Category: Information

Ebook Ethics

Everything we do in life has ethical considerations, even something simple as buying books.  Ebooks represent a change, and that change has good and bad consequences.

Bad

  • Ebooks will put a lot of people out of work.  Bookstores may disappear like record stores.  This is a horrible consequence in these bad economic times.  The digital world is just more efficient than the analog world and that kills jobs.
  • Ebooks will also kill competition, reducing the number of businesses in the marketplace.  Amazon and Apple could theoretically take over all the book and music business from tens of thousands of small businesses.
  • Ebooks are anti-social.  Instead of buying books at a bookstore and meeting other people you order books directly.  Instead of sharing books with friends, readers are locked into a closed world of DRM.
  • Ebooks could damage cultural heritage and history.  Printed books can last for hundreds of years, and people value them, but ebooks probably have no lasting power at all.
  • Bookstores might become extinct which would be a huge cultural loss.
  • Book ownership is probably a deceptive concept and sellers like Amazon shouldn’t describe their ebooks are “for sale.”  To be honest, sellers should claim they are long term rentals until DRM copy protection is removed.

Good

  • Ebooks are extremely environmental.  Wood pulp technology uses lots of water, energy and chemicals, and those chemicals get into the environment.  Printing takes both energy and chemicals.  Distributing books creates lots of carbon and other pollutants.  The carbon footprint of ebooks is almost zero.
  • Ebooks could mean more money for writers, editors and publishers because ebooks could do away with the used book market.  As long as DRM technology is successful, more readers would actually buy books, instead of borrowing them or buying used, which is more ethical for the writer and publisher.
  • Ebooks might encourage more reading and literacy because of their convenience and possibly make reading more appealing to young people because ebooks are available on smart phones, an essential device for kids.
  • Ebooks could enhance cultural heritage and history.  It’s quite easy to load up an ebook reader with the great books of the western world.  Every child or family could have their own library of thousands of free books.

Ethically, the primary conflict is jobs versus the environment.  But that will be true of all industries and businesses as time passes.  If all books, magazines and newspapers were read on digital readers it would have a positive impact on the environment, but at a terrible cost in jobs.

The secondary ethical concern is which format is better for promoting literacy, knowledge and culture?  This is much harder to judge until after ebooks have taken over.  We won’t know their full impact for a very long time.  But consider this:  What if you could hold a device that had every book you ever bought or read in your entire life with annotations, notes, and supplemental reference essays and reviews?  Would such a superbook library have a positive social impact?

I already miss record stores and LP album covers, but I don’t miss LPs.  I don’t even miss CDs, but I do miss shopping for music at record stores.  I have a subscription to Rhapsody Music and can listen to as many CDs as I can cram into my month for $9.99, but the fun of discovering new albums is gone.   From about 1965-1995 I bought 2-4 albums a week.  I loved going to record stores, but that activity is as ancient as horse and buggy rides. 

I’ve been going to bookstores 1-2 times a week since 1965.  It’s about the only shopping I still like to do recreationally.  I’ve bought far more books than I have ever read, or will ever have time to read.  I will truly miss bookstores if they disappear.

On the other hand, I discover all my books and music now from the Internet.  I’m in four online book clubs.  I’m far more involved with books, authors and readers then when I only shopped at bookstores.  Most of my friendships are based around talking about books or music.  I never really went to bookstores or record stores to socialize with the staff, or ask them for recommendations, although I’ve always liked meeting other book and music fans.

Amazon, with its supplemental content and customer reviews has been a quantum leap in helping me discover new books to read.  It’s far more social in helping me make book buying decisions than bookstores ever were.  Web 2.0 technology is a different kind of socializing.  It’s intellectual over physical. 

JWH 8/21/10

Are You Willing to Pay for News?

If you subscribe to newspapers or magazines then you are already paying for news, so the precise question is:  Are you willing to pay for news on the Internet?  One June 1 The Times (London) is going behind a paywall, and The New York Times is planning on trying yet another online subscription plan next year.  The gold standard of news has always been to read a world-class newspaper.  For years people have gotten used to reading these papers online for free, but now it looks like free days are over.

For most of my life I got my news from the plebian news source, television.  Since the 1990s, Internet has introduced me to the world’s great newspapers and I now realize their value, and I have decided to become an online subscriber.  I just have to decide which paper to marry for my news partner.

