One of the major problems plaguing e-books and their development is the issue of piracy. Because e-books consists of so many bits and bytes that can be easily duplicated, the issue of copyright and unauthorized copying becomes critical to the development of e-books. With paper books, it is more expensive to copy them page by page then it is to simply buy the book; pirating the books is thus more difficult and expensive. With e-books, any person who is computer savvy can copy a file and then distribute it via the Internet. Perhaps you have children now who are whizzes at operating the computer. Perhaps they can do with the computer a lot more than you can as adults ("How did you do that?!" might have crossed your mind after seeing such a child do something you didn't think he could do...assuming you didn't then ask the question after seeing their amazing feat.). It costs nothing for the computer owner to copy the file, and then distribute it, either to other friends of his (hers), or distribute it over the Internet. That breeds the recipe needed to pirate books easily and with no way to easily catch the offender. Because there is no expense involved in copying the file, and because it is so easy to copy files for distribution, authors and publishers shy away from producing and selling e-books; before, when the technology for copy-protecting files wasn't in place, e-books could never see the light of day, because it was simply far too easy for anyone else to copy the files and distribute them without the author receiving a penny for his work. Prosecuting the scofflaw was (and still is) difficult at best, and outright impossible at best. While it is possible to track any person who logs onto and uses the Internet by their IP (Internet Protocol) address, it vanishes as soon as they disconnect. Law enforcement would have to catch the offender red-handed in order to have the case...or wait for the person to have established a pattern of distributing the bootlegged files over the Internet. Publishing via the Internet has now been around for over 10 years, in the form of the Web Page (which is considered publishing in certain circles.), and publishing other documents has been around in the form of PDF files for a relatively brief period of time. top.

Of course, there are other considerations as to why e-books have yet to have become popular. You need either a computer or a suitable device on which to read an e-book. But now, with the advent of the Pocket PC™ and the other handheld devices now on the market, the capability of being able to reach this growing market now justifies the development of the e-book. According to one study, over a million e-books were sold last year. Other people report having made thousands of dollars with their e-books in just one weekend. Being the skeptic I am, I tend to look at those kinds of statistics with a grain of salt and a little bit of skepticism. Because the raw data are not there, I suspect the assertions. Even if they are true, it is difficult to verify the figures, because they haven't come to the attention of the "official" marketing agencies who track sales of e-books. One thing can be said about the e-book, however—it is here to stay for the foreseeable future...so long as someone doesn't find a way to defeat the encryption features currently used to prevent e-books from being filed.¹  top.

