Podcast on future of technology, copyright and science fiction
Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, I sat down for an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the editor who runs the largest science fiction line in the world for Tor Books. Patrick is my editor and a friend, and we had a rollicking, quick discussion about copyright, technology and the future of science fiction. It's live now on the Tor podcast, for your listening pleasure.
MP3 link, Link to Tor podcast homepage, Link to podcast feed
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You're probably aware of this: the mp3 only contains the left channel. A mono file would be better. Other than technical stuff: great content. I admire Cory's words and passion.
About the discussion on people liking printbooks better than ebooks... I think we're seeing the very beginning of the turning point. The Sony eReader is a fine product, but I particularly love the iRex iLiad. A little less than the size of a hardback book, but much thinner and lighter, 16-gray 768x1024 eInk display, easy to use, annotation features, with slots for cards.
Everyone I show it to is impressed at the legibility. Then I pull out the 2GB card and say, "And this gives me an additional 2,000 books worth of storage." That's a bit on the geeky side, but I have thousands of SF books that just take up space. I take the reader everywhere I go -- it's currently loaded with the top 100 books in my collection that I want to re-read.
The only downside is the $800 price tag. But I think in five years we'll see sub-$100 readers in color. Perhaps Amazon will get a promotion going at that point: free eReader with the purchase of 20 eBooks.
The iLiad sounds great, Robert. The weird thing is that it is slightly cheaper here in Switzerland than in the US, whereas it's usually the contrary. But if I understood correctly, Cory's pro-print argument was that there are too many distracting things on e-book reading devices, rather than the image quality. In that, the iLiad sounds fine: only Sudoku as far as games go ;-)
But anyway, about distraction: I'm not nunnish, yet I have no more problems switching off other distraction temptations when reading a book on a laptop than on paper and I like doing both,provided I can do things to the text.
I've always made pencil marks in the margin of books, even on whodunnits and on horror books I read for fun. There used to be a copy of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste with margins full of such pencil squiggles by me, my younger sister and my daughter, successively, but then the binding gave. Folks already did that with
calami in the margins of papyrus rolls in Alexandria.
So I don't like Pléiade editions (see www.gallimard.fr/collections/pleiade.htm ) on bible paper and so expensive that my Genevan Puritan background makes me balk at annotating them. And I don't like protected PDFs and old Flash sites where you can't copy the text from to do things to it. And I don't take my laptop to bed to read e-books before sleeping, because annotating with a pencil is far easier in bed than typing a comment (and because I
wouldn't full stop, just as I wouldn't watch TV in bed).
Beyond this belly-button perspective, e-books are great for blind and low-sighted readers (obvious) and dyslexic readers. And there seems to be quite a number of people with some form of dyslexia. In Switzerland, the hitch is that if your dyslexia doesn't get officially recognized before you are in your teens, it is not considered a disability so you are not entitled to the reimbursing of assistive means, including free book scanning.
Some months ago, Gabriele Ghirlanda, of the blind people's association UNITAS, and I, tried to find a reasonably-priced scanning solution for such a late-diagnosed dyslexic girl who had to read André Gide's "Les Faux-Monnayeurs" for school. The book is very long, and even Gide lost track of some of his proliferating characters, making one reappear after he'd killed him in a former chapter. I even wrote to the publisher asking how much they'd charge the student for a personal electronic copy. They said that they unfortunately didn't do that. So I suggested she refered to
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Faux-monnayeurs where there is a good plot summary and a family tree (under "Une construction complexe": you bet).
First time I downloaded an e-text was in 1997. We were reading "Les Liaisons dangereuses" with a class of high-school students of the scientific "stream": they didn't really like reading, we had to do an 18th c. work, and Laclos' book is fun. Well, it's fun if French is your mother tongue, but if it is a foreign language, trying to keep
tabs on who wrote what to whom about fucking whom in order to spite whom gets in the way of enjoyment, I realised after a while. So we searched for an electronic version and I downloaded it. The person in charge of the computer lab threatened to revoke my internet access because I had hogged the school's slow ISDN line for 2 days, but it was worth it: the students still read the book on paper, but they could refer to their electronic copy when they wanted, and use it to take notes. And I just loved the baffled look of the external expert when they took their "maturità" (end of high school) exam.
Back to dyslexia: with an e-text, if you use titles/headers correctly, you can draw a TOC and/or an outline, you can add comments/notes, etc. And that's great for the non dyslexic too: with another class, we made our own (pirate) annotated e-text of "L'enfant de choeur", a novelette
by Simenon. I had to battle a bit to have the French spell-checker re-enabled on the school computers, to eliminate the scanning glitches: spell-checkers were considered "anti-educational" by the pundits. They eventually gave in thanks to a low-sighted student in another class who needed scanned texts anyway.
e-book readers allowing annotation and sharing documents like iLiad certainly have a future.
I think people get hung up over trying to make specialised e-book readers simulate books - I read plain text e-books using the built-in text reader on my GP2X, which also plays games, video and audio.
The screen is only 3 inches wide, which displays just over 50 characters on a line (much the same number as a normal paperback).
I now prefer in to printed books, it's easier to hold and as it is backlit, I can read in bed, in the dark without keeping my wife awake with the light and the sound of turning pages.
The adoption of e-books is been held back (apart from by DRM) by attempting to replicate printed books rather making a more convenient replacement.