The old way of doing things was to subscribe to the local paper and it would include a syndication of state, national and international news stories.  Newspapers were the world wide web before the WWW.  Now, I’m not sure that’s the way to go.  I’m thinking I’d rather have the best news writing, and go with something like The New York Times.  But if everyone thought like that, we’d end up with half a dozen newspapers for the U.S.A.

But then I’m not typical.  I think most people prefer local news.  It’s sad to admit, but I pay zero attention to what goes on in my city and state.  My local paper has a beautiful, and extremely easy to read, free web site, but I don’t read it.  They also offer a modest $10 a month digital edition that’s closer to the looks of a newspaper, but their free site is so nice I can’t imagine even spending that much money.

I think it’s going to be awhile before people pay for local news online, but if The New York Times and the The Times are indicators of the future, will people be willing to pay for a national newspaper?  I don’t think we will know until publishers cut off the free news spigot.  And that’s what the The Times is doing June 1.  The Times will even cut Google off from indexing the paper.  That’s going to be a major experiment. 

So far The New York Times has always kept it’s free web edition going concurrent with any of its paid experimental editions, which have always failed.  I do read the free portions of TimesReader 2.0 that I got when downloading Adobe Reader.  The full edition is $4.62 a week.  $20 a month seems steep compared to what I get from Rhapsody for $10 a month – access to 9 million songs across many major and minor record labels.  The New York Times is preparing a new paid edition for iPad owners, and I think that might be the turning point for switching from paying for printed news to paying for online news.

If I had an iPad I would subscribe to The New York Times, if the web site edition closed down.  I would also consider subscribing to magazines for the iPad.  Again, which magazines I bought would depend if they weren’t available online.  Right now I have little incentive to subscribe to electronic editions of The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Wired because they offer too much content for free.

I used to spend hundreds a dollars a year for magazine subscriptions, but cut them all out because I believe it’s more Earth friendly to read the content online.  And I don’t always expect to get a free lunch, but as long as the content is free I have no incentive to pay either.  I pay Rhapsody $10 a month because I want the music and I don’t want to steal it.  There’s plenty of free legal music on the web, but it’s too much trouble to collect.  For $10 a month I get legal access to 98% of what’s for sale.  I’d rather pay $10 a month to a service like Rhapsody if they distributed legal news and magazines reprints, than make individual subscriptions, but that’s not available.

I’m currently pay Safari Books Online $34 a month for online access to 10,000 plus computer books.  Thus, I’m proving I’m willing to pay for online content.  But I don’t always like the deals being offered.  The online editions of The New Yorker and Scientific American are more expensive than discount offers I get for the paper editions.  No incentive there to subscribe.  I don’t like paying print edition prices for digital editions – it feels like I’m getting ripped off.  Publishers are saving on paper, printing, shipping, distribution, and postal costs, and they aren’t passing any of those savings on to me.

Rupert Murdoch wants people to pay for what they read on the net, at least when they are reading something he’s selling in the analog world.  Now that’s totally against the way the Internet works now.  The reason why the Internet is great is because you can share links.  If some content goes behind paywalls, the Internet will fork into the free and non-free, that which can be linked, and that which can’t.

The Internet is big enough to handle such diversity, but what does that mean at the social level?  We get part of the population reading high quality paid journalism, and the rest will live off of free blog news.  It will also mean those sites that depend on ad revenue will have more readers, those fleeing the paid sites, thus beefing up their financial model.

But think of it this way.  Do you prefer paying for HBO shows, without ads, or watching NBC shows with tons of ads?  That also means, any content I subscribe to on the net better be ad free.  If the TimesSelect 2.0 was $5 a month, instead a week, I’d probably subscribe now if it was totally ad free.  The free, but extremely limited version, has a few ads, but they are still tastefully placed so I can ignore them.  And the amount of great content the New York Times provides with the free edition of the TimesSelect 2.0 also discourages me from paying.

Publishers are going to have a hard time selling content online, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  It’s better for the economy, and creates more jobs if we pay for what we read.  And we get better written news.  But publishers can’t sell quality content in one place if they also give it away in another just as easy to get to location.

JWH – 3/31/10

Get Rid of Textbooks!

