Saving scholarly publishing, and saving civilization.

In 16 minutes.

The full text, and the YouTube videos, are at:

http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html

or you can watch Part I (missing my preface, that’s available in the full text):

and Part II:

A few segments from the text:

The realities I see ahead of us, in the next ten to fifteen years, militate for some radical strategic choices, in the next three years.

I believe that we must shift our business models — publicly, transparently, intentionally, thoughtfully, but radically — to a digital one, with open access as the backbone of scholarly publishing. We must do this to survive a tremendously turbulent next decade, and to ensure that our mission, and its survival, continues to be fulfilled.

…

But CO2 does something much worse. While we bicker with global-warming deniers, the ocean is getting more acidic. Excess CO2 plus ocean produces carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is a clear and present danger. A slight rise in acidity dramatically affects calcium-carbonate-based lifeforms, like most plankton, shellfish, and coral, the cornerstones of the ocean biosphere.

If humans do not drastically reduce our CO2 output in the next ten years, our rich, biodiverse ocean will become an acidic, jellyfish- and algae-filled cesspool, in our lifetimes.

If, over the next decade, humans continue doing what we have done for the last fifty years, then we will construct our own hell, and our grandchildren will curse our names.

…

Within the context of a world in crisis, we *must* demonstrate that we’re radically rethinking our relationship to the future. We must demonstrate that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We must seize initiative now, and start making changes as fast as we can.

Open access + digital publishing will help get us to a sustainable world, and keep us in the mix.

Imagine, in five years, a different income stream where 50% of your income comes from some kind of value-added digital sales, and 25% from print-on-demand, and 25% through institutional support of fixed costs. Dissemination and societal impact will increase 50x, because the material is openly available and promoted online.

With that kind of documented dissemination of scholarly value and University brand, to the broadest public, no dean would be motivated to cut the support that enables scholarship to thrive online. And, our CO2 production will be radically decreased.

The presentation was controversial, and raised both some hackles and some hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck. Far more congratulated me than condemned my analysis — and many said they were rethinking strategy in light of what I showed them.

It was risky, but knowing what I’ve learned over the last two years doing the Apocadocs project, it was a risk I needed to take. Time’s a-wasting.

I’ve been interested to see the  responses, and this post can become a response locale — I’m linking back here from the fulltext, in hopes that some discussion can ensue.

What also stuck me, besides the exhaust, while wondering at that car in the intersection, was that the iPod Touch in my pocket had at least thirty books on it, even though I’d had it for about a month. Say what you want about e-books, it’s not the same as paper, right, but try carrying 100 books in your pocket, or in your car, let alone the 1.5 million that Google is already providing for mobile devices.

I enjoy learning about technology, and take a keen interest in how it affects learning, networks, and society. Still, I’m not really much of a gadget guy, that is, I don’t feel I have to go buy every gadget that comes along. No video game consoles in my house, an ancient yet hardy stereo, no cable TV. My DJing rig is laughable. Traveling around South America, to use one example, tends to wean one from over-consumerist tendencies, not to mention thinking seriously about the condition of the planet and some of its possible futures.

So it’s been with both a sense of wonder and a bit of trepidation, perhaps, that I’ve been able to start playing around with both the iPod Touch and Amazon’s new Kindle 2. I remember reading about a study that tracked over time people’s attitudes about what they thought were necessities, versus what they considered luxuries. Things like cell-phones, iPods, and flat screens keep getting added to the list of necessities, but nothing ever comes off.

The iPhone and Touch portend much more the future than the Kindle. While the Kindle works great as a reading device, accomplishing that feat with panache, I don’t think that enough people really want a reading device, and a separate talking device, and a writing device, and so on. Do I want to carry around all that stuff with me, or take four or five devices on a trip? The Kindle will indubitably evolve more toward the direction of the iPhone than the reverse. Doubtlessly Apple, Amazon, Sony et al. have in mind to create a device slightly bigger than the iPod Touch that combines facets of the cell phone, iPod, Kindle, Flip camera, and laptop. Let’s call it a Podkinfliptop. There is, of course, more than a little speculation already that Apple is on the verge of such a release. Its educational potential, in particular, are enormous. With thirty million iPhone/iPod Touches in use already, and the huge success of the App store, Apple seems natural to expand its dominance with a netbook type device, but many others will follow.

