sBooks: Reinventing Reading

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had many friends and colleagues ask about using Apple’s new iPad as an e-reader.  Many of these folks had been thinking about a Kindle or a Nook but the iPad (and rumors of the iPad even earlier) offers an intriguing alternative.  Of course, the iPad is far more than an e-reader: it’s a portable media player, a mobile browser, and a possible netbook replacement.  But here’s how it stacks up as an e-reader, especially in contrast to current e-readers like the Kindle or Nook.

In a nutshell, current e-readers (like the Kindle or Nook) offer longer battery life and easy reading in natural light but are limited by a static grayscale display and an awkward interface.  The iPad offers a dynamic color display which supports video and animations and a touch-based interface but is limited by a relatively short battery life and screen readability issues, especially in natural light.   Apple is generally brilliant when it comes to user experience, so I expect that interface will be simple and natural in surprising and pleasant ways.

On the content side, it looks like Apple is signing up with all the big publishers, just as Amazon and B&N.  Apple has also said that they will be priced the same as the Kindle, though that might happen by publishers demanding (as they already have) that Kindle prices be raised.

As I’ve said before, the big content issue with e-books (on all the major platforms) is that they are more like software applications than books: they can’t be moved among vendors, due mostly to proprietary copy protection schemes (Amazon’s, Apple’s, or Adobe’s).  This won’t be an issue for the iPad, however, if the Kindle (etc) iPhone/iTouch apps work on the iPad.  This “big if” depends on Amazon (etc) being willing to support the iPad and Apple being willing to accept the applications.  It also isn’t known how readers will add their own e-books to the iPad, though it might be as simple as adding your own MP3s to an iPod using iTunes (and leaving Linux users out in the cold).

Outside of the content questions, then, the big downsides of the iPad are (relatively) short battery life and a display which (a) can’t be read in sunlight and (b) may have eyestrain issues for extended reading.

Battery life. In his introduction of the iPad, Steve Jobs cited an iPad battery life of 10 hours, which is pretty impressive and largely due to the fact that Apple built their own CPU for the iPad.  In an exchange with Walt Mossberg after Jobs’ presentation, Jobs commented that “nobody reads for 10 hours straight” which might be true now that the Harry Potter series is completed.  But the 1o-hour battery life means that you will probably need to recharge your iPad every night.  Depending on the individual, that might be easy to forget at home or hard to sustain when traveling.

However, ten hours is pretty miserable compared to the days and weeks of battery life provided by e-Ink based readers like the Kindle. For example, I once forgot my Kindle’s charger over a week’s vacation but finished all the novels I’d brought without a glitch (though I did turn off the Kindle’s wireless for the duration).

Reading outside.  On that same vacation, I often read outside, which would have likely been impossible on the iPad.  The iPad has a striking LCD display based on IPS technology (in-plane switching) which allows a broad viewing angle together with vibrant and accurate colors.  IPS also requires a strong backlight, which means the display is unlikely to be readable in sunlight.  I was personally disappointed that Apple didn’t go with Pixel Qi‘s low-power sunlight readable display technology.  This technology, which was originally developed for OLPC’s so-called $100 laptop, is featured in (for example) Notion Ink‘s Android-powered Adam tablet.

Eye strain? Computer displays have gotten much easier on the eyes over time, especially as their “refresh rates” have become imperceptible and as anti-aliased fonts have become more common.  But it’s not clear how the iPad display will stack up for e-reading.  Eye strain comes from how the eyes move, which can vary tremendously with task and context.  In a fascinating New York Times piece, I learned that our eyes make 10,000 movements/hour while reading.  Many of these motions are involuntary and can depend on “optical ergonomics” such as contrast or page width or typeface or spacing.

In this regard, the Kindle’s e-ink display is close to ink-on-paper (though the paper is a little grayish) which I find very easy on the eyes. I can read it for hours with no particular problems, providing the ambient light is adequate (as with ink on paper).

On the other hand, reading books on my iPhone, as I often do  waiting in lines, gets tiring after twenty or thirty minutes (as does the waiting in line!).  However, this might be do to the page width, or the screen glare, or any number of other factors.  It remains to be seen how the iPad will function in this regard.  (Stay tuned to this station).

In conclusion, the iPad will probably be an adequate e-reader and has the potential for much richer content and interaction than “traditional” e-readers.  For example, the sBooks experience will be much more satisfying on the iPad than it is on the Kindle or Nook.  The iPad may be especially appropriate for kinds of reading (magazines, colorful textbooks, graphic novels, etc) which current readers handle poorly if at all.

