The future brings with it both good and bad
by Peter Zelchenko
29 April 2001
Editor's Note: This column is a response to a piece we published by Ted Padova on the future of eBooks.
The e-reading community is sketching out the future in the best newspapers and magazines, discussion groups and e-mail lists, and trade shows and conferences. Visionaries like Dick Brass and Bill Hill of Microsoft are joined by Adobe adherents which include Ted Padova and a number of others. Predictions are flying in record quantities in 2001, and my only prediction is that they will probably be even more sanguine in 2002.
20/20 Hindsight
In his insights into the future of books, Ted Padova introduces us to his new world of e-book publishing by lamenting that schoolbooks today cost $165 to $185. It is true that a few textbooks do cost that much, but it is not because of the cost to print and distribute them, which is probably under about $25 per unit. The high price represents mostly markup, in a carefully orchestrated theater which includes state and federal legislators, lobbyists, major schoolbook publishers, publishing industry groups, and education pundits. (For an example of this activity, see reports of the Association of American Publishers' School Division, which boasts among its major accomplishments lobbying efforts which included raising state and federal allocations for textbooks by millions of dollars, forcing a reduction of the adoption cycle for textbooks, and defeating legislation on such things as braille books for the blind.)
E-textbooks would have a similar markup, and a similar cabal, if the same interest groups were involved under similar terms. The technology may change, but the profit motive will remain the same.
Bridging the digital divide in school computing in the 1990s entered into the farcical, when poorer schools could not afford to drill holes for their cabling because the cost of asbestos abatement was too high. Still, nothing kept companies from entering into expensive agreements with visionary principals to wire schools with fiber-optic cable which they still do not use. The result was that some schools could not afford to buy their books. And now the next test: give every child a hand-held device. It is quite a tempting thought at its surface, until one considers the world of things that must attach to those devices, from batteries to tiny wires to support staff. Today's textbooks cost a small fortune and only last three years before they must be updated. What does that begin to sound like? Again, the technology may change, but the motivations will not.
"This evolution [by inculcating children] begins the socialization of a generation," writes Mr. Padova. But is that always a good thing? In the 1950s, we began the socialization of a generation toward the assumption that the automobile can and therefore must be used for our half-mile trip to the grocery. Today, we have the fallout from that socialization: sprawling suburbs and clogged cities, parking lots as far as the eye can see, international wars for petroleum, the forcible death of an amazingly efficient rail system, and everywhere, everywhere, people slowly choking on the fumes.
Tomorrow, says Mr. Padova, we shall begin the socialization of a generation toward the assumption, the assertion, that paper is not for reading and writing anymore -- that in order to read or write we must no longer engage in the simple technique of applying carbon to a whitened vegetable surface. In order to read, we must codge together a device made of silica scooped from the beaches of Malaysia, of copper strip-mined from the Andes Cordillera, of petroleum wrested from the wind-swept deserts of Kuwait, of labor conned from wherever it may be cheapest and most ignorant this week.
Ted is a recognized expert in digital document publishing. It is his measured opinion that our global ecological crises can be solved by going as digital as possible. "Almost every aspect of industrial societies needs to be changed with regard to manufacturing," he insists. "Production of alternative means of content could very well be forced by legislation." But if, as he wrote earlier, the computer industry constitutes by far the largest portion of the economy, does it not follow that it is the very growth of the computer industry itself which, by leading the new economy, may also be much to blame for many of our ecological woes? What might pushing this technology into the hands of every young boy and girl in the world do to the ecology?
Our visionaries regularly dish out select hindsight on what we couldn't imagine in 1975, and Ted Padova is no exception, telling us that few people anticipated the rise of Microsoft and the personal computer, nor the advances of the Internet in the 1990s. If Mr. Padova says correctly that we never could predict the future back then, what makes him and others think we can do so now? After saying we cannot predict the future, he is willing to make pronouncements on what he seems almost certain the future will be. Is he therefore also willing to accept, paradoxically, that 20 years from today things will probably be very, very different from the way he and others imagine them -- whether the technology succeeds or not?
