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Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with com-
puters will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper
press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at
speed. If you try to make it output fine art lithos, you’ll get junk.
If you try to make it output newspapers, you’ll get the basis for a
free society.
And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Nap-
ster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s
with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.
Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone
who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it
is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell
you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really
hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors
out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what the Prot-
estant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile
illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from
your personal Word of God.
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media,
only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media
at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the
old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-
resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are
good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free
in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into
your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
The only really successful epublishing — I mean, hundreds of
thousands, millions of copies distributed and read — is the book-
warez scene, where scanned-and-OCR’d books are distributed on
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