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eBooKs: Neither e, Nor BooKs
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Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
(Originally given as a paper at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference,
San Diego, California, February 12, 2004.)
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference [
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/
], along with
a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can’t be released
alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this
text, notations describing the places where new slides should be
loaded, in [square-brackets].
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
I’ve had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most
of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons
license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
presentations at this event called this talk “eBooks Suck Right
Now,” [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don’t
think it’s true.
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I’d call
it: “Ebooks: You’re Soaking in Them.” [Ebooks: You’re Soaking in
Them] That’s because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is
almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and
that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to
come to a better understanding of that shape.
I haven’t come to a perfect understanding. I don’t know what
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