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I had to laugh at this blog post from Russell Davies that shows a 2000 TIME magazine tech supplement headlined “Get Ready for E-Books.”
Hee, hee, hee. Look at that picture of the Bard! Aw, how cute that they thought e-books might have an impact on literature.
After all, e-books are having more of an impact on not literature, but the publishing business. People who want to write and people who want to read are getting closer and closer all the time, discovering new ways to connect and communicate and interact, while the publishing industry has remained enmeshed in a circa-1960 cycle of print run/return/repeat.
I know very little about business, and I am not trying to say that anyone in the business of publishing is unintelligent but really: A business model based on returns? This must have worked, once; however, in a world containing fewer and fewer independent bookstores and more and more books, this model is less and less valid.
The trouble is that any discussion of e-books, e-readers, and online communication spooks the big houses that control most of our reading choices today (I should clarify: Most of our legitimate reading choices. There are tons of self-publishing outfits who have a manuscript they’d like to sell you). These houses didn’t get big by thinking towards the future; they got big by streamlining the status quo.
My point is that we knew e-readers, e-books, and digital content were coming a decade ago, and our industry has adapted so slowly and reluctantly that we are now in crisis mode. What would have happened if someone with real power had seen the writing on the screen in 2000? What might the publishing scene look like today?
My question for you today, then, is this: If you could do one thing to radically change publishing RIGHT NOW, what would it be?
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Make eReader devices more readily available to booksellers, etc. - it's really hard for us to comment on or provide feedback for epublishing when none of us can afford the technology.
(that's not really the publishers' fault, more like the device developers', but just a thought)
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Rewrite the copyright laws to reflect current reality. Existing copyright law is based on the assumption that books are a single piece of physical property.
No mention of eBooks is complete without mentioning the problem of the lost wealth of backlisted books, videos and recorded music that could be digitized--much backlisted literature has been digitized by Google--and made available to be read again if the copyright laws were to permit it. There's no reason the publishing houses have to bear the entire burden of the process either.
Finally, current copyrights vary widely from country to country even though the present world is knitted together. These copyright laws need to be uniform to promote the free flow of ideas that the US Constitution envisioned as the rationale for copyrights in the first place.
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I'd change buying E-books to buying a service where you can read E-books
the whole idea of buying a single digital copy of a book just as if it was a paper book is as old and outdated as the world of internet only found at home. The internet is EVERYWHERE now and E-books should be intrinsically part of this.
As a model and example I look at Magic the Gathering Online.
on MtGO you can buy digital copies of cardboard cards and play Magic with them online but you can still manipulate them offline and build decks, check out your library etc. but they are YOUR cards and you can sell/trade them away and then they are somebody else's cards.
I'm not a programer, I have no idea how they did it but I haven't herd of anyone "stealing" cards
make this work for books!
A company (Like B&N) offers an E-reader that reads only books from themselves
Buy the book online and read it on your device offline
copy the file and you can still read it and as long as YOU are logged in to the program.
It works for Wizards of the Coast I'm sure it can work for books
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