There is another, emerging POD, however:  purchase on demand.  While print on demand (I will be careful about using the abbreviation here, as it can lead to confusion in this context) changes the economics of book production, purchase on demand changes the economics of book consumption.  Both forms of POD are likely to grow in the next few years and their development will increasingly be linked.

Consumers are used to purchasing things on demand, so what’s the fuss?  Someone walks into a bookstore, eyes a copy of The World Without Us or Sense and Sensibility, picks it up, and steps to the cash register, where it is purchased–on demand.  In this situation, the burden of maintaining the inventory lies with the bookseller, not the consumer.  The bookseller provides the necessary aggregation (the huge stock of titles in a bricks-and-mortar store), and the consumer plucks one copy out of that aggregation for purchase.

Not all books are sold one at a time, however; in not all instances is there a bookseller or an equivalent who is willing to bear the cost of carrying inventory.  In academic publishing, for example, one marketing practice is the standing-order plan.  For this kind of service, libraries fill out a profile (“Send me all books on American history, but do not include titles from the following list of publishers”), which is filed by a wholesaler.  The wholesaler then ships all books that fit the profile to the customer.  In this instance the cost of carrying the inventory is borne by the library, which receives hundreds, even thousands of titles, none of which have been individually examined by a librarian.

Purchase on demand arises when a subscription service such as a standing-order plan is already in place.  The aim of the purchaser is to disaggregate the subscription and pay only for specific titles.  This practice, which is just now beginning in the book industry, shifts the inventory risk from the library back to the wholesaler–and the wholesaler may in turn shift it back to the publisher.  The full economic implications of this are not known, but it is likely to result in fewer books being published, fewer copies of books being printed, and higher prices for the books that do get published.

Subscription bookselling is not new (think of the Book of the Month Club), but in a digital age, it is becoming more common.  One growing practice is the sale of digital aggregations of books to libraries, for which Oxford Scholarship Online is the model.  If OSO were to be moved to a purchase-on-demand program, the many titles in the collection would not be paid for until a library patron actually wanted to look at them.  Many publishers are now launching services very much like OSO’s, and Google is arranging to market even larger aggregations as an outcome of its recent legal settlement with publishers.  Will libraries want to acquire the entire collections, or will they determine to pick and choose, letting patron demand drive purchases?  It’s useful to ponder what purchase on demand will mean in the context of the recent Google-publisher settlement. 

For a library to move to purchase on demand, it will have to make a comprehensive catalogue available to its patrons, with instructions on making requests (“only two purchase requests per patron per week,” etc.).  The catalogue will serve as a front end to book acquisition (and it should be noted that many of the acquired books will be printed on demand).  There is no catalogue in existence today with sufficient information to support the various requirements of purchase on demand.  Amazon’s catalogue covers too much territory  for academic libraries and lacks summaries and other essential metadata; the catalogues of the wholesalers themselves are highly compressed; the catalogues of individual publishers are not aggregated in a single place.

While these examples are from institutional markets, it is likely that some of the same forces will apply as consumer subscription services are established.  We have already seen this in the music business, where consumers have gleefully been disaggregating the collections of songs stored on a single CD.  For producers of intellectual property everywhere, it is useful to bear in mind that digital technology can be applied to every point of the supply chain.  The use of bits over atoms does not put an end to the economic jockeying of producers, distributors, and customers.

     Let’s take a look at audiobooks. For the book publishing industry, audiobooks are one of the few areas of genuine growth. Let me qualify my terms. By “book publishing” I mean consumer or trade books in the developed world and the U.S. in particular. By “growth” I mean industry growth, not the success of a particular title or format or even of any individual publisher. The book industry thus defined is mature, but the audiobooks segment is only in its adolescence. Audiobooks are growing because they reach a new market:  people who want to read books but can’t because for any of several reasons they cannot use their eyes. Among these reasons: visual impairment; a desire to “read” while driving a car; a desire to “read” while working out in the gym, walking the dog, or jogging–any number of reasons when the eye must give way to the ear.

