Letters from the Edge

by H. Doug Matsuoka

Can’t waste words and gotta write fast. Won’t be intimidated by the two Microsoft Rottweilers that tore up my yard last night. They went running back into a big-ass limo with Bill Gates behind the wheel. Well, it looked like Gates, but I couldn’t really say because the guy was wearing shades. Shades. At night! Like I don’t know what’s going on.

So for insurance I’m emailing this to you and putting encrypted copies on every free offer CD that America OnLine sends out. If you don’t hear from me again I’m either dead or poolside in Rio.

Here’s the poop: Last year someone at Microsoft released a killer piece of software called Microsoft Reader as a free download. What it did was allow you to read eBooks. As in electronic books, something almost any asshole with a computer can produce and distribute. Microsoft Reader redefines the word “publisher." Since all you need to produce is one digital copy, you don’t need any connections with Brazilian pulp mills or German ink manufacturers to be a publisher.

Designed primarily for the flat screens that laptops and PDAs have, Reader lets you adjust font size, highlight passages, bookmark sections, make annotations, and store vast libraries in very limited disk space. You can also look up the meaning of a word, although at the moment only in the really crappy Microsoft Encarta dictionary.

The University of Virginia quickly converted a library of public domain works into an eBooks library available for free download. In order to prevent the Napsterization of eBooks, Microsoft also came up with a Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme that allows commercial sites to sell encrypted versions of eBooks that can only be read on two computers, presumably the big desktop computer that you download the eBook into, and the laptop or PDA or eBook reader that you actually read the thing on. You can’t buy a commercial copy of say, the Kama Sutra, and then email it to your “friend” ‘cuz she wouldn’t be able to open it. Of course, if you wrote your own version and DIDN’T encrypt it you could send it to all your friends and friend candidates or post it on your web site.

Actually the Kama Sutra isn’t a very good example because Reader doesn’t handle graphics very well. You can use graphics, yeah, but basically it’s designed to facilitate reading text, which it does a great job at. It’s not like reading text off a web site.

Barnes & Noble and Amazon started eBook sections selling encrypted eBooks. A bunch of other commercial sites like eBookMall and “author sites” like PreviewPort sprang up. (I want to mention publishers who publish eBooks exclusively, like Scorpius Digital, but I don't have the time and space.) Not much of a selection so far -– and when Christmas came along, not a one had a scheme of allowing customers to purchase eBooks as a gift. You couldn’t buy an eBook and send it to a friend. This would have solved about a trillion last minute gift buying problems because there is no delivery time at all. It’s instantaneous.

That’s when I became suspicious. How could the evil empire allow Reader to come into the world, and then not do anything about it?

Some (paid agents of evil) say that no one wants to read eBooks because there aren’t very many titles available. Some people say the exact opposite, that there are too many titles available because any asshole with a computer can produce one. No one complains that inexpensive digital recording and reproduction equipment has produced too many CDs. But what can you say? Some people want their books and music and everything else “filtered” to a pre-approved, easily manageable list by an ever-smaller number of ever-bigger corporate entities.

But here’s the real problem with eBooks. Compared to say mp3 files, they’re tiny. A digital copy of a novel like “Heart of Darkness” is less than 200 KiloBytes as opposed to over 3,000 Kilobytes for ONE song in mp3 format. To download eBooks, you can use that 14.4Kbps modem that you’ve been using as a paperweight. Disk space? For the space occupied by a SINGLE CD compressed into MP3 files, you can stash more than 100 eBooks.

So Microsoft unwittingly released a piece of software that doesn’t require a new computer, doesn’t require a high speed modem or cable or DSL, and doesn’t require much disk space. Now they want you to forget they ever released such a product. In fact, they’ll sick their Rottweilers on you if you say a word to anyone.

But there is a community of people out there creating and selling eBooks already. Anything that offers writers and little publishers a voice and a chance to be read deserves a shot.

So, we gotta pack our stuff quick and get on this bus before it leaves the station. C’mon.

Hey, I gotta go. I hear noises coming from the garage and I think I smell gasoline.

Number of days before everything goes to shit: