The Future of the Book



By Sam Vaknin

Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to

issue this declaration: "The free communication of thought and

opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may

therefore speak, write and print freely." UNESCO still

defines "book" as "non-periodical printed publication of at least 49

pages excluding covers".



Yet, have the innovations of the last five years transformed the

concept of "book" irreversibly?



The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization

software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own,

private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The

emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on

demand or packaged as an e-book.



Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age- old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book

identifiers. Is the "original" the final, user-customized book - or

its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique

identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does the user possess any

rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of

the original authors still apply?



Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a

central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then

give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be

found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with

their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept

of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object

into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns

the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.



Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral

rendition of their print predecessors - they are a new medium, an

altogether different reading experience.



Consider these options: hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content

and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering;

divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines; interaction

with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard;

collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities;

automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia

capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits,

shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related

decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation

capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking

capabilities; and more.



In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on

five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to

other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as

platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by

machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.



E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format

and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because

they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and

the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e- book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of

the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.



E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is

placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by

comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both

sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and,

ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being

reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.



The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision

and fawning.



The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext.

Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship

were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual

links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna)

surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).



Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA - all books are portable.

The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It disseminates its content

virally, by being circulated, and is not diminished or altered in

the process. Though physically eroded, it can be copied faithfully.

It is permanent and, subject to faithful replication, immutable.



Admittedly, e-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer

drives). They are format-specific. Changes in technology - both in

hardware and in software - render many e-books unreadable. And

portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the

availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity).



The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50

years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe swelled from a few

thousand to more than 9 million. And, as McLuhan noted, it shifted

the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution

(i.e., "communication") to the visual mode.



E-books are only the latest application of age-old principles to

new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a surge in

content creation and dissemination. The incunabula - the first

printed books - made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the

vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from

the tyranny of monastic scriptoria and "libraries".



E-books are promising to do the same.



In the foreseeable future, "Book ATMs" placed in remote corners of

the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected

from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of

titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to

overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work

affordably.



The Internet is the ideal e-book distribution channel. It threatens

the monopoly of the big publishing houses. Ironically, early

publishers rebelled against the knowledge monopoly of the Church.

The industry flourished in non-theocratic societies such as the

Netherlands and England - and languished where religion reigned (the

Islamic world, and Medieval Europe).



With e-books, content is once more a collaborative effort, as it has

been well into the Middle Ages. Knowledge, information, and

narratives were once generated through the interactions of authors

and audience (remember Socrates). Interactive e-books, multimedia,

discussion lists, and collective authorship efforts restore this

great tradition.



Authors are again the publishers and marketers of their work as they

have been well into the 19th century when many books debuted as

serialized pamphlets in daily papers or magazines or were sold by

subscription. Serialized e-books hark back to these intervallic

traditions. E-books may also help restore the balance between best- sellers and midlist authors and between fiction and non-fiction. E- books are best suited to cater to neglected niche markets.



E-books, cheaper than even paperbacks, are the

quintessential "literature for the millions". Both erstwhile reprint

libraries and current e-book publishers specialize in inexpensive

books in the public domain (i.e., whose copyright expired). John

Bell (competing with Dr. Johnson) put out "The Poets of Great

Britain" in 1777-83. Each of the 109 volumes cost six shillings

(compared to the usual guinea or more). The Railway Library of

novels (1,300 volumes) costs 1 shilling apiece only eight decades

later. The price proceeded to dive throughout the next century and a

half. E-books and POD resume this trend.



The plunge in book prices, the lowering of barriers to entry aided

by new technologies and plentiful credit, the proliferation of

publishers, and the cutthroat competition among booksellers was such

that price regulation (cartel) had to be introduced. Net publisher

prices, trade discounts, and list prices are all anti-competitive

practices of 19th century Europe. Still, this lamentable period also

gave rise to trade associations, publishers organizations, literary

agents, author contracts, royalties agreements, mass marketing, and

standardized copyrights.



The Internet is often perceived to be nothing more than a glorified - though digitized - mail order catalogue. But e-books are different.

Legislators and courts have yet to establish if e-books are books at

all. Existing contracts between authors and publishers may not cover

the electronic rendition of texts. E-books also offer serious price

competition to more traditional forms of publishing and are, thus,

likely to provoke a realignment of the entire industry.



Rights may have to be re-assigned, revenues re-distributed,

contractual relationships reconsidered. Hitherto, e-books amounted

to little more that re-formatted renditions of the print editions.

But authors are increasingly publishing their books primarily or

exclusively as e-books thus undermining both hardcovers and

paperbacks.



