Digital Reading Part Two: Virtually Free

I find that there's an odd fragility to the concept of the digital book. Short of a big fire, my physical library is almost immortal. Parts of it are more worn around the edges than others, but there's a good chance that even with wear and tear a lot of those books will be around after I'm dead.

The digital library? Back up often - one drive crash and you're wiped out. Even more of an issue is obsolescence. If you hitch your literary wagon to a particular proprietary format, you may find that it's unreadable in a few years as support for the technology vanishes. As an example, I have graphics files from ten years ago that I would have trouble opening right now due to changes in format, version, and in some cases because the software developer went out of business and their product was never updated to the current operating system. Now imagine the same problems with your ebook version of The Lord of the Rings.

However, many of the same comments would apply to digital music, and it hasn't stopped most of the world from switching over to iPods. And it would seem that ebooks are going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, as demonstrated by the plethora of overly-expensive (in my opinion) digital readers that are popping up in the stores. But high-priced hardware is only part of the problem. After all, buying a reader is just the first step - you'll probably want some books too...

Logic - a sadly flawed device for analyzing these situations - would suggest that ebooks would be cheaper than their physical cousins. To my astonishment, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon's Kindle bookstore lists digital bestsellers ranging from $7.00 to $12.00 and claims this as a saving because the hardcover editions sell for about $26. Unfortunately, not quite as much of a saving when compared to the paperback that most of us would buy anyway.

Surprisingly, there's actually an acceptable number of options online for those of us in search of less expensive virtual reading, some of which are aimed directly at the science fiction and fantasy audience.

Topping the list is the venerable (by internet standards) institution of Project Gutenberg, which actually dates back to 1971 and got its start on the University of Illinois mainframe. Gutenberg is based on a very simple idea: free text files of books that have passed into the public domain.

For a genre reader with a taste for the classics, Gutenberg is a bonanza: the Oz books; the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Tarzan and Mars books; the text of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, which introduced the term "robot" to the world; Skylark and Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith (staples of my early experience with SF); classic fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard; stories by H. Beam Piper; novels by Andre Norton - the list goes on and on, and it's all free.

For the reader whose preferences are a bit more modern, Baen Books offers a surprising selection of free books at the Baen Free Library, a basic web site that offers over a hundred different novels for download: mostly SF with a leavening of fantasy. Updates are irregular, but the books listed would make up a pretty good foundation for anyone's ebookshelf. There's also a site called The Fifth Imperium that offers downloads of Baen's free promo CDs, which include ancillary material such as cover artwork or interviews as well as the stories.

The Manybooks site falls between Baen and Gutenberg, with its base offering coming from Gutenberg but in a wider selection of formats, and more current additional material. Free Speculative Fiction Online has a reasonable selection as well, although perhaps with a bias toward short stories over novel-length works.

A Google search reveals dozens of other sites, albeit some that may offer texts of dubious provenance. There used to be a thriving newsgroup community dedicated to bootleg books, and although I have to admit to downloading some of these samizdata files, quality tended to be uneven.

The free solutions that I've listed would certainly give you a good starter library, but I think that there's a better answer to the digital reading question than relying on giveaways. In order for the whole ebook concept to really get a foothold in the marketplace, it needs to have a solution like the iTunes store, a solution which will offer a simple method of purchasing and managing digital literature without charging the same prices demanded by the dead tree publishers.

It’s a shame that Apple has already released a product called the iBook, but I have a lot of faith in Steve Jobs. If or when he decides it's time to reform the digital book marketplace, I’m sure he’ll come up with something equally in line with the rest of the iProduct list.

- Sid

Digital Reading Part One: Dead Trees vs. Melted Sand.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx

As readers of this blog will have already figured out, I'm a bit of a fan of books. Those of you who have responded to this by deciding that I must have enough books by now, so no more Chapters gift certificates for me - well, sadly this is not going to stop me from adding to my little library.

