Megatheriums for Breakfast

Our present world has been shaped by many historical accidents which have become entrenched in boundaries which now make little sense.

In 1494, Pope Alexander VI settled an argument between the great exploring nations of Spain and Portugal by ruling a line down the middle of the Atlantic. All newly discovered lands to the west of this line would be owned by Spain, those to the east of this line could be owned by Portugal. The native inhabitants of these places, of course, were not to get much say in this.

At this time, two years after the return of Columbus, very little of what we now know as the Americas had been discovered; the Pope was not to know that a large part of the landmass of South America bulged well to the east of the line he had drawn. But the Portugese quickly discovered that fact and colonised what is now Brazil.

So it is that today the people of Brazil speak Portugese, while all the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It is hard to imagine that situation ever changing.

Another example is the modern city of York in the north of England. Its winding streets, and even the property lines dividing modern-day houses and shops, are shaped by historical decisions going back to the days when it was occupied by the Vikings or even earlier. Unless there is wholesale buying up and clearance of those properties, those boundaries may last for another thousand years.

And yet another example is the remnants of old empires, such as the British Empire. I am old enough to remember school atlases and globes with all of the countries belonging to the British Empire shown in red – the ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’.

The British Empire is, of course, now long gone, though in the shape of the Commonwealth – meant to be a loose, voluntary association of states – it still has some present day form. Australia, where I live, was part of the Empire and is now part of the Commonwealth.

But this relict of the past still has enormous influence in one area of modern life – copyright and publishing. Here the boundaries seem set as eternally as those of the language zones of South America or the property boundaries of York.

When an author sells a book to a publisher, he or she signs a contract assigning the publisher copyright – literally, the right to copy the work. Though that right is generally as broad as the publisher can get away with, it is spelled out to cover particular geographic areas of the world. And this is where those relict boundaries are still in place – the British Empire still lives!

I’m certainly speaking generally, and I know there are exceptions, but as a consumer the way I understand it is that a British or Commonwealth publisher has the right to copy and sell a book anywhere within the old Empire’s boundaries. An American publisher will be able to sell a book almost anywhere except within those boundaries. Between them, they divide up the English-language speaking world rather in the same way as the Pope divided up the world between the Spanish and the Portugese.

But in today’s ‘flattened‘ world of the Internet, these boundaries no longer make any sense, and in fact result in many very silly situations.

Here’s an example.

Let’s take Michael Connelly’s first novel about Harry Bosch, “Black Echo”. The UK publisher of the paperback is Orion Publishing Group, the hardback Headline Book Publishing.

The US paperback publisher is Grand Central Publishing, the hardback Little, Brown and Company.

So, living in Australia, I can only get to buy one of the UK editions, unless I use the Internet to buy a US edition from Amazon. This is frowned on by the British publishing companies, and by the Australian authorities in charge of intellectual property, but it’s not actually forbidden. If the UK edition is out of print, then the Australian authorities do allow me to ask my bookseller to import the US edition, thanks to some recent relaxations due to our consumer affairs authority.

There’s also an audiobook version, available from Audible.

But wait!! Can I buy the audiobook? No, because apparently it’s based on the US edition, and can’t be sold to me, who lives in the old British Empire. Is there a British audiobook edition available online? Not that I can find. Does this mean that I can buy the only audiobook edition available to me? Not on your life. I’m in the British Empire and so I get to buy – nothing.

Ditto with the e-book edition. There’s no UK version of this, but I am forbidden to buy the e-book from sources such as Books on Board or Fictionwise.

Now, in whose interests is this silly situation? No-one’s interest.

I am not wanting to do something illegal. I want to make a perfectly legal purchase of an item on the Internet. I want to give a publisher (and hence the author) my actual cash. Can I get the e-book any other way? No. So the old relict boundaries are preventing me from giving the author my money. What the…?

And this, of course, is only one example, in the book publishing world. Don’t get me started on other examples, such as the nonsense of DVD region coding (whose brilliant idea was it to put Hong Kong and China into two different DVD regions?).

These kinds of restrictions, as pointed out in this article, just create incentives to find ways around them, almost certainly ending up meaning that the original creator gets nothing.

If the world is flat, if this is the era of globalisation, these boundaries have to be broken up, history or not.

The Love of Books

I confess from the outset that I love books.

I mean by that that I love the actual physical look and feel of books made from paper and board and glue. What are sometimes now dismissively called ‘dead-tree’ books in the same way that we dismissively call physical post ‘snail-mail’.

