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cory doctorow
This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down
to my boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expres-
sion, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved
the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
rest of the world.
Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be
an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
every day.
This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
1. More people are reading more words off more screens every
day [GRAPHIC].
2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every
day [GRAPHIC].
These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper.
* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be).
* You can’t take your ebook into the tub.
* You can’t read an ebook without power and a computer.
* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time.
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the “failure”
of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper,
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