Who, then, could have imagined that Bill Gates would build an empire which could defy its own government, an empire whose arrogant reach makes Vanderbilt and Carnegie look like pushcart vendors, an empire whose software base, which now dwarfs IBM's, is a tragic snarl of conflicting components? That their products work is not terribly surprising, but they do not work in the way I for one in 1975 imagined they might. I naturally dreamt of elegant code being used in neat evolutionary design, and of course fully cross-compatible (and of course all in COBOL). I never for a moment thought about planned obsolescence, sloppy protocols, 20 layers of abstraction, 90-minute hold times for a billion users. We humans are an optimistic bunch: we are wired to ignore the possibility that things can and frequently do go utterly wrong.
More than meets the eye
The future brings with it both good and bad, and often more bad than good. What are the consequences of wild-eyed imagination, when there is actually a budget behind it? Books make it to the fringes of the Earth because ink on paper is an amazingly independent, low-tech process requiring no international coordination. It is possible to burn wood for ink, and beat fibers into pulp for paper, with just a fire and a stone mortar. The cavedwellers at Tautavel could publish, and they probably did, with the same rudiments we employ today.
Now, we would transform the paradigm, and every book in the world must soon travel along some world-wide waveguide rather than on a truck or on the back of a camel. When, as our pundits breathlessly proclaim, the last publisher phases out printing on paper, it also means that the first person without an e-book will lose access to a book. Today, on a street corner in a Kashmir village, you can buy a popular title printed on cheap pulp for about 10 cents, in U.S. dollars. No network, no batteries, no antenna, very little waste, and apparently fair profit for the publisher. And tomorrow?
None of this has touched on the serious question of the synergistic effects of the reduction in value of individual works by electronic publishing. If supply of available works precipitates, the value of each will be reduced accordingly. This is already seen in conventional publishing. How much further will electronic publishing take this trend?
My point in all this is precisely that we should beware what power we wield. Yes, we can change the paradigm if we so choose. Powerful people, and people with powerful visions, by working hard and devoting resources, can move the world in amazing new directions. But before this should be done, all of the premises must be examined and weighed. The triumvirate of key questions for reading: Why does the Sunday paper weigh 10 pounds today? Why is the book returns problem so acute? Why is the bookstore magazine aisle even longer than the soft-drink aisle? To come to the right solutions, these questions must be examined from the standpoint of our ability not only to adapt technology to accommodate, but also to change, perhaps, our perception of what we require daily, and what we can do to reduce our demand or even live without.
Civilized Readers?
The problems with the newspaper, magazine, and book industries are related, and are connected to our innocent middle-class desire to have access to more material than we know what to do with. Current publishing technologies serve the world eminently well, for most material worthy of being disseminated. It is our strange obsession for more, newer, quicker, more individuated, that drives new publishing. But we are a tiny minority in the world.
Being the minority wouldn't matter if we weren't such a powerful minority. Our class, the middle-class Americans, Europeans, and Asians interested in new reading technology, seems not to have much awareness that the rest of the world watches us very carefully for how they should civilize themselves. If we create the illusion by attempting to live it, the consequences are that billions of others will try to do the same.
Today, we will idealize a future. Tomorrow, we will see an image of our idealized selves, reading an e-book, on a poster on a dirty wall in Manila. The message is that reading is edification and that the technology enables reading; it is not clear whether the rest of the world needs to read on an electronic gadget to access their books, magazines, and newspapers, because for most cultures this repository is small enough and localized enough to be published and distributed conventionally with great efficiency. But our desires, when they trickle down, may force others to change for no justifiable reason of their own, and the resultant net cost to the world may end up more with new technology than with old. Though book readers may resemble cell phones both inside and out, this is not like marketing a cell phone, since there is the content of the entire publishing world in the balance. This means that if publishing technology changes, anyone who desires that content will be forced to adapt.
There is no question that we can do whatever we please and that science can produce anything imaginable. If what we are producing is not so clearly in everyone's mutual best interest, how far should it go beyond the realm of the imagined? If anything, our experience so far with technology should be an indication that we should tread very carefully into the next several years, and not do or say anything hasty.
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