Stealing Books - Easy!

Here's another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com's brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies--music, movies and, yes, books, too--can be found if you're not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It's easy. It's quick. It's convenient. It's free. It's also completely illegal--but we haven't seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There's no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won't come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John

Fan Fiction and Harry Potter

There was a fascinating piece of news published a week or so ago. I stumbled onto it in a link to a site called "Stuff" or, more properly, stuff.co.nz, which means, according to my understanding of these things, that the site is registered in New Zealand.

The gist of the story is that a Harry Potter fan, George Lippert by name, wrote a story involving Harry Potter that takes up after the end of the final book in J.K. Rowling's massively successful seven book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and then posted his story on his own website.

Now, there's a long underground tradition of what is referred to as "Fan Fiction." Essentially, fans of a given book or movie or TV series use the characters and settings from their favorite, or favorites if they're feeling extra-frisky, and write original adventure stories that fall outside the established (read "published" or "broadcast") canon. In these stories, almost anything can happen from romances to marriages, from wild adventures to cross-species mating. I first heard of this sort of thing in association with the original Star Trek TV series back in the 1960s and I think that may even be where a lot of the ideas for this sort of thing originated since there don't seem to be too many examples that pre-date that time.

The trick with all of this, of course, is that the various media franchises from which these fan writers "borrow" the characters and settings are owned by large media entities who have shown, on occasion, a tendency to be highly litigious in order to protect the value of the properties they control. In a lot of cases, these corporations may be aware of the existence of these unauthorized stories and simply turn a blind eye as long as they don't see the fan writers doing anything ambitious like printing and selling copies of their stories. Think of it as some dirty little secrets that aren't really secret and probably aren't all that dirty either.

The interesting news part, though, is that J.K. Rowling herself has taken a public position and said that she won't be suing anybody who writes Harry Potter stories as long as they don't sell them and as long as they make it clear that Rowling is not herself personally involved in the stories. That's more than a bit of a leap past the point of turning a blind eye and strikes me as, if not revolutionary, at least generous-hearted and benign. From all I've seen over the years, that doesn't surprise me about her but I do tend to wonder what her publishers and her movie production company think about her decisions to say in public what they've only really ever allowed "under the table," so to speak. The photo that leads this story is from that "Stuff" story link and I can't help but think that the smirk in her expression is the result of feeling the power she now has to make large entities smile and do what she wants–and more power to her.

- John

Esnips, File sharing and Ebooks

I was doing a Google search on the subject of ebooks (no surprise!) and I stumbled onto esnips.com. It’s a site that offers free online storage for up to five gigabytes worth of your electronic files—music, photos, art, texts, whatever. All you have to do is provide an email address and sign up and you’re good to go. You can upload files, make them public or private, share them with friends or business associates, look at and/or download other people’s files and, in general, share: your knowledge, your esthetic eye, your taste, your humor, your whimsy.

It seems as if these sorts of things are proliferating madly. Since I keep an eye on the online world for reasons both personal (plain curiosity among them) and professional (I do most of my work online, one way or another), I’m aware of a current business phenomenon called Web 2.0. There are many, many startup companies these days that are convinced that if they can come up with the perfect combination of tools and services they will be able to attract millions or tens of millions of participants (read: customers) who will join their site, visit regularly and spend lots of time, recruit their social groups to use the site as a meeting place, etc., etc. Since no one is asking you to pay for that online storage space, for hosting your personal website (MySpace, FaceBook, and on and on…) or for whatever else it is that the site might do, you have to wonder who is paying for it all and the answer is, often enough, advertisers eager to put their products in front of your eyes and willing to pay for that opportunity. But I digress…

Ebooks are what got me started and they’re the ostensible subject of this blog so that’s where I’m getting back to. The source that turned me on to the site specifically mentioned ebooks as one of the things you were likely to find a lot of on the site, worth a browse to see what you might find that would be of personal interest. I did some scouting around and I found an item or two of interest, including some short stories posted by other members, a couple of titles by H. G. Wells, including The War of the Worlds as a PDF file, including a link to yet another site, planetpdf.com, which I had not previously been aware of. On the main page of that site was a link, which took me to a page offering a sampling of ebooks in PDF file format: Free PDF eBooks.

I was about to get all bent out of shape about copyright issues on esnips.com (lots more on that in another posting sometime soon) when I saw J.R.R. Tolkien’s name several times and assumed that someone had posted unauthorized copies of his still-in-copyright works but I was happily surprised to note that the files were marked as having been flagged by other users as suspect and were under review before being made available. A self-policing system that seems to work—good stuff. Of course, there were some other items where that nasty copyright issue might have been more pertinent and the prose section (small though it is in these early days) seemed to be well-supplied with MP3 files of songs, a bit of a stretch in classification terms, but the wonderful, horrible thing about volunteer labor, which all of these sorts of sites live and die by, is that you get what you pay for and quality of thinking and organizational ability can end up somewhere on the low end of the scale.

Of course, what we want you to do is buy E-Reads ebooks. Even though we don’t have Tolkien titles available, we do have quite a selection of material by a very diverse group of authors and we’re hoping that this blog will pique your interest just enough to get you to come and browse. I practically guarantee you’ll find something you want to read and own. Just glance around on the page you’re reading, click a link or search for an author name or book title to see what we have. At least we’ve got everything pretty well organized and we guarantee to solve your problems if you have them with any of our products—but, then, we’re not giving them away for free.

- John