I do have to admit that there are problems accompanying the possession of a large number of books. Effectively, I do have a library - I have about 3,000 books lined up on the shelves behind me, and that's probably more than most libraries have in their science fiction and fantasy sections. In addition to having to find space for those shelves, there are obvious issues relating to relocating. When the representative from the moving company* came to my house to give me a quote for the move to Vancouver, his first comment was, "Wow, you've got a lot of books, that's going to be more expensive."

So, just as people like my friend Colin regretfully discovered that it's easier to move around an iPod than 12 crates of vinyl albums, I've given some cautious consideration to the digital library as an alternative.

There are several digital readers on the marketplace: Amazon’s Kindle is now on version 2, Barnes & Noble have just released the Nook, Sony has the Pocket, the Touch, and soon the Daily, and Plastic Logic will be introducing the Que next month. There are minor variations in weight and thickness, but basically they all offer a screen ranging from the size of a paperback to a sheet of paper, with a couple of gigabytes of storage and wireless access to internet bookstores.

At the moment, all of these cleverly named devices share the same problem: they're too bloody expensive. Prices weigh in at about $250-$400+ right across the board, and that's just for the reader, books are extra. However, we're looking at a technology that's in its infancy, and I'm sure that as demand develops prices will drop.

Impressed though I am by the whole futuristic concept of the virtual book as signified by Kindle, Nook, et al., personally, I feel that they're all going to fail in the long run. This won't be caused by any flaw in the product but due to a lack of perception about the nature of the marketplace.

The utility of handheld devices lies in diversity of function and convenience of size. Apple recognizes this, which is why their palm-sized iPhone is also an iPod, gives you internet access for e-mail and browsing, and has a large and growing library of applications - including, of course, applications for reading ebooks. The bottom line is that people don't want to carry around four or five different little boxes: one for music, one for phone calls, one for books, and so on. They also don't want to carry around something the size of a book or larger in lieu of a book.

My personal solution follows this philosophy. I've managed to dodge the cellphone bullet until now, but I’ve owned a succession of little personal organizers since the 90's, and in addition to features such as an address book, calendar, note pad, calculator, etc., you can also download and install the free ebook reader software of your choice. My current device is shown to the left - I purchased it used on Craigslist for about $25, installed PalmReader and Mobipocket, and I was all set.

The thing that amuses me is that when some people realize that I'm reading a book on my slightly battered Palm Tungsten, they frown and say "But the screen is so small, how can you read that?", then excuse themselves so that they can catch up on e-mails or text messages on their iPhone or Blackberry. It seems oddly appropriate to say that there are none so blind as those who will not see...

- Sid

* NEVER EVER EVER EVER hire the Prince Moving Company. Feel free to tell them that I said that.

The Terminal Beach

"Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!"

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

A few months ago, with absolutely no fanfare at all, NASA found evidence of an unthinkably ancient death: the expiration of a star, over 13 billion years in the past.

NASA's Swift satellite, in the fifth year of its near-Earth orbit, picked up Gamma Ray Burst 090423 on April 23rd. Analysis of additional data gathered by the satellite and Earth-based observatories revealed that the burst was produced by the explosion of a massive star and its subsequent collapse into a black hole or a neutron star, a mere 630 million years after the birth of the universe.

The image at the top of this posting is a lie, by the way, a digital abstraction created by assigning colours to the data. The explosion itself was not visible, light itself having failed and faded long ago as time and distance stripped it away, photon by photon.

Science fiction has always been characterized by a sense of scale, of the enormity of time and space. In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, the nameless Time Traveller stands beside a barren ocean 30 million years in the future and describes the following nihilistic vision:

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of Man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.

We stand on the edge of a different ocean, an ocean of stars and galaxies, with the ripples from events that are unimagineably distant in time and space lapping at our feet. And yet, someone at work recently expressed their surprise that I've never watched an entire episode of Seinfeld - I almost laughed at them. Nothing personal, but by comparison Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine don't even start to capture my interest. (Even if their show was about something.)

- Sid