     It is thus unfortunate that digital technology may serve to diminish sales of audiobooks in some channels, though I think that digital audio is likely to help build the market overall (think of audiobooks on wireless phones). In the library sales channel, however, digital audio may cannibalize some sales. This is because the combination of audiobooks on digital compact disks and the iPod will drive up usage of audiobooks in libraries, putting downward pressure on demand for purchases in retail outlets (including online bookstores).

     Some background. The audiobook industry developed very differently in the trade and institutional market. Trade sales have largely been of abridged titles published by the very same publishers that publish the corresponding print books; library sales are more likely to be for unabridged titles, and in libraries a new group of publishers, led by Recorded Books, Inc., has sprung up. I would add, though I have no hard evidence of this, that trade sales seem slightly tilted toward younger (though not youthful) listeners, and those listeners include a higher proportion of men than institutional listeners (more likely older and female). All this is changing now, however, as the characteristics of the two channels are converging. The convergence is significant in that the two channels, which were formerly complementary, are increasingly rivalrous.

     A peculiarity of audiobooks is that the analogue format (books on tape) is still very strong, though analogue media has virtually disappeared for music (partly offset by resurgent sales of LPs among passionate music buffs). Tape works well for audiobooks because tape creates a good bookmark. Try it and you will see. I listen to audiobooks on tape, on CD, and on an iPod and have found that tape is still the most convenient (CDs are at the bottom).

     So step into your time machine and enter a public library 4-5 years ago, where you seek the audiobook section. There you have a selection of unabridged books on tape, with a trifling number of CDs. You decide to check out a title, take it home, and begin to listen. If you listen an hour or two everyday, you might finish a book in two weeks. I suspect most listeners take longer. When they are done, they return the tape to the library, check out another, and repeat the process.

     Of course, the library may not have a desired tape on the shelf. With every instance of circulation taking two weeks or more, from time to time the patron cannot find what he or she wants and turns instead to a local bookstore or perhaps to Amazon. More recently some patrons turned to Audible for downloads. The library, in other words, is not a comprehensive source of supply in part because the time it takes to listen to an audiobook restricts the utility for other patrons of the library’s inventory.

     With digital CDs, abetted by an iPod, the library’s inventory is likely to experience higher utilization. Consider this example. A patron goes to the library and checks out one, two, or more audiobooks on CD. Arriving home, the patron rips the CDs to a computer and synchs with an iPod. The next day the CDs are returned to the library, where other patrons in due course check them out–and the cycle repeats. The inventory utilization drops from two weeks or more to as little as less than one day. The need to shop at the local bookstore or online has been diminished a bit. Thus libraries carrying digital media potentially compete with other sales channels and cannibalize some sales.

     If this became widespread, it could not stand. In time publishers’ compensation for audiobooks in libraries will likely parallel that for videos at Blockbuster and Netflix, with payment to publishers being linked to the frequency of rentals. (Seth Gershel made this point to me concerning audiobooks several years ago.) Or other marketing schemes can be concocted, probably including switching the firm sale of a tape or CD to a library to a subscription-based model–anything, that is, that restrains sales cannibalization.

     Another implication of the change to digital CDs in libraries is that more trade publishers will want to control library sales directly, the better to manage the cannibalization issue. There are signs that this is already happening. Trade publishers will also be more aggressive about acquiring the rights to unabridged audio, rights that at this time are sometimes retained by literary agents, who then forge a license directly with a library audio publisher. The growing competition between trade and library sales for audiobooks will thus spawn a consolidation of rights ownership under a single brand manager–that is, the originating publisher of the book.

     This is not to say that publishers should not publish audiobooks; it is not to say that audio should not be in digital form; and it certainly does not mean that publishers should forsake libraries. What it does mean is that the digital edge cuts both ways, and that publishers have to think strategically, with an eye toward the longer-term implications of new tactics. The time to introduce Blockbuster-like pricing is not after the horse has been stolen from the barn but before the barn gets built.

