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

>just “Gone With The Wind”, not counting the hundreds of other

movies he owns…all from one vote of Congress… . .

Congress should not be allowed to write laws that create

windfall profits for 1% of the population and take away a

million books from all the rest.

Q. What does PG intend to do about the legislative asymmetry

between content producers and creators - and content

consumers? Lobby Congress? Testify? Protest? Organize

petitions? Place “Gone with the Wind” on the Internet and wait

for a show trial?

A. PG Australia already has done Gone With The Wind, as their

50th e-Book, that’s good enough for me at the moment.

Eldred v. Ashcroft was originally drafted as Hart V. Reno, but

the lawyers, Lessig & co, wouldn’t include one word of mine in

the case, so I fired them.

Q. Gutenberg texts are sometimes used as freebies within a

commercial (Monolithic, Wallnut Creek) or semi-commercial

product (such as the Public Domain Reader). Is this

acceptable? Why don’t you charge them a license fee?

A. Walnut Creek PG CD’s weren’t free and they sent us nice

donations. The commercial outfits have to pay for a license,

the non-commercial ones usually don’t. Each case is

separately decided. While we don’t do any ads on our sites, we

don’t insist that others don’t.

Q. Technology is often considered the antonym of “culture”.

TV, for instance, is berated for its vulgar, low-brow,

programming. Hollywood is often chastised for its indulgence

in gratuitous violence and sex.

A. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of

their audience. As long as these are “commercial applications”

that’s what you will get. What else could you possibly expect?

These are all examples of “capitalism gone awry”.

By the way, I’m not anti-capitalism, I really am an Ayn Rand

freak, figure that out…hee hee!

I am doing Project Gutenberg for the most selfish of reasons -

because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it.

Q. E-books are equated with low-quality vanity publishing.

Yet, PG seems to embody the conviction that technology can do

wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy,

civil society and so on.

A. e-Books do wonders for the dissemination of culture,

literacy, democracy, civil society and so on. You do realize

that the Declaration of Independence is/was the FIRST man-made

item in all of history that everyone can have, in as many

copies as they want. Do you realize that a 5 gigabyte section

of a hard drive can hold a million copies of that file,

uncompressed?

Terabyte drive systems are already available for only around

$2,500. Ten years from now 5T hard disk partitions will be

able to hold a billion copies.

Q. Are you a romantic believer in the power of technology to

bring progress?

A. Well, I’m certainly an incurable romantic, and I believe

that technology can bring progress, but I don’t know if they

are, or have to be, related… .

Q. And do you see any dangers in e-books and freely available

e-texts (e.g., hate speech)?

A. Once you start censoring, you are playing with Pandora’s

Box. Just look at what they are doing with Little Black Sambo,

who wasn’t even black, and with Uncle Remus, who was? This is

awful. “Song of the South” was required viewing when I was in

school and now I can’t even show this generation what we were

required to study when I was a kid…1984 really did arrive.

…

Q. In some ways, you “compete” directly with other bastions of

education - libraries and universities. How do you get along?

What about other repositories of knowledge such as Project

Bartleby? Governments?

 

A. Actually, we cooperate with them, not compete with them. We

make all our files available to them and encourage them to

make the texts available to everyone. Some of them view this

as competition, but we don’t. Some prefer to control

distribution…to be a gate that they can open and close at

will…We prefer the doors always to be open.

Have you ever considered why, with the hundred millions of

dollars granted to found e-Libraries at the major universities

some ten years ago, and undoubtedly hundreds of millions more

donated since then, why you are doing an interview with

someone sitting at a basement, running computer hardware and

software that is 10 and 20 years old?

If any college, or company, much less university, city,

county, state or country was willing to do this, you would

have never heard of me.

Q. What has been the personal cost? It must have been

frustrating and exhausting and elating and rewarding … In

retrospect: are you happy with it? Would you have done it

again?

A. I can’t think of anything more rewarding to do as a career

than Project Gutenberg. It is something that will reach more

people than any other project in all of history. It is as

powerful as The Bomb, but everyone can benefit from it. And it

doesn’t make a decent weapon. It doesn’t cost anyone anything

and it is the very first, though obviously primitive, example

of The Neo-Industrial Revolution, when everyone can have

everything - though they are sure to pass a law against it.

I said this in 1971, in the very first week of PG, that by the

end of my lifetime you would be able to carry every word in

the Library of Congress in one hand - but they will pass a law

against it. I realized they would never let us have that much

access to so much information. I never heard that they passed

the copyright extension 5 years later. It was pretty much a

secret, just as is the current one, unless the Supreme Court

strikes it down. Only then will it make the news.

Congress passed that copyright law together with impeachment

proceedings of President Clinton, just to make sure it never

made the news.

