From: alan@edstar.ucsb.edu (Alan Moses)
Newsgroups: alt.wais,alt.hypertext
Subject: Re: Electronic books
Date: 10 Apr 92 03:53:20 GMT
Followup-To: alt.wais
Organization: UCSB Graduate School of Education

[ Follow-up on postings in alt.wais by Kurt Thearling 
  (kurt@Think.COM) and Bob Weiner (rsw@cs.brown.edu) 
  regarding electronic books.]

Regarding the original question:

> 	"What is the economic incentive for a writer/publisher to
> 	produce new books since electronic versions could be copied with 
> 	ease?"

my response is that the incentive is based on the creation of a
new product for a new market, not simply a new form competing
against an old form. It is important not to base your model of
electronic publishing on a narrow conception of the nature of a
book.

To my mind, even with predictable advances in technology,
electronic publishing - viewed solely as a text-delivery system -
will have few advantages over traditional publication.  But
consider the wide range of activities associated with reading:
while reading today, I underlined some text I wanted to find
again, wrote some notes in the margin, stuck in a bookmark, went
to check a dictionary for an etymology of a word, wrote some
notes in my journal about what I was reading, sent email to
someone about what I had read, read and responded to other email,
saved one of my responses into my journal, read news, saved some
articles into my archive, saved Bob's response to Kurt's posting, 
re-read it, and started this message.  Given this range of 
reading-related activity, there's no need to limit electronic 
publishing to merely the text-delivery portion.

I see at least three areas where ebooks could offer something
beyond the text-delivery of current book publication: access,
communication, and integration of related tools. 

- access: an ebook could supplement the basic text by providing
  links to a vast amount of underlying and supporting information 
  (e.g., WAIS, etc.), it could present changing information in a
  dynamic manner, it could provide its information in a variety 
  of forms (e.g. multimedia), it could provide information in
  conjunction with tools that allow the reader to manipulate and
  interact with the information (e.g., Mathematica notebooks),
  it could provide search capabilities and hypertext links to
  allow readers to follow their own interests through the work.

- communication: an ebook could provide the reader with access
  to the author and other readers of the book.  Imagine a book
  that presents itself as a Usenet group, with a permanent
  original posting and the collection of responses that it
  generates.  Alternately, an author could publish a work in
  such a way as invites commentary, and the author could have
  the capability of revising the text based upon the responses
  it generates. [This would obviously call into question current
  structures of intellectual property, copyright, and royalty
  payments.]

- integration: the process of reading extends beyond the act of
  passively absorbing the represented text. An ebook could provide
  readers with a suite of tools that support their active
  involvement with the text: marginal notes, bookmarks and a
  variety of tags for returning to parts of the text,
  reader-provided links between this and other texts, a journal
  where the reader can encounter the text by writing about it.

Taken all together, such an ebook would be a very different
entity than today's paper-based text. It would be a hybrid
product that would be both a text and a program. As such, it
would not even share the same market as existing paper-based
publishing, so there would be no question of fully replacing or
directly competing with paper-based publishing. An ebook could 
be implemented as a software product for an existing platform 
or, when technology allows, as a stand-alone (but connected) 
hardware/software system. 

In sum, I see the issue as not being one of providing books as
they exist today in electronic form, and focusing on issues
like screen resolution, copy protection, means of determining 
royalties, etc. Rather, based on existing and emerging 
technologies, we are now in a position to re-imagine what a 
book can be. 

- Alan

Alan Moses
Graduate School of Education		alan@edstar.gse.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara   			UCSB PROFS: AMOSES 
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9490  		Voice: (805) 893-8031