The problem with DRM, photo by djfiander, cc by-nc-sa. As DJF notes in his comment on the photo, “Spotted on the Toronto subway: if the publishers had their way, she wouldn’t be allowed to take this many notes in her copy of this book.”

Reminder, publishers still hate you. From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog comes this report, E-Textbook Vendor Sues Publisher for Ending Licensing Agreement. The actual fight between the parties seems like it may be more complex than they are letting on (and I admit that I haven’t read the entire lawsuit which is embedded as a document in the blog post), but here’s the crux of the matter from my point of view (with emphasis added):

The conflict began last August, when Kno introduced new features to its e-reader platform. One of those tools, Journal, lets readers take notes and make excerpts for later reference in the software. The next month, Cengage claimed the added note-taking feature enabled copyright infringement “through the creation of a derivative work,” according to the complaint.

There you go. Cengage hates you because you want to take notes and clip passages from its textbooks for later reference. They think that is unreasonable; so unreasonable that they are trying to get out of their contract with Kno, and are willing to endure a lawsuit.

They hate their readers and customers and fair use rights that much.

Thanks, Catherine Pellegrino, for pointing this out via retweet.

The depth of feeling among some in the research community is real and something we take very seriously blah blah blah. #yawn

— Fake Elsevier (@FakeElsevier) February 17, 2012

OK, scientists, now the gloves come off.$2k pub+figs chrgs, $20k lib. subs., full copyright transfer AND you have to give us a backrub

— Fake Elsevier (@FakeElsevier) February 14, 2012

All of this negative energy has got me Stressed. Out.

— Fake Elsevier (@FakeElsevier) February 8, 2012

But if you go there today, you’ll see that the satire is on hold for a day. @FakeElsevier is sending readers to a blog post–a sincere blog post, titled DEAR ELSEVIER EMPLOYEES, WITH LOVE, FROM @FAKEELSEVIER.

Where my publishers hate you post was a rant and took a shotgun approach to publishing in general, this post from @FakeElsevier (a research scientist in real life) is more sincere and more focused than what I wrote, but still angry and plain-spoken. Here’s the main point, emphasis in original:

In the internet age, Elsevier is doing an unbelievably shitty job of accomplishing its ONE AND ONLY PURPOSE: to distribute our work as broadly as possible

See now why we, as customers, are unhappy? You’re distributing our work to a really small audience, and you’re making even that access irritating and painful. Don’t patronize us by telling us how you are “committed to universal access”. If you were genuinely committed to universal access, you’d make things universally accessible. Your marginal distribution cost is effectively zero, so why not act like it?

Now, one could argue that he/she is begging the question that the one and only purpose of a publisher is to distribute its authors’ work as broadly as possible. But I still think this is a great rhetorical move, because if Elsevier wants to argue back about ensuring quality and trustworthyness…well, there are plenty of reasons that Elsevier might not want to get into a conversation about trust and honesty and so on.

I was flattered that Kelly asked my colleague, Jessy Randall, and me to record a video for their fundraiser. Kelly is posting a different video each day of the campaign to highlight all the different people who are interested in the DZL and all our different reasons for finding value and inspiration there.

They aren’t asking for a lot of money per supporter. I donated $25, but donations as small as $5 are helpful and welcome. If you are interested in zines, in self-publishing, in quirky independent libraries, please go to the fundraising site and donate some money to the Denver Zine Library.

In having these conversations and making these comparisons, we are happy to express what makes it difficult for us to read. Some people find a backlit screen causes eye fatigue. Some are distracted too much by the “flash” of an e-ink screen reloading. The size and weight of the reading device, the placement of the buttons, the presence or absence of a touch screen and its particular interface, the type, the typesetting; all the little details are up for discussion and evaluation.

Because it is new and different, and because we all have the experience of reading printed books to compare it to, we don’t take any of the elements of ebooks for granted. We know that all the aspects of the ebook are man-made and contingent and subject to change. If we find it difficult to read a certain way, we don’t assume that it’s our fault, that we are dumb or slow. We assume that we can find satisfaction in a different screen, a different form factor, a different file format.

We also assume that our preferences or requirements aren’t shared by everyone. I can look past mediocre typesetting, but I have friends who are immensely distracted by it. I like backlit screens, but I believe other people who say it tires their eyes. I have trouble relating to people who are put off by the very idea of an electronic book, but I know they are out there, and I know that their resistance is real.

