Feature Creep: 500 Books In Your Gadget Bag

Feature Creep is a new weekly column on Gizmodo which explores the intersection of gadgets into mass culture. This week editor Sanford May looks at what it will take for an eBooks to finally compete with dead tree publishing.

The common wisdom is that eBooks will have a hard time for two reasons: bad reader devices and book junkies opting only for the hard stuff, the dead-tree form factor. But display technology, a sticking point in making attractive readers, has come a long way. And the idea that eBooks and books printed on paper can't coexist peacefully is an almost Luddite belief. Steve Jobs doesn't show up and take your CD deck when you buy an iPod - music and books on physical media remain, for some time to come. Still, bring up eBooks in a bookish crowd, and you've got conflict as contentious as any Manchester United/Arsenal match.

There are plenty of people who insist that all you need for an eBook is a computer. I don't know these people, but we wouldn't get along, anyway. You can make that same argument about digital music; a computer is as good, or better, than a dedicated device. But I don't know anyone who thinks rocking out to her spiffy new Dell laptop while walking the dog is a reasonable alternative to an iPod. (Be forewarned, there are a lot of iPod comparisons to come, but today there is not a better model out there for integrated device, content and content delivery.) A truly portable, take-anywhere device with an outstanding display and long battery life are essential for really enjoying an eBook or magazine. If somebody made one, I'd go buy one right now. I asked Micah Burch, marketing director at Vertical Inc., buzz-worthy independent publisher of contemporary Japanese works in English, to help me out with the industry perspective. I put it to him, how would he feel about a swift little snuggle-up-in-bed eBook device backed by a fully stocked content delivery service? "That would be very cool. I would definitely buy one." Problem is, the hot technology he'd snap right up exists only in theory.

The RocketBook, one of the first fully realized eBook devices, was either a move to create an entire industry segment, or a valiant attempt to push technology forward when few people cared. RocketBook came to market under similar circumstances as the first wave of digital music players: only hardcore geeks wanted one. Geeks are always in before in is hip, but they seldom pay the bills all by themselves. The display, based on the same technology used in laptops and PDAs, wasn't much fun to look at for lengthy sessions, and the library was limited. It died early, hardly mourned. To be fair, the new technology for sharp, crisp and paper-like displays wasn't available then. Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.

Sony, in league with Philips and E Ink, has launched the first electronic ink eBook device, calling it the Librie and hoping it will herald the revolution. Great display, small, light and battery-efficient. And that's where the good stuff stops. There's a truly diminutive selection of compatible content, making RocketBook's old catalog look like the Library of Congress. Oh, and as part of Sony's draconian digital rights management, the few things you can get, they fall down and go boom after two months. They expire. "Books that expire? That's assed-out," said Vertical's Burch, though he did call it an understandable solution. Understandable perhaps, but hardly elegant and ultimately unfair to the consumer. People might buy periodicals with the caveat that they'll expire, but Sony isn't offering much in the way of magazines; and, realistically, few periodicals are suited for electronic ink until electronic ink comes in color, about the time US television broadcasters stop pumping analog signals into the air. After all, even The New York Times is colorful these days.

When it comes to books, DRM is a vicious cramp, but it's no joke. Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts. Vertical is well known for bringing to the US skillful translations of good Japanese novels, like the recently released Sayonara, Gangsters, Ring, the novel behind Japanese and Hollywood suspense films of the same name, and the award-winning Twinkle Twinkle. Micah wants you to buy these books. "You certainly don't want your stuff posted on the Internet!" I'm guessing he wants a roof over his head. And Vertical's authors would like to make a dime or two, and the company can't very well keep importing these Japanese books for free. Although, he said, "Certainly our indie spirit makes us somewhat sympathetic to efforts to break free of the Man." Still, "These issues are precisely why the technology is slower to mature than many had predicted." DRM is not going away. Check that: If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period. If you want to run a capitalist economy - many societies are hell-bent on it - and you want quality in your art and entertainment, your artists must be paid. In any hipster hangout you can prattle on about the vile music tycoons and molesting movie magnates, but somewhere in all the mad cash the big boys are making, the little guy, the artist, takes home a crumb here and there. How else are these people going to make a living? In the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts, a publicly funded program supporting creative work, is tiny compared to what it used to be, and likely to get smaller. I really can't imagine anyone seriously proposing some sort of revenue-division arrangement, sort of like the tip-sharing deal the corner pizzeria waiters are always fighting about. Besides, if you won't pay per item at retail, you're not very likely to pay your annual licensing fees, either. Face it: We support our artists at the shop, be it brick-and-mortar or the Internet. When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I'll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we'll have to play nice within the confines of the present system. For now, the key is developing a solution that makes consumers feel like they actually own what they've bought while protecting artists from rights-jacking hoodlums. Until the equally ridiculous extremes proposed by both sides converge, eBooks, like everything, will bog down in a morass of industry fears and consumer entitlement complexes.

