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The problem with e-books

Recently I came across an Amiga emulator for Linux. I decided I was going to run some of my old Amiga software just to see what it looked like on modern hardware (even under emulation, an 800mhz PIII is faster than a 7.5mhz 68000!). There was only one problem: I didn't have a single piece of working hardware for reading the floppies that the old software lived on. Oh well, guess that's that.

One thing I've learned over the years is that technology is fickle. Companies come, companies go, and the best thing you can do is to keep your files in the most generic form possible. I still have every single text file and document that I wrote with that Amiga, because I had the foresight to not use an Amiga-specific word processor to write them -- I used either plain text, a nroff-style preprocessor that I no longer have an equivalent to but which can be easily massaged into LaTeX or troff format, or WordPerfect. When I switched, it was a matter of hooking up a serial cable and using zmodem to move a zoo-ball over ('zoo' was a program similar to pkzip that was popular 10-15 years ago). But if I'd used AmigaWrite to create my documents, they'd be impossible for me to read today.

I don't know what technology is going to look like twenty years from now, or even ten years from now. The $2,000 laptop computer that I am typing this on has more power than the mainframe that I used when I was a freshman in college. Even ten years ago this laptop would have been science fiction -- "What? 800mhz? 192mb of RAM? 20gb hard drive? 15" screen? 6 pounds? NO WIRES, talks to the entire world at 10Mb/sec thru radio waves?". People would have thought I was nuts.

Is Windows going to be around 20 years from now? Probably not. Todays' Windows will probably look as laughable 20 years from now as CP/M-80 looks today. But I still have 20 year old books that I refer to on a regular basis (Knuth, anybody?). Now, here's the question: What kind of idiot would buy a book that they couldn't read 20 years from now?

And that's why I don't buy e-books, other than the ones sold as HTML by O'Reilly & Associates (for which I've spent over $200 in the last two months). I like having a complete Java reference available on my laptop wherever I am, whether it's at home, at work, or at the airport. It'd be nice if I had the rest of my library similarly available. But if people are going to provide the e-books in a proprietary encrypted format, I just can't afford to risk it.

My library is an expensive investment. I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer books alone, not to mention over 20 years accumulation of science fiction novels. I cannot, and will not, risk the possibility of a beloved book becoming unreadable because of the vendor of its (proprietary) reader program going out of business. And as long as I can get books in paper format that have no such risk, it doesn't matter how cheap or convenient e-books become -- I'll buy paper. Losing access to a work that I bought and paid good money for is just too big a risk for a book lover like myself, which is why I have to laugh about Adobe getting upset about the e-book decoder program -- such a program is about the only thing that could get me to buy an e-book!

Regarding piracy: Most software publishers gave up on copy protection years ago. It just doesn't work. Yet I haven't seen that it's harmed the software industry. Look at Microsoft -- they have more cash in the bank than the typical third world country's GNP. And not a single one of their products is copy protected, as far as I know. Granted, they did this mostly by working savvy deals with OEM's and Fortune 500 companies, but is perfect proof that it doesn't take copy protection to make billions from selling material in electronic form.

The case with books is even more true. Yes, a typical book is only 250K or so of text and even easier to swap than mp3 files... but why in the world would I want to pirate a book when, for less than $2, an e-publisher could make an enormous profit while giving the author more money than he gets today? I spend hundreds of dollars per month on books. I'm unlikely to change my book buying habits (or book budget!) just because books get cheaper online. Indeed, I'm likely to go nuts buying every book in sight, especially now that hard drive prices have become so ridiculously cheap.

But: Only if I can guarantee that I can read the book 20 years from now, when today's computers are likely to be as big a joke to that generation as a CP/M-80 machine is today. If it's a proprietary format, it's about as useful to me as a Wordstar document from 1978 would be -- i.e., slim to none (I have nothing that'll read and display a Wordstar document, even if I could figure out how to get it off of an 8" floppy!).