Rethinking "books" and "ebooks" -- stating the obvious (which often seems to be ignored.)

This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth.

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For the world's largest seller of books, that is a very limited definition of ebook, and an even more limited policy -- as if Microsoft needs to be part of the equation? Actually, I've been selling ebooks -- plain text on ordinary diskettes -- through Amazon for a couple years. And now I'm adding a line of audio-text books on CD ROM. You can find my works by searching their main catalog. But you'd never know I was in the ebook business from the ebook section of their site. In my righteous indignation, I wanted to send a message to Amazon, giving them an accurate definition of ebook.

So what is an ebook? What's going on? What's likely to happen? And how does this get tied into all the silliness over Napster?

A book in digital form is an ebook. It need not have a physical form that can be carried around.

In an ebook, the content may be stored as text (etext) and/or sound and/or images. It may then be copied, distributed, and output in a wide variety of ways. It may be distributed by email, ftp, on diskette, on CD-ROM, on DVD, etc. Its format may be plain text, HTML, SGML, PDF, or any of a variety of encrypted formats. Unless special restrictive technology is applied, an ebook can be freely copied to computers and from computer to computer and saved on digital storage media of all kinds. It can also be printed on a computer printer and read in paper form.

But what is a book? Surely, not just a large number of printed paper pages bound together, or a mechanical gadget for displaying text...

A book is a large and meaningful set of words. It can exist in many forms, both analog and digital, but its ultimate destination is the human mind.

Computers can remember any sequence of characters or code, regardless of whether it has meaning. But humans can only deal with lengthy content if it can be interpreted by them -- they can store very little raw data, but vast amounts of meaningful information. So you might say that when it comes to large sets of data, computers can store anything, but humans can only store books.

Today, very few people bother to memorize entire books. It takes talent, training, and dedication to do so. In our day, it would probably take the incentive of strong religious belief to accomplish such a monumental feat, like memorizing the Koran, when such easier means are readily available for saving and accessing book content. But when necessity dictates -- e.g., prior to written language and in imagined scifi worlds like Fahrenheit 451 -- humans can expand their memorizing capability far beyond what we consider normal today.

The content of a book can be created by a human, communicated from one human directly to another (by voice or other direct signals), or stored in code for later retrieval by him or someone else (if there is agreement on the code). The first codes were visual (written language and its forerunners on the walls of caves). A visual code can be implemented by hand (using a chisel, stylus, pen, etc.) on virtually any solid medium (including sand) or by the use of machinery (like printing presses and typewriters) on media designed for their use (such as paper or cloth).

In the past, whatever could be represented visually could be duplicated photographically. And whatever you could duplicate photographically, you could make multiple copies of, using printing equipment, at some cost. And whatever could be represented with sound could be recorded using analog media, like tape, and then duplicated or broadcast, at some cost.

Today whatever can be represented visually or in sound can be easily converted to digital form. Once in digital form, it can be stored, copied, and distributed at practically no cost.

The mind also converts sound to meaningful form to remember it -- as words or music or both combined. I hear a story and retell it to my kids. I hear a ballad and play and sing it to other audiences. I hear a tune, whistle it, sing it, play it on a variety of instruments, improvising along the way. Someone hears that and does likewise. The brain serves as a storage medium -- sometimes imperfect, sometimes creative.

So where does this lead us? What is the end point?

We need to remember that the human brain is the ultimate storage and retrieval device for books and music and that this means of storage and retrieval fundamentally involves interpretation and change. "Meaning" refers to the brain's interpretive power. We see or hear raw data and remember the "meaning" -- what results when we have decoded the data and adapted its content to our unique needs and perspectives.

Sooner or later technology will make it possible to vastly enhance the memory power of the human brain -- biologically, electronically, or a combination of both. Whether it's a pill or a microchip that provides the enhancement, the brain itself will become the primary storage medium for books -- just as it was in the days before written language.Today, advanced computers can store and retrieve everything that their user sees or hears over the Internet. In the future, your enhanced brain will be able to store and retrieve everything that it sees, reads, or hears.

In other words, sooner or later, books and music will be free. The pace of adoption of technology and the speed bumps of legislation can slow our approach to that point. But that's where we are headed.

In the digital world, what do you sell and buy when you sell and buy a book or a piece of music? In the past, you sold and bought physical objects that were needed to store the information. It cost money to reproduce those physical objects, so you paid enough to provide incentive for producers, manufacturers and distributors to perform their roles.

Now there is no physical object and there is little or no associated cost for reproducing, storing or distributing the content.

Today, publishers of books and music are fighting a rear-guard action, trying to artificially create in the digital world barriers to reproduction, storage, and distribution. They are doing this by means of encryption schemes and associated devices for reading books and playing music.

Mechanical and electronic devices (known as readers) may help and may even be needed to make the content of a book understandable. Such devices include print-to-audio converters, etext-to-voice converters, computers, cassette players, MP3 players, and specialized gadgets designed to deal with encrypted etexts.

Up until recently, the purpose of mechanical and electronic reading devices was to make books accessible by more people in more ways. The purpose of the new generation of readers is somewhat bizarre. Publishers deliberately make their content inaccessible through encryption, and electronics manufacturers sell devices and software designed to unencrypt that content and present it in usable and attractive form. You wind up paying them not just for the content, but for the means to solve the problem that they themselves created.

I hope that this is a temporary aberration -- an attempt to use technology to block the advances of technology and thereby allow old and obsolete business models to persist. I hope that both publishers and electronics manufacturers will eventually return to the task of making books accessible to more people in more ways.

Publishers are also depending on legal barriers to defend both their ownership of the content and their means for limiting access to it. They are turning to the courts again and again to fight off new threats. But since their content no longer needs to be embodied in physical objects, it becomes very difficult to trace where it goes and who copies it and stores it and redistributes it, or to figure out the path by which the copy on this computer got there. Also, in the past, if there was an instance of theft, in most instances, the perpetrators had the same economic incentive as the original producers -- they wanted to make, distribute, and sell physical copies of the content. If they were successful, they were easy to track down. And if they weren't successful, they were insignificant and not worth bothering about. But today, the folks who are copying, storing, and distributing books and music are doing so just to enjoy it and to share it. There are millions of them, all doing it on a small scale, and using technology that makes it easy for them to cooperate with one another without ever communicating directly with one another. Just imagine the enforcement nightmare that that presents.

It would be better for publishers to devote their money and their creativity to finding new business models that work in a world where books and music can be duplicated, stored and distributed for free, where they have no control over content once it has been made available to the public, just as they have no control over it once it has entered my mind.

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