Gizmodo has a new column called “Feature Creep,” and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It’s full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years (“Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it’s the future of eBooks.”) and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there’s hardly a paragraph in there that couldn’t have been written in 1997 — nor one that takes note of any of the events since then.
Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won’t be so invasive that it turns off readers (whom the author insists on calling “consumers,” an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson’s description in Idoru, “…a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed”).
This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the “lightweight” region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact).
This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)
But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again (“If publishers stop wanting DRM, it’s the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.”) despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there’re very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this (“Sony may be nuts, but they’re not that nuts.”), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.
He doesn’t even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who’s tried giving away DRM-free ebooks — me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card — universally, the experience is that we sell more books (Lessig’s latest just went into its third hardcover printing, for chrissakes). This of course echoes the experiences from elsewhere: the movie studios’ box office revenues appear to be increasing as a function of the amount of movies being shared on P2P nets and the only empirical study of music downloading and music sales concluded that the effect was usually negligible, rarely negative, and sometimes positive.
He does, however, take time out to snidely dismiss blanket licensing schemes — like the ones that enable cable television, radio, photocopying, exam papers, live performance, covers, lending, coursepacks, jukeboxes, rentals, etc etc etc all over the world — as a kind of pipe dream (“When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I’ll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we’ll have to play nice within the confines of the present system.”) despite the fact that these systems have been employed to universal good effect whenever new technology makes exclusion too costly to work effectively. It’s like he’s totally missed the fact that billions of dollars go right into the pockets of creators and rights-holders through these schemes.
Bizarrely, he asserts that people might buy periodicals that expire off their players in 60 days — despite the fact that every one of us has a friend or relative with a giant stack of old computer mags, or National Geographics, or colorful Wireds, sitting on a shelf.
Really, it’s as though he sat down and called an ebook startup’s PR guy, then reasoned out all of his conclusions a priori, without reference to any of the activity in the field.
I believe fiercely and passionately in ebooks — that’s why I give talks like this one — but articles like this do nothing to advance the discussion. They’re echoes of the dotcom snakeoil that dominated the ebook discussion five or ten years ago, and it’s a disappointment to see this kind of editorial-in-defiance-of-facts on a hip net-zine like Gizmodo.