At the same time, the relatively short battery life (10 hours), the difficulty of outdoor reading, and the possibility of eyestrain issues will probably make it inadequate as a “read anywhere” device to replace your physical books.

“All aesthetics is functional, even if simply for our souls.”

Printed books are beautiful things.  Even the cheapest paperback, if you look closely, has the hallmarks of a process where individuals made thoughtful choices to enhance the reading experience.  From the chosen typeface to the page breaks to the spacing and separators, books are made to be read.  To see the importance of those choices, just send a large raw text file to your printer and try to read it!

In contrast, many e-Books are especially ugly even given the limitations of their form.  Early in my life as a Kindle owner, I bought the e-book of Poul Anderson’s “Brain Wave,” one of my favorite science fiction novels.  I was disturbed to find that the e-book rendering lost many structural cues, such as the appearance of breaks between sections within a chapter.

There are some great slides from Liza Daly which illustrate this problem (the names have been changed!) and make some points which I hadn’t originally realized.

One of the reasons for the ugliness is that e-book production is typically an afterthought on the print production process and is often out-sourced and based on unproofed versions of the text.  Furthermore, e-book renditions are often not proofed significantly by editors or publishers.

A deeper cause is that many print designers (and editors and publishers) have a prejudice about online design based on the ubiquity of bad design and the early days of the web.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Design is the process of thoughtfully making the choices you have around the choices you don’t.  Book designers have a huge number of design dimensions and  some significant constraints.  The constraints (beyond largely fixed content) are mostly financial in origin, such as the use of color, the size of pages and the linearity of their arrangement.  In the early days of online reading, the design space was nightmarish, because designers had very few choices and the choices they didn’t have were also variable, reflected in the diversity and adjustability of early browsers or display applications.

One of my friends and heroes at the MIT Media Lab was a graphic designer and visionary named Muriel Cooper.  Muriel was a character (in the best of senses) who had started the Visible Language Workshop at MIT after working as a book designer for MIT Press.  The work of Muriel and her students, starting in the 1980s, was about making new media (long before it was thus named) beautiful.

They started by fixing some obvious sources of ugliness: aliased fonts and crayola color models.  They went further to use the bleeding edge of technology to create new choices for designers, leveraging effects like three-dimensionality, translucency, or animated fonts.  Eventually, they developed models for how designs could automatically adapt to the devices or choices of readers.  These ideas found their way into online design by inspirational example, engagement with vendors, and passionate disciples.

Today it is possible to make beautiful online documents, even for the Web, using declared standards that are quickly converging towards ubiquity.  There are some lovely examples at the CSS Zen Garden and even some examples of e-books at the ePub Zen Garden.

There is no longer a good excuse for ugly e-books.

The iPad will apparently be using a proprietary Apple copy protection for its electronic books, according to an LA Times report which cites “anonymous publishing sources”.  This means that you won’t be able to read your Kindle or Barnes & Noble e-books on the iPad or your iPad books on other devices.

We should really refer to these products as a-books rather than e-books because they’re more like applications than books: they’re tied to a particular platform and vendor.  ”a-books” could also coincidentally stand for Apple-Books, Amazon-Books, or Adobe-Books, covering the three major flavors of DRM in use with digital books.  DRM stands for  ”digital rights management” and is (in all these cases) a kind of encryption used to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution.  The Sony and Nook e-readers both use DRM from Adobe Systems.  It isn’t yet known what kind of DRM will be used by Google Editions (though it might be interesting).

This isn’t really new, since most e-books already come with DRM which ties them to a particular platform, but there seemed to be some hopeful convergence on Adobe’s DRM with its adoption by multiple vendors, leaving Amazon as the odd man out with the proprietary DRM.  (Of course, the reliance on Adobe isn’t ideal either).  However, Apple’s decision changes all of this.

The iPad’s book reading application will reportedly use Apple’s own FairPlay DRM, which they use for movies and TV shows and (until recently) music.  This is distinct from the Adobe DRM used on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony readers, and other products.  It is also distinct from the DRM used on Amazon’s Kindle, though the Kindle also has an entirely different e-book format altogether, rather than the ePub format which everyone else seems to be using.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the existing iPhone reader applications, especially the offerings from Kindle and Barnes & Noble (and more interesting ones from other sources).  If Apple lets these applications work on the iPad, you will be able to read your Kindle and Barnes & Noble books on your iPad, just not with the native reading application.  It would also let creative developers come up with even better ways of using the iPad as an e-reader.

However, Apple has an explicit policy of barring applications which replace core functionality.  That was one explanation of Apple’s rejection of the “Google Voice” application which got some anti-trust attention last year.  It is also the reason that alternative web browsers are not generally available in the App Store.  Will this policy bar those kinds of applications not that there is new native functionality?  It would be a questionable move on Apple’s part, but certainly conceivable.  One interesting move would be to provide a way that those applications could connect to the native iPad “bookshelf” and to offer/require that purchasing on the iPad happen through Apple’s in-app purchase infrastructure (where Apple gets a cut).

In the long run, there’s a slightly more than philosophical argument that a given product is not “really” a book (with its connotations of durability and portability) if it’s tied to a device or vendor.  If that’s the case (and books continue to exist), these a-books are a transitional form awaiting either some kind of open and portable DRM (not an oxymoron) or the evolution of publishing beyond dependence on DRM (as has happened in music).  In this scenario, there’s a chance that early adopters (like myself) will end up as either victims (losing purchases to vendor evolution) or criminals (breaking the DRM on books we’ve purchased so we can read them on different devices).   But I’m hoping for a better outcome!

e-Books aren’t owned, they’re licensed.  There are various reasons for this policy (on the part of publishers) which has some serious consequences for both consumers and culture.  On the consumer side, it enables device lock-in and makes e-books more ephemeral (your device could die or your vendor could stop supporting it).  On the culture side, it largely erases books from physical history and diminishes the creation of “hybrid value” brought to books by readers and communities.

In most cases, when you buy an e-book, you are actually getting a license to read it, not genuine ownership.  This is the case with nearly all e-book distributors, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  Google, the coy elephant debutante of the e-book world, has been careful in their formal language to talk about “providing access” to books, rather than selling them, suggesting that their cross-platform cloud-based solution will take this even further.

There are many reasons for the trend away from ownership:

• publishers think digital copyrights are barely worth the paper they aren’t written on, believing licenses (together with DRM) give them more protection from revenue loss through piracy and fair use;
• special restrictions are more easily included in licenses (e.g. no resale, no robo-read-aloud, device limitations, etc);
• those restrictions can give more flexibility in pricing models, which is how publishers recover investment in a largely speculative business;
• licensing opens the way for other revenue models, like subscriptions, for publishers and distributors to explore;
• licensing is the norm in the software world and the rest of the digital media world, partially to restrict rights for consumers and liability for vendors.

It would be nice to believe that ownership and licensing are equivalent for consumers, since both come down to “you pay and you read”.  Unfortunately, it’s not the case.  Some of the consumer consequences include:

• vendor lock-in: I can’t read my Kindle book on my Nook (or my Linux netbook);
• 1984 redux: Amazon could (ironically) delete copies of 1984 from buyers’ digital shelves because those buyers (probably) lived in nations where they had fewer rights than people in other places (1984 is out of copyright in some parts of the world but not in the US, due to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act);
• no sharing: I can’t lend my e-book to a friend or family member; even the Nook’s much-touted sharing features are extremely limited (you can share a book exactly once and only if the publisher allows);
• ephemerality: if a vendor goes away (either entirely or in part) and your e-book is under DRM, you will have “access” to a very random string of bytes (of course, Google and Adobe and Amazon are too big to fail, right?)

Given these issues for the consumer, I’m surprised that I buy e-books in the volume that I do.  But the convenience is compelling (a roomful of books in my briefcase) and I’m gambling that the market will drive some of the deficits away while grandfathering in my digital investment to date.  But the end of ownership has consequences for intellectual culture that are more serious, especially the diminishing of intellectual history and hybrid value.

Book ownership is one foundation of intellectual history for both individuals and the culture.  The books on our shelves constitute a history of our learning and thinking; our own shelves can yield reflection, insight, and inspiration; browsing someone else’s shelves can offer us a glimpse of their minds.  Though browsing a digital shelf might give the same opportunities (or potentially better ones!) for reflection and disclosure, their reliance on cloud-based data could make that impossible.  Repressive regimes make a big deal out of burning books as a way to cement their domination, and the end of ownership will make that even easier (with a reduced carbon footprint, of course).

In his 2009 op-ed piece defending the controversial Google Books’ Settlement, Sergey Brin compared their effort to saving the Library of Alexandria.  Ironically, the swathes and swatches of knowledge which survived that ancient calamity did so because there were many copies (some translations) of the works in many places.  Ownership, physically at least, saved the day and gave us what survived.

A second casualty of the end of ownership is to the creation of hybrid value by readers.  When I buy a book, my rights to the book (to mark up, to lend, to hang on to, to be found by future generations, to resell), allow me to add value to that book for myself and my community.  A book that I can talk about with friends is more interesting than a book just for my personal enjoyment.  A book that I (or a student, child, or friend) can return to in 10 years has more value than is contained in the moment of reading.  The five musty volumes of “Tom Swift” I found in my grandparents’ attic touched me more than the complete set that I now have on my Kindle.  It’s not just about accessibility, but about personal relevance.

