Thursday, December 9, 2010

Commonplace Book: E-books Attractiveness and Brokenness


The fact of e-books being attractive to publishers and publishing trade does not outweigh the fact of e-books being broken along with e-pub. The conventional mind dictates that a broken thing must be fixed. But, first in order to fix something you must distinguish what are the problems. The problems with e-pub are numerous, but here are just a few and answers to the complications.

The digitization of book has been great as of late to the publishing business, but it has its various challenges. One of them is DRM which stands for digital rights management and also piracy. Does rights for digital works stop people from stealing? Cory Doctorow suggest that digital rights management does nothing and in article Freekonomics Doctorow pays homage to the ideas of a economic scholar and leading publisher Tim O' Reilly. O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation," which means some profit is taken of the top, but for the most there is a wealth of product for money to be made for publisher. As far as piracy it is the concerned the doctorate candidates data shows that pirated materials help in net sales music which can also be translated into dividends for e-books. The suggestion of Doctorow, Michael Jensen to stop piracy is give away some items for free. In most cases Jensen exclaims people police the items that are stolen on the internet and tell company. Even when one problem is met with a possible solution more arise.
One other fiasco with e-books is the sometimes attempting of purchase with ease on certain sites. The problem catergorizing e-books. The are suppose to come with metadata of information about the book and is sometimes not available. An one of the most avoidable problem is various text languages, but is due to competitiveness and a need to innovation in a crowded market. One uniform standard for e-book language is needed to give publishers one choice to format e-book. Open standards such markup text (XML, HTML) should automatically be put up for e-book readability. The open standards are good for engineering ideas, and community standards should be used for e-books. The discrepency lies in proprietary standards such as PDF and Java and that vie for stiff hold on market share for e-books being understood in the companies that produced e-code. To solve this jumble of massive e-text being used about for e-books, it should be an all war like as of late Blu-Ray and Hi-Def DVD. The winner of the DVD battle was Sony Blu-Ray. Now Sony's product is the standard format for high definition digital disc. The same can be afforded to happen in the publishing industry and of course to the victor go the spoils. This will only lighten the load of the brokenness of e-books and e-pub.
In close the attractiveness of the unmature segment of electronic publishing is what keeps the publishers interested. But to mature to full potential it must be nurtured and guided into full adulthood. The future will be only worked out by idealist and publishers willing to fix this teenage outbreak of problems.

Commonplace Book: E-books Attractiveness and Brokenness



As mankinds thought evovles better technologies are birthed. So has the book from humble beginnings written on stone tablets to papyrus fit together for codex books. The evolution of books as time has past is now the e-book. Just a responsible look at historical data shows how the uniformity of books have changed.

Robert Darton states in his book The Case For Books:

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned
to write...hieroglpyhs...about3200BC, alphabetical
writing to 1000 BC.According to scholars like
Jack Goody, writing was the most important technological
breakthrough in history humanity. It transformed mankind's
relation to past and opened a way for the emergence of the
book as a force in history (pp.21,22).

From the first manner of writings stems the technological past of books. Each era has made jumps to keep writ Holy or otherwise more stable and to have a longer life. E-books has brought about the continuity of technological change for original books to make them more appealing. With e-books there is no crumbling such as with clay tablets and quick aging as with papyrus an earlier scrolls types of writings. E-books not only is the evolved book but has a certain appeal.

Humans gravitate toward new technology overtime. The same with e-books the attractiveness of e-books came about like a late blooming teen. Though the industry of publishing has been peddling e-books for years, but they have just gained popularity with the masses. The industry has shown tremendous growth in e-sales yearly in just about every segment of the business. The late move on e-books has been because publishers have been skeptical of the e-future and holding on to the costly past of p-books Jason Epstein describes in article The New York Review of Books. This somewhat fear has kept publishers from forging through the e-publishing landscape and charting new territory of what is the beauty of e-pub.

The handsomeness in e-publishing is warehousing of books does not exist, which can become a problem when determining the life of book. The portability of the book is paramount especially if a publisher wants to sale to foreign market. A publisher can easily put their book in XML and various other e-formats and send off. For the consumer they can carry thousands of books in e-reader instead of having a few p-copies of books of interest. Publishers can take books already in backlist in transform them into e-books to little or no cost. There are various ways to sale e-books (i.e. chapters, bundled with print, and pages). Last but not least, every publishers dream e-books are sold on a no return basis. These are some reseasons of what make e-books grand to publishers and the industry.

Get ready for endless possiblities and bask in the splendor of the new publishing industry. Lead by a format that may be a bit broken, but seems not to die because of where existence dwells.