Apocalypse Soon

The Reader isn’t a revolution in and of itself. For $300 all you get is a tiny display and a clumsy interface. Reading a book on this would be deeply annoying — but it wouldn’t be a strain. Instead of an lcd screen, it boasts “electronic paper,” the ink highlighted in soothing contrast, as if it were onpaper. As I stared down at the Sony Reader, for the first time in my life I could envision myself abandoning paper for digital books. It was a revelation.

Suppose Apple released an electronic-paper iTome, I thought, and suppose it was easy to use, reasonably priced, and allowed one to switch between text and audiobook on demand. Suppose, further, that it was convenient, even sexy. Would there still be something sacred and special about bound sheaves of paper? Or would we soon see them supplanted by iTome on the subway, in the classroom, even curled up beside the fireplace?

Doesn’t sound so bad to me. But the idea is like a can of poisonous snakes to most book publishers, and it’s easy to see why when you consider what’s happening to the music industry. Go to limewire.com, home of “the fastest file sharing program on the planet.” Take a couple of minutes to download and install the LimeWire client, et voilà. Despite the best efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, you have access to nearly every song of the modern era all downloadable free of charge.

This is piracy, clearly illegal and wildly popular despite lawsuit after lawsuit, despite increasingly desperate and mostly failed copyright-protection schemes. If and when e-books and digital readers become ubiquitous, the same thing will happen. The change winds have already begun to blow. Pirated audiobooks and “cracked” e-books, converted to easily shared text, are already available online, if you know where and how to look. Imagine if people could download any book they wanted, for free, onto a digital reader with contrast as good as ink and paper. The entire publishing industry would collapse.

The “free content” folks argue, “information wants to be free.” This sounds good; maybe it even sounds right. But like many slogans it makes no sense. Information is an abstract noun, and for itself it doesn’t want anything. Information is what we do with it, but what if we decide we want it for free? You can’t compete with free. Or can you?


While most publishers tremble and fret, some authors actually want to put their work online. Many in this group are from the forward-looking field of science fiction. If you’re so inclined, you can go online right now and read (for free) highly acclaimed science fiction novels such as Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and the entire oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Science fiction publisher Baen Books has made available a “library” of copy-righted-but-free novels. You may be wondering why these authors and publishers have cut their own commercial throats. But the evidence to date indicates that releasing a book online actually increases offline sales. Readers try and then they buy.

Caveats apply. Such releases are still unusual, and thus they receive unusual publicity. Many readers will begin a book online, decide they like it, and buy a paper copy rather than fight their way through 100,000 low-contrast words. (And, indeed, sales and publicity are the two reasons I want to put my own book online immediately, before the iTome emerges as a replacement force.) But there’s also a growing body of evidence that people often buy paper copies of books after reading them online for free, that many readers actually want to pay authors. I find this reassuring because, scary as it might sound, in the long run it’s the publishing industry’s only hope.

The music business has moved to voluntary payment already. Virtually every song available on Apple’s iTunes store is also available on LimeWire at the same quality, with fewer restrictions, and at no cost. Listeners can download these songs without fear of legal repercussions from any Internet café or public access Wi-Fi hotspot — and yet iTunes’s business is booming. Literally billions of songs have been sold. It seems that an enormous number of people are willing to pay for what they can get for free.

Digital books have huge advantages. Printing and distributing bound sheaves of paper is expensive and not exactly environment friendly. In fact, it’s very strange, in this Internet era, to be shipping text on trucks and railcars. If publishers can cut out those costs and pass the savings on to their readers, basic economics dictates that more books will be purchased and profits will grow.

Unfortunately, once a book is an e-book, once a text has been turned into pure information, then all the copy-right-protection schemes and intellectual-property lawyers in the world won’t keep it from being made available for free. It’s simply too easy to share text across servers, nations, and individual computers. And if publishers don’t convert their paper books to e-books, pirates will. In the not-too-distant future, all books will be freely available, just as essentially all popular music is right now. Readers will decide whether books are worth buying, and if so for how much, often after they’ve read them.