As far as the cost, the happiness, the frustration - I am a

natural born workaholic and idealist, so I overcome the

technical frustrations. It’s the social frustrations that are

the hardest to deal with, the people who want permanent

copyright, even though the extensions are already bringing

about “The Landed Gentry of the Information Age.”

Q. Any thought about the future?

Precedents set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Law could well have

an enormous unpredicted effect on computer applications of the

future. One such application is the “printing” of solid three

dimensional objects, often referred to as Rapid Prototyping,

or RP. These printers have been with us since the 1980’s and

now are in a price range of the 5 megabyte hard drives on the

first computer to house Project Gutenberg in 1971. If you

count the inflation factor, they obviously are much more

affordable.

In addition to cost reductions, these 3-D printers now can

print on a variety of materials. The list of printable

substances should expand over the years until we can

eventually print out actual working items, rather than the

models we print out today.

Given that very inexpensive printers today can print in

millions of colors, and that color computer printers were

pretty much non-existent 30 years ago, we should at least

consider the possibility that printers 30 years from now might

be able to “print” on an extremely wide variety of materials,

and that someday we will be able to “print out” a car and

drive it away.

This copyright law covers 95 years. Let’s look back to 95

years and see the “copyright” to what things we may want to

print out would have just now expired:

1. The Wright-Brothers’ airplane and blueprints.

2. A dozen brands of early automobiles.

3. Everything Edison invented until he was nearly 60.

Obviously there are many more.

The point here is that under current intellectual property

law, it would be difficult to print out anything invented

today that reached the market in two years - until 2100, a

time when these items would no longer have any use.

When the Star Trek Replicators become a reality, will it be

illegal to actually use them?

Will all food items be Genetically Manipulated Organisms so

that it will be impossible to find natural foods that could be

copied?

When I grew up in Washington state, there were plenty of wild

blackberries, raspberries, apple trees, pear trees, plum

trees, grapes. I never even considered buying any of these at

a store. But today there has been a serious effort to

discourage free food supplies, and not only in Washington, but

also in most other states.

Last night at dinner, one of our volunteers remarked that he

expected that by the end of his lifetime he might be eating a

dinner of replicated food. I pointed out that by that time -

“they” would make it very difficult to find any kind of food

not protected against replication by intellectual property

laws and that THAT was one of the major reasons for extending

copyright, so that WHEN it would be possible for everyone to

be well-read & well-fed, they will have made it illegal to do

so.

The trend is that everything should cost something. In some

places there are even machines that dispense a breath of fresh

air…for a price.

Do we really want to create a civilization in which everything

has a price…when there are machines that could copy

anything?

 

The E-Books Evangelist

Interview with Glenn Sanders

By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

 

Q. Why electronic publishing?

A. I was first introduced to electronic publishing on the

Internet in the late 1980s and became intrigued by the power

of this revolutionary development. Then, when Mosaic released

the first Web browser in 1992, the Internet finally had a

visual aspect. Suddenly, the vast Internet was transformed

from a dimly lit warehouse for data storage and exchange, to a

visible library and gallery for information. I was hooked.

 

In 1994, while teaching at a university in Japan, I created

what was probably one of the first (if not the first)

paperless reading classes. I taught myself HTML and built 26

Web-based reading lessons for the “comparative cultures”

course I taught there. The reading material in each lesson

linked to related websites and information. Instructions were

included for the exercises, which usually included finding

information or doing research somewhere on the Web. Students

emailed their results to me, and I emailed feedback and grades

to them. Students were not required to come to class, but were

required to turn in their “class work” results to me by Friday

evening.

 

Since then, I have created numerous Web sites, published a

number of electronic & print books, and hundreds of

articles. In the late 1990’s I saw the confluence of three

factors that foretold the electronic publishing and e-book

revolution. The first was the imminent ubiquity of the

Internet. Next, was the growing need for mobile access to

information, and the availability of so much data in the

digital domain.

Finally, I could see the day when technology would catch up

with my vision of a portable information tablet. As of summer

2002, I am still waiting, but technological developments are

rapidly nearing the time, probably somewhere around 2005, when

affordable, portable, readable, wireless reading devices will

reach the mass markets. The company where I work, Rolltronics

Corporation, is developing thin, flexible electronics

technology that will enable many of these devices in the

future.

 

While living in Japan and working at Fujitsu, Inc., I founded

eBookNet and began toying with the design of a next-generation

information display device. In 1998, I founded eBookNet.com,

which became a renowned Web site that provided news and

community services for the e-book and e-publishing industry

for several years.

 

In 1999, NuvoMedia (the company that pioneered the current

generation of electronic reading devices with its “Rocket

eBook” in 1998) acquired eBookNet and hired me. NuvoMedia