WHY eBOOKS SHOULD BE MORE THAN JUST eXEROXES

WHY eBOOKS SHOULD BE MORE THAN JUST eXEROXES


Scans of books are not:

Searchable
Quotable
Editable
Efficient
Easy Sources for New Editions or Critical Editions

You can't load scans into word processors, search engines,
cut and paste into emails, or edit them, or even correct a
typographic error that is quite obvious.

Nevertheless, a few "purists" think that eBooks should see
little more improvement over paper books than appearing in
computers, without any of the advantages normally given to
eBook consideration. . .what these "purists" want is Xerox
copies in their computers, and nothing more, other than in
the area of cataloging, in which they seem to want more in
eBooks than is found in most of the paper source books.

Instead of a new product, a new edition, corrected errors,
search capabilities, easy source material for editions yet
unmade or even unconsidered, such as a single file with an
electronic comparison between multiple editions, they want
nothing more than the old editions.

eBooks have the potential to revolutionize publishing, and
that is exactly what these "purists" defend against:  they
want to keep things as much as possible the way they were.

eBooks are being created at a rate alarming to those Xerox
afficionados who want as much control over electronic book
publishing as The Stationers Guild wanted over paper books
when The Gutenberg Press was invented 550 years ago.

This was the kind of control exercises and exorcised by an
effort of The Church to maintain complete control over who
got to read The Bible, just so The Church could maintain a
perfect level of control over interpretation in methods of
modern times called "Situational Ethics."

People died at the stake to bring you the right to read in
your own home, to create your own editions, to publish the
thoughts in your own head.

Remember, under The Stationers, nothing was ever published
without their consent and control.

This is the same anti-ideal as is being voiced today by an
ever more vocal minority of ivory tower fanatics, who have
little more sense than the religious fanatics they deplore
via there lip service but emulate in fact.


The Preservation of Errors

Both of these fanatical groups believe in preserving error
in their chosen "purist" editions, even though the errors,
such as they are, have been acknowledged for centuries.

The interesting part is that most of these errors were the
creation of the publishers and missed by the editors, thus
not the original words of the authors.  Sometimes printers
just didn't have enough of the right letters and put in an
alternate letter or combination, or even changed words, to
make up for the missing letters.

Yet the "purists" would have all these errors preserved in
their "purist" editions that no one else would read either
because reading with such errors was so distracting or for
the simple reason that the "purists" published only for an
extremely limited audience, limited by price, by knowledge
of what had been published, and by reading difficulty.

When you want everyone to read something you make it easy!

When you don't. . .you make it difficult.

I'm sure most of you have some experience with this.

However, there is one more reason these "purists" want the
editions of the future to exactly match the past editions:

The Power Of Authority

The "purists" are the acknowledged masters of old editions
and would have to study hard to equally master all of such
new editions as might be published.

Thus it is easier for them to apply destructive criticisms
to new editions than to actually master them.

However, this doesn't usually last very long. . . .

In the first 50 years of The Gutenberg Press more books in
the entire world were published than had ever been created
in all of previous recorded history.

The "purists" lost control.

The Church lost control.

The State lost control.

The Commoners learned how to read for the very first time.

The Middle Class was born.

Power shifted from "The Red and the Black" of military and
church power politics to the people, and the age of books,
and thus of literacy and education was upon us, leading to
The Scientific Age, The Age of Democracy. . .eventually to
The Industrial Revolution. . . .

All due to The Gutenberg Press.

Before The Gutenberg Press there was not even the concepts
required for "Mass Production."

Before The Gutenberg Press there were no concepts of using
metallurgy for purposes other than to pierce each other in
wars or to pierce the Earth for planting.

Before The Gutenberg Press there was no concept of publics
being able to read.

Before The Gutenberg Press there was no concept of publics
being educated.

[See the article entitled:

How Gutenberg Started The Industrial Revolution: How the 
The Gutenberg Revolution led to The Industrial Revolution]


Modern Education, Worth of the Name?

Modern education seems to be a tool of conformation for an
upper class to control the next generation rather than any
kind of true educational process.

Learning how to fit in is taught in schools efficiently to
99% of students, yet only 50% learn how to read enough for
just the reading of an article such as this, much less for
an entire educational process.

[Speaking of the United States educational system]


The evidence for this is that the longer American students
stay in school, the farther they fall behind students in a
few dozen other countries, some of which are surprising.

As such, is it any wonder that the winners of The National
Spelling Bee, and other similar competition, have recently 
been home schooled?

85% of Americans get high school degrees.

50% of Americans have trouble reading something like this.



eBooks Have The Power Of "Unlimited Distribution."

Full text eBooks are simple and small enough for anyone to
send to anyone else, much smaller than iPod tunes, so this
should come as no surprise to you:

Within the first week of the iPod people wrote programs to
read eBooks on iPods, and Apple has announced an iPod that
is specifically tailored for eBooks!

Right now there are already a billion Internet users and a
billion more are expected by 2010, in just three years.

I predict that half the world population, 3.5 billion. are
going to be Internet users by 2020. . .which means more of
a chance for literacy and education than ever before.

Right now you can publish a book on the Internet and reach
more people than have ever read any book before, and these
people are going to triple by 2020.

There is a potential for a revolution in literacy, and for
education, in the next few years that would make that olde
Gutenberg Revolution seem like just a bump in the road.


Conclusion

So let us not be fooled by those who try to keep eBooks in
the same place as paper books, who tell us to limit eBooks
to Xerox like scans of their favorite editions, who want a
file for a scanned eBook to take many times the space of a
file for a full text eBook, who want to eliminate searches
and cut and paste quotations from eBooks, and who, most of
all, want to eliminate new editions.

Even old editions are being kept under copyright today.

There are ~33 million books under copyright today.

~31 million of them are out of print.

This means that of all the copyright extensions we live in
that we have lost ~31 million just so the publishers could
try to make a few percent more on the 3% that they printed
new copies of this year.

What would the world be like without copyright extension?

Think what our world would be like today without Gutenberg
and his Revolution, without The Scientific Revolution, and
without Mass Production, without metallurgic revolutions--
and most of all without The Industrial Revolution.

Then think what our world would be like without the coming
Project Gutenberg Revolution, without a coming Scientific-
Technological Revolution, without Neo-Mass Education. . .

and most of all

Think of what our world would be like without Replicators,
for THAT is the precedent being set by the limitation of a
world of publishing and republishing today!

What will the world be like when everyone COULD have every
single item they wanted. . .but it was made illegal!!!

That is what is happening today with eBooks!!!!!!!

Today, for the price of a paper encyclopedia, you can buy,
and fill, a new computer with a million books.

This is what they are trying to make illegal. . . .