My mother and father were reasonably keen readers, and so I grew up in a house which had a few shelves of books, though hardly what could be called a book collection. Our reading matter mainly came from the local lending library, and it was from there that I got my hands on many of my childhood favourites – a quantity of books we could never have afforded to buy.

But, as I say, we did have a few dozen books at home. My father was fond of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I had read my way through his copies of the ‘Tarzan’ series, and science fiction like The Land That Time Forgot by the time I was 12.

When I grew up and started to have some money of my own, however, I quickly developed the habit of buying and keeping books.

Over the years I must have bought and read many thousands of books, but regular purges have kept the collection down to a modest 3,000 or so volumes.

By the standards of true bibliophiles this is not excessive; but when the time comes to move house, or to renovate, having to move that many books becomes a major task.

We recently had the interior of our house painted and then re-carpeted. That meant that all of the books had to come off the shelves mounted on the walls and be packed away in a shed in our backyard for the duration. The physical books sitting modestly on shelves somehow seemed to expand endlessly as they came down and were packed into cardboard boxes. I ended up with some 75 boxes, in total weighing perhaps a tonne and a half. Moving that mass was no trivial task!

So owning physical books can definitely be a burden. And yet, and yet… I love the look of books on the shelf, and some individual hard-covers are so well-designed as to be a source of visual pleasure in themselves. To sit comfortably on a couch, handle such books and read their contents, is surely one of the great harmless pleasures of life.

But that pleasure does come at a cost. The resources required to make the paper and board – those ‘dead trees’ – and the cost of storing and shipping them about, taking them to bookstores, shelving them and selling them, all add up as a cost to the economy and to the environment.

Bits, not atoms

Surely there is a better way: surely we should be ‘moving bits, not atoms’ as Nicholas Negroponte said in Being Digital.

And so we come to e-books. Well, e-books and audiobooks, since the latter these days are also in digital, electronic, form.

I’ll talk about audiobooks in more detail some other time. Enough for now to note that I’ve long been a huge fan of audiobooks. Audiobooks are a great way indulge my passion for reading when my eyeballs are not free for ‘normal’ reading, such as when I’m out walking or driving. So much so that I have spent a lot of time and effort in developing shareware software which helps me (and many others) get audiobooks into a suitable form for the iPod.

But let’s look specifically at e-books, as these are a closer substitute for reading physical books. You have to have your eyeballs free and you have to have the time to sit and read them, just as you do with a physical book. How does the experience compare?

To me, it seems that it comes down to on what device you are reading the book, and in what circumstances.

Reading anything while sitting at a desktop computer seems to me far more like work than pleasure. I’ve talked in the past about the ‘desk culture’ and the ‘couch culture’, which are two very different things. Reading for pleasure surely has to fit within the couch culture. You need to be comfortable, relaxed, at your ease; none of which I feel while at my desk.

I subscribe to ‘New Scientist’ magazine in electronic form. I always used to enjoy reading the paper-based magazine, but the electronic version is far cheaper. However, to read the electronic version I’m essentially tied to my desk. This is one reason that I’m months behind in catching up with it.

So, equally, reading an e-book on my desktop computer is just not something I enjoy, and I quickly stopped trying.

Dedicated e-book devices like the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader are the obvious platform for e-books. Neither of these devices are currently available in Australia, but even if they were I’m not convinced that I would buy one. While I am sure that sitting down on the couch with one would be comfortable and pleasant, I react a little against that concept ‘dedicated’.

The Apple iPod Touch

I recently acquired an iPod Touch. I have owned several iPods over the years – my justification being that I have to have the latest iPod so I can be sure that my shareware software works with it. The Touch, though, is a huge leap forward. It’s a device which I have quickly learned to love for its versatility, ease of use and convenience. That word ‘versatility’ is key.

I don’t want to get distracted by lauding the virtues of Apple and the iPod – I’m no Apple fanboy. But the iPhone/iPod Touch is essentially a pretty fully featured pocket computer, which means it can do a great many different things.

On my Touch, I can, among many other things:

• Store my contacts, calendar, notes, photos
• Check my email
• Use it as a calculator
• Use it an an alarm clock and stop watch
• Use it as a timesheet tool for freelance jobs
• Listen to music
• Listen to audiobooks
• Play games
• Watch videos
• Read e-books

If it was an iPhone, of course, I could also use it to make and receive phone calls.