Hybrid value is what enables serious intellectual discourse.  Academic publication, with its lists and chains of references, was the original “remix culture” where the value of a contribution included the vitality of its intellectual offspring.  In principle, digital technologies should make this discourse even richer and, in the short term, technologies like “Google Scholar” have been boons to conversation and scholarship.  But the end of ownership puts the traditions of distributed intellectual stewardship at risk.

What to do?  Here are a few ideas and I’d love to hear more:

• embrace open and common standards for packaging (e.g. epub .vs. mobi/azw);
• insist on vendor-independent “survivable” DRM (often social DRM) or no DRM at all;
• create frameworks for capturing and sharing user added value (that’s what we’re trying to do with sBooks);
• personally backup your cloud-stored e-books in anticipation of either distributor disaster or improved openness.

One of the biggest issues in e-book publishing today is the incompatibility of formats across vendors.  Right now, without invoking digital arcana and probably violating a EULA or two, I can only read my Kindle books on a Kindle or the Kindle app for my iPhone.  I can’t read them on my computer or a Sony Reader or any other device I might purchase (from anyone but Amazon).  The same is true for e-books purchased from Barnes and Noble or Sony’s online store.  The difference (see below) isn’t just in technical standards (written in malleable code) but in DRM implementation and policy (partially written in obdurate contracts and agreements).

The diversity and incompatibility of e-book formats is a pain for consumers and also threatens the renaissance of engaged reading as a basis for social and intellectual discourse (part of what sbooks.net is all about).  However, the dominance of a single format and vendor (with Amazon the front-runner) would be even worse.

The market power of a dominant non-portable e-reader is especially insidious because books are a long-term investment and the more books one buys, the more one is locked into a particular vendor and their e-reader.  This makes it hard for consumers to change and essentially crystallizes early market dynamics (where we are right now).

Having a dominant vendor and platform is bad for both readers and publishers.  For readers, we’ll find a technology which should have expanded innovation and increased choice does the exact opposite.  Instead of the innovation and growth which accompanied the open-by-design Internet, we will have progress which is slow and limited by a single organization’s strategy.  Some publishers might actually be attracted to this scenario, but they pursue it at their peril.

Publishers lose in this scenario because the market power of a single vendor/format is tremendous.   Big book chains (like Borders) and e-tailers (like Amazon) already use their scale and scope (in terms of outlets or registered accounts/credit cards) to wield pressure over publishers and limit competition (though sometimes in the publishers’ interest).  Having a dominant vendor with a non-portable format will result in shrinking margins for publishers and will hit smaller publishers (with less negotiating power) earliest, leading to reduction in choice.

As the title suggested, in the e-book world, a proprietary non-portable format is like owning an alphabet, enabling the vendor to be a gatekeeper for publishers’ access to the market.  While there will certainly be alternate channels (like ink-on-paper), the absence of an easy way to “rip” purchased books (as you can CDs) makes the advantage even stronger than for music publishing.  And because there is no portable open format (like MP3, which iTunes supported), Jeff Bezos will end up having much more power to dictate to publishers than Steve Jobs ever did, to nearly everyone’s detriment.

– Ken Haase

Geektails: One basic incompatibility is in container formats, with Amazon supporting only Mobipocket-derived formats (they now own Mobipocket, but run it as a separate business) and everyone else apparently converging on the (technically better) EPUB format.  But the deeper incompatibility is the DRM (digital rights management) which is essentially a plug-in for EPUB, so different readers may all support EPUB but still be incompatible for DRM’d books.  And with most of the publishing industry convinced that they can’t live without DRM, this means we have many flavors of incompatibility.

The much-debated Google Book Settlement (GBS) is almost a great idea. Without a doubt, it opens up a vast pool of previously inaccessible information.

To understand how great an idea the GBS almost is, I put together the following back-of-the-spreadsheet graphs:

The green represents orphans or neglected books, the blue represents public domain texts, and the orange represents in-print copyrighted texts.  The left-hand graph represents the accumulation of titles over time, separating out books in-print, books out-of-copyright, and “neglected” or orphan (a term coined by Brewster Kahle for works whose rights’ owners cannot be found). The right-hand pie chart shows the distribution across these categories in 1998, where my low-hanging data end.

The graph is based on US census data about new book titles (from 1881 to 1998, convenient abstracted by Swivel) and two assumptions: that effective US copyright is 95 years (in fact, it varies in peculiar ways) and that (on average) books stay in-print for five years (probably an overestimate). I’d be delighted to get better data or assumptions, but these seem to be in the right ballpark.

