shouting loudly

I’m excited by Barnes & Noble’s Nook, its entry into the eReader market. I can’t wait for somebody to do for journal article PDFs what the Rio did for MP3s. It’s unclear if the Nook will do this (word is that the Kindle DX is a disappointment on this count–a pity at almost $500), but I can’t wait to try it out at a B&N store.

Less importantly for me, but more importantly for the major for-profit publishing market, the Kindle needs some competition to prevent format and vendor lock-in.

Anyway, as the title suggests, the Nook lets users share their eBooks with other users, even if it’s to a non-Nook device (including Blackberries; yay!), for up to 14 days. This has already inspired at least one example of utterly irrational authorial fears of serial copying. International bestseller Michelle Richmond complains:

[The Nook's LendMe technology] means that authors, like musicians, will have no way to protect their intellectual property from being distributed ad infinitum, without compensation. It’s one thing to lend a book to a friend. I love it when readers tell me they’ve sent one of my books to their mother, their sister, their best friend. But it’s another matter entirely to distribute a copy that you paid for to an unlimited number of readers.

My comment is still awaiting moderation by Ms. Richmond, but I can’t wait to see when (or if) she’ll let me rebut her totally unfounded fears. So here goes:

In all due respect, your fears are totally ungrounded, and whatever the nitty gritty details are, end users will certainly have LESS rights in Nook books than in real books.

With paper books, I can lend a book to a hundred people for as long as I want, I can resell it, and I can give it away. (This is the copyright doctrine of “first sale”; after the initial sale, the paper and ink are the purchaser’s property and she can treat them as such.) I can even photocopy a small portion and give it away permanently, e.g. for personal study. (That’s fair use.)

The Nook is another DRM’d format, which means publishers are going to exercise far greater control over end users’ behavior than they could ever hope to achieve over uses of physical copies. This post is needlessly rebelling against a small concession that may make this loss of freedom more palatable to end users. Nook users will still have far less power to make unauthorized uses of content than they would if they’d bought paper copies. See:

http://www.eff.org/issues/drm

The specs on this are still coming out, but even if we knew nothing for sure, we would know that there is exactly 0% chance of B&N creating a platform that allows SERIAL sharing (copies of copies of copies, the problem musicians face). Their business model is selling books, not eReaders; anything that harms book sales is a nonstarter for them.

Right now, I can lend a physical book to somebody for an unlimited period of time. While they have it, I don’t have it, but (a) I can lend it for as long as I want, and (b) it’s easy for her/him to make copies of important sections if it’s the kind of book where the economics of photocopying (or scanning) make any sense. (This is true for many textbooks, reference books, edited collections, and so on.)

I’m sure that if I eLend my book to a friend, B&N is going to make sure it’s actually loaned (i.e., not also still on my reader), and I can only lend it to one person at a time. How is this any better for the customer than the right to lend a physical book? How is this “bad for authors”?

Now let’s review how it really is different than paper books:

*A 14-day cap on the time I can lend it. That’s anti-user, not anti-author.

*(According to rumor) I can only lend it to one person for one time period, and then I can never lend it again. This is ridiculously anti-user.

*(Again, according to rumor, though I’ll just about guarantee this one) Publishers can opt out. They can’t opt out of the first sale doctrine, though heaven knows they’d love to do so. Again, anti-user.

*I cannot resell or give away the eBook, which means I cannot pick up these eBooks on the 2nd hand market or in a book swapping club. Yet again, this is WAY worse for customers than paper books.

The short version is that end user’s rights to a paper book are still greater and will always be greater than their rights in DRM’ed formats, whether Nook, Kindle, or anything similar. Whining about any concession to the end user, especially based on such a profound misunderstanding of the platform, is a great way to kick innovation in the teeth.

The day B&N intentionally costs itself money so that we can engage in book piracy, I’ll eat a Nook.

P.S. If I buy an eReader, it won’t be so that I can eShare my eBooks with my eFriends for an eFortnight. It’ll be because it has good PDF support.

Much like my MP3 collection, I have a massive stack of journal articles on my computer (downloaded legally from my licensing-fee-paying library website). But unlike the wealth of MP3 players, there’s not yet a well-priced, truly capable PDF-native eReader.

I’m an (academic) author, and me and my fellow authors WANT our writings to be free for the world to read. Thanks to the kinds of wild-eyed fears expressed in this post (and embodied in academic publishers’ practices), however, that’s ironically becoming more difficult even as the cost of sharing that information approaches zero.