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durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
BIBLE] Gutenberg’s Xerox machine changed all that, changed a
book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
minutes’ time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than ex-
altation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press
meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than pick-
ing only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge va-
riety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot
of speculation. I’ve been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay
out both categories of ideas.
This all starts with my first novel,
Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom
[COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that
time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on
the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other,
the new and scary practice of ebook “piracy.” [alt.binaries.ebooks
screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
that the idea of ebooks as a “failure” was at strong odds with the
notion that electronic book “piracy” was worth worrying about:
I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb
dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
A brief digression here, on the double meaning of “ebooks.”
One meaning for that word is “legitimate” ebook ventures, that
is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a spe-
cial-purpose hardware device like the NuvoMedia Rocketbook
[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a “pirate” or
unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cut-
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