Ewan's Musings

Literature in the 21st Century

One of the 'must have' applications on my 7650 (and 9210, and 5mx, and Palm, and so on through to the dawn of history) has been an EBook Reader. Ebooks are generally compressed text files that allow you to store an entire novel in around 500K (for the average novel). Given that an episode of The Simpsons is going to take 20mb for a chopppy 15 frames/sec version, that's a lot of entertainment in a small space.

EBooks have allowed me to read some of the classics of literature, from HG Wells "The Time Machine," to Edgar Rice Burroughs "Mars" series of books. But while the classics are easily available, what people want are new and popular books.

And this is where I hope that the literaty giants don't make the same mistakes as the RIAA Napster/MP3 debacle.

The first thing to realise is that reading is a perfect mobile application. It's somethign everyone is familiar with, the size of the devices is perfect, it's somethign you can do on the move (or standing on the Train), and it is something where the user needs to make regular purchases.

At the moment, getting 'new' material for an EBook reader involves trawling the dark edges of the internet (IRC helps a lot her) to find the novel you want. Then it's a matter of opening it in whatever format you find (text, word, rtf and html are all popular). After that, a small desktop tool called MakeDocW.exe (which takes text and creates Palm .Doc file), and then the file gets beamed into the 7650.

Now there's a big problem with all that. I may have purchased a copy of the latest blockbuster underage teen wizard sensation, but I'm not allowed to have an electronic copy on my phone. Thef act that I'd quite happily buy an electronic copy (and not a printed copy) doesn't seem to have been considered by the big publishers.

When "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" arrived in a mass of hype, it took the IRC channels around 20 hours to get a scanned electronic copy, and another 10 hours to proof read it and post a corrected version.

So why can't I just pay the author and the publisher their cut, ignore the physical cost, and read the book the way I want to? I doubt I'm the only person who enjoys eBooks, who would be more than happy to pay £2 or so for some of the latest readings.

It's a captive market, and it's a regular market that comes back. If 2500 readers take 2 weeks to read a £2 book, that's a turnover of £10,000 for a publishing house with their only cost being a hosted website, a monkey with MS-Word and a conversion tool, and.. ehrm... that's about it. It's profit, and isn;t that what drives technological change?

Don't make the same mistakes as MP3. It's already possible to get a huge supply of popular book days after the title is launched. You can either call in the lawyers and make veryone into criminals, or you can capture a segment of the market, make money from them, and benefit from new technology.

In the meantime, if Dale Brown, Diana Gabaldona and JK Rowling want to get in touch, their royalty check will be in the post.