There are real advantages to the e-book that paper books simply don't have...and there are advantage to the paper book the e-books presently don't have. With paper books, you never have to worry about hardware failure swiping the book. Indeed, with e-books, you have to be diligent about the state of your hard drive; if it crashes or suffers a read-write error in that sector where you e-book is situated, you're out of luck...you've lost your book. Of course, the moral of the story is to backup and keep copies of your e-books on other media, such as floppy disks (I would be leery to use a thumb drive alone, as my personal experience with the contraptions show that they are unreliable. In the process of writing my book, Republicans and the Radical Right, I lost about 3 hours worth of work just the other day [4/20/04] because the drive failed during a write operation...ouch! I now use the laptop computer's hard drive for storing the work, with another backup on a removable hard drive—which has proven itself reliable.). Some say you can't curl up in bed with an e-book. Today, that's highly debatable, because of the size of the hardware that can process and render e-books. Others state that e-books are difficult to read. Microsoft Reader® contains a way to alter the size of the text as well as the thickness, to allow the type to look good on virtually any type of monitor. In fact, for the older adult who perhaps doesn't see as well as they once did, the reader is a boon, because they can adjust the size of the type to a size that they can easily read...try doing that with a paper book! As for the Palm handhelds...I can't speak for them, as well as the other readers currently on the market. The size of the display does make an issue for persons whose reading vision is failing. It might be mighty difficult to increase the size of the print too much without having to then scroll crosswise through each line. If you know about that detail, tell me about it, and I'll update this piece!
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Of course...the main disadvantage to e-books might well be the inability to keep them from being copied from an unscrupulous person. Just how serious is the threat, really? Is it as bad a threat to the author who wants to self-publish and make money off his literary works? Possibly. I don't say it isn't a threat. It's possible to point at Stephen King's experiment of putting chapters of his book out on the Web, and encouraging people to pay $1.00 for each chapter. The Plant was never released, except over the Internet, and from what I can gather, it was a resounding success (people are still looking for the book and its installments...unfortunately, it is no longer available.). One posting from his message board stated that a lot of people didn't pay. The problem to be reckoned with. With e-books, they could conceivably be priced to overcome price resistance—and be affordable to people of all socioeconomic classes. One could possibly take the incentive out of piracy by making a certain number of e-books available either for free or at a deep discount...to take away the economic incentive that one might have from pirating bootlegged copies of e-books. Consider the case of cassette tapes and AM/FM stereo radios with cassette decks built into them. Just how badly did that affect record sales? Not badly enough to put the record companies out of business. The original fear was that people would copy the songs they wanted from the radio, and that would undercut record sales badly. The parties involved worked out a suitable agreement (by agreeing to put a percentage of the purchase price of each combination cassette player-AM/FM radio into a fund to offset losses anticipated by bootleggers who might never buy another record or tape, instead opting to get all their music for free from the radio.) and combination cassette recorders-AM/FM radios saw the light of day. By some estimates, it actually encouraged people to go and buy the records. If someone wants to crack the file encryption on an e-book...they'll do so. That might be the worst disadvantage and a perfectly legitimate one, scaring publishers away from e-books. Perhaps the second biggest disadvantage of e-books is the lack of titles. There don't seem to be too many titles right now...but that also makes for an advantage for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit (like me!!). I suspect businessmen are still waiting for developments, spurred on perhaps by Barnes and Noble's decision to discontinue stocking e-books, due to lack of sales. But other sites around the Web are selling e-books. In a later column, I'll report on how they are doing.

One day, I predict e-books will become mainstream in this country and elsewhere, as the price of both the hardware and the software used comes down in price. The disadvantages will gradually disappear; the problems with power should be overcome by a designer prescient enough to look toward photovoltaic cell as a power source for the readers and personal PCs. The technology is now present...or almost present, to enable e-book readers and pocket computers to run by solar power in the same way certain calculators now have solar-powered energy cells. Do I think they'll completely replace the paper book? No...I personally like them too much to scrap them entirely. There's nothing quite like the heft of a book in your hand. Moreover...paper books copy better than the current crop of owner-exclusive e-books currently on the market.² Above all, people might still be bristling over their inability to copy them for their own personal use. The ability to cut and paste text from e-books could make them potentially more powerful for students who want to quote directly from the text, as well as save time. In the current encryption scheme that publishers use, such a method is foreclosed: Owner-encrypted e-books can't be copied in any form. Not the file, and not in the copy function of the reader. Someone might have put it very well when they said that perhaps the best way to handle the entire copyright issue would be to trust the consumer a bit more. Notwithstanding that the early versions of DOS ended up being some of the most bootlegged software in the world (but...did that keep Bill Gates from becoming the world's richest man?³ Certainly not!).

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Notes:

¹ This has already happened. A Russian national and his company found a way to circumvent the encryption of Adobe's E-book format, and basically renewed the debate about how secure the present technology is for preventing encryption. At trial, the company was found not guilty. Given his following, it might well have reopened the debate about fair use, as defined in the Copyright Act (Title 17, USC). Someone was also reputed to have cracked the file encryption code to the Microsoft Reader at the beginning of this year. article here.
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² There are three levels of encrypting an e-book, in Microsoft Reader's scheme. Sealed e-books merely prevent the book from being altered; sealed e-books add the purchaser's name to the book, making it more difficult for the would-be pirater to copy and distribute the e-book anonymously, and owner-exclusive, which is the highest level of copy protection available. Only an activated Reader can decrypt such a book; it then cannot be copied or printed (as they can be under the other two schemes), and the speech synthesizer is disabled—what I find to be the worst shortcoming of the encryption technology currently employed.
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³ At 46.6 billion dollars, he is the world's richest person, according to Forbe's survey of the 500 billionaires around the world.
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