So, inevitably, this brings me back to printed books. Seeing how we differ markedly in our response to electronic books makes me believe that humans’ response to the printed book was never so monolithic as I would have previously assumed. Surely some people find turning paper pages as distracting as flashing screens, or find conventionally “legible” typefaces on paper to be difficult to read for one reason or another.

As we all know, printed books have been around for almost 600 years. The manuscript codex, which was substantially similar to the printed book, takes the basic form of book back another 1,000 years, give or take a few centuries. So we can be forgiven for seeing the book as a natural object, forgetting that everything about a book is a result of human choice, since many of those choices are actually conventions or traditions that date back to the early middle ages.

If we think of the printed book as a natural or perfected object, who are we to say that we don’t like black ink on white paper, or that rectangular books are annoying? With the relatively recent recognition of dyslexia and other learning disabilities, perhaps people are becoming slightly less afraid to speak up about their individual and idiosyncratic experiences and frustrations with ink-on-paper, but by and large the message is clear in our culture that smart people read and reading people are smart, and if reading is difficult for you, the problem is with you, and not with the book.

I hope that our collective experience with ebooks will continue to remind us that reading is strange, books are human creations, and the reading experience is not universal.

It’s easy for academic authors to share their published articles by emailing PDFs to people who ask for them. Taylor and Francis thinks this is a bug, rather than a feature of our networked environment, and want to return to the days of article reprints or offprints.

When Taylor & Francis introduces free author eprints by saying, “Your friends and contacts can now read your published articles for free. The introduction of Taylor & Francis Online author eprints enables all authors to quickly and easily share links to the electronic version of their articles,” what they are really saying is “we hate you for emailing copies of your own work to people, and want you to use our system of artificial scarcity instead.” They go on to say that, “Up to 50 people will be able to access each paper for free. One of the 50 eprints is for you (you will always have free access to your articles), and the other 49 eprints are for sharing.” Really? One of the free eprints is for me? THAT IS SO GENEROUS I’M SO GLAD I GAVE MY WORK AWAY TO A COMMERCIAL PUBLISHER THEY TAKE SUCH GOOD CARE OF ME  I WANT TO VOMIT IN GRATITUDE.

HarperCollins fired LJ Smith from her own book series, The Vampire Diaries. Apparently it was work for hire, so, yes, she should have read and understood the contract. But back in 1990 when she signed the contract, it wasn’t yet clear that HarperCollns hates its authors and readers, I suppose. At least in academic writing we don’t have to worry about such silliness, since academic writing isn’t work for hire. I mean, unless it’s for Oxford. Because Oxford University Press hates its authors, it seems.

This rant was inspired somewhat by the above comic that appeared on Unshelved this Monday. I usually like Unshelved, but this comic got under my skin. “Libraries” don’t “put the line in online.” Publishers put the line in online.  Publishers care about customers, not readers, and they hate readers who don’t pay full freight.

Librarian Shayera Tangri tweeted this yesterday. And I think “poopyheads” is right on. But I also think it’s important to point out that Penguin is not being a poopyhead to libraries and librarians. Penguin is being a poopyhead to readers. Because Penguin loves customers but hates readers.

So library-types, let’s get our story straight. Publishers have contempt for the authors they need to write works, and the readers they need to read works. Publishers are scared that the internet is going to disintermediate their asses into the dustbin of history, and the best response that many of them have come up with is to express their fear through hatred. For all the things that we might need to improve in libraries or apologize for, this isn’t one of them.

(Thanks to Josh Neff, Barbara Fister, and Andrew Shuping who brought some of these items to my attention.)

The “other documents” along with the syllabus are things like the midterm exam, the course evaluation, and the “final you don’t have to take.” We’d originally planned to have a final exam, but due to the complexity of the printing project and the fact that we really wanted them to focus on refining their virtual exhibition assignments, we chose to forego the exam. But that didn’t mean that I had stopped thinking of things I wanted to ask them.

Most of the questions on the “fake final” are questions that I actually find somewhat intriguing, but that I either left more raw or more jokey than I’d feel comfortable putting on a real exam. But Jessy had a very good question that she and I had talked briefly about during the class, but that never really made it to an open class discussion. Here’s my version of that question, which I think could have been a very good final exam essay question, indeed.

For a college book-collecting contest, a student wanted to submit a collection of electronic books. Would you allow such a submission? In supporting your answer consider some of the following: What are good criteria for judging a collection of tangible, physical books? Is it possible to evaluate a collection of electronic books the same way, or would you propose different criteria? Is it possible or useful to compare collections of paper books and electronic books? How do concepts of “individuality,” “ownership,” and “scarcity” affect your answer? Is book collecting of any kind merely a bourgeois exercise in Pokemon-esque conspicuous consumption, narcissism, elitism, and crypto-fetishism by an anal-retentive phallocracy of bibliobores?

