Electronic ink may rewrite book publishing industry

A Column From The USA Today says a new technology is now making it into consumer products that just might make electronic books a viable alternative to printed ones. It’s called electronic ink, and it can make a computer display look like a page in a printed book as opposed to a glowing screen.
E-books are a boon for publishers. While the cost of the content (author, editors, layout artists) remains the same, the cost of production and delivery obviously drops significantly. There’s no paper to buy, no shipping charges to pay, no worries about how big a production run should be.

February 25, 2006 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. J.B. Nicholson-Owens says:
    February 26, 2006 at 3:51 am

    Far more likely to “rewrite” your rights away.

    Electronic books mean that many of the rights you cherish about books can be easily taken away (or never granted in the first place, thus creating an atmosphere where these rights won’t be missed because they never existed; you can’t miss what you never had).

    Right of first sale has been a problem already for electronic music, see George Hotelling’s hassles with Apple and countless people’s eBay problems distributing Free Software for a fee. Loaning and merely reading electronic copies of various works (books, music, etc.) can be easily controlled with the combination of proprietary software and a convenient portable reader that has either a wireless network interface or a GPS unit in it. Talk about being from the wrong side of the tracks! How prescient Richard Stallman’s short dystopic story “The Right to Read” looks now.

    I think that what the reader stands to gain here is far too little in relation to what they stand to lose. Of course, such things are presented chiefly along the lines of publisher hassle or user convenience with unquestioning users. Rarely are these things discussed along the line of preserving reader’s rights because that would remind readers that they have rights they need to fight to save from the large copyright holders.

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  2. leeb says:
    February 28, 2006 at 4:47 am

    Just another format
    I don’t think e-books are for everybody. And there are copyright and piracy issues, etc. At the end of the day, it is just another format. It may be useful for subjects that go out of date very quickly. I don’t think it would be so good for novels.

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