The Perfect Music Box (more about eBooks)

20/08/09

So the Great eBook Wrangle continues…

On the one hand, Random House has agreed (the news services are mostly using the word “caved” and I hope there’s more than meets the eye here) to sell Dan Brown’s new book for Kindle at the same time as the hardback release, for the usual Amazon Kindle book price – ten bucks. Great news for anyone who doesn’t particularly want to own The Lost Symbol in hardback; maybe not such great news for mainstream publishing and its business model – and possibly not for Amazon, in the long run, if they don’t want to have to start doing the tasks of a traditional publisher and raising prices to cover their own costs, rather than trimming the profit margin of a separate company.

(God, I wish I knew what Amazon’s planning horizon / time horizon was, and how they see their endgame with eBooks. Speculating is annoying, and it actually deprives one of the opportunity to make intelligent creative choices. If the market-definer is determined to shadowbox, the market is shadowy. Grrr. And I really hope they actually know what their victory conditions are. I hate to think they’re doing this on the fly.)

In the mean time, Google is getting a kicking. Specifically, the Google Books Settlement – which I still have to deal with, basically by the end of this month – is being challenged left, right, and centre. As an aside, many of the people I’ve spoken to are much, much more concerned about Amazon than Google. Possibly there’s a lesson here for Google – dealing autocratically with individuals is much less popular than dealing high-handedly with other companies.

And there is an issue with what Google is doing, above and beyond the question of fees and orphan works and so on. It’s not a healthy precedent for a large company to be able to say: hey, we’ve infringed a bunch of your old copyrights, because we basically, uh, well we wanted to. So here’s some revenue, and off we go!

I would prefer, for example, that the movie studios not be able to make post facto deals according to a scale, non-negotiable, and then say: oh, and if you want more, sue.

Copyright is in a tangle, and it needs sorting out. There are some conceptual issues at its base which have been brought to the top by the arrival of digital media. However, this is not the way to do it. Google may have weakened the position of the small guy against the big guy here, probably inadvertently, and that is pissing people off. A lot.

Amazon’s just holding some big corporation’s feet to the fire. That they may – may – in the process be damaging a publishing industry already reeling is a much harder story to sell to the world. I mean, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Bertelsmann, however big-hearted you are. An organisation which operates in 63 countries is rather beyond that sort of response, especially at the moment when, if you’re like me, you’re seeing people come up against the sharp edge of the recession all ways up.

On the one hand, the good news is that the eBook situation seems in the short term to be skewing in favour of the consumer, and to be taking off. On the other, I’m not sure about the longer term. Some very big things are happening very fast, without a great deal of debate in the public sphere or a great deal of explanation from the main players about how they see the world when they’re done.

I got very hung up on the idea of stewardship during the high days of the banking crisis (which, NB, is still going on). It seemed to me that there was a pretty obvious lack of it in the financial system. I’m wondering whether we’re seeing a lack of it here, too: companies clawing for territory at the expense of the landscape and the fauna.

All that aside, though…

Something occurred to me recently which I think is worth mentioning. I’m probably the last person on Earth to think of it, but anyway: the Wired piece I mentioned earlier is wrong in one respect: books are not like CDs or DVDs. Not exactly. The curious thing about books is that they do not require a device to make them work. You can buy one and be reading it ten seconds later.

So, now: imagine that there were pocket-sized music boxes in the world which could play a smallish amount of music – say, twenty hours of it – with really high fidelity. Imagine that they were hard to destroy, required no power source, and cost under a tenner. Imagine there were small, simple, attractive objects which could bring Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A to your ears, and follow it with some more of his work. Imagine… the Perfect Music Box.

Want one? ‘Cos I do.

Image by Rama under CeCill Free Software License.

3 Comments to “The Perfect Music Box (more about eBooks)”

Marcus I. said on August 20th, 2009:

That kind of music box would be nice as some kind of collectors item.
Yet, for everyday use, I can’t see the advantage of carrying around dozens of those if I may as well carry one device containing all of the combined music and more.

There’s another difference between books and music: you can’t consume books in the background while mainly doing something else.

Stewardship certainly has its merits: I once watched a presentation where the speaker demonstrated how the production of a feature-length-movie often costs less than a country-wide broadcast of a commercial for some big corporation. So all sides would profit if the movie would be paid for by that company and distributed free of charge to the consumers.
Nick Harkaway said on August 20th, 2009:

Oh, there’s no point carrying around a bunch of them, as you say. However, I can see carrying just one, if it had the right music on it. I don’t always want variety, and batteries do run out.

As to your point about movies – I have to disagree. Film and TV making is already a struggle against advertising slots and commercial interference saying “no, no, we’d rather you didn’t use bad language in your cop show; we want the product we’re advertising in the slots to sell to teens”. It’s not always the case – I can think of one movie which was themed or built around a commercial investor’s product and which worked well on that basis. But that movie managed to stay away from actual endorsement, and contented itself with sponsorship/awareness. Mostly, that ain’t what happens. Sure, some movies could be made as you suggest… but many good ones would vanish without trace in the system.
Kimberly Sink said on August 20th, 2009:

All this imagining has left me with a lovely room conjured up in my head. Full of music boxes made of different materials, flashing lovely in the light streaming in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Seriously, today finds me hating the Kindle and others of its ilk. How I would miss my dear “real” books! Imagine the loss – of never feeling the heft of a thick book in hand. No longer stacked in tipsy piles, each in its own cover wrapping, suited to the stories that sit within. With individual and peculiar typeset, page weight, smell; the most beloved ones with pencil scribbles in their margins after multiple readings. Without them, my home would feel bereft!

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the benefits. But you’ll have to show me the Kindle that can get dropped in a sudsy bathtub and still operate after sitting in front of a fan to dry out before I’ll even begin to consider one. ;)