Magazines are 40% off, which is a good deal, as are Blue Ray discs, which I guess is a good deal if you like that kind of thing. Most book departments are still just 20% off. I bought a martial arts book that I’d had my eye on, but when I later looked it up on Amazon I found that I had guessed wrong: I could have had it for 30% off.

Which may stand as reasonably emblematic of Borders’ problems. When, for one yearly fee, Amazon will deliver almost anything for free shipping in two days at a better price, why shop at Borders at all? And yet, that’s a bit too simple, as Barnes & Noble seems to be doing OK.

Peter Osnos, writing for the Atlantic, had some ideas about What Went Wrong at Borders back in January. In a post this week, titled The End of Borders and the Future of the Printed Word, Osnos quotes Neil Strandberg, whom I used to work with at Denver’s independent Tattered Cover bookstore.

Taking a cue from some of the technologies that have been so disruptive, collectively, the indie community is crowd-sourcing the sustainable bookstore-like thing of tomorrow. One of us is going to figure this out.

I love the “sustainable bookstore-like thing of tomorrow” language, and when I’m feeling futuristic, I’ll be writing about the “sustainable library-like thing of tomorrow.”

I worked at a Barnes & Noble for about two years, almost twenty years ago. It was mostly a crummy experience, with the notable exception of meeting my wife there.

As I picked at the fresh corpse of the local Borders, I looked at the remaining employees and wondered what they were thinking and how they were feeling. If I were in their shoes and depending on my Borders paycheck to support my family, I’m sure I’d be angry and scared about finding another job in a tight economy.

But if I were younger, or if I was part-time, or if for whatever reason I wasn’t counting on my Borders hours to keep me afloat, I think I’d be oddly energized about coming to work. I’d be curious to see how customers react, and if they understand the closing the same way I did. (The woman at the store this morning trying to return a book obviously did not understand.)

I think it might feel like a sombre Christmas holiday shopping season. In December, I remember things getting more frenzied by degrees, stepping up in intensity each weekend until by late afternoon of Christmas Eve, people finally were able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. It felt like a fever breaking.

Of course, Borders’ fever is terminal. But I bet there will be more than a few Borders employees who are making it through the next few weeks driven by morbid curiosity, and a sad sense of satisfaction in seeing things through to the end.

I’m feeling especially warm toward Bridle today, because his thoughts in his post Open Bookmarks II have led him to a position that sounds a lot like what Iris and I ended up saying in our plan that we drafted in reaction to the HarperCollins backlash.

Here’s the part that particularly resonated with me, though I recommend you read Bridle’s whole post:

Everything you can do with a book you should be able to do with an ebook. And this is where it gets hard. Because, again, try arguing with that sentence: is the future really about taking a step back, gaining some affordances only at the expense of losing others?

There are of course different angles to this. Spotify-type models of buying (or being given) access to libraries for fixed periods, or streaming books, or serialisations or installments: these change the traditional model of book ownership. But there will still be books for sale, and where a reader chooses to buy a book, that book belongs to them. We must not tolerate another 1984, and we must not accept further erosion of the First-sale doctrine. Of course times are changing, but our relationship with books, in whatever form they take, should remain a constant: our books, our reading, our experiences.

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?”

Joshu answered: “Mu.” [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning "No-thing" or "Nay."]

This is one of the most famous of Zen koans, or enigmatic stories meant to help one towards enlightenment. This one comes from the Mumonkan, or Gateless Gate, a collection of koans with commentary by Mumon Ekai.

The koan is less straightforward than it may appear, as many say that Joshu is not saying “no, the dog does not have Buddha-nature.” He is negating the question. The verse that ends Mumon’s commentary is as follows:

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

Has a videogame art-nature or not?

My friend Jaybird couldn’t stop himself from putting another quarter in this dead horse this morning and producing a nice post on the subject. Which points to and is to some degree inspired by Brian Moriarty’s talk Apology for Roger Ebert which he delivered at the recent Game Developer’s Conference.

Coincidentally, I found a link to this video of Brandon Boyer’s microtalk at that same designer’s conference. Boyer’s talk is a cri de coeur for videogames as “the best tool available for exploring someone’s incredibly personal dreamscape,” while still acknowledging that finding videogames that live up to the work of people such as David Foster Wallace and Spalding Gray and the profundity of the kind of work that encompasses all the complexity of life up to and including “staving off the sweet seduction of suicide”–well, the games don’t do that, quite, now do they?