Luddite printers and publishers resisted - often violently - every

phase in the evolution of the trade: stereotyping, the iron press,

the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and

typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations, cloth

bindings, machine-made paper, ready-bound books, paperbacks, book

clubs, and book tokens.



Without exception, they eventually relented and embraced the new

technologies to considerable commercial advantage. Similarly,

publishers were initially hesitant and reluctant to adopt the

Internet, POD, and e-publishing. It is not surprising that they came

around.



Printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries were derided by their

contemporaries as inferior to their laboriously hand-made

antecedents and to the incunabula. These complaints are reminiscent

of current criticisms of the new media (Internet, e-books): shoddy

workmanship, shabby appearance, and rampant piracy.



The first decades following the invention of the printing press,

were, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "a restless, highly

competitive free for all ... (with) enormous vitality and variety

(often leading to) careless work". There were egregious acts of

piracy - for instance, the illicit copying of the Aldine

Latin "pocket books", or the all-pervasive book-bootlegging in

England in the 17th century, a direct outcome of over-regulation and

coercive copyright monopolies.



Shakespeare's work was repeatedly replicated by infringers of

emerging intellectual property rights. Later, the American colonies

became the world's centre of industrialized and systematic book

piracy. Confronted with abundant and cheap pirated foreign books,

local authors resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours

in a vain effort to make ends meet.



Pirates and unlicensed - and, therefore, subversive - publishers

were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and libel laws and,

later, under national security and obscenity laws. Both royal

and "democratic" governments acted ruthlessly to preserve their

control of publishing.



John Milton wrote his passionate plea against censorship,

Areopagitica, in response to the 1643 licensing ordinance passed by

the British Parliament. The revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in

England decreed that authors and publishers are entitled to

exclusively reap the commercial benefits of their endeavors, though

only for a prescribed period of time.



The never-abating battle between industrial-commercial publishers

with their ever more potent technological and legal arsenal and the

free-spirited arts and craftsmanship crowd now rages as fiercely as

ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes, and conferences.



William Morris started the "private press" movement in England in

the 19th century to counter what he regarded as the callous

commercialization of book publishing. When the printing press was

invented, it was put to commercial use by private entrepreneurs

(traders) of the day. Established "publishers" (monasteries), with a

few exceptions (e.g., in Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy)

shunned it as a major threat to culture and civilization. Their

attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing

or corporate-controlled publishing today.



But, as readership expanded - women and the poor became increasingly

literate - the number of publishers multiplied. At the beginning of

the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes

allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black

and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical

charts, and other graphics to their books.



Publishers and librarians scuffled over formats (book sizes) and

fonts (Gothic versus Roman) but consumer preferences prevailed. The

multimedia book was born. E-books will, probably, undergo a similar

transition from static digital renditions of a print edition - to

lively, colorful, interactive and commercially enabled objects.



The commercial lending library and, later, the free library were two

additional reactions to increasing demand. As early as the 18th

century, publishers and booksellers expressed the - groundless -

fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Yet, libraries

have actually enhanced book sales and have become a major market in

their own right. They are likely to do the same for e-books.



Publishing has always been a social pursuit, heavily dependent on

social developments, such as the spread of literacy and the

liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As every new format

matures, it is subjected to regulation from within and from without.

E-books and other digital content are no exception. Hence the

recurrent and current attempts at restrictive regulation and the

legal skirmishes that follow them.



At its inception, every new variant of content packaging was

deemed "dangerous". The Church, formerly the largest publisher of

bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and

protector of reading in the Dark Ages, castigated and censored the

printing of "heretical" books, especially the vernacular bibles of

the Reformation.



It even restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of

controlling book publishing. In 1559, it issued the Index Librorum

Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"). A few, mainly Dutch,

publishers ended up on the stake. European rulers issued

proclamations against "naughty printed books" of heresy and sedition.



The printing of books was subject to licensing by the Privy Council

in England. The very concept of copyright arose out of the forced

recording of titles in the register of the English Stationer's

Company, a royal instrument of influence and intrigue. Such

obligatory registration granted the publisher the right to

exclusively copy the registered book - or, more frequently, a class

of books - for a number of years, but politically constrained

printable content, often by force.



Freedom of the press and free speech are still distant dreams in

most parts of the earth. Even in the USA, the Digital Millennium

Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other privacy-invading,

dissemination-inhibiting, and censorship-imposing measures

perpetuate a veteran though not so venerable tradition.



The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the history of

the book teaches us anything it is that there are no limits to the

ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and booksellers, re-invent

old practices. Technological and marketing innovations are

invariably perceived as threats - only to be upheld later as

articles of faith. Publishing faces the same issues and challenges

it faced five hundred years ago and responds to them in much the

same way.





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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)



Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant

Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West

Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,

PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International

(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health

and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and

Suite101.



Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government

of Macedonia.



Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com