Every year I acquire a few K-12 textbooks that are given away where I work.  I am amazed at the quality of these textbooks as compared to those I studied 40-50 years ago.  Mine were much smaller, plainer, and simpler.   Modern textbooks are marvels of knowledge presented in beautiful full color multimedia layouts.  And they are HUGE.  If children are studying these books this generation should be the most well educated generation ever.  Then why all the bad press about failing schools and under achieving kids?  Could the textbooks be part of the problem?

At first glance modern K-12 textbooks look more comprehensive than my general education textbooks in college.  If high school students mastered these books they should be much smarter than college students from the baby boom era.  But then I got to thinking, maybe these giant tomes provide too much content for young people.  Could academic apathy just be a rejection of being over programmed?  Are we trying to stuff too much into growing minds?

I picked up these textbooks for reference works.  I can’t imagine being in the 11th grade and having to master five of them in nine months.  Three of the volumes I picked up this year where American Literature (10th), British Literature (11th) and World Literature (12th).  I got the teacher’s editions and each volume has hundreds, if not thousands of teaching suggestions, questions, quizzes, activities, etc.  This is a lot to learn and to teach.

The goal is the systematic injection of facts, more facts, and endless concepts.  On the surface, the desire to educate is motivated by wanting children to have a deep and wide knowledge of the world and history.  This is great in concept, but I’m wondering is its wrong.

I can imagine an interesting experiment for some school systems to try.  Take 11th graders, and instead of giving them a textbook on British Literature at the beginning of the year, start the year by telling them they are required to each edit and produce a textbook on British Literature to be handed in at the end of the year.  All great literature before the 1930s is available on the Internet in public domain versions, and even selections of copyrighted material after that is available.  Students could collect the content, write an introduction for each piece, and an analysis afterward.  They could do the layout and graphics, and if they wanted, have a hard copy printed-on-demand for less than the cost of buying a professional textbook.

Wouldn’t students learn more by doing?  Wouldn’t learning about British Literature be more fun as a treasure hunt than rote memorization?  Teachers could still guide the students lesson by lesson by discussing a required reading list, but they could also expect students to find their own supplemental reading.

Teachers could lecture on authors, assign a standard poem, story or essay for all to read, and then require students to collect additional works from the author’s output that they felt an affinity for, to add to their personal textbook/anthology.  Lesson plans could be built around students sharing their experiences.  Competition would arise to who could find the coolest works to collect.

And why not let the students collect art work, photos, letters, diaries, and other content to supplement their poems, stories and essays.  Encourage them to study history, science, social studies, economics, etc. to help explain their selections.

It we had students create their own textbooks they’d have a book for life they could keep, revise and expand, and it might be more memorable and meaningful than being forced to study a book for one year that they turned in when school was over.  Also, they would have something to show their kids and grandkids.

What if college acceptance was based on the textbooks they created in high school?  I know this is a bizarre, radical idea, but the Internet is changing our society in all kinds of ways.  With computers, software and the Internet, students shouldn’t have too much trouble creating their own textbooks, and imagine what kind of textbooks they could create for the iPad, which adds the dimensions of sound and video.

Instead of buying students hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks, buy them Adobe Creative Suite and require them to be creative.  Expect them to work instead of memorize, I believe they will learn more that way.  Can you imagine a K-12 system that was based on productivity instead of passive learning?  And students would learn so many practical skills as a byproduct of this kind of schooling.  And the same concept could be applied to all other courses. 

We might have more scientists, engineers and mathematicians if students spent their time doing productive work rather than memorizing.  K-12 students in the course of their academic careers should make a telescope and microscope, design a house, assemble a car, build reproductions of all the classic science experiments, reinvent mathematics century by century, put together a radio, television and computer, and so on.

Every school year in a student’s K-12 life is really trying to learn about reality from the Big Bang to the present.   We weave the language skills with math skills and then start studying the history of reality over and over again, with each school year expanding on the previous one.  That’s a lot of knowledge to catch up on.  Maybe kids would learn better by recreating how it was discovered rather than being forced to memorize the facts.

I remember my elementary, junior high and senior high years, they were like a 12 year prison sentence that I had to endure by sitting and being forced fed a curriculum not of my choosing.  Study, memorize, test, study, memorize, test.  It was all so painful.

JWH – 5/14/10   

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose.  What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines.  The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism.  Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines.  The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words.  Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing.  Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak.  Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited.  I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading.  Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia.  I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there.  Most of the content was filler, like the web.  I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want.  This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV.  We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now.  And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

Your Life in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the computer world, but if you’re not a tech geek you may be wondering about the term.  In the early days of networking, when system administrators drew diagrams of their local networks they’d have little symbols for their computers, printers, hubs, wiring, but when it came to picturing the connection to the outer world, they’d draw a cloud.  Eventually, they’d draw a cloud and write Internet over it. 

The cloud was just a mysterious place at the edge of their map.  Back in the old days, they’d describe two networks, the LAN (local area network) and the WAN (wide area network), but the WAN just meant all the branch offices.  The Internet tied all the LANs and WANs into one big world wide network.  Any computer equipment you don’t manage is part of the cloud.

The shift to cloud computing means trusting other people with your data, programs, and even CPU processing.  Picture this.  The old way was taking photos, processing them with Picasa, and keeping your snaps on your laptop.  The new way is taking photos, uploading them to Picnik, crop and process them in your browser, and then creating a Show to send your friends to view online.  Nothing really happens on your computer.  You use your computer to manipulate photos at a distance.  It doesn’t even matter what kind of computer you have, Mac, PC or Linux.

Now, there are pros and cons to cloud computing.  If your computer is stolen, you don’t lose your photos.  But if Picnik goes out of business, you do.  But Picnik was just bought by Google, so hint, hint, see the direction of things?  Google already has Picasa, so why would they want Picnik? 

Well, a little story might explain that.  In the fabled old days of writing computer programs, a programmer would develop and test a program, and then take it to each computer in the building and install it, and then wait for the users to find more bugs.  If your business had PCs and Macs, you’d have to write two versions of the program.  If the OSes were upgraded, you’d sometimes have to rewrite your programs.  It was a pain.  If the boss wanted a new feature, you’d rewrite the program, and then walk around and reinstall the program on all the machines again.  A bigger pain.  Then came web based programs.  You write one program that runs on a web server that worked with PCs, Macs, and Linux machines.  No more going around installing on individual computers.

Right now when Google updates Picasa everyone has to download and install the upgrade.  If Google switches everyone to Picnik, all that goes away.  They no longer have to worry about supporting millions of users, or maintaining PC and Mac versions of their programs.  But it does mean they need to offer users a lot more disk space to upload their photos to.  Instead of keeping your photos just on your computer, you can also put them on Google’s computers, in the cloud.  If you are trusting, you could even delete the photos off your camera and computer.  In other words, you are letting Google be your hard drive, at least for photos.  And if you use Google Docs, you are letting them be your hard drive for word  processing and spreadsheet documents.

Cloud computing has tremendous ramifications.  Can you trust the cloud?  Actually, can you trust the companies that maintain a cloud presence?  Many people aren’t trusting by nature.  I assume they might use the cloud, but keep copies of everything they own on their PC and backup drives.  But what if there were more security features to the cloud?  What if you could back up your stuff on Google to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage?  Or what if something like databanks emerged, that offered the same security for your data as they do for your money?  What if there were governmental regulations and safeguards to data stored in the cloud?

Let me assure you of something, you will want the cloud to work and be safe because it will make your computing life infinitely easier.  It would mean the end of viruses, and new computers that run slower and slower, and computers that start acting weird in ways you can’t understand.  Computers could become solid-state devices with no moving parts, and the OS could be burned in ROM, so they can’t be changed, or infected, and your machine could become instant on, like a TV.  And the OS wars will be over too, no more I’m a Mac, I’m a PC commercials, even though they were cute. 

This is explained in “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash” by Charlie Stross, the cutting edge science fiction writer, and over at TechCrunch in “Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy and Why Lala is Critical” by Michael Robertson.  It’s why the iPad and iPhone are more important now to Apple than the Mac.  It’s why Intel is worried about its dominance of Intel Inside chips.  It’s why Google is trying to take over the world with Android.  It’s why Netflix can get almost any kind of device to stream videos directly to your TV.  It’s why the iPad can run blazingly fast on a 1Ghz processor.