The Google Books project is such a great idea because it takes the
mostly inaccessible 82% of content represented by the green and blue
regions and makes it accessible on the web. Almost everyone agrees that the Google Book project is a great idea.  The Google Book Settlement …errr… not so much.

The GBS gives Google the right to effectively publish most out-of-print content (the green region) at limited cost and no risk of liability. Everyone else, on the other hand, runs the risk of a $150,000/infringement liability for putting exactly the same stuff out there. Critics reasonably argue that this gives Google a de-facto monopoly over much of that huge swath of content. Google argues that it’s not a monopoly because anyone else could risk the multi-millions in liability, get sued, and make their own deal for further hundreds of millions of dollars (okay, they don’t put it that way). This limits Google’s competition to bold and deep-pocketed players, which is a pretty small circle. For small tech companies (like my own, to be honest), Google’s de-facto monopoly is especially harmful because it cannot be “innovated around” like other kinds of monopolies (for instance, patent-based or infrastructure-based monopolies).

To be fair, Google’s monopoly does not extend to the public domain (the blue sliver) and the GBS will increase the public domain (turning green into blue) by identifying works which didn’t have their copyrights renewed back when copyrights had to be renewed.  It will also identify the actual rights owners in those cases where they can be found (though it’s unlikely that a competitor could get terms equivalent to Google).  However, these will likely be small advantages and the GBS still puts Google into a unique safe harbor while also making it the “publisher of default” for out-of-print books not contested by verifiable owners.

There is an alternative, which is orphan copyright legislation (HR5889 and S2913) which was making solid progress in the previous (110th) Congress and would reduce the potential liability for everyone and not just Google.  It was based in part on a report from the Register of Copyrights.  The passage of this legislation would lessen the negative impact of the GBS and unblock numerous efforts, public and private, to open up the “green field” represented in the graphs above.  Unfortunately, the GBS has taken the wind out of the sails of that legislation, which has not been re-introduced in this Congress.  Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (whose massive book-scanning efforts preceded Google’s), a vocal critic of the GBS, recently urged Google to withdraw from the GBS and support this legislation.

There are also a variety of “author’s rights” concerns about the GBS, legal concerns about the class action suit which led to the settlement, and international copyright concern.  There are also concerns about the representativeness of the class and that the settlement is more a commercial transaction than a legal action.

The plaintiffs (represented by the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers) together with Google are currently trying to modify the agreement to address those various concerns while (presumably) maintaining the central role of the plaintiffs (as class
representatives and in administering the settlement) and preserving most of Google’s (closely held) sheaf of business models. We can only hope (and lobby) that the changes are radical enough to dismantle the potential monopolies it creates and satisfy the constitutional purpose of copyright, which is to serve the public interest.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle.  Its convenience — a bookcase in my backpack — has changed the way I read, led me to to expand my variety of reading, increased my book-buying, and reinvigorated my interest in great classics.  But the Kindle (and competing e-readers) still have some big issues:

1. Navigation.  Reading linearly on a Kindle is delightful, but scanning back or forward is painful, much more so than with a physical book.  It’s ironic, since non-linearity is one of the hallmarks of new media and the Kindle is awful at it.
2. Search.  Who needs navigation when you have full-text search?  Even if this were true in principle, search on the Kindle reminds me of how bad simple keyword search can actually be.  We’re spoiled by modern web search engines which leverage context and linking patterns to improve results.  Normal e-books don’t have that advantage, so search all too often veers towards either keyword roulette or result overload.
3. Sharing.  I like talking about books and their ideas and consequently like to lend out or share my physical books, a kind of interaction which is generally impossible for purchased e-books.  Being online and often networked, you would expect e-books to be more social, but the opposite is true.
4. Ownership.  When I buy an e-book, I don’t actually own the book, I license it.  This rules out many things that I take for granted with physical books, like resale, long-term persistence, or other kinds of personal control.  I’m not sure why this is so, since the copyright applies to the content and not the medium.
5. Lock-in.  When I’ve bought a Kindle book, I can’t read it on a non-Kindle reader (the same is true for the Sony reader), due to both different file formats and (more significantly) different DRM (digital rights management) schemes.  The problem with lock-in (beyond the inconvenience) is that it substantially distorts the market, giving vendors huge leverage over both readers and publishers.

Even with these problems, I’m still buying Kindle books and enjoying the device’s convenience.  I’m hoping and working to ensure that new approaches to the reading experience (sbooks.net), alternative business models, and more open architectures will win the day.