’s

Terms of Service (TOS). Millions of other web sites - the

results of collective, multi-annual, transcontinental efforts

- contain unique stores of information in the form of

databases, articles, discussion threads, and links to other

web sites. Consider “Central Europe Review”. Its archives

comprise more than 2500 articles and essays about every

conceivable aspect of Central and Eastern Europe and the

Balkan. It is one of countless such collections.

Similar and much larger treasures have perished since the dawn

of the digital age in the 1920’s. Very few early radio and TV

programs have survived, for instance. The current “digital

dark age” can be compared only to the one which followed the

torching of the Library of Alexandria. The more accessible and

abundant the information available to us - the more devalued

and common it becomes and the less institutional and cultural

memory we seem to possess. In the battle between paper and

screen, the former has won formidably. Newspaper archives,

dating back to the 1700’s are now being digitized - testifying

to the endurance, resilience, and longevity of paper.

Enter the “Internet Libraries”, or Digital Archival

Repositories (DAR). These are libraries that provide free

access to digital materials replicated across multiple

servers (“safety in redundancy”). They contain Web pages,

television programming, films, e-books, archives of discussion

lists, etc. Such materials can help linguists trace the

development of language, journalists conduct research,

scholars compare notes, students learn, and teachers teach.

The Internet’s evolution mirrors closely the social and

cultural history of North America at the end of the 20th

century. If not preserved, our understanding of who we are and

where we are going will be severely hampered. The clues to our

future lie ensconced in our past. It is the only guarantee

against repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. Long gone

Web pages cached by the likes of Google and Alexa constitute

the first tier of such archival undertaking.

The Stanford Archival Vault (SAV) in Stanford University

assigns a numerical handle to every digital “object” (record)

in a repository.

 

The handle is the clever numerical result of a mathematical

formula whose input is the number of information bits in the

original object being deposited. This allows to track and

uniquely identify records across multiple repositories. It

also prevents tampering. SAV also offers application layers.

These allow programmers to develop digital archive software

and permit users to change the “view” (the interface) of an

archive and thus to mine data. Its “reliability layer”

verifies the completeness and accuracy of digital

repositories.

The Internet Archive, a leading digital depository, in its own

words:

“…is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with

major historical significance — and other “born-digital”

materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with

institutions including the Library of Congress and the

Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record

of public material.”

Data storage is the first phase. It is not as simple as it

sounds. The proliferation of formats of digital content has

made it necessary to develop a standard for archiving Internet

objects. The size of the digitized collections must pose a

serious challenge as far as timely retrieval is concerned.

Interoperability issues (numerous formats and readers)

probably requires software and hardware plug-ins to render a

smooth and transparent user interface.

Moreover, as time passes, digital data, stored on magnetic

media, tend to deteriorate. It must be copied to newer media

every 10 years or so (“migration”). Advances in hardware and

software applications render many of the digital records

indecipherable (try reading your word processing files from

1981, stored on 5.25” floppies!). Special emulators of older

hardware and software must be used to decode ancient data

files. And, to ameliorate the impact of inevitable natural

disasters, accidents, bankruptcies of publishers, and

politically motivated destruction of data - multiple copies

and redundant systems and archives must be maintained. As time

passes, data formatting “dictionaries” will be needed. Data

preservation is hardly useful if the data cannot be searched,

retrieved, extracted, and researched. And, as “The Economist”

put it (“The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 22nd,

2001), without a “Rosetta Stone” of data formats, future

deciphering of stored the data might prove to be an

insurmountable obstacle.

Last, but by no means least, Internet libraries are Internet

based. They themselves are as ephemeral as the historical

record they aim to preserve. This tenuous cyber existence goes

a long way towards explaining why our paperless offices

consume much more paper than ever before.

 

Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property

By: Sam Vaknin

Three years ago I published a book of short stories in Israel.

The publishing house belongs to Israel’s leading (and

exceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which

stated that I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the

sales of the book after commissions payable to distributors,

shops, etc. A few months later (1997), I won the coveted Prize

of the Ministry of Education (for short prose). The prize

money (a few thousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing

house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the

book belongs to them because they own the copyright.

In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses,

the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like

this : if the rights to intellectual property were not defined

and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on

the risks associated with publishing books, recording records,

and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative

people will have suffered because they will have found no way

to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it

is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the

refrain.

But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very

limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only

select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation

(most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael

had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come

close to deriving subsistence level income from their

profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly

creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property

rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael

Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least

as much as they are artists.

Economically and rationally, we should expect that the

costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its

market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.

Consider a publishing house.

A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potential

audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like

this) - would have to be priced at a a