     The moral of this tale is that profitable strategy is neither digital nor analogue; it is not about whether information should be free or paid; it is not about what is cool; and in its winning form by definition it cannot be what everyone else is doing. Profitable strategy is about identifying new markets and creating new value. Digital audiobooks can lead to a winning strategy, but without a thoughtful strategy, digital media giveth and digital media taketh away.

I have dusted off that proposal and reproduce it here, with a bit of editing for context-building. An interesting (to me) aspect of the original post was that it garnered a fair number of offline inquiries, all from commercial publishers. This was despite the fact that the post clearly stated that there was nothing in the proposal for commercial ventures. I interpret this response to indicate that publishers are studying all new business models for academic materials and are determined to come to the dance even when they are not invited.

Almost Open Access begins with institutional repositories, which align themselves, understandably, with their parent institutions. Since most institutions at least in part serve undergraduates, for whom the goal of creating “the well-rounded person” has not been entirely abandoned, IRs set out to cover everything–to put the universe into the university. Let’s call this the vertical axis: the self-contained institution, with the IR that reflects the institution’s goals and constituencies. Researchers, on the other hand, tend to align themselves with other researchers in their fields. The expert on the use of microalgae for CO2 mitigation happens to reside at Tulane, but his or her intellectual colleagues may sit at the University of Hawaii or in Tokyo. Research thus is horizontal, straddling multiple institutions. This is the world of professional societies and academic fields (which are reflected in journals publishing). There is a tension here: libraries and IRs are being asked to face in two directions, vertically and horizontally, straining resources.

Not surprisingly, the actual use of IRs is less than many had hoped for, and much of the use is for such things as students’ papers. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not in keeping with the often-declared goal of “capturing the intellectual output of the university.” What I propose is that in addition to IRs (which ultimately are simply going to be extensions of course-management systems, so why not just hand off this function to Blackboard and be done with it?), libraries organize disciplinary repositories or DRs. These would be horizontal, not vertical, and reflect the actual research activities of the global intellectual community.

These DRs can be assembled on a consortial basis, with institutions sharing access to DRs and each institution taking charge–exclusive charge, so as to avoid redundancy–of a certain number of topics. How to assign who does what will not be easy, but it simply makes no sense for there to be competing DRs for some segment of nanotechnology or Keats research. One would expect that Harvard and the University of Chicago would do more than Middlesex Community College or an emerging institution in the developing world, but there is a case to be made for every institution to do something. Universities can save a great deal of money by recognizing that in some cases, there is no need to be universal.

How would this work? Progressively, I would hope. The larger institutions would take over the curation of more disciplines, but even the smallest would have to contribute something in order to get access to all the rest. The definitive DR on stem-cell research may be curated at John Hopkins and the history of Silicon Valley at San Jose State–not really comparable, to be sure–but Hopkins and SJS would each have access to the other’s DR. To each according to his means. To join the consortium, an institution would have to propose to the governing board what DRs the prospective member plans to sponsor and curate. The stern gaze of the board would prevent free riders or “cheap riders”: Carry your weight in curation or be an outcast.

As for independent scholars without institutional affiliation, I propose that they would gain access by doing the equivalent of purchasing a library card from a member institution. For $50 you get everything.

This plan solves a number of problems. It aligns repositories with the research community–horizontally, in DRs. It saves money by negating the need for institutions to try to cover everything, a pointless and unnecessary endeavor in the world of the Internet. For those uncomfortable with commercial organizations operating within the academic community, it provides a purely consortial arrangement among similar not-for-profits. It is progressive, enabling the participation of Third World scholars on the same level of access as their lucky counterparts in Oxford and Palo Alto. It provides a good ROI for major institutions, and a fabulous ROI for small ones. It eliminates the free-rider problem by mandating some level of curation, however small (but scaled to an institution’s resources), and thus provides an incentive for all institutions to get involved. And it captures the output of academic institutions in such a way as to provide significant incentives for researchers to participate (which is the problem with IRs: little researcher participation).