Are games art? Can they be beautiful, moving, upsetting, wicked, and challenging? Can they be the Mona Lisa or Hamlet or 4’33″ or Homage to New York or Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park or Untitled?

Have you beaten Guernica yet? Seen the videos of that speed run of Eraserhead?

Is sometimes the only way to win not to play?

Has a videogame art-nature or not?

Has an e-book book-nature or not?

In the Library Society of the World FriendFeed room, Kathryn Greenhill asks:

Just wondering what proportion of us actually enjoy reading ebooks as much or more than print books?. I know it varies from situation to situation, device to device, but GENERALLY, let’s try More, Same, Less ….?

The e-books I have read have tended towards free and cheap. I have tended to judge them accordingly.

E-books have text that flows and is re-sizable and which appears in the typefaces and resolutions and colors available to the device I read them on, making them seem a little more like every other thing and a little less like themselves.

Paper codexes never seem so great nowadays as they were in 1896 or 1623 or 1450. E-book devices never seem so great nowadays as they will be real soon now.

Ebooks don’t smell like anything. Codexes don’t smell like anything either except when they do and then they smell bad, hasn’t anyone digitized this smelly thing yet?

It’s impossible to drop a codex and render your whole library unreadable, just as it’s impossible to download another codex to replace the one your ex-best-friend lost on the stupid bus.

If I deplore the idea that people don’t read much anymore and I find the idea of e-books abhorrent, should I be happy or sad that those people who don’t read aren’t reading e-books?

Has an e-book book-nature or not?

Sometimes people make unauthorized copies of works, or they want to make unauthorized copies, or they just enjoy thinking about the issues surrounding the making of unauthorized copies. Such activity often leads to those people wanting to justify what they have done (or want to do or have thought about doing). Since the legal standing for making these unauthorized copies is, in many cases, dubious at best, those arguing in favor of copying must find their support outside the law as written, leading people to practical, moral, or cultural arguments rather than legal arguments.

A line of thought that I have seen in a few places recently goes something like this: “Suppose I have a legally-obtained copy of a work, either one that I have purchased or one that I have checked out from the library. Because I have this legal copy, I should then have the right to also obtain and use other copies of the work in other formats.”

For example, Jason Puckett recently posted this to a private feed on FriendFeed:

Hypothetical. I have a book checked out from the library but decide I don’t want to lug the physical copy around. I download a bootleg ebook edition from bittorrent and load that on my ipad. When I’m done I delete the ebook copy and return the stacks copy. Unethical?

Here, the idea is that as long as one has a legitimate copy in one’s possession, it does no harm to the market for the work to get additional digital copies for personal use, providing that copies aren’t allowed to proliferate, and providing that once the person no longer has possession of the legitimate copy, the unauthorized copies are destroyed.

Sometimes, as with Aaron’s comments in this thread, people argue that once they have purchased a copy of a work in one format–any format–they should be entitled to download the same work in digital form for free.

In either case, the argument seems to be that when one has a legitimate copy, one also has something else: a license to the work in other formats. In some cases–as with the first example above–the argument is that one has a limited license to electronic copies that don’t involve the loss of a sale. In other cases–as with the second example, and as with more extreme cases I have seen elsewhere–the argument is that purchasing one copy in one format one time amounts to a blanket license for the rest of the purchaser’s life. So that 8-track copy of Mr. Roboto kicking around the back of your Trans Am should let you download it on iTunes for free.

What is fascinating to me is the way that consumers have internalized the idea of the license, creating what I’m thinking of as “license culture.” We started to think of music recordings as “content” when home taping became cheap and easy, and this only accelerated with digital music files. Software has always seemed like something apart from the medium upon which it was recorded. We have conceived of books in this way for a while now by analogy with these other media, but only recently has it been feasible to think of actually obtaining a book-as-text without also obtaining a book-as-codex.

And I think that this means the “content suppliers” and “rights holders” have won. If even those contemplating “piracy” (as the “rights holders” would certainly term it) are thinking in terms of licenses rather than copyright, I think that might mean that copyright is pretty much done, except as a gateway to licenses. Even Creative Commons is a license. It seems we all agree that copyright is broken, we just can’t agree how.

OK. So. Does that make sense? Is it more useful/interesting or tautological/boring or confusing/TL;DR?

Lastly, I know that people must have thought about “content” apart from “containers” for millennia. Does anyone have good recommended reading that would help me trace this idea through history?