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The Analogness of Mayberry Memories
Head of Systems, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh. Column for April 2006 I sat down to write this with a heavy heart, as one of my heroes had just died—Don Knotts, better known as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, or to the less culturally literate, Mr. Furley from Three’s Company. Losing Barney was like losing a family member. You see, I’m a child of the ’70s, and for many of us that meant eating meals in the warm glow of the television instead of around a table. I spent literally every evening with Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News and reruns of Andy Griffith. The impact has been long-lasting. The life lessons I learned growing up revolved around references to Mayberry and its inhabitants—a simple, straightforward world in which you could learn life lessons in 25 minutes. In that simple world, books were black-on-white and read left-to-right. I doubt that anyone in a town such as Mayberry could have imagined an electronic book; they didn’t even have phones with dials. And, I predict, the Mayberry way will persevere as the preferred method for consuming books for a long time to come. Now, I am almost famous for my wildly wrong calculations about the future of e-books. But, Mayberry memories notwithstanding, it seems to me that ever since Google announced intentions to digitize the print world (with the help of libraries), the print world has grown less skeptical of digitizing books. Lots of companies are now rushing in where they once tread only with great trepidation. Some hardware prognosticators are calling 2006 the year of the Tablet PC. More computer than a Palm or Blackberry and lighter than most laptops, the Tablet is a fully powered PC with the added benefit of a writing stylus and several supported applications that enable handwritten text and drawings. My library loans Tablets to patrons as part of its laptop-lending program, and I have been a Tablet devotee for almost three years. I am now on my second model, the IBM Thinkpad Tablet. I have even handwritten parts of columns using its text-conversion capabilities. Bill Gates has a lot riding on the Tablet and has made predictions even wilder than the ones I used to make about e-books. Nevertheless, the Tablet is cool technology. I should be getting them for free, given the amount of buzz marketing in which I have engaged in airports, at work, and at conferences. Reading between the pixelsI used to keep track of what boiled down to three business models for e-books (four, if you count “free” as a business model, which most vendors do not). HarperCollins has a plan, though, to keep its e-book costs down in much the same way that newspapers remain cheap. The book publisher is offering a pilot program of ad-supported e-books that are free to readers. In essence, out of fear that online content will cannibalize print sales, HarperCollins is looking to fill the profit gap. It plans to try the advertising model with nonfiction and reference works, apparently believing that fiction and ads might not make good bedfellows. With plans to start digitizing its back catalog, HarperCollins seems to believe that most users will not read entire books online (although I would dispute this assumption, especially given the looming ubiquitousness of wireless network access), but will be persuaded to buy the print version once online excerpts convince them there’s content worthy enough to be bought. If proven, this model will break down publishers’ fears that e-sales will cannibalize print sales. No pulped fictionIs it oxymoronic to call a prepublished e-book a “preprint”? Well, Safari Books is taking a stab at preprints in a post-print world with the release of Rough Cuts, thus providing access to books as they are being written. Rough Cuts purchases allow unlimited access to manuscripts in progress as well as the finished product in print. This service could prove especially useful for technology titles that seem to go out of print as soon as they are in print. The Open Content Alliance is also gearing up for some rough cuts of its own—by way of OCA negotiating author- and publisher-granted prepublished rights to electronic books. Under some unofficial leadership from the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger, the OCA is planning a major proof-of-concept launch in October. Several working groups—on topics including metadata, preservation, and data transfer protocol—have already formed to facilitate the more measured approach to such an undertaking. OCA is one of the few groups taking an organized stand against more restrictive digital rights management, the killer of e-book adoption. Ironically, some of OCA’s founding members have played major roles in restrictive DRM, a topic ripe enough for a future column. I’m not sure Deputy Fife would have gone in for e-books; he never seemed to like change very much. The dedicated deputy left the show in 1965—coincidentally, as it started filming in color. Opie’s voice was changing and he was dancing to rock ’n’ roll, and Aunt Bea had become a women’s libber by 1960s North Carolina standards; things would never be the same. Life’s lessons are easier to follow in black and white (for TV and books) and are often more palatable. Can e-books change that? I like to think there’s a reason that the simpler times are always behind us. Open Source Watch
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