THE FUTURE OF E-BOOKS

---

Publishers want to restrict copying while readers want the freedom to read their e-books in any form without artificial limitations. Compounding the problem of copy protection, e-books also face an uphill battle for widespread acceptance, since no single file format has emerged as a standard. To fix this problem, several companies have banded together to form the Open eBook Forum (http://www.openebook.org), but more time has been spent squabbling over Digital Rights Management and copy protection, so don't expect its members to find a solution to e-book piracy any time soon.

Unlike the music industry, where corporations spend millions of dollars buying the rights to songs only to see their investments get swapped across the Internet for free, book publishers are in a slightly more favorable position. For book publishers, the greatest expense comes from printing and distributing their products, which is exactly what e-books eliminate.

After people cracked the copy protection on Stephen King's e-book Riding the Bullet, critics spoke about the problems of piracy, but others saw the hack as a unique marketing opportunity to attract additional publicity for the e-book. "In book publishing, a little bit of piracy may be good marketing," says Chris MacAskill, former CEO of the once-independent online electronic publishing sites Fatbrain.com and MightyWords.com in Santa Clara, California. Eliminate the bulk of your expenses (printing and distributing) through ebooks, and Internet piracy can just be part of the cost of doing business, much like factoring in the inevitable cost of shoplifting when calculating profits for a printed book.

Unlike songs that sound the same whether they play from a CD or as an MP3 file, e-books and physical books differ because an e-book may be convenient to carry, but it's not as convenient to read on a bulky and tiny e-book reader, such as a handheld computer. Despite the threat of blatant copying, e-books can actually reach more people who might never have known about the e-book's existence and entice them to buy a physical copy later. "The more people who see the books, the better, especially if the book is good," says Bill Pollock, founder of No Starch Press. "And if the book is bad, this is a great way to sort that out before spending your hard-earned dough on something that isn't worth the paper it's printed on." E-books could complement printed books and possibly expose people to a wider variety of books to read.

That's part of the plan for TeleRead (http://www.teleread.org), a proposed national digital library for storing e-books and distributing them to schools and libraries across the country. By providing a national library that anyone can use, TeleRead hopes that e-books can finally give everyone equal access to information regardless of their physical location or economic status.

China has already started a similar project dubbed the China Digital Library Project (http://www.china.com.cn/english/PP-e/32407.htm). So far, this Chinese national digital library has collected over 23 million books, making it the largest book collection in Asia. The Digital South Asia Library (http://dsal.uchicago.edu) also plans to store reference and scholarly works about Asia in digital format. Although copy protection may be necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders, projects like TeleRead, Digital South Asia Library, and the China Digital Library Project can't let copy protection interfere with the public's legitimate need to read that same information.

---