One of the things that brings me joy and despair in equal measures is the concept of electronic books. The idea brings me joy because any book can be distributed around the world to virtually anyone who wants it, books need never go out of print and I can potentially store millions of electronic books in a tiny space (as opposed to hundreds of printed books in the tiny space of my home).
Knowledge can now be transmitted rapidly, instead of waiting for a monk to draw the whole thing out on staggeringly expensive parchment and then deliver the thing by hand at the end of a six month donkey ride. Though sometimes Amazon still seems to emulate that process quite well.
Electronic books bring despair because, even after all these years of ASCII, Ethernet and cheap disks, they are still rare and hard to get hold of. And if you don't want to read them on screen, you're out of options.
For example, publishers and hardware manufacturers seem to almost want hardware ebook readers to fail. Example one: the ebook of one of Stephen King's novels was more expensive than ordering the hardback, even minus postage, on Barnes and Noble's website. It was bizarre pricing like that killed of the Rocket Reader.
Example two: Sony's new Libre ebook reader only reads books in a proprietary format and, get this, you can only rent titles. The device itself is great, and uses a revolutionary display, but won't even load up text documents. Why not? Sony really need a good kicking for that – it was a short-sighted and greedy move that's going to die on its backside when everyone decides it's just not worth buying.
So, I'll just have to face up to the fact that I won't be curling up in bed with my millions of ebooks any time soon, and will just have to read them on my PC. Ah, except there aren't millions of ebooks, are there? Even the biggest ebook projects only have 15,000 titles or so.
Online music stores start up and have over a million tunes straight away – royalties are all worked out, the distribution is fine – when there were no music stores 18 months ago. Yet, even after years of scanning and distribution there are only a few tens of thousands of texts available. Publishers have made the text of many of their books available to Amazon and Google – but I can't read the books or download, I can just have a bit of a search and maybe pop off an buy a title. Again, a missed opportunity because of greed and lack of foresight.
Never mind then, 15,000 books is still more than I'll ever be able to read – I'll just down load those using my P2P client. Not so fast.
Not many people peer ebooks on the popular networks like eDonkey, meaning that my download speeds are very, very slow. It's not made much better by the fact that not many people want ebooks either and so my upload speeds are negligible. Down load is tied to upload ... it's a vicious circle.
If you're after some naked flesh or a ripped U2 CD, then no problem – there are loads of peers, and you'll have the whole thing down in no time, whilst helping others. The ISO for the Gutenberg Archive typically only ever has one person willing to peer it, and no-one else really wants to download it.
Therefore, today, I'm looking at a download time of around a week to get my hands on those lovely text files.
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