We'll need a great eBook reader with trendy clout and not just livable, but convenient, DRM to really break open the market. But, no, Virginia, you won't have to give up your pretty printed books. Books are important. Books are as entrenched in contemporary first-world culture as anything I know. Books are really part of us, even those of you who don't read so much. "Vertical's strategy has involved incorporating the Japanese design aesthetic, and so our books are intended to be objects that you want to have around as well as good reading material," Micah said. Even if he owned a near-perfect eBook device, Micah insists, "I'd still go to the bookstore. I really think that books are a pretty damn good technology." When eBooks take off, they'll be a choice, not a mandate. Indeed, I like my shelves stuffed with attractive volumes, too. But it's not all I want. Reading the work of Michael Chabon, I developed an intense interest in Vladimir Nabokov's novels, particularly the infamous Lolita, and I keep a text copy of that one on my PowerBook. It's there for convenient search, but reading Lolita straight through, I pull out the print edition. Micah is not sure eBooks will ever kill off the paper stuff. "I think it's going to take a bigger paradigm shift to doom print — like when the written word isn't necessary for communication." I dread that day.

Without wholesale industry adoption of eBooks, all that spiff tech crammed into a little winky-dink will be worthless. You can't rip books to your iPage like you can rip CDs to your iPod. An Internet bookstore chockfull of material is essential, not just an alternative like Apple's iTunes Music Store. Unfortunately, the publishing industry has a well-deserved reputation for being staid and stuffy. Even progressive houses like Vertical won't be first to market. "We'd be very interested in any new iPod-like technology, but I don't think we'd be the first to jump on board until there's some sort of market acceptance," said Micah. Like sex in high school. Everyone stands around waiting for everyone else to do it so it's okay to do it because everyone is doing it. If somebody had just done it, we could have all been getting laid. The same logic doesn't well translate to book publishing. In Micah's opinion, "When you balance what a reader wants out of a book against a publisher's practical needs, it's hard to come up with something better than what we already have." Someday, someone will take the risk. But it will probably be a publishing juggernaut, wobbling under it's own wealth, doing something we don't like, or an undeniably cool innovator dwelling outside the industry and thus unable to attract the kind of content most people want in books. Small, successful independent houses won't bet the farm on an unproven market.

This looks grim, for now, I admit. Nobody is going to get really hot for eBooks until the display technology supports full color, even if they don't need color for what they'll publish and read. Color alone won't be the magic bean; most publishers will avoid the ice-cold water of the early season, holding out for fairer days. But it is going to happen, this eBook revolution. Of course, if you live long enough, everything will happen. Take heart, count years, not decades. And like anything with silicon in it, early adopters must pave the way. Most of them won't admit it now, but on the day iPod was announced, many of Apple's most ardent supporters labeled it the dumbest thing to come out of Cupertino since Pippin. Oh, how they were wrong. Those who say eBooks will never come into their own are likewise wrong, but it will not be as dramatic as Apple's digital music coup. In Micah's opinion, "The difference between iPod and eBooks is that iPod doesn't qualitatively change the work it's delivering." Strictly speaking, he's right. But iPod has greatly expanded the boundaries of music listening, tantamount perhaps to creating a new medium. eBooks must deliver in the same way before they'll be widely accepted as able substitute for the hard stuff. Like iPod, none of the eBook enhancements need be especially novel in concept; true genius will lie in the packaging: content, convenience, and, of course, cool factor. Without a truly compelling alternative to print, the eBook revolution will stall at its own forward-thinking rhetoric.

Sanford is a writer living in Dallas, Texas, dividing his time between fiction and the straight stuff. He has written in various fields, including economic development, games publishing and literary criticism. He's written the strategy guide for a series of Blair Witch movie tie-in games, and his work has appeared on the Web and in print. On the side, Sanford dabbles in full-time childcare. Rather than blog about it, he'll leave it for the kids to write sensational, tell-all memoirs — if they grow up sane enough to form sentences.

Contact information for this author is not available.

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