When everything is moved into the cloud, computers can become very simple.  Steve Jobs knows that in the future no one will pay extra bucks to own a Mac.  It’s why the iPad started out so cheap that HP and Microsoft cancelled their tablets.  Computers will go through a paradigm change like when they morphed from  mainframes/minis into microcomputers, that caused the personal computer revolution.  For decades the network computer has been predicted, but it’s taking a while to emerge.  Network computers can only succeed if everyone has fast broadband.

You are already living in the cloud if you use Netflix to stream movies.  You are already living in the cloud if you do your banking online.  Most people who did their taxes this year used cloud programs rather than installing TurboTax on their machine.  Most people store their photos in the cloud.  Soon you’ll store your music in the cloud.  Eventually they will make video cameras that have WiFi and your video will be saved immediately to the cloud.  If you watch Hulu, you are getting your TV from the cloud.  When you put your medical records online, they will be filed in the cloud.

I use Safari Books Online, and so I read computer books from the cloud.  Kindles and Nooks could just as easily display pages of books from the cloud instead of downloading whole books.  I read my newspaper on the cloud.  I’m starting to read magazines on the cloud.

Now I’m sure some of you are wondering why invent a new word for the Internet.  Or we could simplify everything by just calling it the net.  Everything will be on the net.  The distinction is that your old computer and hard drive are on the net now.  They are a node on the Internet.  Using the term cloud implies the that node is different.  It should eventually do away with hard drives, and seldom mentioned, but also do away with printers.  If you combined tablet computers with cloud computing you can do away with paper.

One of my tasks at work is to monitor the helpdesk tickets for my college, so I know what kind of problems pester users every day.  Cloud computing will make most of the problems I see now disappear.  Sadly, it will put a lot of tech support guys out of work.  If one geek guru can support a hundred users now, he or she will be able to support five hundred in the future.  But this won’t happen overnight.

Most businesses will not let their workers put business documents in the cloud any time soon, but I expect most students to start saving their work to the cloud now.  Why spend big bucks for Microsoft Office when you can use Google Docs or Windows Live for free?  Poor OpenOffice should just fade away.  All the free cloud computing services will convince home users and students to switch pretty quick.  Business will install SitePoint and create their own private cloud services for awhile, but when security and privacy get better, I bet they will move to paid cloud services.

Using the cloud will cost money.  We see a lot of free services now, but it will be tiered, so if you want more or better functions, you will pay.  Picnik is a good example.  I’m expecting iTunes 10 to incorporate Lala technology in a way that puts personally owned songs into the cloud.  Whether Apple sells us the space or gives it to us is another issue.  I’m thinking as long as you’re a loyal iTunes shopper, Apple might give their customers lifetime space, but we’ll see. 

I’m anxious to see what Steve Jobs announces in June.  Apple has leaped into the forefront of the cloud computing revolution with the iPad and iPhone.  By fiercely controlling its App Store, it controls the quality of its cloud experience.  That was a brilliant move on Apple’s part.  I would expect further control in the future.  It’s great to say you have over a 100,000 apps, but it’s another thing to say you have 10,000 A+ quality apps.  I see the iPad as the model of future computers.  Personal computing wild west days are over.

Right now computer users can muck up their machines by installing anything they want, or carelessly allow hackers to install dangerous programs on their machines.  If all applications came from a tightly control app store, then things will be different.  I expect the replacement for Windows to be an OS tied to an app store, so Microsoft can control the entire experience.  I’m not sure what the Open Source crowd will think.

Right now the iPad represents a hybrid of cloud computing.  It still downloads apps.  A true network computer won’t.  HTML 5 will go a long way towards making everything a web application.  Most iPhone/iPad apps are really just hybrid web apps.  This is a murky area for my crystal ball.  A totally streamlined OS for a net computer will be little more than a HTML 5 browser.  It should also mean the end of the app store.  If you play a game, the game will run at the game server, not on your device.  Your scores and saved games should be saved on the server.  Anyone who is really into thinking about cloud computing will see this as a conundrum for the phasing out of dedicated computers.  Games require the most local hardware, so they will be phased out last.

Other people will say that’s what the Xbox and PS3 have been doing for years, phasing out PC gaming.  Will cloud computing ever have the power to compete with gaming consoles?

JWH – 5/2/10