As avant garde as the term “e-publishing” may sound, it is certainly not a new concept. In 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg when he decided to hand-code the first 100 e-books to be offered online to the general public. Almost forty years later, Project Gutenberg offers nearly 30,000 titles created with care by technology and literary enthusiasts the world wide. On the commercial front, Amazon offers over 300,000 Kindle e-books from publishers as large as Random House and as small as a self-published poet. Still, the Library of Congress boasts 20,854,810 books, proving we’re still no where near the watershed for which so many people have waited expectantly (Annual Report FY 2007).
It’s not as if the world isn’t ready. According to the U.S. Census’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007, “Adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) [in 2007] watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices” (“Nearly Half of our Lives Spent with TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, According to Census Bureau Publication“). Americans seem primed for a new format war: with the music industry settling slowly but surely into the realization that the iPod won’t be unseated, the movie industry throwing its weight behind BlueRay, and newspapers and magazines desperately vying for a voice among blogs and news feeds, it’s only painfully obvious that the publishing industry needs an update, a following, or at least a device we can all agree will effectively drag the written word into the twentieth century.
Is the Kindle just warming up before it becomes an iPod for lovers of text? Have we missed the boat, only to see some new savior coming down the pike? And why exactly hasn’t the industry changed already?
This project intends to investigate two hurdles that have proven themselves harder to clear than they first seemed. Digital Rights Management (DRM) promised to protect publishers’ investment in their products but has only been a cumbersome hurdle in business models and in practice. And contracts–something I’m sure publishers thought they had down–have been typically underutilized in defending the best interests of authors and publishers of e-books alike. As public and scholarly opinion vie for influence over public perception, watch for signs that these roadblocks to progress are only a symptom of a bigger battle ahead: the two issues at hand are too close to the foundational concept of copyright to ignore the growing dissatisfaction and contempt of readers, authors, and sometimes publishers toward the current interpretation of a six-hundred-year old right (or privilege, depending on your outlook). In the end, I hope to offer a fresh breath of clarity to the arguments we hear over and over again, to find something practical in an industry riddled by stubborn traditions, and to start picking a path toward something greater.
