Regarding the very modern ebook machine thing

At the conclusion of his column in the July/August issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby – a popular novelist with an aptitude for imparting his reading habits – promised:

‘In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern ebook machine thing. It’s the future.’

The future, the one that used to be around the corner but nowadays has converged on the present. Publishers and technologists and corporations predict that the future of reading will be defined by a single portable device (a dedicated eReader or more generalised tablet), similar in size to a printed book, which contains whole libraries of electronic data files known as ebooks. Cory Doctorow joked at his Meanland lecture earlier this month: ‘anytime someone mentions the word “ebook”, everyone crowds closer because they want to make sure the future involves them.’

With the release last week of the Sony Reader – an end to the almost six-year wait for Australian readers – the future does seem to be on the horizon, although antipodeans could be mistaken for thinking it’s trapped in a digital traffic jam. Confusion abounds, especially around issues of Digital Rights Management and how they presently impact eReaders and ebooks in Australia.

In ‘Another mystery: buying e-books overseas’, NYT columnist David Pogue remarked:

It always blows my mind when media companies deliberately prevent us from buying their stuff. When there are certain TV shows you can’t legitimately buy online, in any form. When certain books are unavailable as e-books in any format.

One of Pogue’s readers wrote from Spain with a complaint that unless you’re in the US, all sorts of copyright restrictions apply to the purchase of ebooks for your reader (in this instance he was speaking of the Kindle). He could, however, legitimately purchase an identical print copy of the book online from Amazon – the same company that owns the Kindle and profits from the ebooks downloaded for them (except those pesky out-of-copyright ones).

The best metaphor for the DRM issue came from Doctorow himself:

‘Imagine audiences buy your books through the iPad’ … As a creator, you could not authorise users to move to the Kindle if, for some reason, you decided to move platforms (or distributor). ‘It would be like Borders telling customers they could only use IKEA bookcases on which to shelve their books.’ If you as creator decide to change stores, you have to be certain that all those customers will follow – meaning they have to throw away all of their old books and buy new ones, or be satisfied owning parallel collections.

In other words: DRM affects ebooks. Ebook readers, on the other hand, are affected by formats. So the difficulty of eReading in Australia comes in where format issues and DRM meet. If you had a DRM-free ePub ebook, you would be able to read it on most ebook readers, but without conversions you’ll still have problems reading in on an out-of-the-box Kindle.

Therein lies the misconception. Or perhaps the misconception is exacerbated by linguistic similarities. For instance, an ePub is an ‘electronic publication’ but it is also a format of ebook. More accurately, it is a file format standard for the ebook, established by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which can work across platforms, devices and purposes. It is also not tied to a single publisher, unlike Amazon Kindle’s ebook format.

This is a problem: publishers place DRM on books, and this DRM is then also ebook-reader dependent due to restrictive software.

Let us use as an example Sony’s deal with REDgroup, owners of Border and Angus & Robertson stores in Australia. This collaboration works in two ways: Sony Reader users are pushed into buying ebooks from REDgroup because of licensing and availability. These books can then only be read on one of the Sony readers (and presumably the Kobo reader). One flattering journalist reported, ‘This arrangement will mean that Readers are set up to quickly and easily access these familiar stores for those who aren’t necessarily technologically savvy.’ In contrast, the Kindle Review wrote: ‘Apple and B&N are using custom DRM that renders their ebooks unusable on each other’s and Sony’s devices.’

Any which way you turn, it’s the consumer who loses in this equation. Even with their monopoly on the Australian market, REDgroup is still limited by the licensing agreements that currently restrict digital downloads in Australia. REDgroup already promotes the Kobo reader, which even now only has limited content available. Yet, according to the Book Bee website, things are looking up for the antipodean eAdventurer when it comes to the Sony reader and digital content.

But one thing we can all agree on? Longevity is yet to be seen on the ebook market (short of text files from Project Gutenberg). It’s an evolving market and field and none of the readers or tablets have matured. If you buy DRM ebooks now, there’s a very real possibility that these could be unreadable in future. It all depends on how the market and the device develops. We are not certain where this DRM-controlled future is headed; all we can be certain of is that there are many people with vested financial interests afraid of losing money. ‘The reason DRM is a bad idea,’ says Doctorow, ‘is because it locks creators in to platforms without delivering what it’s supposed to be delivering. And everybody involved in DRM legislation has a financial stake in legislating DRM.’

Kindle Review asks: ‘What’s the point of ePub if every company adds its own DRM on top of it and makes it unable to work on other ePub devices?’ They argue that the ‘format problem’ is different to the ‘openness problem’. Ideologically we can want open unrestricted formats that work across devices and platforms, but practically we just need a format that works across devices. In other words, who cares who has the monopoly? Not readers, implies Kindle Review.

But look around at all those heavyweights salivating at the prospect of controlling all the digital copyright and content. To borrow from Doctorow again: ‘If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit.’ Because what is the point of all this DRM? It’s not preventing piracy. The main thing it’s doing is limiting and frustrating readers and writers.

The real hope, for our personal libraries, our bank accounts, our sanity and our political wellbeing, can be found in non-DRM ePub ebooks – an open standard, which has always been the central aim of many developers and creators. Of course, you can always go forth and ‘Build a digital book with ePub’ – but it’s a bit like building your own bookshelf: laborious and painful unless you’ve got the background. Another alternative is Calibre, a free open-source ebook library management application, which let you easily convert between ebook formats, allowing you, the reader, to choose when and what you read.

Then again, perhaps you, like Hornby, ask what’s the point:

The advantage handed the eReading business by copyright laws hadn’t really occurred to me before I helped myself, but it spells trouble for publishers of course; Penguin and Co. make a lot of money selling books by people who are long dead, and if we all take the free downloading route, then there will be less money for the living writers. In a spirit of self-chastisement, I bought a copy of Our Mututal Friend immediately, even though I have one already. It won’t do any good, in the long run, because we are all doomed.

Admittedly, I, like Hornby, haven’t read a whole book electronically. Guess I’ll have to assign myself some homework for the week so I can weigh in on the deliberation of doomed or not.

*I was going to offer a summary of the readers currently on offer in Australia, but have run out of space. Why would I need to anyway, when Book Bee and Book Thingo already have your backs?