How ebooks should work
Robin Sloan's Aspire zine makes an argument about how ebooks should work, that information technology should aspire to the speed and privacy of the printed page. It's a lovely, beautiful thing, containing a compelling argument.
The ebook version of the zine has some fun tricks. Each is unique and accessible via a QR code in the zine. Each is good for a hundred views and has a fun but completely understandable geographic restriction. I love this.
This is also all related to my Amazon wishlist purge and doing the de-Amazoning. Anarchae recommended LibraryThing for logging and tracking. And Bookshop has finally started doing ebooks in the UK so hopefully that will help.
For context, I want "You'll own nothing and be happy", as in, the original meaning. A library economy, a sharing economy.
Sloan points out the ebook of his zine is fixed. It's not dependent on the ereader. I understand this. For the design to matter and mean something. I did, however, find it too small. This is a great thing about ebooks and ereaders. The accessibility. But yes, you shouldn't need an app. People might choose to use an app but certainly ebooks should not depend on them. Probably I could do with investigating a new ereader app. But if ebooks were the ideal it wouldn't be such a problem!
DRM has to be sorted out. Lending ebooks should be better than lending hard copies. You're not entrusting your precious original to someone who might never give it back or whose dog might eat it. Sloan's lending system is really cool - a hundred loans with an interesting geographical limit feature.
In games a lot of (almost all?) purchases of the physical book come with a pdf. That feels like a really sensible standard.
Similarly, another natural advantage of ebooks is they are easy to copy from. Which is not seen as an advantage by publishers and thwarted at every turn. On Kindle I can highlight, export, copy, up to a certain percentage of the book determined by the publisher. On Libby I can only highlight. I then need to write it out myself. So I mostly read fiction on Libby where I'm highlighting occasional good words, not big chunks of more technical stuff.
On piracy concerns: seems to me, I don't know, it's inevitable. This arms race big businesses always engage in just annoys actual paying customers with anti-piracy features. Concentrate on the people who want to pay and don't worry about the rest. I'm paying you! Stop punishing me because some people don't.
Publishers being able to change ebooks once they've been bought ought to be a good thing. Get those typos fixed! Except it's easy to use for ill.
The ebooks that have a synced audiobook seem really fun. I'm not very good at listening to books or podcasts and such, so I mostly don't. But I imagine lots of people would find this really useful. What if I was really into a story but had to go drive - I could just keep listening. Also, more of an edge case, reading while listening to the audio is really good for language learning.
There's also this article from 2012 with a guy talking about his ebook publishing philosophy. It has good points but also it's from 2012 and they are still mostly the same points.
There's so much I love about ebooks. So much potential to be weird and cool and accessible! Which TPTB clearly hate. Up to us I guess.