The iPhone as an E-Book Reader

So, the iPhone/Touch is definitely not a ‘dedicated’ e-book reader. But how well does it work in that role? In my experience, pretty darn well.

Using the Stanza software I have read a number of novels on it now, including Randall Garett’s Lord Darcy, Stella Rimington’s At Risk and Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I have found it a surprisingly easy and pleasant experience.

The small form factor of the iPod screen is something that doesn’t bother me much at all. At the font size which I find comfortable, there are about 150 words per ‘page’, which is maybe half of what you would find on a standard paperback page. So I do find myself tapping to turn the page fairly often, but not excessively often – not much more often than I would turn the pages of a large-print book, for example. The backlit screen makes the text bright and clear (in fact, I’ve adjusted the ‘paper’ colour so it’s a bit more grey than white to reduce glare).

Holding the Touch in one hand, I can tap to turn pages with my thumb, while sitting in comfort.

The huge advantage I believe that the iPhone/Touch has as an e-book reader is simply that it is so small. I always carry it with me in my pocket (inside a Belkin leather wallet), and so I can pull it out any time when I have a moment to spare. Unlike an audiobook, I don’t need to fuss with earphones: I can just pull out the device, make a couple of taps, and start reading. I can’t imagine carrying a Kindle with me so simply and easily. The iPhone/Touch is more portable than even the smallest paperback book; and yet it can contain literally hundreds of novels.

But it is not too small. Trying to read anything (for example, an SMS) from my Nokia mobile phone screen, for example, is extremely frustrating. (I know modern Nokia phones have bigger screens, but mine is an old one).

And I do think about the fact that if I had every one of my 3,000 physical books in electronic form, then I could have picked them all up in one hand and carried them out of the way of the painter and the carpet layer in an instant. That surely beats moving one and a half tonnes of dead tree.

On the Other Hand

But…

Yes, there are a few buts.

Firstly, there’s something unsatisfyingly impermanent about owning an e-book. Yes, I can back it up somewhere, but I still don’t quite feel that I possess it in the same way as I possess a physical book. I can’t easily lend it to a friend, or re-sell it.

Secondly, it just doesn’t have the look and the feel of a ‘real’ book. It’s not going to look good on my bookshelf; it’s not something I can admire for its design and its physical construction.

Thirdly – I don’t like the feeling of being ripped off. E-books are still ridiculously expensive. Sure, there are plenty of out-of-copyright free books, but I like reading modern mysteries, thrillers and science fiction. And these cost way too much for their actual value, in my view.

Think about it. Think about what it must cost to design and print a physical book. The cost of the paper and the ink and the machinery to print, fold, stitch and trim it. The cost of packaging. The cost of shipping. The costs of the retailer in employing staff, having the book on their shelves, doing stocktakes, and so on. These all add up to a very large percentage (I guess at least 80%) of the retail price of the book.

Now look at the e-book. Sure, you still have to pay the author his or her usual pittance, maybe still pay the publisher’s staff like editors. But you’d have all those costs anyway if you were publishing a print version. So if there’s a print edition already out, what are the incremental costs of publishing an e-book based on that? You probably got the manuscript in digital form; for sure it was turned into digital form before you went to print. Let’s be generous and say that maybe you have to spend say five hundred dollars employing a geek to convert the book into a number of different e-book formats. And that’s it.

So you could almost certainly make a handsome profit if you sold the e-book for say 25% of the cost of the printed book.

But that’s not what’s happening. This was brought home for me when I compared the cost of a few recent novels in e-book form with the cost of the print editions through Amazon.

In many cases the cost of the e-book is 90% or more of the cost of the printed paperback edition (eg Ruth Rendell’s End in Tears at $11.16 for the paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle version; Orson Scott Card’s Magic Street at $10.17 for the paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle version.

I’m not taking into account shipping costs, which for Amazon books sent to Australia can be significant; but look at it from the point of view of US readers who can often get free shipping from Amazon.

If you don’t have a Kindle, the cost of the e-book can easily be more than the print version, eg the latest Ruth Rendell novel, Not in the Flesh in ePub version (suitable for my iPod) through Fictionwise is $25.95, compared to $10.20 for the paperback. In other words, 250% of the cost of the print edition or more than double the cost of a version that would look good on my bookshelf, that I could lend out, that I could re-sell.

You are paying more for, really, considerably less. This is a rip-off.