Open Access purists will note that this plan falls short of full OA. That is correct: this is Almost Open Access, as it requires institutional affiliation (which you can get for the cost of a library card). The virtue of AOA as opposed to OA is that AOA is sufficiently suasive to ensure economic commitment and participation. Traditional publishers (for whom there is absolutely nothing in this plan) will remark that AOA is what they have advocated all along. That is also correct. But publishers will never grow comfortable with pure OA, as their business training will not permit them to expend 100% of their effort to satisfy 1% of demand.

But they are not needed for this plan, so their comfort is besides the point.

I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on monochrome screens some ten to fifteen years ago; even the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal started printing color pages about then. E-Ink displays are kind of like dancing bears — it’s not great dancing, but it’s remarkable that it dances at all. Amazon’s Kindle is an interesting exception, because it’s not really about reading. It has several features which distinguish it:

• An always-on no-subscription-fee Sprint EVDO connection. This means that it’s always connected (or at least tries to be that way), and that connection is part of the sale price, not something extra to sign up for. No WiFi hotspots to hunt for, pay for, and sign on to. How much is Amazon paying for this? I’m told that access to Sprint’s EVDO network for unlimited data transfers is on the order of $50/month — surely Amazon has negotiated a deal here…
• But still — how do they pay for that EVDO? Perhaps with the fact that the Kindle serves as an always-connected consumer-carried sell-me-something terminal for Amazon. Think of this: the consumer carries around with them a sales terminal which only connects to your store, and makes buying something very very easy. What’s more, it’s big enough that it preempts any other retailer’s similar store-in-your-pocket. They sell one big flat-screen TV and they’ve recovered the cost of the Kindle. Do they give a cut to the EVDO provider?
• Amazon has moved agressively into the book market, both with paper books and then with ebooks, buying both Mobipocket and Audible.com, the big seller in the spoken book market. And any of these can be purchased from the Kindle (and then “read” on the Kindle). Book purchases are not an important factor for Amazon here, but the fact that it’s a book reader is. This gives the consumer an excuse to carry it around, a critical factor for success as a impulse-purchase terminal.
• The Kindle has an “experimental” web browser, email support, a keyboard so that you can type into it. In fact, it’s sort of like a butterflied laptop with a bad screen — looks a lot like those old Alan Kay DynaBook mock-ups. So Amazon is pushing into the “Internet tablet” space; this isn’t really just an ebook reader. The apps are not great, and the keyboard is pretty stiff, but at least they are there.

In short, I think the Kindle may have a future, despite its technical shortcomings, because it directly supports Amazon’s very agressive selling (books and otherwise) business plan. I expect the Kindle to evolve as technology does, perhaps a bright color OLED screen, possibly with a touch surface, coming eventually. This seems to be an example of a perceptive and forward-looking business strategy, perhaps somewhat hampered by relative inexperience in consumer product design.

Note the similarities to the iPhone: always on, point-of-sale terminal for iTunes music and movies, agressive moves into the music and movies businesses, Internet tablet apps. Different design points, to be sure; Apple had to go with bright color to sell movies, and “it’s a phone” is the excuse for the consumer to carry it. I wonder if the bright color screen, plus the woeful state of current battery technology, dictated a pocket-sized phone rather than a larger tablet — would a big screen wear out a small battery too quickly? MacBook Air and iPhone 3G reviews suggest as much. Or was the “phone” necessary as the excuse for the consumer to carry it?

The competition isn’t exactly head-to-head here; one can’t buy soap or basketballs from Apple (yet). However, as a point-of-sale terminal, the iPhone has a number of differences from the Kindle, most of which seem to be advantages:

• Both products have high-dot-pitch screens (163 dpi for the iPhone, 167 dpi for the Kindle), which gives a crisp sharp detail to the edges of text. However, the Kindle screen is limited to 8 (4?) shades of gray, and relatively slow to update (to save on battery life), while the iPhone appears to be 32-bit color, and updates quickly enough to play movies and games. In addition, the iPhone screen includes a backlight, so it can be read in the dark without additional lighting. Perhaps most importantly for a retail device, the iPhone can display mouthwatering full-color alpha-blended photos of products for sale, while the Kindle has to settle for that 2- or 3-bit grayscale. The iPhone’s screen is a fair bit smaller, 320×480 (3.5 inch diagonal) versus 600×800 (6 inch diagonal) for the Kindle.
• The “excuse” of buying a phone, rather than buying a dedicated ebook reader, is much more palatable for many many people. As I explained elsewhere, a dedicated ebook reader competes with much cheaper and more durable book technology, while buying a cell phone has become a standard practice for many people, and is subsidized by the phone companies. What’s more, Apple has reversed the income flow for connectivity that Amazon must be paying; the consumer pays Apple (indirectly through the phone company) for connectivity, rather than the other way around! Beautifully done, Apple.
• The iPhone fits in a pocket; for most pockets, the Kindle doesn’t.
• The iPhone is designed as a communication device; the Kindle isn’t. This seems to me to be a huge advantage for the iPhone; human beings are natural communicators, and they flock to anything that gives them cheaper/better/different ways of talking with each other.
• A consumer can “watch TV” on the iPhone (which should speak for itself).
• The iTunes App Store opens up the iPhone to other uses, and to other retailers. Fictionwise has already released an app to sell books in eReader format from their bookstore. Stanza connects a reader to a huge free backlist of out-of-copyright (or open source) books, stories, and articles. A variety of free applications connect readers to news stories and RSS feeds, and the full-color standards-compliant Web browser is there for other sites. You can even shop Amazon from your iPhone. Where’s the Kindle equivalent of this?
• What’s more, the App Store creates an incentive for developers to imagine and then create new uses for the iPhone. This makes it more useful to consumers, thereby increasing sales. Nice market penetration strategy. Apple keeps 30% of the sales price for their efforts, and sends the other 70% off to the developer.
• The iPhone handles HTML, PDF, Word, and Powerpoint formats. The Kindle supports HTML, PDF, and Word through its mail-us-your-document conversion service, which installs the document in Amazon’s proprietary AZF format, but this is a problem — corporate clients would like to be able to convert their reports and presentations in-house, or better yet not convert at all. The iPhone now supports that mode of operation. Neither device has a good strategy for managing collections of documents or syncing documents.
• The Kindle has a hardware keyboard; the iPhone doesn’t. This seems an advantage for the Kindle.
• The Kindle supports an SD memory card; the iPhone doesn’t. The iPhone has a camera (which supports communication); the Kindle doesn’t.

(Looking at these differences, I’m very tempted to assign Myers-Briggs personality profiles to each device. But I’ll leave that up to our readers; what do you think the personality of each is? :-).

Overall, I’d say that the iPhone 2.0 firmware release, and the iTunes App Store, has raised the bar a good deal in this competition for the pocket of the consumer. I expect to see a competitive release from Amazon in the near future, but I wonder how they’ll compensate for the shortcomings of the E-Ink screen?

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/booklist.html

And thought: Stanford, Sergey…. and clicked on it. And yes, it’s a 1998 looong list of “Sergey Brin’s favorite books,” from his Stanford days. His 1998 Web page is accessible from that page, where it becomes clear this long list is something he used for “Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web,” given at the WebDB Workshop at “EDBT ’98.” His home page is a charming little thing, fresh with the newness of the Web.

And so now, I link to it here. Not like Sergey needs links — but it is an example of the “search net” phenomenon. Because I was using four terms and a phrase, my specificity enabled serendipitious discovery, of a substantive chunk of content.
This is worth thinking about by publishers, because increasingly, searchers/researchers are using strategies like I did, to make sense of the density of the underbrush of the abundant Web. If that’s the case, and if encouraging “stumbling upon” our books is a good thing, then it behooves us to make our content indexable, one way or another.

At the National Academies Press site, we include, on the first page of every chapter (the books are presented page-by-page) , the full unformatted text of the first 10 and last 10 pages of that chapter. We include key phrases extracted from the chapter. And by doing this, we provide a huge, juicy target for search engines to slurp up.

Consequently, if someone’s putting in three, four, or five terms into Google or MSN or wherever, and those terms happen to be in our chapter, then we’ll show up in the search results, and get that wee bit of traffic. And a wee bit of opportunity to sell that book to someone who might be interested in it (note: only 0.24% of visitors currently buy anything from our site).

But those terms would almost certainly not all be in the book’s metadata, or in the publisher’s catalog blurb, or in the table of contents. It’s only openly indexable content that will provide a big enough pool of possibilities to match ever-more-esoteric and -specific search strategies: ‘net casting of a paragraph or a document, selectable groups of terms, phrase-pair searches, etc.

I’m still convinced that for small-market publications in particular — the kinds of books that are generally hard to justify significant promotion of — openly indexable content is a precondition for survival, in terms of long-tail backlist success in the scholarly environment. People find something, link to it, and thus promote it for free, for us, in the venues that care about that publication.

This theme pertains a bit to my comment on Joe’s Baby and Bathwater post, on the University of Pittsburgh Press’s digital library experiment, though alas, I don’t think that UPP’s library provides any indexable content. Even rough OCR would help, and I hope it’s part of their plan, eventually.

I’m pretty sure my demos sold three Kindles this weekend. I am more convinced than ever that the overall value proposition here — easy connectivity and the fast and direct acquisition of many of the books it would occur to people to want — will create success despite the real flaws in the product design.

I made the leap long ago to reading books on a hand-held device, currently a Palm Pilot. The always-with-me aspect combined with the back-lit screen for reading in bed in a dark room created book-reading opportunities no paper book could fill. And I learned to like the small page and short line width; I have come to notice when reading something forces my eyes to move and to have to work to find the beginning of each new line on the left. Doesn’t happen on the Palm. Or the Kindle.

For straight narrative reading, there are two serious disadvantages to the Palm, both solved by the Kindle. One is the purchasing and loading experience, which for the Palm is time-consuming and often frustrating. You shop either at Powells.com, which isn’t bad, or EReader.com, which is atrocious. Then you download to your computer, open the file, and load it to your Palm by hot-synching it. Failures can occur at every step. The other issue is the battery life. I can only read the Palm for a couple of hours before it starts needing juice. And I have other things I need the Palm to be functional for. So it isn’t a good tool to provide airplane reading for a trans-Atlantic flight.

The Kindle gadget itself is actually pretty seriously flawed. You have to get used to holding it while you read in a way that avoids inadvertent page advances. The “cursor” and selection wheel is limiting and, consequently navigation is over-involved. If using the iPod and iTunes defines elegant, using the Kindle and Amazon through it defines clunky. And yet…

Once you get used to keeping your fingers off the page-turning bars, reading on it is just fine. I hate right-justified lines, which it’s got (and why no way to choose out of it?), but the page width and depth are very paperback book-like. I’m fine with the default type size, but changing it to a larger (or smaller) one is two clicks. It’s lighter to hold than a book and advancing through pages is no harder or more distracting than with a paper book. Halftones and line drawings are okay — not great. I have a feeling, as I’m reading it, that I’m missing a lot of visual elements in the Stephen Colbert book. Like maybe they just left them out of the Kindle version. But I don’t read that many books that have visual elements.

It is solving my two prior ebook complaints: ease of title acquisition and battery life. And it is adding something fabulous: Amazon offers quick-loading samples of every book that are free. What you get in the sample, which you have about ten seconds after you click for it, seems to be all the front matter and a chapter or two. In an otherwise busy week, I’ve downloaded about ten samples, bought two books (and read big chunks of both of them) I’ve only had the device for ten days, but it looks to me like I will actively be reading two different books on devices from now on: one on my Kindle and one on my Palm. Which I’m reading at any time will be a function of circumstances and, of course, the urgency of reading the next chunk of one book or the other. The Palm is in my pocket all the time; the Kindle will travel in my laptop case and be with me at home, at the office, and in my hotel room and in transit when I’m travelling.

When I show people the device, they’re intrigued. When I show them the reading experience, they’re satisfied and accepting. But when I show them the buying procedures, they’re entranced. Amazon’s core competence ain’t devices, but they sure know how to maximize the shopping experience.

As you’ve read elsewhere, the Kindle takes you quickly and directly to Amazon, where you shop selections (bestsellers or new and noteworthy) or search the site in the normal way. Then you get the full Amazon data set, including those reviews they have. And you are offered an opportunity to buy or download the sample with a click.

I didn’t know the price of either of the two books I have bought when I bought them, so quick and seductive is the purchase button. And, of course, I was “sold” because I had, in both cases, read the sample. But I was pleasantly surprised. Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth”, for which the new paperback costs $11.99 at Amazon, and the cheapest used copy is $11.05, was $6.39 for my Kindle edition. And Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America (And So Can You)”, a current hardcover bestseller for which the publisher’s list is $26.99, the new book is $16.19 at Amazon and the cheapest used copy is $12.48, was $9.99 for my Kindle edition. Based on this very limited sample, savings (over Amazon prices) are $2-5 per book. If that holds up, it would take 100 or so books to repay the $399 (current) cost of the device (assuming one didn’t plan to re-sell the print editions after reading them.)

I have seen Jeff Bezos quoted to the effect that ebooks should be cheaper because you can’t pass them around like printed books. On that basis, the price comparison above might not be accurate. But one of the people I showed the Kindle to, who travels a lot and reads lots of books and who does not re-sell her printed editions, did the arithmetic for herself about the same way I did above.

And the Kindle does more than deliver you cheaper books; it also, in a way most people wouldn’t use a lot but which can certainly be helpful from time to time, delivers the Internet.

The dynamic the book business needs to wrap its collective brain around is that the more straight text narrative books you read, the more useful Kindle is and, on balance, the less it costs. And once you have a Kindle, it will take some real reason to make you buy a book of that kind another way. This is fraught with implications, which will be the topic of another post.

Living with me, her first reaction was to get books from Project Gutenberg. We found one of Danton’s famous speeches, translated into English, in a book of speeches, as well as several other useful books about the French Revolution that included nice sections on Danton. When she mentioned this to her teacher, he insisted that there must be recent work on this subject and that she should find it. Our local library and her school library have quite limited collections, but she did eventually identify a couple of recent books that the local library supposedly had, only one of which was available.

One final piece of background is that my daughter, who loves to read, does so fairly slowly and it is very difficult for her to skim printed text. Working with etexts is much easier for her since she can use search functions to help her spot what she needs. Trying to find useful pieces of information in a large, paper book is always an exercise in frustration for her.

What really struck me is the contrast between how easy it was to find public domain etexts and how difficult it was to find, using local public resources, relevant modern material in paper form and that modern, citable, content (books) simply wasn’t available in electronic form. Or rather, it might be available if we were willing to pay for an entire book, but that seemed like overkill for a homework assignment so we didn’t pursue that path. I suppose what we really wanted was the equivalent of the local public library, but for electronic texts. She had no desire or need to “own” the book and I didn’t want to buy one or more books (although I would have been willing to spend a few dollars to “rent” access for a time).

 Despite knowing all the reasons why setting up the ebook equivalent of the local library is hard, it just seems like a shame to me that modern analyses of Danton in electronic form either don’t exist, weren’t easily found, or are out of our reach.

But looking at their “Red” in-flight entertainment system today, with a menu button marked “Read” along with Music and Games and Chat and other cool functions (alas, the [Read] button was inactive, with a “coming soon” message); along with a WEP-protected wireless network labeled “VAsecret1″ … what if an airline partnered with Amazon, or with Google Books? (Or any other ebook store). Trapped in a long tin tube, the advantages of inflight reading are significant, as anyone who has ever bought a book clumsily onboard already overstuffed luggage can attest — and how much the better if I was able to actually browse a store (or a library!) and then order content or rent access online. Or, if I could identify myself and then gain access to my own accumulated e-library, even more awesome.

It seems to me that this is one of the core assets of ebooks — they make reading more pervasive, in a way that it has always strived to be, first with books, and then paperback books. A progression of the same, but with enhanced flexibility.

There is nothing to stop this vision from happening, and it has many advantages, so it must, one think, come to pass.