Will it last? Well, it’s hard to see it changing. There’s no easy way, unlike music tracks, to get hold of an e-book version without buying it – much harder for an individual to ‘rip’ the content from an analog to a digital form and so much less need for the publishers to compete with illegal downloads.

So publishers of all stripes are going to see that e-books are far more profitable than print books and can essentially charge whatever they please, almost without regard to their actual production costs. I sincerely doubt (as a one-time author myself) that they are likely to pay more to the writers.

Unless there’s a consumer revolt, which I can’t see happening.

Or we all stick to printed books.

I’ll try and keep this up on a fortnightly basis.

What (and how) I am reading varies a lot these days. I am generally reading several books at once (terrible habit, I suppose, but I don’t seem to have any trouble keeping plots separate in my head).

So, I’m currently reading:

No Name by Wilkie Collins (1862).

Hardcover.

This is my current bed-time reading.

In my opinion, this is Collins’ masterpiece, not The Moonstone or The Woman in White. No less an authority than Collins’ mentor, Charles Dickens, agreed with me.

Unlike Dickens, Wilkie Collins really knew how to write about women characters. In this novel, the marvelous character of Magdalen Vanstone is absolutely memorable, as the young woman struggles to regain her lost fortune, aided by the unscrupulous fraudster Captain Wragge.

Full of passionate writing, effortlessly mixing tragedy with humour, this book tells a really gripping tale.

 

At Risk by Stella Rimington.

E-book, read on my iPod Touch.

I read this in a variety of locations such as medical waiting rooms, on the tram, etc. Nice to have a whole novel you can fit in a pocket.

This thriller is distinguished as the first fiction work by Rimington who was actually head of Britain’s MI5 (and its first female head). She therefore really knows what she is talking about. This debut novel has a few weak points, only to be expected, but it was still a very good read, as we follow the semi-autobiographical protagonist as she tries to track down a pair of terrorists from a tiny amount of evidence.

As an aside: reading this book on my iPod was a perfectly pleasant experience, despite the small form factor of the iPod Touch screen. I’ll write more fully about e-books sometime in the near future on this blog.
 

The Great War: American Front by Harry Turtledove.

Audiobook, on my iPod Touch.

I am listening to this while I walk or drive.

Harry Turtledove is considered to be the king of alternative history writing, and for good reason. This book is set in a timeline in which the South won the American Civil War. So far, so ho-hum; but Turtledove doesn’t concentrate on the actual Civil War itself for more than a page or two of prologue. What sets his works apart is that he looks at where this other trouser leg of time (as Terry Pratchett would say) leads to.

His first novel in this timeline was How Few Remain, set 20 years after the “War of Secession”, when the North and the South again come to blows.

In The Great War it is now 1914, and the USA finds itself allied with Germany, and the Confederate States with Britain and France. The USA thus finds itself at war with Canada to its north and the CSA to its south. Trench warfare, with poison gas and tanks.

This isn’t just a war novel for boys, though. Turtledove makes the idea come alive by concentrating on the individual stories of a wide variety of people, ranging from individual soldiers on both sides, to a woman running a coffee shop in occupied Washington, to a French Canadian farmer, to a trawler fisherman captured by the CSA navy, and many more.

There are also some famous names still around. General George Custer is still alive at the age of 75 and in charge of an army of the United States (and being thoroughly incompetent at it). Theodore Roosevelt is President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson of the CSA.

Extremely entertaining. But very long. This novel, the first of a trilogy about the Great War, is 24 hours in duration as an audiobook, as are the sequels. And after that, Turtledove has a series based on the Second World War. Lots of listening to come!

 

Miscellaneous

I’m also trying to keep up with reading various blogs, the Crikey newsletter and New Scientist.  I’m about four months behind on the latter.  All of these, including NS, in electronic form, read on my computer screen.  New Scientist is about the only thing for which I wish I owned an Amazon Kindle.  Alas, the Kindle is not for sale in Australia, nor (even more alas, in my view) is the Kindle iPhone app.

The Australian Government is proposing to enforce mandatory filtering of the Internet in this country, justifying the move as one to keep out floods of extreme pornography, but in reality potentially enabling it to block any web site with views it doesn’t like. Based on a ‘black list’ which it will maintain but prevent anyone else from seeing or checking, it could cripple Internet access to perfectly legitimate and innocuous web sites including Wikipedia.

Guy Rundle has a great article on this issue at the Crikey web site.

And the GetUp organisation is running rallies and an online petition. See below for the petition: